Background
Jordin grew up in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area and attended Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.
engineer physicist Aerospace engineer
Jordin grew up in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area and attended Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania.
He received his Bachelor of Surgery in Electrical Engineering and Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and Doctor of Philosophy in Astrophysics from University of California, Berkeley in 1984.
In particular, he was responsible for Mockingbird, a conceptual design for an extremely small (75 kg dry mass) reusable launch vehicle, and was involved in the Clementine lunar mapping mission. Kare is also known as developer of the interstellar propulsion concept and, in the science fiction fan community, as a composer, performer and recording artist of filk music Kare is the brother of Susan Kare, designer of the fonts and icons of the original Apple Macintosh user interface.
Kare worked for many years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
In 1996, he left LLNL and, after working briefly for a small space-related startup company, became an independent consultant specializing in advanced space system design in 1997, and started his own company. He is a leading advocate of laser propulsion for space launch and in-space propulsion.
He organized a 1986 Workshop on Laser Propulsion at LLNL and later led a development program for ground to orbit laser launch supported by SDIO. He has received a National Aeronautics and Space Administration Institute for Advanced Concepts grant to study a near-term form of laser launch using arrays of relatively low powered lasers. He is Chief Scientist at LaserMotive, Incorporated. of LaserMotive, a laser power beaming entrant in the Elevator:2010 Beam Power Challenge.
Kare initially presented the concept of a SailBeam Boosted Magsail in a report prepared for National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Institute for Advanced Concepts called “High-Acceleration Micro-Scale Laser Sails for Interstellar Propulsion”.
A key idea is that if you accelerate vast numbers of tiny sails rather than one enormous one, you can bring the same amount of mass to high speeds with a less complex optical system. Unlike particle beam propulsion where the beam disperses as it travels, a stream of low-mass microsails is not limited by such diffraction. Using dielectric rather than metal sails, you can also accelerate the sails much closer to their power source.
The stream of microsails then becomes a source of propulsion to a starship as particle beams mounted on the starship vaporize the incoming sails into plasma.
Kare is also known as a science fiction fan and filksinger. He has been a regular attendee and program participant at science fiction conventions since 1975.
He was an editor of The Westerfilk Collection: Songs of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an important filksong collection, and later a partner in Office Centaur, the first commercial publisher specializing in filk songbooks and recordings. An astrophysicist character with his name appears in War of Honor and Torch of Freedom, military science fiction novels in the Honor Harrington series by David Weber.
