Mitch grew up on a farm in a small town in Minnesota. A move to Colorado as a teenager found him graduating high school in 1975 and leaving for boot camp in the U.S. Marine Corps. A twenty year military career as an electronics technician and CH-46 helicopter crewchief in the U.S. Navy brought him to retirement in 1998. He graduated Summa cum Laude from Southern Illinois University in 1991. Mitch transitioned to the space industry as a Reliability Engineer and Engineering Analyst where he currently conducts worst case performance, electrical stress, and failure modes and effects analyses, reliability predictions and a host of engineering tasks which assist in spacecraft design.