Kevin Watson Email & Phone Number

Bellevue, Wa, Us

Planegg, Bavaria, De

I’m responsible for the fault tolerant avionics architecture of the Nyx spacecraft. In addition, I’m responsible for the design of the Nyx flight computers. Nyx is a human-rated spacecraft designed to ferry passengers to and from the International Space Station and other future space stations.

Long Beach, California, Us

Vast acquired Launcher in March 2023. At Vast I continue to lead avionics development and management for our Orbiter spacecraft, including overall avionics architecture. With few exceptions, all hardware was developed in-house, including our flight computer. I am also designing the human-rated fault-tolerant flight computers and networking hardware for our Haven series of space stations.

Hawthorne, California, Us

At Launcher, I was a founding member and built out the entire avionics group. Currently, I’m leading the design team that is developing the flight hardware and software for a new orbital transfer vehicle that we intend to launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket in the Fall of 2022. We are also busy developing our own launch vehicle that uses our ultra-efficient (97.5% C*) LOX-RP1 staged combustion engine. Yes, it's a very fun gig :-)

Redmond, Washington, Us

I'm leading the development of new MEMS-based LiDAR and computing technologies. The goal is to produce a miniature time-of-flight LiDAR sensor with very high resolution and frame rates that can be mass produced inexpensively. This sensor coupled with advanced built-in sensor fusion capabilities will enable amazing advances in many areas including autonomous vehicle localization, path planning, mapping and ADAS applications.

I'm leading a team of engineers who are developing new sensing and computing technologies for localization, mapping, path planning and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) in future automobiles.

Tustin, Ca, Us

I was responsible for the architecture and development of the computer hardware & software for Virgin Galactic's new LauncherOne orbital launch vehicle.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

As a consultant to Google's Advanced Technologies And Projects (ATAP) group, I was the lead computer design engineer on Project Tango. My favorite contribution to the project was the development of an ARM SoC-based sensor hub that is responsible for, among other things, the precise microsecond-level time-stamping of system events like gyro & accel updates, camera Vsync, laser strobe, etc. The goal of Project Tango is to give mobile devices a human-scale understanding of space and motion and I think the results are fairly spectacular.

Hawthorne, California, Us

I managed the Flight Computing Group at Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), where we designed the computers and networking hardware for our launch vehicles and spacecraft. I was personally responsible for the overall architectural design of the Falcon 9 & Dragon fault-tolerant computing and networking systems. In addition, I performed the board-level design of the computers and networking hardware used on these vehicles. I also designed the computer and network hardware installed on the International Space Station (ISS) that is responsible for control and communications between the internal ISS network, a Dragon spacecraft on approach to ISS, and SpaceX mission operations.

Pasadena, Ca, Us

I managed the Advanced Computer Systems and Technologies Group within the Autonomous Systems Division. My group had been historically responsible for the flight computers used in JPL spaceflight missions, but I greatly expanded the role of the group to include technology development to support these missions. During my tenure as supervisor, I wrote, or co-wrote proposals that brought in one to two million dollars yearly for our R&D work, which mostly centered on computing solutions for robotic exploration missions to Mars.As an example of this work, I started a task in 2004 to design a FPGA-based stereo vision processor with the goal of enabling continuous autonomous driving and hazard avoidance of our Mars rovers. This work was awarded a Major NASA Space-act Award in 2008. This work continues to this date and will be used on the 2020 Mars rover.When I started my career at JPL, I worked nine years within the Radiation Effects and Testing Group where I developed methods to test the sensitivity of complex integrated circuits to the transient effects of space radiation. During this time I developed a deep understanding of the effects of radiation on these devices. I would later apply this knowledge to hardening industrial and military grade electronic hardware to space radiation which enabled the use of much higher performance computers in space, but at a much lower cost as compared to traditional aerospace radiation hardened devices.