Greg
Allison is the Alabama state director of the
Task Force on National and Homeland Security.
Mr. Allison is a subject matter expert in
avionics system safety. He has been active in
the aerospace community as an electrical
engineer, systems engineer, system safety
engineer, project/program manager, team lead,
and an avid space activist for 45 years. He
designed the architectural layout of the power
and data systems distribution for the
International Space Station’s Nodes 2 and 3. He
has designed power and control systems for
industrial equipment and worked on M1 Abrams
tank and F-15 avionics. For the past 20 years
Mr. Allison has been performing avionics system
safety for NASA as a contractor employed by
Bastion Technologies Incorporated working on the
Artemis-1 Space Launch System, X-37, various
satellites, and other projects.
In 1994 Mr. Allison was the founding Program
Manager for the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society
(HAL5) High Altitude LiftOff (HALO) Program. He
led efforts that developed and launched hybrid
rockets developed in garages from balloons at
the edge of space into suborbital trajectories.
Some of these balloons that carried the rockets
up were launched from ships in the Gulf of
Mexico. These activities were conducted with
part time help on a shoestring budget. This
caused Mr. Allison to become quite concerned
about the types of missions that terrorist or
other nations could one day launch.
In
1994 Mr. Allison was the founding Program
Manager for the Huntsville Alabama L5 Society
(HAL5) High Altitude LiftOff (HALO) Program. He
led efforts that developed and launched hybrid
rockets developed in garages from balloons at
the edge of space into suborbital trajectories.
Some of these balloons that carried the rockets
up were launched from ships in the Gulf of
Mexico. These activities were conducted with
part time help on a shoestring budget. This
caused Mr. Allison to become quite concerned
about the types of missions that terrorist or
other nations could one day launch.In 1996 Mr.
Allison founded the High-Altitude Research
Corporation (HARC) to further develop the
balloon launched hybrid rockets. He won a NASA
Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR)
grant (which is intended to be a paper study)
through which the HARC team actually executed a
flight hardware program to develop and launch
Balloon Launch Return Vehicle (BLRV), a reusable
remotely piloted rocket plane from a balloon.
Mr. Allison managed a project to launch a rocket
with HARC designed altitude determination system
to verify an altitude of over 200 km. He managed
an at-sea balloon launch for JPL. These missions
were all conducted from ships in the Gulf of
Mexico.
Mr. Allison determined that he could not expect
to survive a grid down scenario, so he decided
to do something about it. He formed the Alabama
Power Grid Defense Committee. He chaired two
Power Grid Defense Conferences in Huntsville,
Alabama, one in 2016 and one in 2018. Mr.
Allison is drawing on his 10 years of experience
and Chairman of the National Space Society’s
Policy Committee to build an advocacy base to
support hardening the power grid.
Our prior guest on this
subject was Dr. Peter Vincent Pry, who
unfortunately passed away in 2022. Below are
programs, some relating to subjects dicussed on
this program.