I started as a manual draftsman in an architectural engineering consulting firm in 1988. I got licensed as a Professional Engineer in 1993. I published two textbooks with McGraw-Hill on energy conservation and electrical design in 1997 and 1998. At that time I was one of the most influential engineers in the southwest. . .
Trying to Promote Energy Conservation in Texas
In the fall of 2000, I presented my Mars Pathfinder computer program at a seminar in the Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Here’s the official flyer (PDF). This was my fourth year in grad school, studying toward a Ph.D. in celestial mechanics. There were several faculty members there as well as an engineer from NASA in Houston. (UT Austin is basically JPL East in the space community.)
After the seminar, I talked with Dr. Wallace Fowler and the NASA rep. They liked my Mars research but had no questions. I mentioned a computer program I had created as a consulting engineer a few years earlier. The program (now set up as a one-page spreadsheet, Energy Auditor 2.0) was created to calculate annual energy use for small hospitals in central Texas, as part of the SHEMP program (Small Hospitals Energy Management) for the state of Texas’ LoanStar Program.
I told them I could easily configure the program to calculate energy use for buildings on the moon or Mars, for the most energy-efficient designs. They seemed to be interested.
Conservation Gets The Axe
One week after the seminar, I met with my academic advisor, Dr. Cesar Ocampo, in his office. He insisted that my Mars solution was grandiose. “You really think you came up with a better solution in 20 pages of FORTRAN code than NASA’s million-page optimization solutions?”
My Mars solution was admittedly controversial, which is exactly why I’d mentioned another excellent dissertation research topic at the seminar. (NOTE: My Mars methods later became mainstream in orbital mechanics, spawning a whole new discipline.)
Dr. Ocampo quit as my advisor a few days later. I suppose it didn’t matter that I’d published more tech papers than most tenured professors – including two textbooks with McGraw-Hill. They’re listed toward the bottom of my resume page.
I was one of the most qualified consulting engineers in the country at that time. Texas and Big Oil. Can’t cater to saving energy….
Please visit the link below for my official credentials in engineering.
WH Clark, P.E.