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BLUE ORIGIN

I was present at the origin of Blue Origin (originally Blue Operations LLC) and was its only employee for a little while. Under the title (shared by basically everyone in the company) of Member, Technical Staff, I worked there from circa 1999 until 2006. I performed operations as prosaic as punching down Ethernet cable, operating a plate grinder, and passivating rocket parts (which means making sure they don't have any residue that would react with hydrogen peroxide) but the bulk of my efforts were devoted to investigating possible alternatives to conventional rockets as ways of getting into space. Basically this involved producing a lot of Mathematica notebooks. When the company made a decision to stick with a more tried-and-true approach, I found other ways to make myself semi-useful, largely in the realm of trajectory analysis, until I decided to make an amicable withdrawal in late 2006.