By Jeff Hunter ’96

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Shortly after completing bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Utah State University in mechanical aerospace engineering in the late 1990s, Curtis Bingham’s career took off.

He secured a position as a performance engineer at Pratt & Whitney, founded a century ago and long considered one of the world’s finest designers and manufacturers of aircraft engines. Bingham then spent nearly two decades in Connecticut working for the renowned aerospace company.

“My dad always taught me that engineers were the useful ones,” Bingham says of his father, Gail Bingham, who retired in 2010 as the chief scientist at the Space Dynamics Laboratory in North Logan. “He said they were the ones that could help make the science happen, and so he kind of built that up in us and that became something I wanted to do. I was always interested in the hardware. To be able to create something out of metal like that was just fascinating.”

When he was a teenager, Curtis’ older brother was a student at USU who was involved with a science experiment being prepared to launch into space. Curtis had a chance to visit the laboratory of longtime mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Steven Folkman, and that experience was life changing.

“As soon as they showed me the hardware, it was like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do. I want to be a mechanical engineer,’” Bingham recalls. “There’s just that connection. And I think that my background up to that point had prepared me well to want to make that decision.

“I’ve always enjoyed aircraft. I mean, what kid doesn’t like that when Top Gun comes out and you’re in that impressionable age, right? When I had the opportunity to go and work at Pratt & Whitney, I was really excited.”

Curtis, whose graduate focus at Utah State was on fluids and aerothermal sciences, built thermodynamic models that helped to predict the performance of engines under different conditions. During his time in Hartford, he worked on engine development for the Joint Strike Fighter program, which resulted in the F-35 Lightning II stealth fighter. He also helped create jet engines for commercial aircraft like Russia’s Irkut MC-21 passenger plane.

But in the late 2010s, Curtis and his wife, Bethany, started thinking it was time to return to the Western United States to be closer to relatives, and perhaps have some of their six children attend college at Utah State. Fortunately, even though he had been retired for a few years by then, Gail still had plenty of friends at SDL who kept him in the know.

“And I knew some people who said they were looking for engineers,” he remembers.

The elder Bingham passed that information on to his son, and Curtis promptly applied for an engineering position at the Space Dynamics Laboratory. While he was online, he also took note of a job as a program manager — a position very similar to the one he held while working on the Irkut MC-21 project.

“That’s how I ended up here, kind of backwards,” Curtis notes with a smile. “I applied for one job but got another one.”

Curtis, who grew up in Hyde Park and graduated from Sky View High School in 1991, returned to Utah with his wife and family in 2018. During his seven years back in Cache Valley, he’s served as the manager for multiple high-profile programs, while also relishing the opportunity to be part of the second generation of Binghams at the Space Dynamics Laboratory.

“It was fun when I started here because different people at different times would realize that I was Gail Bingham’s son,” Curtis recalls. “They’d tell me a story about my dad, and it was really meaningful.”

“And, in a way, it still kind of happens. I run into different people who share stories with me. So, it’s been very meaningful to learn more about my dad. And not just the technical work, but also the type of person he is, and what his role was and the impact he’s had on others.

Time and Space

While the younger Bingham’s connection to space came about through his introduction to engineering, the elder Bingham’s connection was initially founded in his understanding of things much closer to the ground.

A native of southern Idaho, Gail was born near the end of World War II while his father, Eldon, was serving overseas, and graduated from West Side High School in Dayton in 1962. He then served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Tennessee before starting college at Utah State in 1965, working under longtime soil physics professor Sterling Taylor in the development of soil instrumentation. Gail completed a bachelor’s degree in agriculture at USU and then went on to secure a Ph.D. in biometeorology — the study of how atmospheric and weather conditions affect living organisms, including humans, animals, and plants — at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Gail also served in the U.S. Army Reserve and was working as an atmospheric physicist at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1973, when Curtis, the fourth of he and his wife Gloria’s six children, was born in Maryland. About a year later, the Bingham family relocated to northern California after Gail accepted a position at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a biologist in the Biomedical Division in the Environmental Sciences Section.

“We were there for about 10 years while he worked on atmospheric studies with them, on things that he hasn’t been able to tell me about,” Curtis says with a chuckle. “It has to do with laser propagation in the atmosphere, and things like that. It was the time of Reagan and Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative) and all of that, and he was kind of supporting that effort.”

The Binghams ended up returning to Utah in the mid-1980s when Gloria’s mother became ill, and Gail secured a job in Logan as the state climatologist.

“It was in the basement of the Ag Science Building,” Gail recalls.

Located back then in the E.G. Peterson Agricultural Science Building, which was demolished in 2012, what is now known as the Utah Climate Center continues to operate out of USU’s Department of Plants, Soils & Climate. Part of Gail’s position was funded by the Department of Agriculture, while the rest of his salary came from teaching in the soils department and grant-funded research.

At the time Gail was the state climatologist, the Space Dynamics Laboratory — founded in 1970 when the Upper Air Research Laboratory at the University of Utah relocated to Logan and merged with the Electro-Dynamics Laboratories at USU — was still located on the Utah State campus, and he ended up working in a dual role as the state climatologist and an SDL scientist specializing in the development of optical sensors.

Gail eventually moved over to SDL on a full-time basis in the early ’90s, and his first major project involved the data management of CIRRIS 1A (Cryogenic Infrared Radiance Instrumentation for Shuttle). Designed for NASA to measure infrared emissions in Earth’s upper atmosphere and study background infrared radiation from space, CIRRIS 1A flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-39) in the spring of 1991.

While he was involved with the design, calibration, and operation of optical and infrared sensors as the chief scientist at SDL until his retirement, Gail received a significant amount of media attention in the mid-1990s due to his determination to grow vegetation in space. Unable to spark NASA’s interest in the project in the ’80s, he managed to put together a collaboration with the Russian space program, which led to the successful growth of wheat and other plants aboard the Mir space station.

“The Russians had root modules for planting, and it was working with them and those root modules, which they set up,” Gail says of the self-sustaining growth chambers designed to study root development in zero gravity. “And it worked because they had access to space that we didn’t have.”

A partnership between SDL and Russia’s Institute for Biomedical Problems, the project known as the Lada mission led to the successful cultivation of several different crops, including barley, radishes, dwarf peas, and dwarf wheat in space. And one of the small orange trees originally grown by USU students to test Lada’s water-moisture sensors and data-collection system lives on in the atrium of the SDL’s Jake Garn Space Research Building. 

“(Gail Bingham) did a lot of research with plant modules here at the lab, and he helped develop some of the first plant modules that made it possible to grow plants on the Mir, and then later some experiments on the ISS (International Space Station),” Curtis adds. “A lot of his research was done in joint ventures with Russian scientists, and then he’d also pull in a lot of students to help in that process.”

And Gail, who was awarded the Governor’s Medal for Science and Technology in 2001, tried to utilize one of those students — his son — to aid those efforts after Curtis returned home from serving a two-year mission in Ukraine.

“I spoke Russian when I was there, and he was working with the Russians,” Curtis notes. “And he thought, ‘This is amazing. I’ve got a built-in translator, who, when he comes back, will be able to translate stuff for me.’”

In need of a translator for a remote meeting with some Russian scientists, Gail had to wake his son up in the very early hours of the morning due to the nine-hour time difference. Still groggy from having his sleep interrupted, Curtis says the first sentence his father asked him to translate involved a lot of technical jargon.

“He says something about, ‘We’ve got questions on this data point on the humidity curve, just coming off the saturation of whatever,’ and I kind of just look at him like, ‘How am I going to translate this?’” Curtis recalls with a laugh. “But I start to try, then my dad just kind of went, ‘It’s OK son. That’s fine. You can go back to bed.’ And that’s the last time he ever asked me to translate for him.”

Reaching Higher

When Curtis was growing up, his father founded a side business called Bingham InterSpace selling instruments that collected data on plant health. He and some of his siblings became heavily involved in the venture, even helping to fabricate hardware for the instruments Gail sold to universities and other entities.

“I decided that since I had six boys and a daughter to put through college, I needed a home business to make more money and give my sons a trade they could utilize to make more money while going to school than they would make flipping burgers as some greasy food joint,” Gail  explains. “… We sold 10 or so systems over the next few years and building them kept me busy. I would work all day at the university, the come home and work on those systems until about midnight.”

Curtis was barely a teenager when his father purchased some CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software to help design some of the small company’s equipment.

“That wasn’t my main focus — I was a kid that liked to go play soccer and other stuff — but CAD work was really interesting to me,” Curtis says. “I’d watch my dad work a lot of hours at his day job, then come home at night and go down in the basement where we he had all of his equipment and work on the electronics and the flow meters and different things he needed.”

One summer, the Binghams even moved back to North Carolina so Gail could conduct research on how different levels of carbon dioxide would affect plant growth. It turned into a family vacation, as well as a summer job for Curtis, who got another taste of his future vocation when he was tasked with drilling holes in aluminum panels to accommodate gauges.

“As an engineer, now I understand what tolerances are,” Curtis says. “But as a kid back then, I just went for it. You know, drill it out and kind of hope it fits.

“I think I probably caused my dad more rework than helping him in that process, but it was a great way for us to earn a little money and learn new stuff.”

Curtis continues to learn and develop “new stuff” as a program manager at the Space Dynamics Laboratory. One of his first projects involved the creation of a thermal subsystem for the scientific instrumentation on NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, which was launched last October from the Kennedy Space Center. The Europa Clipper is expected to travel 1.8 billion miles before arriving near Europa, one of Jupiter’s largest moons, about five years from now. It will then conduct reconnaissance of Europa’s ice shell and subsurface ocean, assessing its potential to support life.

The Radiator Cold Assembly on the Europa Clipper was designed at SDL to maintain the optimal operating temperature of the Mapping Imaging Spectrometer for Europa (MISE) instrument, helping to ensure accurate measurements of Europa’s surface composition.

“That was exciting to be a part of,” says Curtis, who attended the launch of the Europa Clipper last fall in Florida. “And its passing Mars just now. It’s on its way to Jupiter, but it’s got to slingshot around Mars, then come back to the Earth. Then slingshot around the Earth as Jupiter comes around, so it can match the speed of Jupiter as it comes around without having to burn a lot of fuel to slow down when you get there. So, we’ll be able to track it for the next five years before it gets there, which is kind of fun.”

Curtis was also involved with the NEO (near-Earth object) Surveyor project, which is a space-based infrared telescope developed by NASA to detect and track potentially hazardous asteroids and comets that could pose a threat to Earth. But he was recently moved to another program, one he was already familiar with from his youth.

“Some of my dad’s colleagues from the root-module program came back to him and said, ‘Hey, we need some engineering work for this NASA grant that we’re applying for. Can you help us out?’ So, my dad said, ‘Well, let me introduce you to my son,’” Curtis says. “I went to my manager at the time and asked if we could bid on it, and if so, could I be the project manager. And he said, ‘Yeah, that looks great.’”

Already part of one of the many familial associations that can be found at the Space Dynamics Laboratory involving the children and grandchildren of current and former SDL employees, Curtis now has a direct connection to the work of his father.

“We just delivered to USU the engineering model of the root module that will go up. If we get the Phase C contract, they’ll buy a flight-ready root module and grow plants in the International Space Station,” Curtis says.

Proving once again, that at the Space Dynamics Laboratory, roots run deep — even 250 miles above the Earth.