Rocket science, drug discovery, and bioinformatics might seem like strange bedfellows at first glance, but there is more to the story than meets the eye. Over the past year (2000-2001), a number of firms that specialised in aerospace and defence have announced major new initiatives: applying their computational technologies to pharmaceutical and bioinformatics problems. This biotech 'rocket science' movement actually started nearly 10 years ago. Moldyn Inc. of Cambridge MA led the way by taking its techniques for modelling the structural dynamics of spacecraft and adapting them to simulations of molecular dynamics in drug discovery. In the course of its work relating to defence and aerospace, Moldyn had been developing methods based on information and estimation theory to solve problems of detecting and tracking dim targets against a cluttered background. Among the problems posed by this 'dim target/cluttered background' issue were detecting and analysing interferometric fringe pattern signals from distant faint stars, plume emissions from missiles and aircraft, and spectral signals from camouflaged ground targets. These technologies have now been transferred to new, highly efficient 3D structure determination and refinement methods for NMR and X-ray spectra of biologically interesting molecules. Other applications in biology include peak detection, sequence identification and protein identification for mass spectrometry; and new structure-function similarity search methods for 3D protein structures. The techniques also offer benefits in mining information and knowledge from large multidimensional databases of bioinformatics and medical informatics.