An adventure in technology and marketing:: A personal account -: Trip to the orient via the moon

Early in the Sixties when President Kennedy announced the goal to land a man on the Moon and return him safely to Earth, there was no way to gauge, accurately and reliably, the millions of pounds of fuel and oxidizer in the proposed rocket. Late in the sixties, when Phillips Petroleum and Marathon Oil contracted to provide large-scale, long term, ocean transport of Liquefied Natural Gas, no system existed to satisfactorily gauge this stream of high value cargoes for commercial transactions. The adventure in solving these related problems led to a worldwide market for LNG Custody Transfer Systems, a successful transfer of technology from a NASA program to commercial use. While I was studying Applied Physics at the Harvard Graduate School, two senior engineers at Raytheon and I kept in touch. We developed communications equipment and they were planning to start a company specializing in aircraft flight test instrumentation. The company would be called "Trans-Sonics, Inc." - a word of the future en route to supersonic flight. Ultimately, Trans-Sonics, Inc. would be acquired by the Foxboro Company, largely as a result of events related here...