About Stephen Horan

Stephen Horan, Ph.D., retired in 2021 as an electronics engineer with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Langley Research Center. Dr. Horan joined Langley in 2009 as a spacecraft communications lead for satellite and hosted payload concepts. He has also served as the Branch head for the Remote Sensing Flight Systems Branch. From August 2013 through April 2020, he was the Principal Technologist for Avionics in NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. Dr. Horan is also a Professor Emeritus at New Mexico State University, where he held the Frank Carden endowed chair in Telemetering and Telecommunications from 1996 to 2009, when he retired as a Professor and Department Head in the Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. At NMSU, he developed the graduate telemetering systems course at the Klipsch School and the industry short course upon which this text is based. He taught other courses in communications systems and was the principal investigator on several telemetry and telecommunications projects at NMSU. Dr. Horan received his A.B. in physics from Franklin and Marshall College, and his M.S. in astronomy, M.S.E.E., and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from New Mexico State University. Dr. Horan’s research focused on space communications under the support of NASA and the Air Force, including leading the communications system development for the 3 Corner Satellite and the NMSUSat nanosatellite projects. Before joining the NMSU faculty, Dr. Horan was with Space Communications Company (now part of General Dynamics), working in satellite telemetry and telecommand systems, operator interfaces, and systems engineering at NASA’s White Sands Ground Terminal. Dr. Horan is a senior member of the IEEE and AIAA. He also holds the amateur radio license NM4SH. He has been a NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellow at Johnson Space Center and Goddard Space Flight Center.