<font color="yellow">but I am used to the SF Bay Area earthquakes</font><br /><br />S.F. area, eh? OK, now we know the geographic area I can be a bit more specific in my help <img src="/images/icons/smile.gif" /><br /><br />From what you've stated, sounds like you would enjoy working on space-borne hardware, as they do require more design innovation than something just sit on your desktop. <br /><br />For starters, I would visit launch vehicle website and look for "payload planner's guide". It's a manual launch vehicle (LV) companies put out to satellite manufacturers so they can design the satellite to satisfy the launch enviornment, inclduing shocks, acoustic, random vibrations, thermal as well as all necessary interfaces. You can down load them for free and understand a lot about launch vehicles and payload integration. Just google the key word and look for Atlas, Delta, Sea Launch and Arianne's payload planners' guide.<br /><br />Now onto more exciting aspect of satellite design. Satellite has 2 parts --- bus and payload. Bus is the "standard" part of a satellite offerrings such as Hughes (now Boeing) HS701, Loral & Lockheed has their own platforms. A bus is like a bone structures of a satellite with the standard subsystem such as propulsion, comm, and power. <br /><br />A payload refers to the specific instrumentations that a particular satellite customer want for its purpose. Generically commercial satellite wants the "comm" features while the government wants the "EO" feature (politely called as "earth observation" but really is "spy" satellites <img src="/images/icons/laugh.gif" />). Now spy satellites are really cool as they demand finer and finer target recognition and discrimination. But really, both comm and EO satellites are very much in demand. <br /><br />Another exciting arena for satellite is called "configurable" satellite bus architecture. Suppose there's a little crisis happen over in one part of world and the government wants to q <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> </div>