Alan Eustace
Alan Eustace | |
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Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology |
Robert Alan Eustace (born 1957) is an American computer scientist who served as Senior Vice President of Engineering and first Senior Vice President for Knowledge at
Early years
The son of a
As a university student, Eustace worked part-time selling popcorn and ice cream in Fantasyland and working on the monorail at Walt Disney World.[5] After taking a class on computer science, he decided to switch majors and ended up completing three academic degrees in the field, including a doctorate in 1984.[5]
Professional career
After graduation, Eustace worked briefly for Silicon Solutions, a startup in Silicon Valley,[5] before joining Digital, Compaq and then HP's Western Research Laboratory, where he worked 15 years on pocket computing, chip multi-processors, power and energy management, internet performance, and frequency and voltage scaling. In the mid-1990s, he worked with Amitabh Srivastava on ATOM, a binary-code instrumentation system that forms the basis for a wide variety of program analysis and computer architecture analysis tools. [6] These tools had a profound influence on the
Eustace was appointed head of the laboratory in 1999, but left it three years later to join Google, then a new startup.[5] At Google, he worked as Senior Vice President of Engineering until he retired from that section of Google on March 27, 2015.
Eustace is currently Technical Advisor
In the course of his professional career, Eustace co-authored nine publications and appeared as co-inventor in ten patents.
Stratosphere jump
In 2011, Eustace decided to pursue a stratosphere jump and met with Taber MacCallum, one of the founding members of Biosphere 2, to begin preparations for the project.[2] Over the next three years, the Paragon Space Development technical team designed and redesigned many of the components of his parachute and life-support system.[1][2] The Paragon team integrated systems for the Stratospheric Explorer mission code named StratEx Space Dive.[8]
On October 24, 2014, Eustace made a jump from the
His descent to Earth lasted 4 minutes and 27 seconds[11] and stretched nearly 26 miles (42 km) with peak speeds exceeding 822 miles per hour (1,323 km/h),[9] setting new world records for the highest free-fall jump and total free-fall distance 123,414 feet (37.617 km; 23.3739 mi).[12] However, because Eustace's jump involved a drogue parachute, while Baumgartner's did not, their vertical speed and free-fall distance records remain in different categories.[13][14]
Unlike Baumgartner, Eustace, a twin-engine jet pilot, was not widely known as a daredevil prior to his jump.[2]
Eustace's world record jump was featured in two episodes of STEM in 30, a television show geared towards middle-school students by the National Air and Space Museum.[15]
See also
- Space diving
- Yevgeni Andreyev
- Felix Baumgartner
- Charles "Nish" Bruce
- Joseph Kittinger
- Nick Piantanida
- Cheryl Stearns
- Steve Truglia
- Olav Zipser
- Victor Prather
References
- ^ a b c "StratEx". Paragon. Retrieved October 27, 2014.
- ^ a b c d e f Markoff, John (October 24, 2014). "Parachutist's Record-Breaking Fall: 26 Miles, 15 Minutes". The New York Times. Retrieved October 24, 2014.
- ^ "Management team". Retrieved October 24, 2014.
- ^ Markoff, John (October 27, 2014). "15 Minutes of Free Fall Required Years of Taming Scientific Challenges - For World Record, Alan Eustace Fought Atmosphere and Equipment". The New York Times. Retrieved October 31, 2014.
- ^ a b c d e f Kassab, Beth (December 13, 2011). "Google exec remembers growing up in Pine Hills". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved October 25, 2014.
- ^ A. Srivastava and A. Eustace, ATOM: A system for building customized program analysis tools, Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming language design and implementation (PLDI '94), pp. 196–205, 1994; ACM SIGPLAN Notices - Best of PLDI 1979-1999 Homepage archive, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 528–539; doi:10.1145/989393.989446
- ^ "Opener".
- ^ "StratEx Mission". paragonsdc.com. Paragon. Retrieved December 8, 2020.
- ^ a b c "Google VP's 135,908-foot leap breaks world record for highest free-fall parachute jump". The Verge. October 24, 2014. Retrieved October 24, 2014.
- ISBN 978-0997691900.
- ^ Eustace, Alan. "Transcript of "I leapt from the stratosphere. Here's how I did it"". Retrieved November 10, 2018.
- ^ "Google's Alan Eustace beats Baumgartner's skydiving record". BBC News. October 24, 2014. Retrieved October 25, 2014.
- ^ "Baumgartner's Records Ratified by FAI!". FAI. February 22, 2013. Archived from the original on March 2, 2013. Retrieved October 26, 2014.
- U.S. Parachute Association. October 24, 2014. Archived from the originalon October 3, 2015. Retrieved October 26, 2014.
- ^ The Engineering Behind a Record-Breaking Skydive, retrieved February 6, 2019
Further reading
- Leidich, Jared The Wild Black Yonder, The Inside Story of the Secret Trip to the Edge of Earth's Atmosphere for the Highest Balloon Flight and Skydive of All Time. Stratospheric Publishing, 2016. ISBN 0997691905
External links
- Media related to Alan Eustace at Wikimedia Commons
- "I leapt from the stratosphere. Here’s how I did it" (TED Talk, March 2015)
- "Alan Eustace Jumps from Stratosphere Breaking Felix Baumgartner's Record" (John Markoff, The New York Times, October 24, 2014)
- Alan Eustace at IMDbmovie about record setting space jump 14 Minutes from Earth (2016)