Oceaneering Space Systems

I joined ILC Space Systems in 1991 as a project engineer on their contract for the Space Station. My main responsibility was to develop a 20 cubic foot refrigerator freezer for the galley so that they could store frozen food. The idea was to fill the freezer with frozen food on Earth and send it up to the station in a module and then send the empty freezers back down to be refilled for the next flight up. ILC had been working on an R11 compresser based system with R.D. Little for years, but it just didn't seem right to be flying R11 into space when we were in the middle of banning it on Earth. So we looked at alternate refrigerants and none of them looked much better.

Then ILC was purchased by Oceaneering Space Systems, and the new president, Art Stevenson, was open to looking at a thermoelectric cooling system that used superinsulation panels. My plan was to mount the cooler in the door, and dump the heat into the cabin. It didn't have to cool the food down, because it was already cold, all it had to do was counter the heat loss through the superinsulation panels, and the heat gain when the door was opened to get food. I even designed the internal air flow so that it went around the walls first. I formed a consortium with Marlow Industries and Corning who made the coolers and panels respectively, and we filed for three patents.

However at that time I was awarded my own SBIR for the astronaut training system, so I bowed out gracefully.