Doug Rickard

Doug Rickard
Born	May 1939 (age 72)
Died	May 7, 2002(2002-05-07)
Nationality	Australian
Education	The Southport School
Spouse	Lehte
Children	Jeremy, Ingrid, Madelaine, Raphael, James.
Work
Engineering discipline	Space Engineer
Institution memberships	Woomera DSS, NASA JPL, Institute of Marine Science,University of Queensland, Digital Equipment Corporation, Project Athena (MIT)
Significant projects	Mariner IV, Ranger 9, Maralinga Physics Health Team
Significant design	Contributed to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Logo, designed by Bill Kennard

Doug Rickard (26 May 1939 – 7 May 2002) was an Australian-born space engineer. He is known for his stories of engineering while at the Woomera Deep Space Station. He died in 2002 from myelofibrosis caused by contact with Cobalt-60 while working at the Maralinga nuclear test facility.^[1][2]

Some of his stories have been collected by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, whose logo he possibly inspired (although the logo was designed by Bill Kennard), under the title Memoirs of a space engineer. Additional humorous engineering stories^[3] include hand-decoding images from Mariner 4 onto a sheet of graph paper since NASA JPL had only built a single display system, running a magnetic tape recorder 25 times over its rated speed to have enough bandwidth to record Ranger 9 video of its impact on the moon, and an impromptu excavation of Pompeii's plumbing systems.

Doug also worked for some time for the Australian subsidiary of Digital Equipment Corporation. During that time he was seconded to Project Athena, the Campuswide Computing environment developed at MIT, with the specific responsibility of developing "Bones" a version of the Kerberos Authentication System, that did not relying on strong encryption, and as such would not require US Government approval for export.

File:Doug 1.jpg

Doug Rickard

References

1. ^ "Memoirs of a Space Engineer". http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/memoirs/about.htm. Retrieved 8 November 2008. 
2. ^ "The Maralinga Cobalt 60 Incident". Archived from the original on 5 November 2002. http://web.archive.org/web/20021105011404/http://home.primus.com.au/rickard/maralinga.html. Retrieved 8 November 2008. 
3. ^ Stories by Doug

Persondata
Name	Rickard, Doug
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	26 May 1939
Place of birth
Date of death	7 May 2002
Place of death