Museum of Flight

Jacquelyn and I went to the Museum of Flight to see the Space Shuttle display.  It's so close to where I work that I walked over there and met her during my lunch break.

We had a good time together.  This is a picture from inside the Shuttle Bay looking up at an Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) booster just coming out of the shuttle into space.  The IUS is built by Boeing and was used to take satellites up to higher orbits.  I worked on that program for 5 years back in the early 90's and got to be in a Mission Control station down at Kennedy Space Center for a Space Shuttle launch.

 Here's my beautiful wife next to an astronaut suit.

 We also took of tour of an Eisenhower/Kennedy era Air Force One.

 The Presidential Conference room inside.

Also saw a large number of airplane displays.  Jacquelyn got to sit in the cockpit of an SR=71 Blackbird spy plane.

Veteran's Day

We celebrate all the veterans today.  Jacquelyn and I are both veterans.  We were in the U.S. Air Force.

We were both stationed at SAMSO (Space and Missile Systems Organization) at Los Angeles Air Force Station.  That's were we met each other and got married.  Lt. Swift and Lt. Swift.

 This is my senior picture from the Air Force Academy.

Here's Lt. Swift hard at work at her desk working for DARPA as a Cost Analysis for the Air Force on new technology development programs.  This is a picture of girl I met and started dating and fell in love with.

This is Jacquelyn as a Captain. 

Here we are in our formal Mess Dress at a big Military-Industrial Conference called WINCON that Jacquelyn was in charge of organizing.

Then I got out of the Air Force and Jacquelyn took a transfer to McConnell AFB in Wichita, Kansas where she stayed in the Air Force for several more years.

We were lucky not to have had to experience any wars while we were in.  I was an Astronautical Engineer and worked on the first experimental GPS satellites.  Here's a picture of one in the factory.  So every time you use a GPS, now so common, remember I helped make it possible.

I got to take part in four different launches of the satellites on Atlas F rockets from Vandenberg AFB and was a mission controller at Sunnyvale deploying the satellites up into orbit and getting them activated.

We can't forget another veteran.  My dad was a veteran during the Korean War when his guard unit got activated.  He was a bombardier on the B-36 Bombers.  When they got over the targets he took control of the aircraft, scoped out the targets, and let the bombs fly.  The B-36s were part of America's nuclear arsenal and were stationed on the Atlantic Coast full of atomic bombs.

Their mission was to attack Russia with nuclear bombs in case the Korean War got too far out of control and world war broke out.  They had to have a lot of dedication too.  The thing was, the B-36 couldn't carry enough fuel to hit targets in Russia and make it back home.  So the plan was to fly their mission, destroy the assigned target, and then get as far back as they could before ditching the airplane and bailing out.  Depending on the target that would put them in eastern Russia or Communist East European countries.  Then they would have to evade capture and try to escape for home on foot.