Dr. Bob Dempsey – Director of Flight Operations / Orbital Reef, Blue Origin

THE CLASSROOM WILL BE OPEN FOR THIS TALK.

This event WILL be live-streamed on YouTube and as a webinar on Zoom. Our speaker will be joining us remotely but we’d love to see you in the classroom for the talk. As always, the talk will be posted to the Westport Astronomical Society’s YouTube channel afterwards.

We welcome back WAS member and our friend Robert “Dr. Bob” Dempsey for his third time to the Westport Astronomical Free Science Lecture Series. This time around we’ll learn some more about New Shepard’s suborbital program. You can see some of Dr. Bob’s other talks that are archived on the WAS YouTube channel. In September 2021, the former NASA Flight Director gave a talk on Tales From The Trenches – When Things Go Wrong in Space and in 2023 returned for a great talk on The Blue Screen of Death – The near loss of the ISS. Dr. Bob has a new gig now that he’s no longer with NASA, he’s the Director of Flight Operations for Blue Origin’s new space station Orbital Reef.

Dr. Bob Dempsey received his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Toledo in 1991. He went on to both observe with, and operate, the Hubble Space Telescope. In 1997 he joined NASA’s International Space Station program where he controlled the computer and communication systems on the ISS. In 2005 he was selected as a Flight Director (call sign: Galileo). In this role he supported numerous Space Shuttle assembly missions, space walks, rendezvous and dockings of autonomous or crewed vehicles and supported many shifts in Mission Control. For 10 years he led the operations team that developed and operated the Boeing Starliner crewed vehicle. In 2022 he retired from NASA and joined Blue Origin serving as the Director of Mission Systems and Flight Operations for the Orbital Reef space station program.

Cal’s Corner is TBA