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Thomas Gangale holds a Bachelor of Science degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Southern California, and a Master of Arts degree in international relations from San Francisco State University. Upon graduating from USC, he was forced to turn down an offer from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to join the Voyager mission control team due to his prior commitment to the United States Air Force. He was both an airman and an officer in the USAF, serving as an air traffic controller, an F-4 weapon systems officer, and an historian. Also while on active duty, he served on the technical management teams of several satellite projects of the highest national priority involving national technical means of verification of strategic arms control agreements, as well as a Strategic Defense Initiative satellite program and two Space Shuttle payloads (STS-4 and STS-39). He was one of the authors of the Air Force Space Systems Division response to the NASA 90-Day Study on the Space Exploration Initiative for the human exploration of the Moon and Mars. As a civilian, he has contracted with the United States Navy to analyze maintenance data for the P-3 aircraft fleet. He has published numerous articles in aerospace and social science journals, has presented papers at several aerospace symposia, has written opinion editorials in major metropolitan newspapers, and has appeared as a guest on radio talk shows. He is a leading authority on timekeeping systems for other planets, and is the inventor of a class of orbits that will be essential to communication between Earth and crews in the vicinity of Mars. He was an original member of the Design and Project Management Team for the Mars Arctic Research Station, a NASA-related Mars analog research facility located near the Haughton Meteor Crater on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. | 