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My Brother’s Apollo 17 Contribution
My brother passed away last year. He built the Lunar Atmospheric Composition Experiment (LACE) for Apollo 17, seen here in the foreground of the photo.
He was a technician at The University of Texas at Dallas. UTD was quite involved with the space program, and he was charged with building the LACE prototype, which was sent back to NASA as a model for the instrument to make the flight.
The flight instrument was sent back to UTD for testing because they had a vacuum chamber that they could also heat. The engineer in charge of the project asked my brother to test it at 0 atm and I think 140°. (I could be wrong about the exact temperature). Unfortunately, the engineer did not specify if the temperature was in Fahrenheit or centigrade, and the UTD vacuum chamber was calibrated to centigrade. To make a long story short, the one that was to fly on Apollo 17 was cooked. This was past the window that a new one could be built, so they took my brother’s prototype, which worked very well and sent it to the moon. It’s still sitting there.
When I was 14, my brother and sister-in-law took me to Florida, where we watched the nighttime launch of Apollo 17 from the VIP area. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I will never forget that. I’m so proud of my brother and his small contribution to the space program.
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My brother passed away last year. He built the Lunar Atmospheric Composition Experiment (LACE) for Apollo 17, seen here in the foreground of the photo.
He was a technician at The University of Texas at Dallas. UTD was quite involved with the space program, and he was charged with building the LACE prototype, which was sent back to NASA as a model for the instrument to make the flight.
The flight instrument was sent back to UTD for testing because they had a vacuum chamber that they could also heat. The engineer in charge of the project asked my brother to test it at 0 atm and I think 140°. (I could be wrong about the exact temperature). Unfortunately, the engineer did not specify if the temperature was in Fahrenheit or centigrade, and the UTD vacuum chamber was calibrated to centigrade. To make a long story short, the one that was to fly on Apollo 17 was cooked. This was past the window that a new one could be built, so they took my brother’s prototype, which worked very well and sent it to the moon. It’s still sitting there.
When I was 14, my brother and sister-in-law took me to Florida, where we watched the nighttime launch of Apollo 17 from the VIP area. It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen. I will never forget that. I’m so proud of my brother and his small contribution to the space program.
#space
source
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