God Is My Copilot

Kenneth L. Atkins

Description

Briefly, the book is the story of adventure from the Texas Plains city of Amarillo with a dream to fly for the Air Force. It led to action with the Strategic Air Command during the Cold War and eventually to NASA’s planetary exploration program, opening the solar system’s mysteries beyond the Moon.

Highlights include a love story, the joys and risks of flying, closing the Cold War missile gap, why the United States did not fly a spacecraft to Halley’s Comet in 1986, and leading NASA’s project Stardust to capture and return to Earth dust particles from comet Wild 2 plus actual star dust from an interstellar flow across the solar system.

The adventure was imbedded in a journey of faith’s role and consistency with discoveries about the Cosmos.

Sujets

• Personal Memoirs
• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Xlibris US
• Date de parution: 08 août 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781669819943
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

GOD IS MY COPILOT
TO FLY LIFE, LOVE, AND THE COSMOS
KENNETH L. ATKINS

Copyright © 2022 by Kenneth L. Atkins.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022909187
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-1996-7

Softcover
978-1-6698-1995-0

eBook
978-1-6698-1994-3
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.
 
 
 
 
Rev. date: 08/05/2022
 
 
 
 
Xlibris
844-714-8691
www.Xlibris.com
775496
Table of Contents
1Time to Consider
2Awareness, Times, and Players
3Distraction and Transition, 1945–1955
4Emergence
5Parks, Foundations
6Some Enchanted Evening
7The Winds of March
8The Forever Pledge
9To Fly, 60 Foxtrot
10Strategic Air Command
11Supersonic or Speed of Light
12University of Illinois
13NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab
14Purple Pigeons: Solar Sail or Ion Drive to Halley’s Comet
15Halley Flyby Tempel 2 Rendezvous
16The Eighties: Hitting the Line
17From Grand Tour to Discovery
18Stardust
19Stardust Epilogue
20Cosmic/Eternal Answers
 
References

Dedication

With overwhelming gratefulness to: Barbara who changed my life forever, Lee, Laurie … and the unfathomable Creator whose existence is evident, omnipotent “beyond time and space,” and who created the essences of reality: —light, sound, gravity and matter, enabling music and love.
1
TIME TO CONSIDER
It was somewhere around 5:30 a.m. “Again?” I thought. I awakened early as aging required more frequent “relief” trips. Not unusual but a nuisance. Now in retirement. I reflected the stresses. In a full life of adventure, lots of times, they brought insomnia. I knew periods of restlessness. But I felt the recent occurrences, like this one, were due to an uncomfortable set of national and personal realities.
The country was a mess. In fact, it was (and still is) virtually bankrupt. Some future American generation will feel the poverty and reduced quality of life experienced in Greece’s sovereign debt crisis. It was 2016, years after the worldwide financial crisis of 2007–08. But our government again had irresponsibly led the developed world with something called “quantitative easing.” Just printing a huge quantity of paper money (backed by “the full faith and credit” of the citizens), first using it to buy bonds on itself and then selling bonds to them and other nations, thus “borrowing” even more. It was still saddled with the debt for the expensive “entitlements” of Social Security, Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, a.k.a. food stamps). [1] Another debt included is the old standby, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF, a.k.a. welfare). [2] All this was supposed to be contained by a legally set debt limit that comes and always gets raised to continue this “circular firing squad.”
Another contributing reality is that Muslims were continuing their role (almost exclusively) as the total cause of world violence through terrorist acts against themselves and the totality of Judeo-Christian and other “infidel” faiths. Our government, fickle as ever, was trying to stop them by “negotiating” a slower acquisition of nuclear weapons.
There’s a slight tip of the hat to the Russian dictator who, pining for the wretched glory of the old Soviet empire, invaded neighboring Ukraine to “protect” fellow ideologues and then moved over to Syria to fill a vacuum against its own Islamic threat. Remind you of anyone from 1939 with a need for Lebensraum?
Further, a lot of people were fleeing all the violence and poverty. The former caused a “first wave” human flood into Europe from the Middle East and Africa. The impoverished second wave brought people illegally across our southern border from “banana republic” government failures in Central America and Mexico. These spawned drug and “trafficking” operations by cartels serving our nation’s apparently insatiable drug lust, born out of family destruction by government programs and rejection of Almighty God in our culture.
It enabled an unhealthy level of dependence, victimhood, and isolationism. We have experienced a number of psycho shocks with shooters in the streets, theaters, schools, colleges, churches, and businesses. “We’re not in ‘E Pluribus Unum’ 1 anymore, Toto!” 2 All of it painted a recurrent sickening nightmare that robbed me of peaceful sleep in concern for country and family’s future.
As I finally piled on, a closer-to-home cacophony of additional stresses poked me from just “living long and prospering” [3]. I definitely felt the reality of fewer remaining years, even while still being physically fit and expecting to go well and active toward my nineties. But there is still what I referred to as the midlife conspiracy. Conspiracy? I described it humorously as a pact held between the appliances and other home features as to whose turn it was to break, leak, or present a problem for me to fix, costing time and money. The conspiracy was, of course, overseen by Murphy. 3 I know this sounds familiar.
As usual, Barbara had awakened about seven and had preceded me to the kitchen to prepare breakfast. When I came to the island, she greeted me with “How are you?”
I usually toss off the easy answer, “Fine.” But this time, I confessed how I felt, “Depressed.”
“What do you mean?” she queried.
I muttered something like, “It’s easy sometimes to have a molehill and work hard to make a mountain out of it.” That helped me move on. But I kept thinking about it.
I was working through my seventy-ninth year on this planet. More and more, it was hitting that I am mortal. My retirement in 2002 was far behind. Some fourteen additional years had drifted into the rearview mirror. Now, my trail on life’s colored-glass road of memories was fast dimming into fog. How did I get to “here”? Well, as I stopped to consider, it’s been quite a ride. I realized how blessed my long life has been.
Amazing really. And truly out of this world. I’d traveled from the plains of Texas to deep space and the icy dust-storm mask of a comet, appropriately named Wild 2 (but pronounced Vilt two ) and back. Considering a yellow-brick road in Oz and a little girl called Dorothy dumped from a Kansas tornado, I could relate. In fact, I’d actually experienced a tornado reminiscent of the old Dust Bowl. Since then, I’d been on my colored-glass road through the kaleidoscope of life. For my guiding companion, I did much better than Dorothy with her Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion. But I didn’t know who it was for a long time. Then the blessings began to flow. God … was my copilot. Maybe that’s a story worth telling.
2
AWARENESS, TIMES, AND PLAYERS
Awareness starts by understanding the time, background, and characters of one’s family and events awaiting your unique arrival. It began in Amarillo, Texas.
Between the edges of the Great Depression and the obscuring horror of The Dust Bowl, a young man named Walter Joe “W.J.” Atkins had a job. It was in a transfer and storage warehouse owned by his uncle, a Jewish businessman named Alex Davidson, who had come to the Texas Panhandle just before the turn of the century. The family characterization of “Uncle Alex” was less dignified. Dad described him as just a “run-down Jewish peddler.” He opened a general store on Polk Street (the main street in town); and on his way there from parts unknown, he’d met and in 1901 married my grandmother’s younger sister, Frankie. Keenly attuned to business opportunity and aggressively competitive, Uncle Alex later sold his store to build Amarillo’s premier ice plant.
In those pre-mechanical refrigeration days, ice kept the world eating, at least stuff other than at room temperature. It kept food fresh in restaurants, saloons, grocery stores, and homes. Where there were people, there were ice plants, producing and delivering blocks of crystallized water. When Uncle Alex got involved, manufactured ice was one of the nation’s fastest-growing industries. He knew providing ice to the dry “Wild West” community was a winner. His vision was based on a key virtually untapped natural asset in the area, and it was brilliant.
He saw underground water in a way analogous to the then-adolescent oil business. He deep-drilled an artesian 4 well into the Ogallala Aquifer, 5 a shallow underground “lake” of freshwater located beneath the Great Plains in the United States. One of the world’s largest aquifers, it underlies an area of approximately 174,000 square miles of portions of eight states. He would exploit it.
His “oil” was water, coming free from the aquifer, which could be frozen into pure clear ice blocks. His “technology” employed compressing low-cost anhydrous ammonia and then letting it expand through matrixes of pipe coils submerged in large four-foot-deep “freezing tanks” of brine. Rows of individually covered rectangular (22x11x44 inch) water cans, sandwiching the ammonia pipe system, floated inches above the freeze-tanks’ bottoms and comprised the floor in a large open production room [4]. Once fill