Alumni

Patrick Marsden

Engineering Physics

Patrick was born in rural northern Wisconsin, but moved to Ocala, Florida when he was eight. Once in Florida, he became very interested in the space program. Being able to see launches at the Cape from your own backyard will do that. Originally, like all of the first EP class, he was enrolled in Aerospace or Aeronautical Engineering. A couple of weeks after getting accepted to ERAU, he switched to Engineering Physics.

Immediately after graduation, he spent a summer working at Space Camp in Alabama. Then he attended The George Washington University's Joint Institute for Advancement of Flight Sciences (JIAFS) at NASA Langley in Hampton Virginia. He worked and took classes there, eventually earning a Master in Astronautical Engineering in 1993. While there, he worked for NASA's Atmospheric Sciences Group on the Magellan Program, which was orbiting Venus at the time. That work, which eventually became his thesis, involved examining atmospheric torques on the spacecraft and deducing the atmospheric density profile which caused those torques. The work helped expand the understanding of the Venusian atmosphere.

After graduating, Patrick was offered a position with Computational Physics Inc. (CPI) in Fairfax, Virginia. This was a small atmospheric research company. After a year or so, he became a Co-PI contractor for the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C. There he did similar research tasks for the Middle Atmospheric Group of the Space Sciences Division. The main product was large computer simulations predicting how the atmosphere would behave. Ironically, Patrick shared an office at NRL with Andy Nichols, also from the first EP class. And just down the hall were Scott Diamond, Doug Drob, and Steve Lockwood, also from the class of 1991. After a few years in a pure science position, he decided that he'd like a little more exposure to the engineering side of life. He took a position with a satellite software company in Herndon, Virginia; that company was promptly acquired by L3 Communications. Patrick worked as a systems engineer helping to design and implement ground communications systems for a variety of spacecraft clients. It was there that he was able to exercise his orbital mechanics knowledge.

From his exposure at L3, Patrick became convinced that he really liked spacecraft engineering. In 1999, he moved down the street to Orbital Sciences Corporation, where his wife was already working. He was hired into the group responsible for new business proposals, and conceptual mission design studies. The work was mostly composed of academic designs, similar to doing an EP Senior Design Project every 45 days. He was involved in the winning proposals for the recently launched Dawn mission to the asteroid belt and the upcoming OCO mission. He also headed a number of funded studies for NASA and other clients. Eventually he transitioned to a systems engineering position on a government spacecraft. He was responsible for the design of the command and telemetry scheme and assisted with the flight dynamics.

Patrick is currently a senior engineer with Orbital Sciences, just outside of Washington, D.C. He works as a spacecraft systems engineer for Department of Defence and NASA missions. His most recent spacecraft was a small technology demonstration vehicle for the government, for which he served as a Flight Safety Engineer during mission operations.