posted 05-27-2018 05:30 PM               

Wikipedia has a small snippet of the story. Let me tell you how it came about...

There was a cocktail party at Cornell University where an industrialist whose company made the rockets, NASA big shots and Air Force bigwigs were talking about the frustrations of spending millions on a rocket and when they do get one off the ground, whatever we try to get back through the atmosphere always burns up and we learn nothing, because it all burned up. Then a professor at the university, Arthur Kantrowitz stepped into the conversation stating "I can recreate the conditions of reentry in the laboratory and solve the problem — in about six months!"

The industrialist hired him on the spot, NASA and Air Force went off to get funding. They set him up in a lab and let him hire anybody he wanted. In about six months, he had a complete understanding of the heat that had to be dealt with, the forces on the craft and the shock wave that formed around it. They made a nose cone to his specs and it came down successfully on the first try! The actual measurement of the thickness of the coating left on the nose cone was within ten percent of his prediction proving his theory was correct! Unfortunately his name has been lost to history.

To show you his ability to cut through the chaff and get to the core of a problem, I'll give you an example: After solving the re-entry problem, the government wanted to photograph actual re-entry. They called for proposals for a one year contract to develop equipment and methods to take these pictures. They gave out several contracts with the plan to have a contest at the end where they would all photograph an actual re-entry and the one that got the best pictures would get a long term contract to continue to study re-entry.

All the people at the lab, were puzzled why DR. Kantrowitz didn't submit a proposal for the one year contract. It seemed to be right down our ally. Two weeks before the contest, Dr. Kantrowitz arranged for us to be in the contest. He had correctly analyzed the problem and realized that the hard part would be to acquire the target before the phenomenon was over. He compared it to skeet shooting so he had us mount the cameras on shotgun stocks. We were the only ones to get any pictures and we got the long contract.

We bought two airline planes and modified them so our techs could lean out the sides to get close up photos. They were stationed at an island in the south Atlantic near the end of the missile range.

Kantrowitz also designed and built a MHD powered spaceship engine (I believe some call it an ion engine) for extended flight. He also conceived of an orbiting fuel station which would scoop air from the edge of the atmosphere turn it into fuel for the MHD engine to avoid having to bring fuel up from Earth.

To see how much bigger his story is than his great contribution to the space program, I'll list some of his other substantial contributions to science. He was a leader in laser research. He made the first tunable laser that made it possible to change the laser frequency. He developed high power lasers and showed that there was no limit to the power a laser could produced. He produced metal cutting lasers.

He made advances in superconductivity. At one point we had the most powerful magnet in the world. He applied the principles of MHD to generating electricity. He received a contract with a group of utility companies to build a pilot electric plant which was successful. The thing that impressed me was that at the end of the MHD process the leftover heat was enough to power a regular steam driven dynamo and make electricity again. He even developed a medical device that has saved millions of heart attack victim's lives and made bypass surgery practical. It is still in use today. He also developed the first box type ambulance that included all the emergency equipment needed to care for the patient in transit. He also sat on the president's science advisory committee.

I had the pleasure of working for him for over twenty years. I would love to work with a writer who believes he can write a really great book/biography of this great scientist. I have the information, documents, leads for further research, other people to interview and the location of the official records. But I'm not a good enough writer to do the book justice. I'm not looking for a ghost writer. I want someone to author the book and get credit for it.

He also had a talent for gathering together innovative scientists, engineers, and technicians. And letting them pursue their out of the box ideas.