JIm Harris's passing

This morning I was saddened to hear about the passing of Jim Harris after he was involved in a traffic collision on Saturday.

The traffic collision occured on Highway 18 west of Sheep Creek Road in Phelan California.

The link to the San Bernardino Sun is above. This story in the Victorville Daily Press from Saturday has more detail about the collision.

I was lucky to have worked with Jim when he was with Symvionics in the 1990's. At that time the Interactive Analysis and Display System (IADS) was under development to support the F-22 flight test program. Jim was one of the leaders on the original IADS development team.

In more recent times Jim worked for the Government at the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center where he was part of the Western Aeronautical Test Range leadership team.

I am told that a family member was also injured in this collision but do not have any details.

NASA Global Hawks

This AV press article talks about the Air Force transferring Global Hawks 6 and 7 to NASA. Here is the link to the story and photos on the Edwards AFB website.

Astronaut Gordon Fullerton's Final Flight

The Antelope Valley Press link above shows Astronaut Gordon Fullerton retired at NASA Dryden on Friday. Long ago I attended reviews for the Pegasus launch vehicle when it was a DARPA project. It was one of those pinch myself "I am lucky to work at Edwards" moments. Here I am in a cool review about a new space launch system with a NASA Astronaut. Mr. Fullerton was the pilot for the B-52 launch aircraft 008 which was air-launching the Pegasus. Now Orbital Sciences has the L-1011 launch aircraft.

Several years ago we watched the same B-52 fly over the house in Rosamond on the way to Point Magu. This time to launch the X-43. Mr. Fullerton was the B-52 pilot for that launch.

Over the last couple of months I have been listening to this MIT open courseware class on the Space Shuttle's Systems Engineering. Session 22 features Mr. Fullerton discussing test flying the Space Shuttle. It is a great talk about cockpit design and the approach and landing tests of the Space Shuttle. Also the abort-to-orbit incident that occurred on one of his shuttle launches was interesting