We Built It with Slide Rules. Then We Forgot How
My father grew up on a subsistence farm, the kind that raised chickens and grew just enough to get by. Farmers were the original hackers. You couldn’t wait for the right tool or the right expert. You fixed what was broken with what you had, because the alternative was worse.
As a kid he taught himself rocket chemistry. Not from a kit. From whatever he could source locally. He was trying to make things burn hotter and fly farther, adjusting mixtures through trial and error long before he had words like specific impulse or oxidizer ratio for what he was doing.
The materials weren’t exotic. Potassium nitrate sold as stump remover. Sulfur and charcoal. Mix them correctly and you have black powder, the same oxidizer-fuel logic underlying every solid rocket motor ever built. More ambitious builders used potassium perchlorate from chemical suppliers, mixed with aluminum powder or sugar to control burn rate and energy density. All of it over the counter. All of it accessible to someone willing to read carefully and try things until they worked.
He wasn’t following a plan. He was just that kind of person.
Most people have forgotten that the Air Force had its own space program before NASA existed. NASA was carved out of NACA in 1958, but the Air Force had been running parallel efforts since the mid-1950s. That generation had grown up on science fiction and wanted to see it happen. When Sputnik launched in October 1957 the country went into a low-grade panic about whether it understood physics well enough to survive, and suddenly the kids who had been dreaming about space since they could read had somewhere to go with it. What followed was one of the rare moments in American history when technical aptitude was a genuine class elevator. The government needed people who understood this stuff badly enough to find them wherever they were.
He enlisted in his early twenties, aerospace degree in hand. The Air Force space program was what he was aiming at. He ended up working on attitude control thrusters for reconnaissance satellites, the kind that could resolve fine surface detail on Earth from hundreds of miles up. For that mission attitude control wasn’t a secondary problem. It was the central one. A camera that can’t hold still is useless. The thrusters are what made the intelligence possible. The underlying engineering was the same problem he had been teaching himself: oxidizer, fuel, combustion geometry, now controlled to tolerances that left no margin.