Rex Thomas Email & Phone Number

Berkeley, California, United States

Advanced Reactor Design Group

Los Angeles, California, United States

Working on making nuclear reactors portable and rapidly commercializable

San Francisco Bay Area

Working on commercial emission-free power

South Pole, Antarcrtica

-Supported research studying the cusp zone of the Earth's magnetic field to gather data from cosmic rays, plasma density and movement, and space weather in the Earth's ionosphere at the Pole-Fuel ops for LC-130 Hercules aircraft and Basler DC-3 aircraft-Greenhouse management, emergency medical first response, and tactical rescue team -Total of 13 months, part of the 2020 winterover crew of 42 people, no planes in or out for eight months, no sunlight for six months-Being plopped back into the pandemic world nine months late was a wild culture shock... ask me about it!

Greater Los Angeles Area

-Structural design, analysis, and testing on composite landing leg and heatshield components for the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles

Los Angeles, California, United States

-Led full-scale qualification test campaign on the Landing Leg 2.0 of the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch vehicles.-Created system-level finite element analysis model for the composite Landing Leg structure to characterize landing leg loads while attached to the fuel tank during all regimes of flight (ascent, reentry, and landing), validated models with full-scale test data and flight data-Certified the landing legs for flight with NASA for the human-rated Dragon missions to the ISS

Hawthorne, Ca

-Wrote wind tunnel test data post-processing scripts for on-the-fly data analysis during the test and analysis after the test for designing the trajectory for Crew Dragon reentry-Designed a study to verify and validate an adaptive meshing feature of FUN3D, a fully unstructured Navier-Stokes solver, to cut down on total CPU time and increase fidelity of CFD results over a range of flow regimes-Analyzed Falcon 9 fairing and Crew Dragon reentry vehicles using CFD, including mesh generation, running CFD code on local cluster, and post-processing results-Evaluated ice impact loading on Falcon Heavy structure by writing scripts to post-process ascent CFD data

Hawthorne, Ca

-Assisted with EMI testing: test setup, production of test harnessing for Dragon 7 Draco engines, and test logging -Worked with Integration and Power teams to collect F9 v1.1 vehicle unit and harness data for power bus model

Houston, Texas Area

Designed, manufactured, and calibrated a no-contact force measurement technique to measure thrust generated by the quantum vacuum plasma thruster (Q-thruster) test article and integrated it with the Q-thruster torsional balance test rig

Charlottesville, Virginia Area

Worked with Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) spectroscopy testing methods to obtain qualitative flow visualization images and quantitative flowfield data of velocity, pressure, temperature and species concentration for a Mars Entry, Descent, and Landing (EDL) at Mach 12

Hampton, Virginia

Worked on green aviation: a hybrid electric propulsion system for mid-sized commercial airliners. Tested and validated the capabilities of Flight Optimization System (FLOPS) to handle a double engine deck: a battery deck for taxi, takeoff, climb and descent, and a traditional internal combustion engine for cruise.

Master Of Science - Ms, Nuclear Engineering

Bachelor Of Science (B.S.), Aerospace, Aeronautical And Astronautical Engineering

Activities and Societies: Rodman Scholars Program at University of Virginia, Society of Women Engineers, Resident Life, Entrepreneurship.