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| The Department Spacecraft Missions Ground-Based Research |
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John Spencer We had this wonderful trip up to the Grand Canyon in February 1981. About seven or eight of us headed up there in a couple of cars, and we had CB radio going up I-17 toward the Grand Canyon, and listening to each other’s favorite music very loud on the tape deck. Just that great feeling of camaraderie—I think it was the first time in my life that I felt surrounded by like minds, people who really understood and enjoyed the same kinds of things that I did. Guy Consolmagno The other big thing, of course, the big cultural shift that occurred which changed everything, changed everybody’s life, was the movie Star Wars. After the movie came out, for about a year there was endless discussion of everything in that film, how they did it—It was just the only thing that people could talk about. We went and saw it I think about eighteen times. Because we didn’t have VCRs in those times, so the only way you could go and see it was to go to the movie theater. The movie came out in the summer of ’77. In the fall of ’77, NASA was going to test the first mock-up of the shuttle. Not by launching it, because of course the shuttle lands without any power, and NASA had built a 747 that could carry the shuttle on top of it, which I guess they still use. What they were going to do was fly the shuttle on top of the 747, release it, and then just let it fall to Earth and see if you could actually land the thing. Somebody said it was like flying a brick. They were going to land it at Edwards Air Force Base. |
On the spur of the moment, Nick Gautier—who was not actually a LPL student, he was a Steward student, but he hung out with us because he was doing infrared astronomy—Nick, and John Wacker, and it might have been Bob Howell I want to say—hopped into a car, probably John’s green Volvo, and drove from Tucson to Edwards Air Force Base in time to see the shuttle land, which was called the shuttle Enterprise. It never flew, it was just the mock-up. Then [they] continued from there into Los Angeles, which had one of the three theaters in the world that was showing Star Wars in 70 millimeters. Somebody knew someone that they could crash on the floor of. That was the kind of stuff that we’d do as grad students. I have a feeling that grad students today are doing equally crazy things. Nicholas Schneider When I was applying for graduate school, my astronomy advisors—because there were no planetary advisors—said, “Nick, you’re giving in to the Dark Side,” a term which was two or three years old. I’m very proud of it, and I feel very lucky that the timing worked out to realize that this was the wave of future. But clearly there were very few places in the world where you could do planetary science. The fact that there was a whole building for it was pretty astonishing to me. |
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