Jordin Kare

In June 2017, Kare's wife Mary Kay announced via Twitter that his aortic valve was failing and needed to be replaced. On July 19, she announced that he had died.

Kare worked for many years at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. In 1996, he left LLNL and, after working briefly for a small space-related startup company, in 1997 became an independent consultant specializing in advanced space system design, and started his own company.

He was a leading advocate of laser propulsion for space launch and in-space propulsion. He organized a 1986 workshop on laser propulsion at LLNL and later led a development program for ground to orbit laser launch supported by SDIO. He received a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts grant to study a near-term form of laser launch using arrays of relatively low-powered lasers. He co-founded LaserMotive, Inc., a laser power beaming entrant in the Elevator:2010 Beam Power Challenge, in 2006, and led the overall system design and the laser transmitter design efforts.

Kare grew up in the Philadelphia area and attended Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania. He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984.

Kare was also known as a science fiction fan and filksinger. He was a regular attendee and program participant at science fiction conventions starting in 1975. He was an editor of The Westerfilk Collection: Songs of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an important filksong collection, and later a partner in Off Centaur Publications, the first commercial publisher specializing in filk songbooks and recordings. Kare won two Pegasus Awards for his filk songs, Best Classic Filk Song in 2010 for "Fire in the Sky" and Best Writer/Composer in 2017, as well as seven additional nominations from 1987 onwards.

Jordin T. Kare (October 24, 1956 – July 19, 2017) was a physicist and aerospace engineer known for his research on laser propulsion. In particular, he was responsible for Mockingbird, a conceptual design for an extremely small (75 kg dry mass) reusable launch vehicle, and was involved in the Clementine lunar mapping mission. Kare was also known as developer of the Sailbeam interstellar propulsion concept and, in the science fiction fan community, as a composer, performer and recording artist of filk music.