Atheists & Agnostics
Related: About this forumMPAD Memoirs
Which would be a nifty title, but I don't know what the title will be.
MPAD = Mission Planning and Analysis Division, simply the utterly most important and core part of what was then NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson Space Center) in (south of) Houston. (Others who worked there, but not in MPAD, might disagree.) (They'd be wrong.)
Recently, a former MPAD coworker of mine from the days of the Apollo Project contacted me to say he was interviewing people who worked at MPAD at the time of the moon landings. He's my age and also retired, and he drives around the country quite a bit. He arranges his trips so that he can drive through the cities his old colleagues (and we are all old!) now live in and interview them. Once all the interviews are done, he'll figure out how to weave them together with the story of Apollo. The result will be a fairly substantial book.
He was in Denver yesterday, and we had a very nice and quite long meeting. Mostly, he was interviewing me about my life before, during, and after Apollo, but we also spent some of the time talking about the other people who were in MPAD back then. He'll probably want me produce the e-book and print versions of the book and design the cover.
PoliticAverse
(26,366 posts)F4lconF16
(3,747 posts)DavidDvorkin
(19,485 posts)Sorry.
awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)I am fascinated with everything that has anything to do with that.
DavidDvorkin
(19,485 posts)I arrived about a year after the Apollo 1 fire, when the investigation was finsishing up and everything was starting to move again, and I left after Apollo 15, which was the first mission to use the Lunar Rover.
awoke_in_2003
(34,582 posts)I was born in Feb 68, and I have a picture somewhere of me in my walker. It was shaped like a space capsule. Every one was excited about NASA in those years. It is sad to think of what could have happened if only we funded it properly.
DavidDvorkin
(19,485 posts)I've forgotten so many details. The guy who's doing the interviews said he has the same problem. Periodically, he rereads the memos he wrote back then to refresh his memory. I have a lot of my own memos from NASA days, possibly all of them, stored away in the basement. I should try rereading them.
Just chatting with him brought back a lot I had forgotten.
One thing I never did get to do was see a launch. A bunch of my coworkers made a trip to Florida to see one of the Apollo missions lift off. I wish I had been able to go with them.