Alumni

Alumni Profile

From the Cold War to the War on Terror, an engineering career of innovation
Mechanical Engineer Minoru “Sam” Araki (BS ’54, MS ’55) graduated from Stanford at a time when the Cold War was rapidly heating up. He quickly found himself helping lead a project to develop the nation’s first spy satellite, named Corona. Ultimately the pioneering work he and his team did earned them the 2005 Charles Stark Draper prize from the National Academy of Engineering.

Araki recently granted Stanford Engineering an interview in which he describes the engineering challenges of building an early satellite, his tenure as president of Lockheed Missiles and Space, and his newest venture. He is currently CEO and president of a homeland security company called ST Infonox.
Tell us about the Corona project.
Corona was started during the very, very beginning of the Cold War and the emphasis on Corona was brought about by the Russians’ launch of Sputnik. The U.S. had not been centered around going into space. We were essentially caught flat-footed. As that was occurring, one more thing that made Corona, a top secret project, even more urgent was the shooting down of the U-2 [spy plane]. That eliminated our ability to conduct photographic reconnaissance of the Soviet Union. Coupled with those two events there was tremendous pressure put upon President Eisenhower to undertake a crash program to regain the ability to do photographic reconnaissance.
How did you figure out how to make this work?

Our team came from all different walks of life and education. The problem that we were trusted with was a problem that none of us had been formally trained to perform. I had a ME background, which at Stanford was more in thermodynamics and fluid dynamics. Lockheed bilt a green field plant in Sunnyvale and we started in Stanford Industrial Park. This approach encouraged innovation.

We developed a discipline of our own because we had to put together all of the space physics knowledge that we could, [but] space physics was basically unknown. I graduated at Stanford just three and a half years before I went on the Corona project with a Masters and we had no program at all on space. So we had to develop space as a discipline from a space physics point of view as well as developing engineering methods and the program management techniques. As a matter of fact, on every flight that we flew with Corona we always flew scientific experiments alongside of the flight so that we could learn more about radiation, zero "G," and learn more about how vacuum sublimation, radiation heat transfer, and zero "G" capillary action takes place and so on.

One of the key aspects we had to develop [during the Corona years] was how to build a simulation model of everything we built and designed for space. We built the simulation model and then when we built the satellite we did so exactly to the simulation model … and verified that the hardware that we built actually worked to that simulation model. We did this for all discipline areas including structure, propulsion, electrical, attitude control, communication, command, control and sensor system RF and optical performance and so on. Every aspect of the satellite. We developed simulation techniques and then we always developed a testing technique in the space environment to be able to prove that we had built the right kind of system. We developed that over the first 10 to 15 years of the project. We started in 1960 with satellites that could only last one day, and in 15 years achieved satellites that had a 5 to10 year life.

When we started Corona all we had were slide rules and mechanical calculators. The computers came in the early ‘60s. By the mid-60s we had developed all the simulation tools and all of the computer automated test programs to be able to design, build and test satellites.
How did your studies at Stanford help, if not with the subject matter of the project?
Let me share something with you because I cherish my education at Stanford, the mechanical engineering masters program. When I went to school, Professors A. Louis London and William Kays were the thermodynamic professors at that time. The thing that I cherish the most in the education program that they developed was not the thermodynamic portion, it was the method by which you solve problems. You always state the problem. You always state the assumptions. You always state the method by which you are going to solve the problem and you always have to come to a conclusion. We used that over and over again in the Corona program because we first of all had to understand the problem. Every time we had a failure, every time we ran a flight, we had to understand the problem first and we had to always make some assumptions because we never had complete knowledge of what happened.

[At first] we had no knowledge of how to simulate on the ground as we do today. We had no environment test program to simulate space in a chamber. We couldn’t run vibration tests, we couldn’t run acoustic tests, and we couldn’t run vacuum tests. It didn’t exist. So we basically built something and flew it just to learn if it is going to work or not. When it didn’t work we had to really analyze why it failed, under what condition it failed and what should be the corrective action. This whole process we developed – a lot of it—was based on the kind of discipline we learned from London and Kays.
What are you proudest of in your time as president at Lockheed?
The last job I had before retirement was the merger of Lockheed and Martin Marietta. That was in 1996. So I was the last president of Lockheed Missiles and Space Company and I was the first president of Lockheed Martin Missiles and Space.

Corona was by far a very important achievement because it was the first. The second major achievement came about as a result of the fact that with the development of computers and communications it became obvious that we could develop an ability to go from space to a smart weapon – take the information from sensor to shooter in near real time. That development came into fruition and was tested in the Gulf War. The 1991Gulf War was the first true information age warfare which totally changed the way we fight wars. We were in the forefront of that. Our aircraft sister company built the F-117 stealth fighter, which carried smart weapons. Space information was coupled with the stealth fighter with the smart weapon.

One more thing relative to the information age warfare was MILSTAR. MILSTAR was another very key development that provided the first space intranet. MILSTAR, with its space borne switchboard/router and relay became the DoD digital, secure backbone for global communication. You could take any message from anywhere and reach another part of the globe without touching the ground.
You like to say that you “failed” retirement. What are you doing now that you are back at work?
When 9/11 occurred and we had this terrible terrorist attack, I having spent my whole career in national security programs, realized how vulnerable we were. What I saw was that if we put our minds, our technical talent, our program management talents and some money behind it with a national need, like a 9/11, that we could come up with a national security system for homeland security which is equally as good as what we had for the Cold War.

I got very interested in that and at the same time a good friend of mine asked me about starting a venture capital firm in homeland security. He and I teamed up together and found this company called ST-Infonox. ST-Infonox is a spin-off from a financial transaction platform built by Infonox, which does anti-fraud money transfers. Fraud works just like terrorism. They are both "asymmetric" threats. With terrorism you never know where the enemy is, where it is going to strike, how it is going to strike -- it's an unpredictable threat. For an anti-fraud transaction system, you have to design a system which detects threats, catches them before they happen, early enough to catch multiple indicators, integrate those multiple inputs and come to a conclusion that there is a threat in the making. That’s what this money transaction system does. We are successfully applying this to homeland security.
   

September 2005
 Related Topics