User:Clavious000/sandbox

Brendan (Ben) Quine is an industrialist and entrepreneur. He is CEO and CTO of ThothX LLC a space and defense company that provides space situational awareness by deep space radar and based in Colorado Springs. He is also CTO of Thoth Technology Inc., based in Ontario Canada, that he co-founded with his business partner Caroline Roberts in 2001 and Director of the Algonquin Radio Observatory since 2008. He is a prolific inventor of space technology innovations including deep space radar sensors, autonomous star identification, ultra-sonic flow measurement and space elevators. He is married to his business partner and lives in Ontario with his children Chloe and Henry Quine.

Early Life

Brendan was born in the United Kingdom and spent his early years growing up in Canterbury where his parents where professors of psychology at the university there. He attended Simon Langton Grammar School for boys where he developed a keen interest in physics and engineering.

Education

In 1990 he went to study Physics at the University of Bristol, sponsored by British Aerospace Space Systems. He graduated in 1993. His third-year thesis work on a method to meter spacecraft propellant ultrasonically was subsequently patented by British Aerospace. In 1993 he attended Oxford University where he held an Industrial Fellowship from Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and in association with British Aerospace Space Systems. Under the supervision of Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte and J. Michael Brady he studied data fusion applying it to star identification and attitude determination in spacecraft. After three years of research, he graduated with a doctorate of Philosophy in 1997 and his thesis work received a United States Patent in 1999. An autonomous star camera based on his work flew on PROBA in 2001.

In 1997 he became a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Toronto where he worked on MANTRA a high atmosphere balloon mission to study stratospheric composition with launches between 1998 and 2004. During his research he developed a new balloon pointing control system and also write a line-by-line radiative transfer code called GENSPECT.

Career

In 1989 he joined British Aerospace Space System Ltd as an apprentice engineer where he grew his interest in space technology working on cryogenic coolers and spacecraft stability problems including the dampening maneuvers for the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. He co-founded Thoth Technology Inc. in 2001 with his business partner Caroline Roberts who he met while at Oxford University. Together they set about creating Thoth Technology Inc. a space and defense company focusing initially on space test and instrumentation and the development of Northern light, a robotic mission to Mars. In 2002 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto but subsequently moved in 2003 to York University to become a founding professor and director of the Engineering School's new program in Space Engineering. At York he was the recipient of a Canadian Foundation for Innovation grant for the construction of a thermal vacuum and vibration test system at York University.

While at York, he partnered with Robert Zee and the University of Toronto's institute for Aerospace Studies CanX program, providing a miniaturized near infrared spectrometer sensor suitable for CubeSats called Argus. The first sensor was launched into space in 2008 on CanX-2 and the design was subsequently commercialized and flown on multiple missions. In 2010, the CanX-2 team received the Alloutte Award for the work. He was also Editor in Chief, Canadian Aeronautics and Space Journal CASJ for four years. He retired from York University in 2022, becoming an adjunct professor, to pursue his entrepreneurial passions full time.

In 2008 Thoth Technology acquired the lease on Algonquin Radio Observatory. The three thousand tonne antenna was in a rough shape with multiple bearing failures in the main load bearing gearboxes. Brendan led a four-year campaign to refurbish Canada's national observatory, ultimately succeeding in restoring full operation to the antenna originally constructed in 1963.

In 2012, he invented a novel space tower popularly called the ThothX Tower and was granted patent protection for the concept from 2015. The tower aimed to reduce significantly the cost of sending payloads into orbit by providing a freestanding launch pad at 15 kilometers altitude where hypersonic spaceplanes can launch directly into Low Earth Orbit and return to land without the need for multistage rockets. In addition the tower would provide real estate with a view that is out of this world and a destination where tourists could enjoy the vista of space safely and under normal gravity. The work captured media attention around the world.

After successfully refurbishing the main antenna at Algonquin, Brendan set about developing an experimental astronomy program with the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and the Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto developing research programs in collaboration with MITACS and SOSIP.

Working with partners Analytical Graphics Inc. (AGI) he also worked on Earthfence a radar capable of tracking spacecraft in geostationary orbit. Earthfence is a fully digital pulsed compression radar system that can track objects in GEO and XGEO at a station to satellite range ranges up to 50 million meters. The first such commercial DSR is deployed in Canada at the Algonquin Radio Observatory and provides service over the Americas. In 2019, the radar was used to observe the breakup of Intelsat 29e. Thoth is now expanding this technology globally.

In 2020, as part of the Chime team he co-detected of a fast radio burst (FRB) emitted from magnetar SGR 1935+2154 at a range of twenty thousand light years using a 10 meter antenna at the Algonquin Radio Observatory (ARO), first constructed in 1961 and refurbished for the experiment. The work was published in the journal Nature.