Profile: Dave Gorney

A Chance to Succeed

by Donna J. Born

Fresh out of grad school, Dave Gorney found a home in the Aerospace labs. More than 25 years later, he's still finding opportunities to learn and apply new skills.

Dave Gorney has been at The Aerospace Corporation for more than 25 years, and he still drives to work with enthusiasm every day. He's held many jobs during his career, and he said he is always fondest of whichever job he's working at the time, which today is General Manager of the Navigation Division.

"There are absolutely no limits to where your career can take you—that is one of the wonderful things about this company," Gorney said in a recent interview. "The opportunities are out there. I've absolutely enjoyed every one of my jobs. Right now I'm working on GPS (the Global Positioning System), and right now it's my favorite program—the system has been providing just tremendous capabilities. It's the best job in the world and I love it."

One job that Gorney said holds a special place in his heart has been his work with DMSP (Defense Meteorological Satellite Program) because this program introduced him to Aerospace. The research he was doing on his Ph.D. in atmospheric sciences at UCLA was in line with the data coming from the DMSP satellites, then being worked on in the Aerospace labs. He became acquainted with Aerospace scientists working on DMSP, the data he obtained filled a lot of gaps in his research, and his connection with the lab led to his first job with Aerospace in 1979.

Dave Gorney, Research Scientist.

"It really was the trigger for my career in national security space systems. And over the years I've been back to DMSP several times, either to provide technical advice to the program or to be program manager. Its importance to my career is such that whenever I think about satellites—even though I've worked on hundreds of them, probably—the mental image that comes to my mind is a DMSP satellite. It's the icon in my mind for what a satellite is," he said.

Gorney was also with DMSP during its transition in the late '90s from the Department of Defense to the follow-on program NPOESS (National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System) under NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). That was a very interesting yet uncertain time, he said, because the weather program was undergoing an upheaval caused not only by government reorganization but also by the many industry contractor mergers and consolidations occurring at the same time. When one contractor closed its factory in New Jersey, for example, DMSP satellites had to be boxed and shipped to a Sunnyvale, California, factory whose engineers had not designed, built, or cared for the satellites. Aerospace helped provide the continuity and stability for the program to get through some very distracting external events.

Such transitions occur regularly in the space industry, Gorney explained, and can be accompanied by emotional as well as technical turmoil. Natural rivalries between those who feel proprietary about the legacy program and those who are eager to move ahead with the modernized program sometimes cause barriers against the flow of information, but good management support can get these two groups talking and turn this rivalry to productive ends. Aerospace has played a key role in making that happen during many such transitions so that the modernized program can benefit from all the lessons learned from the legacy program.

"I would have to say as far as success for the entire DMSP mission, continuity was absolutely our most critical contribution to that program and to that transition," Gorney said. "Aerospace engineers had worked with DMSP throughout its entire life while the satellites were designed and built and initially tested and are now able to provide the experience and lessons learned to NPOESS."

At this late stage, even though its replacement is in production, Gorney said DMSP is still undergoing change, primarily to remedy technology obsolescence either from wear caused by age or from inconsistency with the evolution of the technology on the ground. The current satellites have more sophisticated sensors than were ever imagined for DMSP, but Gorney believes the most important technological developments today can be seen in the ground systems that are using the satellite data. The advent of new computer capabilities and new modeling techniques means the true potential of DMSP data is finally being realized on the ground, he said.

"DMSP always provided wonderful pictures and wonderful quantitative data, but I might estimate that the majority—greater than 50 percent—of that data was not being used at its full potential. Following the conflict in Kosovo, and certainly the Persian Gulf war, and without doubt Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom, we finally started seeing the full potential of the sensing capabilities of DMSP along with the ground capabilities of processing that data and turning it into useful products coming together. It truly is a much more capable system than was envisaged in the '60s and '70s when the first blocks were coming about and just pictures were being produced—valuable pictures, but compared with what's being done with the data now, almost a trivial utilization of the capability."

Aerospace's involvement with DMSP has been primarily with military applications, ensuring that systems and requirements of the military users are being met. But Gorney said another important role Aerospace plays in all these dual-use systems is in designing the system architecture so that these tremendous assets can be available for civil and commercial use. "We are really providing the war fighters with what they need out of these systems to fight and win wars, but we have such an ability to provide a systems-level view that we are looked at by the commercial users, civil users, and even international users, as a trusted agent or broker for their needs."

Aerospace continues to have an integral engineering and program office function in the NPOESS program office, and Gorney believes that will continue in the future. "Throughout that system, I would have to say that Aerospace's roles, responsibilities, influence, and potential for future contributions are as strong as they ever were in DMSP. Customers change, but Aerospace's role and commitment to that mission continue."

Many new opportunities and technical challenges for Aerospace's future work in all space systems, Gorney said, will involve the tight integration of space and terrestrial technologies. "Already we are seeing the payoff of having space systems and ground systems tightly integrated. Aerospace has a long history of serving as an integrator between systems and forming systems of systems, so our talents will be very pivotal in these future integration opportunities."

Gorney has been Principal Director of several offices, including Research and Technical Applications, Technology Operations; Research Engineering, Engineering and Technology Group; Defense Support Program; and Meteorological Satellite Systems. He has most recently been Corporate Chief Architect/Engineer. "Aerospace has offered me tremendous opportunities not just to do interesting work, but to see interesting work being done by really capable people. My job opportunities that came available at Aerospace had very little to do with my specific training. At Aerospace you are immersed in a continuous learning environment, with some of the best 'teachers' in the world," he said. "We just don't call it learning or teaching, we call it 'working.'"

Gorney learned from his father, a first-generation immigrant from Europe, to seize opportunity and to stretch himself and try different things. "My father saw the opportunity offered in the United States, even though that opportunity was just a chance to have a job in the coal mines of Pennsylvania. He led a terribly hard life in the coal mines, raising a family, and dying young. Through it all, he kept encouraging me. I remember him saying, 'Someday you're going to be a research scientist.' I still have his miner's carbide lantern on my office shelf at home, and underneath I have my business card that says: 'Dave Gorney, Research Scientist.' He's my hero."

A portrait of the scientist as a young man.

In high school, Gorney was also fortunate to have a teacher who saw he "might have a little spark of interest" in science and math and gave him a box of his college textbooks. "We were a very poor town and didn't have a lot of resources. He didn't tell me what to do, he just gave me the box of books, and I went through the stuff, and it was a gold mine, and it was fascinating. And when I went from this small school in Pennsylvania into the college environment, I was coming from nowhere, but I knew calculus, I knew spherical trigonometry, and that little push allowed me to get over the hurdle and then get on with my career."

He feels strongly about providing similar opportunities to young people. He helped establish the Aerospace Academy to improve science and engineering education at local high schools. For the curriculum, he developed a new science course and helped raise funds for lab equipment. "I'm doing this because someone did this for me. That's how I hope to mentor these students—to give them materials and learning opportunities, and encourage them with the excitement that we all feel about science and engineering." Aerospace encourages employees to participate in such community outreach programs, Gorney said. "It is a great corporation that provides great opportunities to its people, not just for their careers, but for their personal development and then to contribute to the community development."

Gorney is very much aware of the opportunities he has been given to come just one generation away from the coal mines, an extremely tough existence, to a really quite influential and quite responsible area within the space industry. Doing the jobs and having some degree of success and customer satisfaction have been rewarding, he said. "But the most rewarding thing to me from a personal and professional growth opportunity is not so much doing the separate jobs, but in each job seeing the vast variety of other people doing their jobs with tremendous talent and capabilities. Watching all that go on in the whole landscape of Aerospace is absolutely remarkable."

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