Growing up one of the things that had happened was Sputnik had been shot by the Russians
and I wanted to build rockets. I in fact did this in science fairs,
ll this sort of stuff, from the sixth grade on.
In fact saw Sputnik, you know, when it was launched
and remember falling off the porch as I'm watching it go over. [laughter]
About killed myself. Thought it had hit me or something.
So anyway, I had started building rockets and every year had learned more and more.
Now this was, you know, NASA had not been that old at this particular point
and one of the things was you couldn't get the nice rocket engines you can get now
so I had to mix my own gun powder and that sort of thing and had several of them blow up
so my dad wanted me to have a bunker for that.
So needless to say there were only a handful of schools that you could study aerospace engineering
and fortunately one was in my backyard, so I went down to State and started off to be an aerospace engineer.