Mike attended 1 year at the Volga school and finished High School at Central. He Graduated in early February of 1980 and entered the Army in that same month.

On the day that his class graduated from Central Mike was making his 2^nd jump out of a “perfectly good airplane”. By the end of the week he had earned his army airborne wings, parachutist certification.

In the army Mike was stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington and then in Fort Kobbe, Panama in the canal zone. It was in Panama where Mike met and married his wife, Teresa, who was active duty in the Air Force stationed at Howard Air Force Base in Panama. Mike left the army after a 4 yr career and moved with Teresa to FE Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming. Teresa remained active duty Air Force and was stationed at FE Warren AFB in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Mike joined the Wyoming Air National Guard and was the NCOIC, Non Commissioned Officer In Charge, of the Wyoming Air National Guard Combat Arms Training and Maintenance Group. Mike and Teresa also had their first daughter, Stephanie, in 1986 in Wyoming. That same year Mike started work with Boeing upgrading missile silos and control centers to the Peacekeeper missile, which was eventually decommissioned but not before being very useful as a deterrent during the final years of the cold war. From there Mike was offered a job with Boeing on the IUS, Inertial Upper Stage, program in Florida at Kennedy Space Center.

The IUS was a solid fuel upper stage that was the only large upper stage allowed to be used by the Space Shuttle in the years after the Challenger disaster. With the IUS they not only flew off of the Space Shuttle but also flew on top of the Titan 4 rocket which is where Mike would next be working for Martin Marrietta, later to become Lockheed Martin. It was during this time when he learned just how good his education at Central truly was and how it was far above most other schools. Although Mike started algebra in his junior year in high school, he was not getting it and was put back into general Math class mid-year. This was important to Mike because in 1991, after being out of school for 11 years, he decided to go to college and get a degree. Since Mike had been out of school for so long he was required to take a placement test to determine where he could start his college classes. Mike scored well enough on the placement test so that he didn’t have to take any makeup classes and moved directly into college level curriculum. He later found out that he had scored better than 90 percent of the students that had just finished high school. A HUGE testament to the education Mike received at Central. He received his Associates degree 2 years later. It was during this time that their 2^nd daughter, Michelle, was born in 1992. He worked with payloads on the Titan 4 program also. After 5 ½ years on the Titan program Mike was called back to Boeing on the IUS program and remained there until the program was ended in 2002. During this time he also spent time on loan to the ISSPF, International Space Station Processing Facility, working on future Space Station hardware before it was sent into space.

Boeing asked Mike to work on the Delta 2/3 rocket program after IUS and later on the Delta 4 rocket program which he did until 2008. In April 2008, the director of a new startup rocket company in Florida asked him if he wanted to go to work with them on their team. Mike told him he needed to give ULA, which was a merger of the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 programs, a 2 week notice. He said great and 2 weeks later he was working for Spacex, Space Exploration Technologies.

Mike took this job not knowing how far it would go or if it would even go. It seemed at the time that the owner, Elon Musk, had some very ambitious goals. He was at the time the 323^rd employee of the company and he wanted to be able to go to Mars. Mike wasn’t sure what he was getting into, but really did like the business model and definitely could see this company going places if the drive and ambition was kept along with the general philosophy that everyone is asked to offer up ideas. In the end the person in charge of each project would make the final decision on the path forward and they were to move in that direction as a single team, It did and, in his opinion, it’s what made Spacex able to advance the aerospace industry at such a high rate of speed. If you would have told Mike when he hired on with Spacex that in 5 years they would build their own rocket, build their own capsule, launch and test both and have the capsule start taking provisions to the international space station and be the only capsule in the world to be able to return cargo and valuable experiments back to earth, He probably would have brushed them off. Guess what, they did! Unheard of in the rocket launching business since the initial phases of the rocket programs in the 60’s. The first Falcon 9 launch from launch complex 40 was June of 2010 just 2 ½ years from the old Titan 4 tower coming down on launch complex 40.

Mike held positions at Spacex to include Technician, Lead Technician, Supervisor. Also served as LE, Lead Pad Engineer, responsible for rolling the rocket out to the pad and all preps up to launch. Immediately returning to the pad post launch, usually within 5 to 10 minutes, to ensure the condition of the pad and to reestablish security at the pad post launch. He has since held a position of Pad Lead responsible for day to day activities required to keep the pad operations moving forward safely and efficiently and implementing updates to accomplish that goal. Most Spacex launches and landings can be watched live on Spacex.com. These can be very interesting as the milestones leading up to launch and through launch are explained along with the milestones leading up to the landings.

In total, he owes his success to his faith, family, friends and the education I received at Central.