posted 03-03-2014 09:03 AM               

Your Grandson will look back in years to come and be amazed at knowing Mr. Arabian, I imagine.

posted 05-25-2014 03:20 AM               

To get anyone's attention, Don had to almost scream above the audio level of our headset's volume. For Don, this was not a particular handicap. His projected volume, like my voice, needed no amplification. However, a soft-spoken MER operative would be wholly incapable of communicating.

I remember Don crying out from his throne along the wall opposite the video tripods. "I need those guys in the back room to give me their fix to the carbon dixoxide filter problem." Had Don not been blessed with loud lungs and larynx physiology, I would have missed that moment in time, a key element of the Apollo 13 rescue, making a square peg, the Command Module's square filters, work in the Lunar Module's round CO2 filter holder. Indeed, the MER's audio system needed no binocular counterpart to the video monitors, i.e., an amplifier. Don's voice was amplifier enough.

posted 04-04-2016 05:03 PM               

These are distributed copies — not the original hand-signed ones. The notebook, filled to capacity, was given to me by a friend of mine who was a GE electrical engineer assigned to Project Apollo at the Manned Spacecraft Center from 1964 to 1970.

posted 04-04-2016 05:27 PM               

In all my research on the MER and, more specifically, Mr Arabian, I think the strangest most obscure mention of Don's name was in this PDF annual review (page 13) for a UK care home!?!

posted 08-25-2019 05:23 AM               

I'll start off with one of my favourites from Glynn Lunney's JSC Oral History interview with Carol Butler in January 2000:

[Chuckles] Speaking of that, Don [Donald D.] Arabian ran what was called the Test and Evaluation Office, or something like that, and one of his functions was that he would run this mission evaluation room during real time where, when problems occurred in flight that could be beneficially looked at by the engineering team, Don and his staff kind of ran those things, and Don often ran many of them himself, especially the ones that were either urgent or critical.

Don was flamboyant, smart as a whip kind of a guy, but difficult for people to control. It was impossible for people to control him and so on, and he used to terrorize the engineering team in terms of his demands for this and data for that and tests for this and so on, and for clear thinking, in my view. He always demanded clear thinking, not some muddled-up answer. [Chuckles] There were times when I used to, if things were dragging on the resolution of a problem, I used to threaten the engineering team with "getting Don Arabian to look into this if you guys don't get this thing fixed." [Laughter] So he was great.