Dave Doody

Background

About Dave Doody

After serving in the USAF, Dave worked as an instructor for Japan Air Lines teaching flight procedures, navigation, systems, and stuff to Captains & First Officers. He also led instructional systems design at the JAL flight crew training center, creating computer and photo labs, which produced system simulators, teaching methods and materials, and instructional facilities. This was up through 1978 while living aboard the sailboat Almitra. Having taught celestial navigation and sailing the coast with his partners, he landed at Catalina Island. Dave worked there as systems engineer for three years before joining the NASA-JPL Deep Space Network, where he created instructional systems for operators of new spacecraft-communications and tracking systems. On completion of the DSN contract, Dave got his master's degree and went to work on the NASA Voyager flight operations team while Voyager 2 cruised from Saturn and encountered Uranus and Neptune. Flight ops on Magellan, the Venus mapper, then led to flight ops work on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn and Titan, and now Mars-2020, Psyche, and the Europa Clipper Mission. All during the Voyager, Magellan, and Cassini mission operations, Dave has also been publishing in the technical and popular literature, teaching, and speaking in public about space-flight related subjects. His book,"Deep Space Craft"​ (2009 Springer) is a fairly technical overview of interplanetary flight. His much simpler "Basics of Space Flight"​ went online in 1993 and is now also a paperback. Once in a while Dave plays sidewalk astronomer in Pasadena, offering free telescope views of planets to passers-by. Annually, Dave teaches "Basics of Interplanetary Flight" for ArtCenter College of Design Public Programs, and is proprietor of Space Craft International, a web-based source of low-cost educational scale models of space-exploring machines. Interested in selecting highly effective charitable organizations to support. Animal rights advocate.