My name is Robert Lainé. I was born in 1945 in a small town on the bank of the Loire river in France. I graduated at ENSEA as engineer in electronic and electro machinery in 1968. Since 1970 I have been working in space engineering. I developed tape recorders for spacecraft at IER (Paris - France) then move to ESTEC in the Netherlands to work on developing new thinks like X-ray optics for Exosat satellite and became system engineer for GIOTTO mission to Halley's comet. Then back to France for then Alcatel-Espace in Toulouse where, among other things, I managed Telecom-2 payload (launched in 1992) before being called back to ESTEC by Professor Roger-Maurice Bonnet to again develop X-ray optics and manage XMM a large X-ray space telescope launched in 1999. I then move near Paris to lead the development of ATV (ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle) which is a 21 tons spaceship which re-supply the International Space Station since 2007. Then I lead the Ariane launcher department of the European Space Agency in Paris. Finally for 5 years I was Chief Technical Officer of EADS Astrium before retiring in 2011 near La Rochelle on the West coast of France where I created SPACINOV sarl to provide consulting services in innovation based on the knowledge I acquired from space projects.
Apart from working on space and innovative projects, I enjoy sailing.
This is why I design and make my own sails. I quickly found that good sails respected some basic aerodynamic principles. From there the first Sailcut was written on a home computer equipped with a Z80 processor! I had to work hard to fit the software in the 16 kB memory. Having solved this problem and having made a number of successful sails, I helped friendly sailmakers to evolve from the traditional lofting of sails on the floor to computer aided design of sails.
Another friend asked me to make a small software to speed up the design of hard chine work boats. This is how I got into the boat design arena and the first Carene software was born. As I enjoy working with wood, I also made a couple of boats for myself to validate the software.
Enjoy my software and do not hesitate to contact me at robert.laine @ sailcut.com for any question you may have.