This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Curtis Cleven conducted by Peter Westwick. Topics covered include: JPL’s shift from Army to NASA; secrecy and classification; development of systems engineering; building hardware in-house versus contracting; shift from engineering to management; JPL and local aerospace industry; JPL work ethic; faster-better-cheaper in the 1990s; emergence of computers in engineering design; PERT software systems; and workforce demographics. Curtis Cleven was a technician and engineer at the Jet Propulsion Lab from 1957 to 2001. Curtis Cleven was born in South Dakota in 1934 and raised in a small town outside Seattle. He studied physics for two years at the University of Washington and in 1954 joined the Marine Corps, serving three years as an electronics technician, working on missile guidance radars. In 1957 he joined JPL as an electronics technician on the Sergeant missile before returning to school to obtain an undergraduate degree in physics at San Diego State in 1962. After obtaining his degree he became a flight projects engineer at JPL, working first on spacecraft power systems, then on assembly and launch for the Ranger and Mariner missions. He served as spacecraft systems engineer on the Topex earth-observing satellite from 1980 to 1993, and then worked on the Mars Pathfinder lander. He retired from JPL in 2001. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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