By Robert Bell. This Vietnamese immigrant to the US has made many fundamental contributions to the technology of the satellite industry. The Vuong-Vuong Techniques used to calculate satellite link availability during rainfall are at the core of virtually all software that develops link budgets. The same is true of software for predicting sun transit outages, which make use of the Vuong-Forsey Technique.

He first came to the US in the 1960s on a USAID scholarship to study at the University of California. It’s fair to say that was one of the better immigration decisions America ever made. In the 14 years he has worked at Artel, the company has grown from under $20 million in revenues to more than $400 million, and from managing no satellite capacity to nearly 6 GHz on 60 GEO satellites.     The sales and service team knows that, wherever he happens to be in the world, he is just a phone call away when it is time to solve a customer problem. That’s one reason that a US Defense Department customer called him an “unsung hero” in supporting the warfighter.

For all these reasons, SSPI was proud to induct X.T. Vuong, Chief Scientist of Artel, into the Satellite Hall of Fame on March 17. He joins such luminaries as Mark Dankberg of ViaSat, Dave Thompson of Orbital ATK and Dirk Breynaert of Newtec – not to mention Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Dr. Harold Rosen, Pradman Kaul of Hughes and Robert Berry of Space Systems Loral. Congratulations, X.T., for a job well done, and many more to come.