The Summer of 69: The Lasting Impression of the Apollo Program
Event Information
The accomplishments of the U.S. space program in its early days, starting with Projects Mercury and Gemini, and culminating in the moon landings of the Apollo program, were remarkable not only for their astonishing technological achievements, but for the inspiration, motivation and sense of shared experience that they gave to millions of people throughout the world. Dennis Ebbets was in sixth grade when John Glenn orbited the Earth in his Friendship 7 Mercury capsule, and was a sophomore in college when the Eagle landed at Tranquility Base. This talk will describe some of the events that made lasting impressions on him, and initiated a lifetime of educational and professional interests in space science, technology and missions. We will discuss a few interesting aspects of the Apollo mission architecture whose underlying scientific, engineering and managerial approaches continue to influence the design and execution of many of today’s ventures.
Biography: Dennis Ebbets is a 1978 graduate of the University of Colorado, where he completed a PhD in the Department of AstroGeophysics (now known as Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences). Following a two year fellowship at the University of Texas in Austin he joined the Investigation Definition Team for the Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) being developed for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This included positions at the University of Wisconsin Space Astronomy Laboratory in Madison and Johns Hopkins University Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. In 1985 he returned to Boulder to continue work on the GHRS and later other instruments for HST at Ball Aerospace. Dennis retired from Ball in 2015 after a thirty year career almost entirely devoted to NASA space astronomy projects. Throughout his career he enjoyed many opportunities for sharing the importance and excitement of space missions with public audiences from young school children to adult professional and civic organizations.
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