Parkin was previously a member of the
Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Research Staff and previously Deputy Director of the Mission Design Center at
NASA Ames, and project lead for the Microwave
Thermal Rocket. Beginning with his Ph.D. thesis on Microwave Thermal Propulsion, his work spans theoretical, computational and experimental domains for the general problem of space access and economics. In July 2005, he was awarded the Korolev Medal by the Russian Federation of Cosmonautics. He founded the NASA Ames Mission Design Center (MDC) and developed its
software architecture. The Ames MDC was the first of its kind to make extensive use of groupware, for example in pooling knowledge to create and maintain spacecraft parts databases. Another innovation was the use of a centralized parametric mission design archive that enables realtime concurrent design collaboration and object-oriented style 'inheritance' of missions to promote reuse of designs and the growth of design trees. In 2010, Parkin was tapped by the NASA Ames Center Director to manage the
100 year Starship study for NASA and DARPA. Parkin is a member of the
Institute of Physics (IOP). ==Patents and selected publications==