Robert Childs began his 30 year career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1969 as an electronic technician in the Instrumentation Lab (Draper Lab) after completing his term of service in the US Air Force. There he assembled and tested miniature gyros for guidance systems used on Poseidon Missiles and the Apollo Moon Mission. He quickly transferred to the Center for Space Research (CSR) the following year to begin work on the Lunar Surface Experiment that was one of the successful experiments of the Apollo 17 Mission, the last manned Moon mission of the Apollo Program. This experiment was used to map the Lunar surface for minerals and water using the Lunar Rover and a transmitter deployed as an interferometer system to look deep into the Lunar crust. The three-year development program took the team to various glacier fields around the world to test the prototype packages in an electrical environment large enough to represent the electrical properties of the Moon. With the successful completion of the Apollo Program at MIT Bob was asked by a professor who had seen his work to transfer to a new project that the professor was collaborating on.