About Kurt Leucht
Background:
I grew up in Central Illinois, in a small town called Mackinaw (near Peoria). I went to Deer Creek-Mackinaw High School and did pretty good in Math, Science, and Art. I went to Illinois Central College for two years while enrolled in the Pre-Engineering Program. I transferred to the University of Missouri-Rolla (now Missouri University of Science & Technology) in the Electrical Engineering Program where I spent four more years of school while co-oping half of the time in Florida for NASA at the Kennedy Space Center (where I currently work). I met my beautiful wife, Samantha, at Park Avenue Baptist Church in Titusville. We currently live in the small Space Coast town of Titusville. We have two wonderful boys.
Family pictures:
Starting from the left and going clockwise: My sister’s husband, my sister, me, my mom, and my stepdad. This photo was probably taken while I was in high school, so late 1980′s.
Starting from the left and going clockwise: My dad, my two stepbrothers, me, my sister, and my stepmom. This photo was probably taken while I was in high school, so late 1980′s.
Work:
I started working for NASA as a co-op student and spent my first 6 years in the Materials Science Laboratories in the Electrical Group. We got paid to blow up stuff. It’s the CSI of NASA. Cool place to work. Then I decided to try my hand at Computer Programming. I worked for about 5 years on the biggest software design project that KSC has ever attempted. It was called the Checkout & Launch Control System (CLCS) Project. Here is an Internet Archive of the CLCS website. Sadly, that project ran over budget and schedule and was cancelled in it’s last few years. Since CLCS, I worked a lot of other small software projects in the Engineering Development organization. In addition to being a Software Developer, I’ve turned into sort of a Test Engineer over the past few years also. I’ve been on many projects where I was in charge of writing/reviewing/executing test procedures. Now that NASA has decided to retire the Space Shuttle and develop some new rockets, I’m on a team that is in charge of developing a brand new command & control system for KSC. This time we’re focusing on commercial off the shelf solutions and only writing custom software where necessary to adapt or glue the various COTS tools together.
Here are some photos from my co-op days of us hard at “work” in the malfunction laboratory:
Our motto in the Electronics Laboratory was “Never shake hands with Mr. Electricity”
My StackOverflow “flair”
