Garry McGuire: Aiming for the Stars

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Garry McGuire of the Jacobs Space Exploration Group at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, reflects on the serendipitous moment that led to a leadership role at IPC and the enduring relationships he’s built through his participation in the organization. With the rapid advance of technology constantly pushing the industry forward, Garry urges newcomers to jump in and experience all IPC has to offer.

Garry, congratulations on receiving the Hall of Fame Award, the highest award that IPC gives to their volunteers. What was it like getting that phone call from John Mitchell?

It was a big surprise. When I first picked up the phone, I had that anxious feeling you’d get when you got called to the principal’s office for doing something bad—but then it turned out to be a great surprise.

I’ll bet. What got you involved in IPC? When did all that happen?

In the early ‘90s, I was supporting NASA at Goddard Space Flight Center; my main role there was to support our customer by developing and maintaining NASA’s workmanship standards. In 1994, Admiral Perry released an acquisition reform memo directing government agencies to stop using their internal standards and to look for voluntary consensus standards where possible. At NASA, we began looking outside the organization to see what options we had to get rid of for our internal soldering and cabling standards, etc. Before that moment, we’d known a little about IPC, but after that decision by the Admiral we started taking a more serious look at them and found them to be a good fit. We started going to the semiannual IPC meetings, probably in 1995 or ‘96; I’ve been active in IPC since then.

That transition actually became part of my job description which is when I fully engaged with the IPC which lead to the work on the initial release of the J-STD-001 space addendum around 2000.

To read this entire conversation, which appeared in the 2023 edition of Show & Tell Magazine, click here.