The book, Assured Destruction" makes clear to me now why I never met anyone who designed, developed or manufactured a nuclear warhead ballistic missile. It happened before 1964. By then only the solid fuel Minuteman built by Boeing mattered. Later I would meet the Commercial Space Booster (CSB) which was assigned to TRW where Neal Ellis had gone and invited me to make an application in one of the Tishman Buildings in Redondo Beach.

I met the CSB as a triple element Titan with two of the elements as solid boosters in an article in the SAE Journal. The AIAA Journal of that era had an article that included the Thor-DELTA with 9 auxiliary solid fueled boosters. The exact stopping point for my own potential operational or mission work on a liquid fueled large rocket was with the interplanetary Centaur as a candidate for upstaging a Space Shuttle. Nope! The PWA Field Engineer for the RL-10 engine that UTC had bought from North American Rocketdyne was Billy R. Warner who created a training manual for a quick course in the F-100 Augmented turbofan for all us new Field Engineers to be doubled up with existing -100 at F-15 bases and new at the upcoming F-16 bases. He became a good friend as he prepared for his Florida State Licensed Engineer Test after working years beyond his alma matter in Daytona Beach.

Many of us are not going to fly a homebuilt with a FADEC engine, a Fly-by-Wire airplane control and Carbon Fiber-Reinforced plastic structure but still the work with Boron has lifted us a bit. Will our fuel ever be a cryogenic like hydrogen when the solid fuel so cautiously dismissed LOX and efforts to replace mono-propellent like hydrazine in satellites and even solar sails seem so near.

Here I am pushing buttons on my watch after layers and touch screen on Polar, then Garmin brands. My telephone did not survive as a clamshell when I took a trip on British airways to experience the CFRP Boeing 787 I had been pressed to predict 33 years before.

At my first real job the saying was that in Operations Analysis I had 20 years of experience in a 5 year old profession the day I walked in. Operations Research was a different thing and included time and motion study. There was ORSA and MORS for that and the American Ordnance Association became the National Security Industrial Association the year they sponsored a Energy Conference in the State Department Conference Room the year that I met Dr. Steven Dean, the coordinator of all the different means of peaceful Fusion power, Tokamaks, Lasers, all in a flow path guaranteed to achieve beyond break even but major output.