Published: October 28, 2009 07:31 pm      

Science pioneer will be at Morehead

MOREHEAD — A scientist who started his career in the infancy of the U.S. space program will speak at Morehead State University Friday.

Gil Moore, who spent 62 years in the space program, will speak at 2 p.m. in the Space Science Center’s Star Theater. His topic will be the early days of the program. The presentation is free and open to the public.

Moore can give history of the space program that few other people can give. He is a close colleague of Bob Twiggs, who recently joined the faculty at MSU.

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.

In his career he worked with space pioneers who are now household names including James Van Allen, Wernher von Braun, 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.

As an adjunct professor of physics at Utah State University for more than 30 years, he 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, Moore and his wife Phyllis developed project "STARSHINE" to involve tens of thousands of children in more than 40 countries in deploying a series of mirrored spherical satellites from Space Shuttles and expendable launch vehicles, to keep track of the way storms on the sun influence the density of the earth's upper atmosphere and the orbits of low earth orbiting satellites.