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Growing up one of the things that had happened was Sputnik had been shot by the Russians

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and I wanted to build rockets. I in fact did this in science fairs,

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ll this sort of stuff, from the sixth grade on.

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In fact saw Sputnik, you know, when it was launched

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and remember falling off the porch as I'm watching it go over. [laughter]

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About killed myself. Thought it had hit me or something.

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So anyway, I had started building rockets and every year had learned more and more.

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Now this was, you know, NASA had not been that old at this particular point

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and one of the things was you couldn't get the nice rocket engines you can get now

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so I had to mix my own gun powder and that sort of thing and had several of them blow up

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so my dad wanted me to have a bunker for that.

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So needless to say there were only a handful of schools that you could study aerospace engineering

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and fortunately one was in my backyard, so I went down to State and started off to be an aerospace engineer.