Dr. Rick Fleeter rfleeter@mindspring.com P.O. Box 481, Charlestown, RI 02813
They say fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly, but what they don't tell you is that thermodynamicists gotta travel. In fact, travel is so fundamental to the life of the engineer or scientist, that most of them no more realize that simple fact, than fish realize what water is. One who did was the greatest Thermodynamicist of all, Ludwig Boltzman. As so often happens, seeing a greater perspective led him to write - in his case the essay "Travels of a Thermodynamicist in California" but also to his profound depression, which he successfully, and appropriately, resolved by hanging himself from a hotel room chandelier. I thank the dearth of chandeliers in today's La Quinta and Econolodge hotels for my having thus far escaped emulating even that element of Boltzman's greatness, and thus providing the time for writing this book. Such is the importance of travel that I owe my life to budget hotels.
How did I decide to compete swimming breaststroke, pick up the Cello, pursue long distance solo cycling and do a PhD in Thermodynamics? The common denominator is the search for a pursuit so archaic, so unappealing to the opposite sex (or even my own), so widely ignored, that even I, with minimal effort, could, if not dominate, at least get to the first rung on a competitive sports, music or career ladder. That strategy propelled me to the #1 (and not coincidentally the only) position worldwide in authoring books on microspacecraft.
A quick scan of Amazon or your local bookstore tells you why I will never write a book on starting a company, or pioneering a new field in Engineering. The shelves are full of well written books I couldn't hope to outshine. But a book on the experiences and the lessons learned from a career of mostly pointless business, recreational and competitive travel? There's a niche even Rick Fleeter can own for a long time. And, dear potential reader, therein might lie a similar opportunity for you to be unique in having actually purchased and read that book. For $35.95, can you bypass the opportunity to be the first on your block, and maybe on the planet? I hope not.
About Rick Fleeter
In 1986, Rick Fleeter came home from work as a rocket scientist at TRW in Southern California, with news. He had quit a secure job with outstanding salary, benefits and career opportunities to move across country on a mission to convince the world that microsatellites could do for space what microchips were doing for personal computing. Commuting to work from LA to Washington DC was mistaken as peripheral to his focus on making space cheaper, quicker and simpler as a way to service a much wider constituency. In the twenty years since, he's learned that travel, like life, is what happens while you're making other plans, and building the world's smallest spacecraft company, known to the rest of the world as AeroAstro, Ashburn, Virginia.
When we're young, we all want to be airline pilots, soldiers, pro athletes, nurses and railroad engineers. Then there's that education phase where we're all going to be professors and researchers, or writers and philosophers, or great artists. The models we have at University. After graduation, practicalities lead to entering the workforce, where salary and resume building take control. Eventually, for Rick, transportation graduated from a peripheral element of professional progress, to his answer to the questions of life, the universe and everything.
Before commencing this odyssey, Rick built rockets (for transporting satellites, astronauts and pilots foolish enough to hit the eject button on their jet fighters) at TRW and at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Those jobs enabled him to quit his previous transportation jobs as freight pilot and flight instructor, which helped pay for 18 semesters and for printing 3 diplomas, in Economics, Aerospace Engineering and Thermodynamics, his studies punctuated a little too heavily with flying, collegiate bike and swim racing, and long distance cycling, in keeping with the transportation theme he as yet hadn't recognized.
On rare occasions when he's home in Reston, Virginia, he bike commutes to AeroAstro where they have yet to figure out how to fire him from the President and CEO job. They don't need to since he's almost never there, still traveling the earth promoting Microspace. Some of the time spent on planes and trains, and in hotel rooms, resulted in his first two books, MicroSpaceCraft and now in print The Logic of Microspace (Klewer). While on company travel, most of his spare time is spent traveling on a bike, in water, or on running shoes. The few minutes remaining he spends writing about travel, resulting in a collection of essays now assembled into this book, Travels of a Thermodynamicist.
In 1986, Rick Fleeter came home from work as a rocket scientist at TRW in Southern California, with news. He had quit a secure job with outstanding salary, benefits and career opportunities to move across country on a mission to convince the world that microsatellites could do for space what microchips were doing for personal computing. Commuting to work from LA to Washington DC was mistaken as peripheral to his focus on making space cheaper, quicker and simpler as a way to service a much wider constituency. In the twenty years since, he's learned that travel, like life, is what happens while you're making other plans, and building the world's smallest spacecraft company, known to the rest of the world as AeroAstro, Ashburn, Virginia.