Biography: Terry Stroud

Jonathan Goodwin
Mikey Nelson
Terry Stroud ←

Terry Stroud has superpowers and can heal the sick with his touch. He also insists that he write his own bios so that lies don’t continue to be spread that the extent of his superpower is the ability to smell bacon from a mile away. Born in Oklahoma (where bacon smelling is damn near a survival skill) he moved to Dallas, Texas as a young lad to escape a botched mass-healing at a roller rink.

Since Oklahoma is synonymous with advanced science, it’s no surprise he always had a love for all things technical. In junior-high he began programming computers, in 6502 assembly language. If he were here now, he would probably warn all those java-programming young hacks out there that; unless you’ve earned your chops programming Apple Basic, Quick Basic, Visual Basic, COBOL, FORTRAN, PASCAL, VB script, Java script, Flash, 6502 assembly, 80x86 assembly, C, C++ , and nearly every microcontroller on the market, don’t bother coming to Terry’s tent looking for healing or needing help finding your bacon.

At 14 years old Terry began flying sailplanes. This is his lifelong passion and he still does it to this day. He has his own plane (a 15/17.6m Ventus Ca thank you very much) and races about the sky chasing his friend at his flying club (www.texassoaring.org) He also advises you to look into this fine sport at www.ssa.org.

As expected for anyone born in Oklahoma, university went well. After only 13 years and 194 credit hours he obtained a B.S. in Physics. He didn’t get a degree in Math (although he got close.) He didn’t get a degree in Aerospace engineering (one class short). He also didn’t get a degree in Touch-Healing (bastards wouldn’t listen.)

Terry started his own company (Orbital Machine Works, LLC) and branched out from programming to include designing and building… well… anything. OMW makes sports broadcasting equipment, medical eye-research devices, and speed controllers for 660kW and 1.5MW wind towers.

Much to his everlasting shock, he ended up on TV. He first appeared on Discovery Channel in the rocket documentary Rocket Challenge. The production company liked Terry and his dad’s 25ft, all carbon fiber, dual computer, CO2 deployed, Mach 2.1, 32500ft altitude rocket so much they suspended their normal rule of putting only attractive people on TV. This series, Master Blasters, featured Terry and his Dad doing some routine rocket things like launching a BMW mini-cooper ¼ mile using two boost sections from Tomahawk cruise missiles. This show found its home on Science Discovery. Despite new laws to the contrary, Terry is somehow still on TV, this time helping Jonathan Goodwin (I’m told you may know him?) and Mikey Nelson do some quasi-legal things on the Discovery show One Way Out.

Terry still lives in the Dallas-Fort Worth area with his lovely and talented wife and 4 dogs.

Terry’s hobbies include:

1. Soaring (you weren’t paying attention were you?)
2. Golf
3. Paintball
4. Robotics
5. Complex representation of special and general relativity with an eye towards a potential link to wave function notation of quantum mechanics. (If only he were joking about this, he may have had a more pleasant time in high school)