Dr Jones - I've been reading your thoughts here with interest - thanks.
By chance, might you have run into G. Harry Stine during your time at
White Sands, or since? He was a young engineer involved in the V-2
flights there during roughly that same pre-NASA, pre-Sputnik period, and
of course involved in model rocketry in later years. I ran into him on
the policy/advocacy end of things in the eighties, and was fortunate to
have him as a friend thereafter. We drove out to White Sands from
Phoenix together for DC-X flights several times, and I heard a lot of
stories of the old days - I take with a grain of salt his tale the time
when the program was winding down and he could have had a V-2 on its
trailer for the asking, only his wife told him he could NOT park that
thing in the yard. But the afternoon we spent visiting with his old
friend Colonel Stapp then touring the then-new NM Space Museum and its
then-displays of V-2 bits was remarkable (and I hugely regret not
recording the whole thing.)
Henry
On 1/21/2021 1:40 PM, Dr Edward Jones wrote:
...guided my way into test
engineering, data reduction, and a job at White Sands Proving Ground,
all before NASA was born, before Sputnik One.