The Basics
Work
Current Assignment:
I am a web administrator and work with IIS and Front Page server extensions on our
content servers, and Sun One and Tomcat on our Application servers. We recently added
a wiki site. I also am the desktop planner and work with both hardware and software
requests and planning.
Personal
Personal Statement:
Life is too important to be taken seriously – Oscar Wilde
Something most people at work do not know about and the Most Interesting / Strangest
job you have ever had:
I started college in an accelerated aerospace engineering program at Iowa State and tested
into a student co-op program with NASA. Two girls from ISU got in, but did not get
their notification of acceptance until about 3 months after the guys got theirs. Some ten
or so students were selected in nation-wide testing and all but two were from ISU. This
was about the same time that Linden Johnson, as recently revealed, summarily put a stop
to having women in the astronaut program. My fellow student and co-worker, Sheryll
Goecke, went on to be an outstanding woman in NASA’s engineering staff. I,
unfortunately, lost my courage and changed schools and majors. Women in Flight
Research at NASA Dryden Flight Research Center from 1946 to 1995
I worked for NASA at the Flight Research Center for 6 months in 1963, as an
engineering co-op student, when the original X-15 rocket research plane was still flying.
I had my own research project studying lift over the body at altitudes above something
like 40 miles. While there, I saw the first un-powered test flight of what would become
the space shuttle. A plywood and Plexiglas mockup was towed to 10,000 feet behind a
B-52 and cut loose for Milt Thompson to ride down. It dropped like a rock for 9,000 feet
and finally developed enough lift over its wingless bathtub shape in the last thousand feet
to give Milt enough control to land it on the dry lakebed.
If you could have dinner with anyone in the world who would it be?
Scott Bakula, Rick Berman, Brannon Braga; or maybe join Ed’s supper club!