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Biography - Mark Vatsaas
When you are the younger brother of Brad and Rick, insanity is a blessing.
Mark is fortunate, therefore, that both Brad and Rick are blessed with
it in abundance. Unfortunately for Mark, their nuttiness is contagious.
Mark started out in life as an extremely precocious child and has pretty
much stayed that way ever since. Well, the child part, anyway. He considers
that an asset now that he has four kids of his own. His wife of ten years,
Bethel, isn't so sure. It remains to be seen whether it is an asset in
rocketry. Brad and Rick have child-like qualities, too, but they're doing
amazing things with undergarments nowadays.
As a child, Mark was never the modeler that Brad and Rick were.
However, he has many fond memories of watching them and cousin John as
their rockets incinerated in midair, cratered in the wheat field, and
started grass fires just as the local sheriff arrived. One of his favorite
memories is diving for cover as John's core-burning black powder E engine, suddenly
unencumbered by such bothersome components as fuselage and fin, careened
about our heads before sailing off over the lake in a graceful arc of fire.
Mark still gets all misty-eyed whenever he thinks about it, but the doctor
says that head-injuries can have that effect on you.
These memories have served as a faithful guide to Mark's reentrance into
model rocketry, as he once-again watches his brothers' rockets die ever
more glorious and spectacular deaths. With effort, however, Mark believes
that he, too, will someday achieve their level of excellence.
About the time he was 12, Mark's interest in rocketry gave way to
computers. Throughout junior and senior high, he achieved dizzying heights
of geekdom in the computing realm. Evidently, the first thing he learned
about computers was nepotism. Fresh out of high school, he joined the
family business as a part-time student intern at Honeywell. Working in the
same department as Rick meant that Mark had the privilege of being abused
at work as well as at home. Yes, Rick still lived at home after college,
but when he got married Mom and Dad told him he had move out.
Unlike Rick, Mark did go down the electrical engineer route, but his
academic train leapt the rails after three years of college and he dumped
the EE diploma in favor of a career in software development. Now Mark works
with many of those that actually finished their EE degree, making their
transition into computer science only after foundering in the EE job
market. Some people are slow learners.
Today, Mark's rocketry interests are frequently thwarted by the demands
of small children and a cleaning dysfunction that leaves the workbench is
a perpetual state of chaos. It is his hope that time and therapy will
eventually allow him to throw away the same quantity of time that Brad
and Rick do. Until then, Mark must remain content with only occasional
doses of rocketry excess, usually made possible by choosing the hobby
over less important activities such as sleep.
Bradley's Bio
Rick's Bio
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