Pat Norris

Pat Norris has worked in the space and software industries since the 1960s. Born and educated in Ireland, he started his working life in the UK at the radar laboratories of Elliott Automation. He moved to the USA in 1966 working for the RCA Service Company at the Goddard Space Flight Center, supporting NASA's activities in precise orbit determination, gravity field modeling and satellite geodesy. In 1967 he joined TRW to work on the Apollo moon landing program in Houston Texas. He led a small team of engineers analyzing the challenges of navigating between the earth and the moon, and around the moon. He received the Apollo individual Achievement Award from Neil Armstrong in August 1969 for his endeavors - in particular the determination of accurate geodetic locations for the one third of NASA tracking stations whose data had to be binned in the Apollo 8 mission. From 1971 to 1980 he worked for the European Space Agency as system and software engineer on the Hubble Space Telescope, the Meteosat weather satellite, the Aerosat navigation satellite and the OTS telecom satellite. Since 1980, Pat has worked for Logica in the UK. This multinational software company is now the European leader in space software - its software currently supports the missions of more than a third of the world's satellites. Space missions in which Pat has been involved in this role include the Giotto probe to Halley's comet, the Hipparcos star mapper, the Huygens probe to Titan, the Galileo navigation system, the Inmarsat-4 global mobile broadband network, the XMM X-ray astronomy observatory and the Skynet 5 military communications satellite. Pat is Chairman of the Royal Aeronautical Society Space Group, a member of the Executive Committee of the UK Parliamentary Space Committee and a former Chairman of the trade association of Britain's space industry, UKspace (previously called UKISC). He is a Fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation, a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society and a Chartered Engineer (CITP).