Bruce Cordell:  

*** I'll use this space to augment captions associated with photos in the Gallery.*** FOOTBALL (The THEN photo), TENNIS, MSU, UCLA & JIMMY CONNORS I was really surprised and thrilled to be chosen All-Conference Quarterback for 1966. It may seem trivial now but I secretly wanted it, especially since I didn't plan to play college football. So I decided to give myself a chance by working out with weights for months before my senior summer -- and it really helped! In fact, Coach Bekius made the All-Conference thing possible by allowing me to throw the football all over the field. And my receivers (Bob Funnell, Garrett Anguilm, Doug VanSlyke) were simply great! They were very patient with my sincere attempts at something sort of like a West Coast offense, occasionally punctuated with a longer ball when I thought no one would notice! Unlike my experience in football -- where my receivers often made me look better than I actually was -- I was also a 4-year member of the WHS Tennis Team where surprisingly, I didn't seem as good to most people as I really was. This is because almost no one ever saw us play -- we played during the day, usually off-campus. Except for a couple matches my first year, I played 1st singles and never lost a conference tennis match the whole 4 years. Friends who hear this story usually reply, "Well if you were so hot, why didn't you become a Spartan netter?" Of course, I wasn't sure I was that "hot", and also didn't want any distractions on my quest to become a PhD astronomer. Well, after watching the Spartan tennis team close-up as a student for a year I knew they were beatable (even by me), but decided I'd rather be a first-rate astronomer than tennis champion of the Big 10! And indeed, my first year at UCLA removed any lingering doubts. 1971 was a big year for Jimmy Connors and me at UCLA: I was a 1st year graduate student and Jimmy was a Freshman. When I wasn't studying planetary & space physics or doing scientific research with my two faculty employers (one of whom became a member of the National Academy of Sciences!), I watched Jimmy practice and play tennis in-person and couldn't believe the speed and intensity! That year Jimmy became the first college freshman to win the men's singles NCAA championship, and he went on to become one of the all-time tennis greats winning multiple US Opens and Wimbledons. He still holds the all-time record for the number of men's singles championship titles (109). At UCLA my impression of Jimmy was that he had an "S" on his chest, wore a red cape, and was from another planet! MORE ABOUT ASTRONAUT ALAN SHEPARD Alan Shepard was a Navy test pilot who became a famous astronaut in the early 1960s. A few weeks after Russian Yuri Gargarin became the first human in space, Shepard became the first American (and 2nd human) in space in May 1961. Because he was older than most Apollo astronauts, I only met Alan twice: Once accidentally at the Bob Hope Desert Classic golf tournament pro-am (see photo w ex-), and Second, at a big dinner in Houston honoring the career of the director of Jet Propulsion Lab (in Pasadena, CA). I went because I happened to be at Johnson Space Center (in Houston) and the GD bosses in San Diego called and told me they needed another General Dynamics person at the event. Indeed when Alan joined the drinks line before the dinner, I sprinted over to chat with one of the most colorful celebrities in the history of space exploration (see also next para). After being plagued with an inner ear disorder that precluded spaceflight for many years, Shepard had experimental surgery that was successful and made him available for an Apollo mission to the Moon in January, 1971. Apollo 14 was the 3rd human landing on the Moon and the first in the lunar highlands at Fra Mauro. At 47 Shepard was (and still is) the oldest person to ever walk on the Moon. And at the end of their mission, Shepard, a big golf fan, used a makeshift golf club -- in full space suit -- to become the first human to hit a golf ball on the Moon; see YouTube. GENERAL DYNAMICS IN SAN DIEGO AND PLANS FOR MARS NASA wanted answers about how to get astronauts to Mars -- especially about safety, costs, and program viability -- and at GD we had a group that specialized in answers! Without knowing much about it, as a high school student I had already staked-out a genuine interest in human voyages to Mars (see P. 67 in your '67 Viking yearbook!) that continued through a PhD in planetary science at Univ of Arizona (Tucson) and beyond. Indeed by 1990 my GD colleagues and I had coalesced around the exciting idea of going to the tiny moons of Mars (Phobos, Deimos) FIRST, BEFORE landing on Mars itself! This would actually cut the cost, crew, and schedule risks in half (over a Mars FIRST program), and would save the exciting, dangerous stuff -- the Mars landing itself - for months later whenever the astronauts and the amazed public audience on Earth felt like it, and the network news cameras were ready. By the mid-1990s even NASA had begun to warm up; e.g., a well-known NASA scientist independently advocated the Case for Phobos by referencing one of my AIAA papers of 1989: "Quoting from Cordell, 'The Phobos/Deimos-then-Mars strategy, appears to have operational, resource, science, and colonization advantages over a "Mars-first" strategy.' " EARLY PLANS FOR HUMAN MISSIONS TO MARS WERE DRIVEN BY "SCIENCE" UNTIL THE MID-1990s But this was still controversial because of our interest in "colonization" (later called "settlement") of Mars; The rationale for early human Mars missions was "science", not colonization. For example, even as far back as the 1950s, the great Wernher von Braun -- who built the Saturn V that first launched humans to the Moon in 1969 -- designed his human Mars mission concept around a large, crewed, mobile Bio-Lab (see photo) that they'd drive from the Mars polar cap all the way to its equator, while studying Mars science! According to von Braun himself in 1954, "We'll be on Mars for 15 months, That's a long time -- but it still will be too short to learn all the science we'd like know about Mars." This "mostly-science-emphasis" for human Mars missions was significantly weakened in the mid-1990s when Jet Propulsion Lab announced the "era of Mars rovers" -- i.e. robotic JPL spacecraft and rovers at Mars -- had produced detailed, essentially continuous explorations of Mars' surface and skies since then! While we all would prefer trained scientists to be actually on Mars' surface doing Mars science directly, most people agree that the "era of Mars rovers" has enabled scientists at JPL to do almost as well. Imagine this phone call in 1995 from NASA HQ to Dr. von Braun, " Hi Wernher, how's everything? I have to report that many NASA and government types are asking out loud why you c...Expand for more