Steven M. Marsh – NESC Academy Biography

Steve began working in Aerospace engineering as a post-graduate during the 1980s at the Purdue School of Aeronautics and Astronautics.  There he did research chiefly on the numerical simulation of libration point trajectories supported by NASA-Goddard and the National Science Foundation, and his thesis was on the subject of double lunar swingby trajectories.

At Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in Sunnyvale, California, he supported a variety of space missions where orbital perturbations and simulation speed were critical factors, such as missile defense and the design and build-up of the Iridium Constellation.  It was there that he first came in contact with the POST program, which was a Space Shuttle program then used for Titan launch vehicle simulation.  He eventually transferred to Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver in 1995 to work on the Titan project, mostly with POST, particularly on the re-designed simulation that was to be called POST2.  During this time, Steve undertook and completed the conversion of the program from its native FORTRAN into the C-language.

After working on a missile defense project that involved successfully adapting POST2 to a real-time, hardware-in-the-loop test-bed, and trajectory analysis for the Orion manned spacecraft, Steve took a job developing and maintaining POST2 full-time for the Atmospheric Flight and Entry Systems Branch at NASA-Langley where POST and POST2 had been originally commissioned.  Since then, the program has been greatly improved by the groups that use POST2 at Langley and other NASA centers, and Steve continues enthusiastically in the development and maintenance of that tool for use with many new missions, but especially the new Space Launch System supporting manned space exploration.