Steve,

My condolences on the passing of your father. A sad day indeed.

Being an American that grew up in the 60's and 70's when such achievements of the space program where an excuse to bring a tv into the classroom (gasp!) to watch launches and landings, I recognize all those spacecrafts.

Yes, your father is famous. Maybe his name is not a household word (although if I mention to my husband he will probably recognize it), but the contribution he gave to this country is outstanding.

You are a lucky man.

Diane

P.S. Coincidently I live a few town south of the Goddard Mansion in Claremont NH.

Sundown17, thank you very much. your thoughts are very kind and much appreciated. Interesting about the Gorrard mansion you menyion. He had the Goddard Space Flight Center named after him.

I know much more about Von Braun, who was a brilliant and equally arrogant German Scientist in WWII who is oten thought of as the father of modern rocketry. He was recruited by NASA after the war and built a non-working rocket called Atlas. And non-working Centaur.

After dad worked with him as a young protege of the aging mentor, Von Braun dropped a non-working nemesis of his called the Atlas rocket, which he announced would never fly. It was given to dad and told to make it work. He did - and in the process created the unqique fuel mixture of liquid hydrogen and Liguid oxygen in precise ratio that prevented explosion, yet provided burn - and later lifted the SATURN V and Apollo off the ground with 7 million pounds of thrust ( !!!) to land on the moon.

To this day the Atlas is still in use, being tailored for missions by Lockheed Martin here in Colorado near where I live in Douglas County. Dad and team built the entire Atlas-Centaur launch vehicle, if of any interest to your husband. Is he in Aeronautical Engineering or relared ?

Your husband may be interested in the NASA Glenn Research Center Web-site where the history of that shop has been in documentation , including numerous references to Dad, at what used to be called LERC, Lewis Research Center, when he worked there. Thanks for the kind words. He sure is famous to me. Thanks
geo Steve

So sorry for your loss, Steve. He sounds like a man to be very proud of. And yes, I also recognize all those rocket names - must be a boomer thing, growing up with "Uncle" Walt Cronkite practically jumping out of his seat, saying "go, baby, go!" as a new rocket thundered off the launch pad. And the late wonderful Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series was a favorite too. If my math skills were better I might have become an astronomer.

Great Steve you reminded me of a subject that I think I have espoused here before concerning the strange choice of 4 foot 8 and a half inches as the "standard gauge" (distance between the rails) of most of the worlds railway/railroad tracks.
for a good giggle you have to visit:-
http://www.seiyaku.com/reference/shuttle.html

this report concludes with an observation on the space shuttle
"You may have noticed there are two huge ancillary rockets on the sides of the main fuel tank. These are known as 'reusable solid rocket boosters' and are made by a killing-machine firm called ATK Thiokol in Utah. The assembly plant for these boosters is located on western side of the Rocky Mountains and to transport them to the Kennedy Space Center, rail is the cheapest and quickest method. The line from the factory runs through a tunnel so the booster rockets have to be made smaller than the tunnel. This tunnel is only a bit wider than the track, and therefore the rocket design had to take this into consideration.So there we have it. Today's space travellers owe the design of the Shuttle's rocket motor to Ancient Roman test-pilots."
this "explanation" appears on many web sites.and I like the expression you can find on for example:-
http://www.astrodigital.org/space/stshorse.html
"So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass!"
I have a feeling that the tunnel referred to here is in Colo(u)rado

And I just remembered another "brush" with another obvious, to me at least, famous person.
There is a section on my website devoted to one of my favo(u)rite authors, my late namesake see:-
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/johnfowles/
to my lasting chagrin, since he passed away last year,I never actually met him.
But I once spent much time walking around Lyme Regis,Dorset where he lived and used for the setting of his most famous novel "the French Left-tenants Woman"
which became a great film starring Jeremy Irons (himself an old boy of the "publc" (i.e.private) Sherborne School) and Meryl Streep
http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/6...withthe.th.jpg
I was trying to find his house whose address I knew but failed.
Soon after he revised his superb novel "The Magus", which is a very rare thing for a novelist to do,and i felt emboldened to write to him about it. To my considerable surprise he replied:-
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/6...tter8zh.th.jpg
JohnFowles BSc Aeronautical Engineering (now the Web Author)

[ June 09, 2006, 09:39: Message edited by: johnfowles ]

omigosh that's the same question I asked MY dad!
lol
just goofin' on ya Steve...

I am very sorry to hear about your dad's passing....It's nice to hear how esteemed he and your mother are in your mind. What a wonderful legacy to have left you...

We watched all the launches as well and I vividly remember our apartment crammed with people to watch the moon landing on our new colour TV....altho I do believe it was broadcast in black and white....hmmmm. was it in colour or did Ted Turner colourize that old footage and that's what I remember?
lol
It's lovely to read your memories and loving thoughts...thanks.
Char

it was definitely in Black and White. I was at the time back in the UK and well remember a dash home from visiting relatives in the early hours of the morning to watch the landing live,we made it, then twiddled our thumbs for ages before Neil could be seen coming down the ladder, I clearly remember thinking that the picture was very indistinct so that it took lots of imagination to make out what you were actually seeing.
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question...trong-step.jpg
I also clearly remember the words utterred by the late great Frank Muir who was one of a number of pundits brought in by the BBC to entertain viewers if and when things were slack.
He opined "that nearly everything the Americans did was on a vast scale whereas what the British did was usually half-vast". very few in the studio audience got it. Just say that to yourself

John

Steve,
Very sorry about the passing of your father, there is not a thing anyone can say to ease how you are feeling. Please remember you have many people who care and are here for you.
What marvelous memories of your father, and so many things around us these days to trigger those memories.
Like Diane, Annie and Char I lived the space age and watched it happen in school and at home. It makes it all the more wonderful now that I "know" someone who made it happen.

Annie, Char, Brink, et al
I am not at best today so, I am very greatful for your kind comments about my Dad. Your appreciation of the events that took place over our boomer childhoods you are kind enough to remember is very..helpful. On another day, I'd like to answer your kind posts a tittle more thoroughly. Thanks

John,
As always, your posts are a veritable treasure trove of germaine and interesting information - more than trivia, not trivial at all. I am greatful you've answered a couple of questions posed above in the replies to my post.

I really do thank you for that, as my wife I spent hours today consoling my mother. That priveledge (helping) sure does bring back all of it for me is in large part why I am spent. Then, I had to exchange yet my 6th e-mail with a slack-jawed idiot at the funeral home who couldn't find his tally-wha**er with a 6 man search party, no less publish my father's obituary, containing the common somewhat longer paens (sp?) to the historically significant (dad's contributions) things I helped him with for local papers. Then, more correspondence as well with the NASA webmaster's need for more family info for dad's obituary and technical memorial at NASA Glenn Center's website.

John one technical thought now, ( I'll examine all your thoughtful links to related threads you show above likely tomorrow). The N-Thiokol of O-ring infamy on the shutter has a long history of failure below 32 degrees F due to thermal expansion/contraction on their solid-fuel boosters. Dad built them on at times such as on the Titan-IIIC, and Atlas-Agena launch vehicles when extra "oomph" was needed at lower altitudes, as you very likely know the gravitational pull varies as the square of the distance from the gravimetric center of the earth's geoid, and so they become more useful closer to the earth in trajectory.

Anyhooo very interesting the tunnel info. For a straightforward train track trivia gimme, do you know the reason train's steel wheels are substantially beveled, leaving in theory only a tangential "point" of the steel rim touching the steel trackat any given time ? I'll read all your links John , thanks.

To all of you that very kindly wrote back on this, I am sorry I am not quite up to responding to all today so I will simply say thank you.
geo Steve

No need to worry Steve...take time to take care of yourself.....you'll be able to help your wife and mum better that way.

de-lurking to send sincere condolences to Steve. I know what you're going thru, buddy. Been there, done that.It's very early days, so pace yourself. There are no rules in this game of life. Thinking of you and your family at this time.

thanks again , here to the last two from Char and Bru above. I do appreciate it.
steve

I watched the Tony awards yesterday evening and one of the featured previous winners was "Academy Award-winning actress" Patricia Neal. This served as a "reminder" of another of my brushes with the famous.
Just about 6 years ago now Susan and I were extremely fortunate to find ourselves almost inadvertently on a 6-day honeymoon cruise aboard a luxury liner from Southampton to New York that was named after HM
no not the now I see infamous Heather Mills but Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second
http://www.concordesst.com/history/reds/qe2t.jpg
the QE2 accompanied by the flight of the RAF's Red Arrows acrobatic display
"Flight with G-BOAG along with the QE2. This occured during the Sunday formation flight at the 1985 Royal international Air Tattoo."
from great series of Red Arrow/Concorde pictures on a Concorde site at
http://www.concordesst.com/history/reds/reds.html
Every day there was some sort of lecture in the theatre and on the Monday we heard an "informal lecture" entitled "As I Am" by Patricia largely explaining how she had overcome a series of massive strokes.
After the lecture we happenned to be walking past a door from the the theatre stage area when she emerged. I was able (very tongue tied) to tell her stumblingly that I too was a stroke survivor

[ June 12, 2006, 11:39: Message edited by: johnfowles ]

The main trouble with the internet is that it is all too easy to get sidetracked.
Having posted that wonderful picture of a Concorde with her RAF training plane escort, I thought
I would try to get a picture of the one donated to the Intrepid Museum in New York.(That is an old US Navy aircraft carrier permanently moored on the Hudson just south of where we docked back on July 1 2000
Details of their Concorde exhibit are at:-
http://www.concordetribute.com/intre..._concorde.html
To get a view my favoured route was to locate her using the recently announced
Windows live local service at:-
http://local.live.com/
where you can view much of the United States in 45 degree aerial photos by simply entering a relevant zip code
Having entered the Intrepid's zipcode (10036)
I found this view showing another favo(u)rite aeroplane a (retired) US Air Force Lockheed SR71 Blackbird
(the large black plane to the left of the control tower)
http://img486.imageshack.us/img486/6...bird3bv.th.jpg
click to see a larger version
with the local live system you can also view adjacent pictures so next I checked the stern of the carrier but this failed to show the Concorde
http://img486.imageshack.us/img486/3...ernview9yf.jpg
Nope no Concorde there either at least not on the carrier when this photo was taken.
Instead of giving up my quest, I googled some more and found
http://www.concordetribute.com/intre..._concorde.html
where I read:-
"She will initially go on display alongside the carrier, but preliminary plans have been mooted that will see her eventually on display on the quayside in a special glass built building to protect her from the elements of the Atlantic Ocean"
Ok so where is she now??
an image search revealed this picture clearly showing both my plane and the carrier apparently in close proximity
http://z.about.com/d/cruises/1/0/w/h/new_york016.JPG
back to the neighbouring pix on local.live and I finally found her
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/2...oncorde0ys.jpg
and a litte larger
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/5...rdeonly3dz.jpg
note that these pictures are obviously "before" and "after"
That local.live site is something else I have some great shots of our house
in New Jersey showing views looking North East and West including our swimming pool
in a screenshot of my mother-in-law's house you can even see that her car is dark grey
and roughly in the middle of this picture is our favo(u)rite local restaurant
The Star Of India in Kenilworth NJ
http://img230.imageshack.us/img230/6...ilworth6ke.jpg
(the building on the corner near a row of 4 parked black cars, where we park if lucky or else in the carpark up the road a bit (where you can see a largish white vehicle))
John Fowles
Ain't life wunnerful???

[ June 12, 2006, 11:56: Message edited by: johnfowles ]

I don't know how I forgot about this other "brush with the famous." I guess because I don't think of her that way anymore now that I've gotten to know her.

It's a controversial person so I won't mention her name. She's been the subject of many TV documentaries. It seems like her story runs every few weeks... I originally contacted her to see if there was anything we could possibly do for her. She's not a serial killer or a member of the Manson Family or anything. lol.. (far from it) Someone else at the website knows about this and is probably relieved I'm not naming names..

I mentioned this in another topic but in 1982/83 I met famed D.J. Wolfman Jack at an opening of a store near our home (in a Safeway plaza).

He was braodcasting on 94.5 Kool-FM from there and one thing I recall him saying to the assembled audience was,"You all remember the song "Running Bear"? ... "Well,that's what we'll do in the parking lot after the show! :D

He autographed & personalized a picutre for me that I still have. :)

I even got on the local news that day! :cool:

I was so sad when passed away in 1995. :(