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Dave Drachlis
NASA Marshall Space Flight Center
July 7, 2003
(256/544-0034)

RELEASE: 03-102

NASA propulsion guru Robert Sackheim reflects on past, looks to future

Part 1 of 3

NOTE TO EDITORS/NEWS DIRECTORS:
NASA propulsion guru Bob Sackheim will be a panel chairman during the
39th annual AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference, to be
held July 20-23 at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Ala. For more
information, visit: www.aiaa.org/events/jpc03

40 YEARS LATER, NASA PROPULSION GURU ROBERT SACKHEIM
WOULDN'T TRADE HIS CHOSEN PROFESSION FOR ANYTHING

There is nothing small about Bob Sackheim. And even less that is
ordinary. 

Contemplating his desk-stacked high with engineering texts, vehicle
schematics, scale models of various spacecraft, and other
paraphernalia befitting the office of a leading NASA space propulsion
engineer-one imagines the ease with which even the hardiest civil
servant could disappear beneath all that paperwork.

But Sackheim isn't your typical civil servant. The assistant center
director and chief engineer for space propulsion at NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., Sackheim is a burly,
ruddy-cheeked, 6-foot-4-inch force of nature, whose cliff-like brow
crashes down, alarmingly, as he ponders the clutter of books and
papers. 

"I'd clean it up," he says, and suddenly that rocky brow lifts once
more. He breaks into a self-deprecating chuckle. "But then I'd never
be able to find anything."

He sits, and the jumble, not the man, is diminished. He grins, waves
at the mess. "Here it is-the upshot of 40 years' obsession with space
propulsion." 

The upshot is far greater than that. From his office at the Marshall
Center, Robert L. Sackheim supervises all NASA space propulsion
research and development activities-from Space Shuttle propulsion
elements and conventional rockets, to innovative kerosene and liquid
oxygen engines intended to launch next-generation spacecraft to
orbit, to alternative propulsion technologies meant to carry them
deep into the Solar System and beyond. In the 1980s, he wrote the
book-in fact, the entire curriculum-on spacecraft design for the
University of California in Los Angeles, and he continues to teach
aerospace engineering classes today, at the University of Alabama in
Huntsville. He has authored more than 150 technical papers and
contributed to four books on rocket propulsion. He holds eight
patents in spacecraft propulsion and control systems technologies.

In the 40-plus-year history of the Marshall Center, Sackheim is only
its third employee ever to be elected to the prestigious National
Academy of Engineering, for his contributions to space and missile
propulsion technology and programs, and he holds a slew of other
awards and accolades from NASA, from the U.S. academic and aerospace
communities, and from organizations and colleagues worldwide.

One doesn't come this far without accruing a lot of paperwork. And a
lot of stories.

The call of the engineer
Perhaps the least romantic of Sackheim's tales is the manner in which
he caught the space bug that would shape the course of his life. No
Hollywood clichés here. No open field, no telescope, no small boy
with a Heinlein paperback in hand and visions of Mars in his
head-Sackheim is a native of New York City, where the vast starscape
was dimmed by the bright lights of the Big Apple. And by the time the
Soviet Union rocked the world by launching Sputnik in 1957, Sackheim
was a sophomore at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville,
where he was too busy pursuing a chemical engineering degree-the most
promising new field of that period, he remembers-to take much notice
of the coming space race. 

But like many of his classmates, Sackheim's education keyed on his
Reserve Officer's Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship. In 1961, after
obtaining his master's degree in chemical engineering from Columbia
University in New York, Sackheim was commissioned as a lieutenant in
the U.S. Air Force, assigned to the Air Force Research and
Development Launch Crew stationed in Complex 15 at Cape Canaveral,
Fla.

When Sackheim reported for duty, his whole life took an abrupt
turn-straight upward.

"I had a job all lined once I finished my four year stint," he says.
"Union Carbide in Charleston, W.Va., a great job. But once I arrived
at Cape Canaveral, everything changed. I realized what I was being
tasked to do, and I just flipped. It was tremendous. I remember
working 36 hours straight once, early on-loading and launching a
Titan II rocket. After that, I never strayed [from this field]
again."

During his years at the Cape, Sackheim served as chief of the Titan
II Propulsion Section. He also became integrally involved in Gemini,
the successor to the Mercury manned space program. Sackheim led
development and flight-testing of Gemini propulsion systems,
preparing to send America's second wave of astronauts into space.

In 1964, at the end of his tour of duty, he left the Air
Force-without complaint. "If you stayed in, it was because you wanted
to be a professional soldier," Sackheim says. "I wanted to be a
professional engineer. No match." 

Taking up Kennedy's challenge
By that time, the call of space-and President Kennedy's challenge to
the nation to put an American on the Moon by decade's end-had seized
him irrevocably. The Union Carbide job was ancient history. Sackheim
went to work for Space Technology Laboratories (STL), a small but
rapidly expanding company in Redondo Beach, Calif.

But Sackheim decided to leave the human element of spaceflight-and
the furious, high-profile work of the Apollo program to land
Americans on the Moon-to others. His primary fascination remained the
hardware and propulsion systems necessary to hurl tons of metal into
the sky and across the empty gulfs of space. Let others ponder
matters of payloads and destinations; for him, the key element of
Kennedy's challenge was the vessel. The means of flight.

"I was 28 years old, and there I was, project manager for Mariner's
Mars Propulsion Subsystem," Sackheim recalls, still marveling. The
Mariner program was a perfect fit. Intended to bolster national
interest in America's spaceflight endeavors, Mariner was NASA's first
effort to launch automated probes to Mars. Mariner 4, launched in
November 1964, obtained and transmitted the first-ever close-range
images of Mars in July 1965. Mariners 6 and 7, launched just weeks
apart in early 1969, scrutinized the Red Planet's atmospheric
composition, pressure, density and temperature-laying the groundwork
for research necessary to enable future missions, including potential
crewed voyages being planned by NASA and its partners today. 

Sackheim's contributions led to quick advancement within the
organization-by now called TRW Corp. and burgeoning into an
international leader in the automotive, aviation and aerospace
industries-including senior management roles in TRW's product
engineering department and hardware engineering laboratory.

 - Continued -

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