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Tom Gavin discusses space exploration and the history of JPL
Tom Gavin discusses space exploration and the history of JPL

Santa Clarita Man Discusses 52 Years With NASA, JPL

Ed. Note: KHTS AM-1220 recently learned more than 400 Jet Propulsion Lab employees — 440 to be precise — live in the Santa Clarita Valley. These scientists, engineers and technicians from the SCV help further our understanding of science, technology and our universe with missions that look at questions such as whether Mars could have ever sustained small life forms. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be interviewing some of the faces from our community who further our exploration into the final frontier with their work.

From everything to how a controversial Cuban plot spurred the nation’s moon landing to how our space program went from slide rulers to wireless computers, Santa Clarita resident Tom Gavin has pretty much seen it all in his five-plus decades with JPL.


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Gavin remembers being one of the earliest residents of the Sky Blue housing tract in the Santa Clarita Valley, where he and his wife and young family purchased a $22,000 home in 1967. The rent with an option to buy meant his first year’s rent went toward the down payment.

The “city of Santa Clarita” was about two decades away, and the Newhalls were in the midst of an unsuccessful bid to name the area Valencia Valley.

And the technology was vastly different, as well.

“There were no hand calculators,” Gavin said. “The spacecraft computers were fixed wired — a lot different than it is today.”

Gavin works as a consultant for JPL, using his experience as “one of the graybeards” to advise on development. Gavin joined Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Nov. 19, 1962.

He also takes part in roundtable discussions on spacecraft matters as an adviser to the National Science and Technology Council.

Cold War beginnings for space program

Throughout the history of space exploration, scientists’ plans and imagination really only suffer two practical limitations, he said.

“There was a question of how much money (would it cost),” Gavin said, “and was the country willing to invest in it.”

The nation’s priorities have shifted since the beginning of the space race, Gavin said.

During the Apollo program, spending for the space program reached a peak of about 5 percent of the nation’s budget. The current spending represents less than half of 1 percent of the total budget, based on federal data.

There were a number of reasons for this, he said.

Gavin started in the program not long after President John F. Kennedy made his famous speech at Rice University in which Kennedy famously said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard… “

The speech was not only politically and financially motivated — the country was about 18 months removed from the unsuccessful Bay of Pigs invasion, and needed to justify more than $4 billion for its space goals — but it framed the space race in the context of national security because the Russians had already started exploration of the final frontier.

“When the Russians launched their first satellite, that was a real shock to Americans,” Gavin said. “The Russians did that?” he said rhetorically, mimicking the shock many Americans felt at the time.

At the time, the United States had launched two rockets as part of its Vanguard missions that had been thus far unsuccessful.

“You have to remember the international political situation was the engine that allowed NASA to grow — competing with the Russians — especially in the manned program,” Gavin said.

“But it was very tough in those days,” he added. “The mission designers had to deal with rockets that were blowing up on the pad, and those kinds of things. It was a very tough business.”

The pressure of the two Vanguard rocket failures and the success the Russians had with launching a dog into space put tremendous pressure on the program, he said.

“America had to do something,” he said. “That something was, ‘OK, if you can launch a satellite into orbit in 90 days, we’ll let you do it — and we did, called Explorer I, on Jan 31. 1958.”

The backbone of outer space exploration

While Gavin worked almost exclusively on the unmanned missions for JPL and NASA, he considered the manned missions as the “backbone of the entire space program.”

“Having a human there, who’s been trained and can adapt to different situations — you’ll never replace that,” he said.

Gavin also touched on the future of space industries, such as asteroid mining, which is a subject he recently discussed with a panel of experts.

“It’s a natural evolution,” Gavin said, noting the private industry’s growth in shuttle development while NASA ended its final space shuttle mission July 21, 2011.

“Now, NASA is developing the Space Launch System,” Gavin said, noting there are still American astronauts conducting research at the International Space Station today, however, we use Russian spacecraft to transport to and from Earth.

The future of NASA, JPL and space exploration

The Space Launch System, or SLS, is being designed to carry the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, as well as important cargo, equipment and science experiments, to deep space, according to NASA’s website.

The Orion spacecraft would be able carry up to four astronauts beyond low Earth orbit on long-duration, deep space missions, and include both crew and service modules and a launch abort system to significantly increase crew safety.

“When I came out of retirement, I was asked to lead a study of a mission to Europa (the sixth-closest moon of the planet Jupiter),” he said.

Europa is a moon about the size of our moon, and it’s got an ocean under about 50 kilometers of ice,” Gavin said. “If there’s a place in the solar system with life beyond here, it would be in Europa.”

One of the problems NASA and JPL are working to solve is navigating through the radiation levels surrounding Europa, which “sits right in the middle of the Jovian radiation belt.”

Just as the space program has inspired American innovation for decades, the radiation challenge was no different.

Scientists are developing a “Europa clipper,” which will take passes around the radiation belt and make a brief pass through in order to explore the unknown icy abyss.

Do you have a news tip? Call us at (661) 298-1220, or drop us a line at community@hometownstation.com.

 

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Santa Clarita Man Discusses 52 Years With NASA, JPL

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About Perry Smith

Perry Smith is a print and broadcast journalist who has won several awards for his focused, hyperlocal community coverage in several different regions of the country. In addition to five years of experience covering the Santa Clarita Valley, Smith, a San Fernando Valley native, has worked in newspapers and news websites in Los Angeles, the Northwest, the Central Valley and the South, before coming to KHTS in 2012. To contact Smith, email him at Perry@hometownstation.com.