Jack Clemons

Career

Jack received his Bachelor's and master's degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Florida. During the Apollo Moon Program he was a lead engineer at TRW Systems Group in Houston, Texas, supporting operations at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Johnson Space Center). He developed procedures allowing astronauts to monitor the Apollo Command Module Onboard Guidance and Navigation Computer during atmospheric reentry, and to control the reentry manually should they need to override the computer. He provided real-time reentry support during missions Apollo 9 through Apollo 14, including NASA Mission Control Center backroom support during the extended 6-minute reentry blackout period on Apollo 13.

Following Apollo, at IBM Federal Systems in Houston, he was the overall program manager for the development of the onboard software for NASA's Space Shuttle. Driven by a NASA requirement for "error-free" code, Shuttle Flight Software became the first program rated at CMM Level 5, the highest rating of the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model. As a member of the IBM team, Jack worked early on with Shuttle astronauts to design the onboard computer displays, and later provided problem analysis and flight support during the first six Space Shuttle missions.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Clemons was Senior Vice President of Engineering at Lockheed Martin Air Traffic Control Company in Rockville, Maryland. His organization designed and implemented the hardware and software required to support the modernization of the FAA's nationwide Air Traffic Control computer systems, and the United Kingdom's London Area Air Traffic Control Centre, as well as systems in Scotland, Eastern Europe, South America, and New Zealand.