Andrew Heafitz, 34 Invented inexpensive rocket-based
surveillance systems Andrew Heafitz acquired his first patent-
for a high-speed shutter on a balsa wood camera- at age 19.
Since then he has designed electric vehicles, invented a low-
cost rock engine, and developed a plant growth experiment that
flew on two space shuttle missions. His MIT undergraduate thesis
centered on a remote-control aerial-photography system he built
using a Nikon camera and a helium balloon. While he was a
mechanical engineering master’s student at MIT, he installed a
tiny off-the-shelf video camera inside the nose of a small
rocket he’d designed. He called the device TacShot and in 2001
launched a company of the same name in Cambridge, MA. The
350-gram self-propelled rocket travels to heights of 100 meters,
radioing images of the earth to a ground-based laptop. Heafitz’s
software assembles the pictures into a 360-degree mosaic of the
launch site. TacShot could be carried in a soldier’s backpack
and deployed for aerial reconnaissance