Dr. John Brandenburg

Author

John E. Brandenburg is a theoretical plasma physicist who was born in Rochester Minnesota, and grew up in Medford Oregon. He is the inventor and developer of the MET (Microwave Electro-Thermal) thruster using water propellant. He is also the discoverer of the Paleo-Ocean of Mars. He obtained his BA in Physics, with a Mathematics minor, from Southern Oregon University in 1975 and obtained his MS in 1977 and PhD in Plasma Physics both from University of California at Davis in 1981, with a working fellowship at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. His first professional position was at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque working on controlled fusion and directed energy weapons. He was working at Kepler Aerospace LDT in Midland Texas as Chief Scientist of the Astronautics Division on the subjects of Advanced Space propulsion and Fusion Energy. He is now an independent space/physics consultant. Before this he was a consultant at Cal State Fullerton on Advanced Space Propulsion. Before that he was a consultant at Morningstar Applied Physics LLC and a part-time instructor of Astronomy, Physics and Mathematics at Madison College and other learning institutions in Madison Wisconsin. Before this, he worked at Orbital Technologies in Madison Wisconsin, as Senior Propulsion Scientist, working on space plasma technologies, nuclear fusion, and advanced space propulsion. He is the principle inventor of the MET (Microwave Electro-Thermal) plasma thruster using water propellant for space propulsion. He has previously worked on SDI, the Clementine Mission to the Moon, Rocket Plume-Regolith Interactions on the Moon and Mars, Vortex theory of Rocket engine design, combined Sakharov-Kaluza-Klein theory of Field Unification for purposes of space propulsion and Mars science. He is a lifetime member of the AIAA. He also performed an architecture study for a Human Mars Mission using solar electric propulsion. Before coming to ORBITEC he was teaching and performing research at the Florida Space Institute of the University of Central Florida, at Aerospace Corporation in Chantilly Va., and earlier at Research Support Instruments (RSI) in Lanham Maryland. During the Reagan years he worked at Mission Research Corporation and Sandia National Laboratories on SDI and plasmas for controlled fusion and directed energy weapons. He has authored the popular science books “Death on Mars,” (2014) “Life and Death on Mars” (2010), “Beyond Einstein’s Unified Field” (2011) and “Dead Mars, Dying Earth” (1999) with Monica Rix Paxson, which won the Ben Franklin Silver Medal award for best Science/Environmental book in 2001. He has written two science fiction novels under the pen name “Victor Norgarde”: “Morningstar Pass, The collapse of the UFO Coverup”