He was responsible for Mockingbird,[2] a conceptual design for an extremely small (75 kg dry mass) reusable launch vehicle, and was involved in the Clementine lunar mapping mission.

Kare proposed the SailBeam Boosted Magsail in a report prepared for NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts called "High-Acceleration Micro-Scale Laser Sails for Interstellar Propulsion".

[12] A key idea is that if vast numbers of tiny sails are used to accelerate rather than one enormous one, the same amount of mass can be brought to high speeds with a less complex optical system.

A physicist by his name (and his wife, Mary Kay) appear in Callahan's Touch by Spider Robinson, where he shoots a cluricaune with a fire extinguisher.

His song "Fire in the Sky" is featured in the novel Fallen Angels by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn.