Gil Moore has spent 65 years in the space program, so far. He started out at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico in 1947, as a student employee of New Mexico State University, installing instruments in captured German V-2 and U.S. Navy Viking and Aerobee rockets for the pioneering space scientists of that day. He was privileged to be a flunky for such luminaries as James Van Allen, Wernher von Braun, Homer Newell and Fred Whipple. He also worked alongside some of Robert H. Goddard's employees, who moved to White Sands after Dr. Goddard's death in 1945. Following graduation from New Mexico State, Moore spent 13 years in supervising teams of engineers who launched sounding rockets all over the world to study the effects of solar storms on the earth's upper atmosphere. This field is known as solar-terrestrial physics. He then spent 25 years working for Thiokol Corporation in northern Utah, continuing with solar-terrestrial physics rocket launches around the world, and then transitioning into earth-orbiting satellite experimentation. As an adjunct professor of physics at Utah State University for the past 30 years, he, assisted by his wife, Phyllis, has helped several generations of university undergraduate students to build and fly dozens of "Get Away Special" experiments in NASA's Space Shuttles. Moore joined the astronautics department of the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1995 to help establish a program to allow cadets to build and fly their own satellites on surplus military launch vehicles. Upon retirement in 1997, he and Phyllis developed Project Starshine to involve tens of thousands of children in over 40 countries in deploying a series of mirrored spherical satellites from Space Shuttles and expendable launch vehicles, once again to keep track of the way that storms on the sun influence the density of the earth's upper atmosphere and, thereby, the orbits of low earth orbiting satellites.
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