Rockwell International

I was born in the South Bay area in Redondo Beach, California, which is a suburb of Los Angeles.

And at one point, my dad accepted a job with Rockwell International in the aviation industry.

He was going to be working on the B-1 bomber project.

So we packed everything up and we moved to a little town called Tachipi, California, which is out in the sticks of Southern California.

I can get their contact information while I'm studying to become a realtor myself.

And that's what my dad actually did for a while because he knew that he had to put food on the table.

Ultimately, he pivoted again and was able to pick up a job back with Rockwell International in the space shuttle program, which he worked on for a lot of years and eventually did go back to the B-1 program when it was restarted.

But that was the first example that I had of an adult kind of taking lemons and turning them into lemonade.

Because people move from job to job to job, and they don't really have a lot of common experience.

And one of the things that I learned from one manager that I worked for at the time at Rockwell International, which is now part of Boeing, is he would give everybody a book at the beginning of the month on his direct reports, the people that worked for him, and then at the end of the month, we would all have a conversation together about what we learned from the book and what the lessons are from the book.

And it was, it was a way for us to each experience the book-

Mm-hmm

What do you, what does that refer to, and how does that exemplify itself in execution?

All right.

And that's, okay, so as I said, I learned this, this approach to trying to develop a common language from one of the managers I worked with, worked for at Rockwell International.

And it's the idea that, just take the simple model of what if everybody on your team spoke a different language? What one- One English, one Polish, one Hebrew, one Arabic, another Spanish.

He also holds a Master of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a Master of Education from the University of Washington.

Since that time, he has worked as a safety and reliability engineer for Martin Marietta Aerospace and Rockwell International on space shuttle design proposals.

He worked for the Federal Aviation Administration as an aircraft structure certification engineer, an FAA attache to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia, and as a mathematics teacher and tutor.

In 2005, he published the book Fated Giant with co-author James Klotz, which details his UFO incident while he was stationed at Malmstrom Air Force Base.

And again, John Deere had to adjust on the fly.

This started on June 23rd, 1995, when Rockwell International Corporation, traditionally a US defense manufacturer, unveiled its proprietary vision system, effectively firing the first shot of the digital farming revolution.

It seems so simple now, but Rockwell's vision system was poised to usher in a new age of efficiency by using defense satellites to pinpoint and track a tractor from above, which in turn would allow a farmer to better monitor their field's yield or, when it came time to plant, better disperse seeds and spray chemicals.

Precision farming had arrived, and while Rockwell was the first, competitors such as Case Corporation and AGCO Corporation were close on the company's heels.

From there, the career path was simple.

She got a job with Rockwell International, an aerospace company, and began working on engines for rocket ships.

Monica was an incredibly intelligent and accomplished woman, having worked for several high-profile companies in their research department.

In the late 1990s, she collaborated with the Air Force Research Lab.

Monica would later work with NASA in the 2000s on other research projects of engines and fuels.

But her biggest accolades wouldn't come until 2016 when Rockwell International made significant advancements in, you guessed it, rocket propulsion technology.

In 2025, Monica was made the director of materials processing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

There's the JPL once again.

So I started my career Oh, about 35 years ago in the space industry.

After I got out of school, I worked for a little company called Rockwell International.

And when the guy was interviewing me for the job up in Grand Prairie, Texas, he goes, why do you want to work here? And he had a picture of NASA on the wall behind him.

And I said, well, y'all work there, right? He goes, yeah.