Fred Kroeger:  

Wow, I posted a note a few months ago and now can only add 200 characters.. I am mostly recovered from previous surgeries and the motorcycle accident I mentioned. I take some stuff to help me out. So I bought a John Deere tractor back in January 2023. I just love working on what I now call my farm. I've made some improvements such as building a metal building, putting in gates, etc. I've bush hogged about 10 acres so far and plowed up some ground and seeded it to make a food plot for the deer. Looking forward to hunting season. So now I ride my URAL with a sidecar all over the place. It's a lot of fun. I rode downtown with a club for a charity event last month, parked on the square with all the other bikes and had a 20-something year old girl try to pick me up. Ha. She told me she would like to be the ballast in my side car. Whoooeeee. I had my buds come over and get her away from me. Make me laugh. I am at least 50 years older than her. Nothing exciting is going on so I will say Adieu for now. So after HS graduation I tried college for a year at SUNY in Farmingdale for Automotive Technology and promptly flunked out. I think the strip bar across the street had something to do with it. I joined the Navy and ended up in Corpus Christi, Texas. Not a bad place to be. I got used to it and then decided I liked it. I got out of the NAVY and stayed there and went to work as an Industrial Mechanic in the Texas oil fields. Hard, hard work. I got married and had a kid. Decided I would be old before my time if I stayed working in the oil field so I re-enlisted in the Navy and got shipped off on a Med cruise right away on the USS John F Kennedy aircraft carrier. I was the supervisor for the Aircraft Starting and Cooling System. Spent two years floating around and got divorced. A dark time for me. So I decided to go back to college and get a degree. There was just me to worry about. I moved to Port Charlotte, Florida and stayed with my folks for awhile while I went to college down in Fort Myers. Hey, I found out if I actually read the books and worked some problems all this stuff wasn't so hard after all. I ended up getting a scholarship for a degree in Physics at the Univ. of West Florida in Pensacola. This was by far one of the hardest things I have ever done. I thought I was pretty smart and found out I'm not! Anyway, I graduated and landed a job at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and been here ever since. I have been very fortunate, I worked in the test area for a couple of years doing data acquisition and control of rocket engine tests, then went to work in the Avionics Lab and designed and tested computers for Physics experiments that flew on the Shuttle, mostly in Space lab. I did that for 15 years and then transferred up to the Chief Engineers Office and worked on Micro-Gravity experiments. I got tired of all the BS and went back to work in the Lab as a Systems Engineer on the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor System (GBM). Google it. I built most of the GSE and cabling and designed all the environmental tests and installed it on the satellite. So I retired from NASA in 2007, right in the middle of all the testing for the GBM. But I came right back to work as a contractor a week later. Now I work for Jacobs Engineering. I finished up the FERMI satellite and then started working on the Environmental Control & Life Support System (ECLSS). Specifically, I was one of three Lead Engineers for the Urine Processing System. Yep, We turned pee back into water for the astronauts to drink. This was a very stressful job so after a few years I transferred over to a Video Imaging Lab. Now I am developing camera systems for the new SLS systems. I was recently made the Lead Test Engine...Expand for more