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  Skylab parasol designer Jack Kinzler (1920-2014)

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Author Topic:   Skylab parasol designer Jack Kinzler (1920-2014)
mode1charlie
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posted 03-14-2014 11:09 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for mode1charlie   Click Here to Email mode1charlie     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Jack Kinzler, the longtime chief of the Technical Services Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, passed away on 4 March 2014. Mr. Kinzler was known as NASA’s resident "Mr. Fix-It", and was responsible for building many of the full-scale models of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft used in preflight tests, and solving a spate of other mechanical problems over the years. However, his obituary in the New York Times points out that perhaps his greatest accomplishment was as the architect of an improvised thermal shield he created for the Skylab station after the original was stripped away during launch.
When Skylab shed its shield, most of the proposed solutions entailed a spacewalk, with all its inherent dangers. To Mr. Kinzler, that was an unattractive prospect: The commander of Skylab’s crew, Charles Conrad Jr., known as Pete, was his next-door neighbor and friend.

What was needed, Mr. Kinzler knew, was a fix that could be done from the inside. He learned that Skylab had an airlock — a narrow passage meant for use as a camera port — near the site of the damage. It might be possible, he thought, to build a kind of flat, collapsible shade tree, which could be extruded through the airlock and, once outside, made to bloom.

He phoned a sporting-goods store and ordered a set of fiberglass fishing rods. The salient thing about them was not that they caught fish, but that they telescoped.

To build his prototype, Mr. Kinzler arranged four rods like the ribs of an immense umbrella, securing one to each side of a piece of parachute silk roughly 24 feet square. Folded, the parasol would just fit into the airlock. Once extruded, its canopy could be snapped open by means of springs.

randy
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David Carey
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Greggy_D
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Delta7
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cspg
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Michael Davis
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fredtrav
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Apollo-Soyuz
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posted 03-15-2014 04:41 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Apollo-Soyuz   Click Here to Email Apollo-Soyuz     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
Here is a scan of a cover as a tribute to Jack Kinzler.

Astro Rich
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LM1
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jasonelam
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dss65
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Ronpur
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hlbjr
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Gilbert
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Robert Pearlman
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posted 03-20-2014 11:24 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Robert Pearlman   Click Here to Email Robert Pearlman     Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
In addition to the New York Times' obituary cited above, the Washington Post, TIME magazine and the Daily Telegraph noted his passing.

astro-nut
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