The Other Side
Just how did we get there? and space; like Tarzan swinging from technology, and human expertise As the outer planets plod through vine to vine through the jungle, missing to catch up. the frozen void, once every 175 years a transition by even the smallest of JPL formally proposed the Grand they line up in such a way that Jupiter’s margins would spell disaster. A few Tour in 1970, with Harris M. “Bud” gravity can be used to fing a properly months and several reams of graph Schurmeier (BS ’45, MS ’48, ENG aimed spacecraft on toward Saturn, paper later, Flandro had worked out ’49) as the project manager. This was and thence to Uranus and Neptune. In hundreds of itineraries—some reaching an A-team effort: Schurmeier had just THE the spring of 1965, Caltech aeronautics all the way to then-planet Pluto—for presided over the Mariner 6 and 7 grad student Gary Flandro (MS ’60, the upcoming launch window. His fybys of Mars, and his collaborators PhD ’67) was working part-time up boss, Elliott “Joe” Cutting, booked included JPL’s planetary program at JPL analyzing so-called gravity- him a meeting with the chief of JPL’s director, Robert Parks (BS ’44), and its assist trajectories when he realized that advanced technical studies offce, spacecraft systems manager, Raymond OTHER such a four-for-one alignment would aeronautics professor Homer Stewart Heacock (BS ’52, MS ’53). It was also occur between 1976 and 1979; (PhD ’40). Stewart embraced the idea, a gold-plated Cadillac of a mission—a intrigued by the possibilities, he set christening it the Grand Tour.
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