Co-Founder, Vice President and Chief Engineer
Dr. Jim Rogers has over forty-five years of aerospace industry experience, and is a co-founder of Solaren Corporation, the first commercially viable space solar power company. As Solaren
Vice President and Chief Engineer, Dr. Rogers has overall responsibility for the space solar power plant system architecture. He has co-authored several key Solaren space solar power system patents.
Prior to Solaren, Dr. Rogers had a distinguished career at Hughes Aircraft Company where he held several technical leadership positions. Dr. Jim Rogers was key member of the optical payload team for the Hughes-built unmanned Surveyor spacecraft, which preceded the manned Apollo missions to the moon. Surveyors performed the first successful soft landings on the moon, and surveyed the lunar surface. Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad landed his lunar module a short distance from Surveyor 3 and retrieved the optical camera. Upon its return to Earth, Dr. Rogers and the team evaluated the condition of the Surveyor camera for guidance in future designs. The camera is now on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
After the Surveyor program, Dr. Rogers held key technical positions on teams developing state-of-the-art systems that flew on numerous NASA and DOD spacecraft. Dr. Rogers’ expertise is in the field of components for advanced space-based systems, e.g., spacecraft power generation, thermal control and optical sensors. Dr. Rogers has authored twelve papers, which were published in numerous scientific journals and holds four patents in the fields of spacecraft power generation, spacecraft thermal control and space-based optical systems.
Dr. Rogers attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Berkeley, and received a joint Ph.D. in Engineering and Physics from the University of California at Los Angeles.