Space-age nostalgia

Astrobiology magazine has a lovely interview with JPL veteran William Momsen, an engineer who was able to buy a Jaguar with the overtime he earned working on the first Mars mission, Mariner IV. And as Martian Soil points out, Momsen's excellent Mariner IV memoir can be found here. It's a wonderful evocation of the days of eight-bits-per-second downlinks and parrots eating the radomes and engineers wondering if they could get enough money for a quick and dirty Venus mission by raiding the landscaping budget, the days when planetary science was an exciting academic cottage industry that just happened to be allied to the most impressive and expensive technology the military industrial complex had to offer.

Even then they knew it couldn't last. In his memoirs Bruce Murray recalls chatting about Mariner IV with his friend John Casani a few months after the fly-by, and Casani saying wistfully "That was the last good mission". By then NASA was cooking up plans for large automated laboratories being sent to the surface of Mars by Saturn Vs, of which it was thought there might be a glut. Things were clearly about to get big and bureaucratic and less fun.

Somehow, though, people contrived to keep flying good missions. And over the decades, Casani must have found some way of accomodating himself to the big mission era; he is now the JPL manager for the biggest mission of them all, the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Still, "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive -- But to be young was very heaven!"

(Incidentally, this site has nothing to brag about in the proofreading department, but the Momsen interview does offer a lovely example of the dangers of "change all" commands. Either that or a "williamion", as in "four williamion web hits", is part of some strange alternative nomneclature for very large numbers of the sort that people have recently been educating Neil Gaiman about.)

Comments

[Rupert]

JIMO looks fun, but it'll take a lot of chutzpah to orbit a nuclear reactor these days.

Looks rather familiar too.

http://www.astronautix.com/craft/tmke.htm

R

[Adf]

, Sure! But things are far too inersetting here right now.BTW, a terrific novel following terraforming pioneers after they've been pretty much abandoned by the corporations who sponsored them is THE EMPRESS OF MARS by Kage Baker.