| Message: | | You just asked me a question that could (but won't) get me going for days on end. I was starting my freshman year in college (after my stint in the military service) when Sputnik went up. I had been in an "Honest John" rocket outfit in the service and had developed some interest in rocketry. After the Sputnik "revolution" rocketry became a very big deal and I fashioned my engineering degrees in such a way as to prepare me for aerospace. I graduated with a BS in physics and a BS in Mechanical Engineering with a direction toward thermodynamics and aerodynamics. My masters was in aerospace. The day I walked into Pratt and Whitney Aircraft was the same day that Kennedy signed the procurement for Project Apollo. We had the fuel cells (two of which were knocked out by the explosion in Apollo 13) on that bird and we also had developed the RL10 liquid H2 - O2 rocket engine which was the forerunner for the upper stages of the Saturn 5. I've been on the SR71 blackbird, the F15, the F16, the 747, the 777, and a slew of other programs but the Mars probes came after I retired in 1997.
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