From Spacecraft to Racecars: Physicist Pushes Vehicle Limits
Faster, higher, stronger — together. Those words make up the Olympic motto, but they also describe Jim Hamilton’s career.
“I’ve been a part of some unusual and extraordinary teams,” he said. “There has to be the joy of working together and respecting what everyone else is doing.”
Hamilton, a 1965 graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Physics, has helped build interstellar probes and championship race cars. Throughout a career that spans nearly six decades, he has pushed the envelope of innovation.
“I use physics absolutely every day. I still have a sense of wonder about many aspects of physics,” Hamilton said. “It is in everything. My world has been mostly in classical physics, and it’s been really helpful for me working with engineers who know more about applied physics. But it always goes back to the some of the first principles.”
Physics is the basis of Hamilton’s lifelong work in supporting vehicles that operate under extreme conditions, but it was Alan J. Perlis, a pioneer in computer science who won the first Turing Award, who showed him how to harness it.
“He looked and acted like an extraordinarily intelligent man from Mars. He just set the place on fire,” Hamilton said.
Perlis was head of the Association for Computing Machinery and Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Mathematical Sciences while Hamilton was a student.
“So much of my career has turned out to be based on his teaching,” he said. “I had an advantage because he taught software. That really helped me into my first forays into aerospace.”
In an undergraduate computer course, Perlis taught octal, a number system with a base of 8 used to represent binary numbers, which allows for more compact programming instructions.
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In his first job after graduation, Hamilton worked at Space Technology Laboratories, a division of Thompson Ramo Wooldridge Inc. As part of the guidance and mission simulation department, he worked as a programmer on NASA’s Gemini and Apollo programs.
With Gemini, he used classic physics to help understand Hohmann transfers, a maneuver that shifts a spacecraft from one orbit to another in the same plane. It’s the type of move that gets a spacecraft from the Earth to the moon.
“It was very simple classic physics. It was just a matter of conservation of energy,” Hamilton said. “How much energy do you have to exert? In what direction and at what time do you need to make that happen?”
The language those onboard spacecraft computers used? Octal.
“I was one of only a few people working hundreds of hours a week. Innovation can happen a little bit easier in those compression situations,” he said.
For Apollo, it was about storing a collection of trajectories to help astronauts out if a mission needed to be aborted.
The work he did on the Gemini and Apollo missions set him up for understanding how to patch ellipses and parabola orbits together. That knowledge helped send Pioneer and Mariner satellites out to explore the Solar System and Voyager satellites to go interstellar.
“Some of those are still flying,” he said.
Another set of satellites explored much closer to home. Hamilton was part of Project Corona, the first series of American photographic spy satellites. Declassified in 1995, the images preserve a high-resolution view of the world during the 1960s and are used today by researchers studying environmental change and other areas.
“We could see the satellites launched from Redondo Beach — if there was clear sky — and see them go into the ionosphere. It was always near sunset, and you would get this multicolored rainbow scribbling in the contrails.”
Hamilton worked out of the Air Force’s Satellite Control Facility at Onizuka Air Force Station in California. He was part of the team working on software that made decisions about what photographs to take.
“I was the main troubleshooter for the early missions, and the software was big. It was written in Jovial, based on a version of the international ALGOL language. Again, I was grateful for Alan Perlis,” he said.
Hamilton left aerospace and worked on a ship design for the Navy before turning to cars. He led research at both BMW and VW on safety and engineering teams. But his passion for cars started in high school, when he was involved with racing. First, it was an Austin-Healey Sprite that a friend owned, then motorcycles and then a used Lotus 18.
“I wasn’t formally involved with Buggy in college, but in our dormitory, there were several teams. I helped them in an informal way with experiments to quantify and improve — to reduce wheel bearing friction and so forth,” Hamilton said. “It was so cool.”
An amateur racer for most of his life, he served as a race engineer for Dan Gurney's All American Racers, Patrick Racing and PacWest Racing before spending the last 25 years with Chip Ganassi Racing.
Since Hamilton joined the team, Ganassi Racing has won five Indianapolis 500 championships. As a performance engineer on the team, his role requires looking for ways to use simulation data analysis to identify potential innovations and share his results with drivers and lead engineers. Among the drivers he’s worked with are some of the sport’s best: Jimmy Johnson, Dario Franchitti, Scott Dixon and Alex Palou.
“Everyone respects what everyone else is doing. Teamwork is a huge part of it, and that atmosphere starts from the top,” he said, referencing Chip Ganassi, a fellow Pittsburgh native. “Just to be a part of it, especially a part that’s off in left field doing new stuff and yet is accepted within the larger frame of teamwork, I’m pretty proud of that.”
As part of Ganassi Racing, Hamilton holds four U.S. patents in vehicle dynamic technology, including the Delta wing race car. He gives back to the industry through leadership opportunities like serving on the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Vehicle Dynamics Technical Committee, chairing vehicle dynamic sessions at the SAE Motorsports Engineering Conference and presenting to both the U.S. DOT and the SAE on vehicle safety. He also served for six years as a National Academy of Sciences panel member evaluating US Army Research Laboratory projects in Mechanical Engineering and Air and Ground Vehicle Technology.
Although he wasn’t formally involved with Buggy while he was a student, Hamilton was there for another quintessentially Carnegie Mellon race — the world’s first robot car race in 2004. Ganassi Racing sponsored Sandstorm, Carnegie Mellon’s self-driving Humvee that traveled more than 7 miles during the race.
“It was an unprecedented race. We were happy to get involved,” Hamilton said.