JMH Bio Notes

Introduction

These are some events in my life.

7/8/42 My Brothers Ship Torpedoed

My second brother, Bushrod Washington Hopkins was on a merchant ship in convoy PQ-17 bound for Russia when his ship, SS Alcoa Ranger, was torpedoed . All the crew survived. The ship was lost. Convoy PQ-17

8/30/44 My Oldest Brother, Matthew Smith Hopkins Lost at Sea

When my brother Matthew's ship was torpedoed, my second brother, Bushrod Hopkins was on another tanker in the same convoy 8 miles away.

St. Andrews School

In 1948, as a senior I saw the ENIAC on a field trip to Aberdeen Proving Ground. This was one of the first digital computers.

Haverford College

Attended Haverford college for 2 years. Considered major in Engineering, then Math, then Philosophy. In the summer of 1950 my room-mate from college and I were crew on the schooner Sunbeam, sailing on Long Island Sound. Then the Korean War broke out and I joined the Air Force rather than be drafted into the army.

First Marriage

At Haverford I studied Russian and met Helen, the president of the Russian club at Bryn Mawr College. Four years later I married Helen in Biloxi, Missippi.

United States Air Force

I was in the USAF from September 1950 to September 1954. Studied and taught radar at Keesler AFB for 2 years. In 1953 I was stationed at a Radar site on the island of Kume Shima.The island is about 75 miles west of Naha, Okinawa.My favorite song at the time was China Night

Vitro Corp.

When I was discharged from the Air Force in 1954, I went to Work for Vitro Corp. as a Range Instrumentation Engineer. We were under contract to the Air Force Armament Center at Eglin Air Force Base. One interesting task was acceptance testing of a strobe light system for photographing shrapnel dispersion. Another task was testing an airborne strobelight system which was mounted in a drop tank on an F-89 Scorpion jet fighter. It was used in early testing of an Infra red tracking system. Eglin was an interesting place to work. Among the sights was seeing a B-47 perform a "toss bomb" maneuver. Releasing its bomb while flying nearly vertical.

E.G. Holmes and Associates

I left Vitro to work for Holmes as a sales rep for electronic instruments. I covered the state of Florida and saw a lot of what was going on at the time in the area of technology. I was not a very good salesman and gave that up.

The Martin Company

In 1958 I was working for the Cocoa Division on the Martin Company. I was a Quality Assurance Engineer on the Titan I project. I was there for the first Titan I launch. I also did some failure analysis work on the Vanguard Satellite Launching Vehicle (SLV) This involved analysis of telemetry data in the final moments of the vehicle before it exploded. Another investigation was to explain unexpected venting of the Liquid Oxygen tank during a static firing of the Vanguard. I left Martin while they were still testing the Titan 1.

Ground Guidance System (GGS)

http://space.skyrocket.de/index_frame.htm?
http://www.skyrocket.de/space/doc_sdat/pioneer_p1.htm
http://claudelafleur.qc.ca/Spacecrafts-1960.html#PioneerP-30

Pioneer P-30 
Spacecraft:  	P-30 / Able VA (Atlas Able 5)
Chronologies: 	1960 payload #27 ; 1960 12th loss ; 80th spacecraft.
Type: 	Lunar probe
Sponsor: 	NASA / U.S. Air Force
	
Launch: 	25 September 1960 at 15h13 UTC, from Cape Canaveral Air Force
Station's LC-12, by an Atlas-Able VA (Atlas D 80D / Able-5).
Orbit: 	None
Mission: 	This Pioner P-30 / Able VA had a slightly different instrument
complement from that of its predecessor (Pioneer P-3), but it had similar
mission goals. The 175.5-kg probe was to enter lunar orbit about 62.5 hours
after launch with parameters of 4,000 x 2,250 kilometers in a period of 10
hours. Although the first stage performed without problems during the launch,
the Able second stage ignited abnormally and shut down early because of
an oxidizer system failure. The third stage never fired, and the probe burned
up in Earth’s atmosphere 17 minutes after launch.
Although the mission was a failure, ground controllers fired Able VA’s
onboard liquid propellant hydrazine rocket engine – the first time that an
onboard motor was fired on a space vehicle.
Later, on 15 November 1960, NASA announced that two objects from the Able VA
payload had been found in Transvaal, South Africa.

A piece of trivia: I (JMH) sent the firing command for the spacecraft engine from the Digital Command panel in the central van of the GGS on verbal direction from Howard Whiteside, Able Guidance Test Conductor. My moment of glory.

Courier 1B 
Type: 	Experimental communications
Sponsor: 	United States' DARPA	
Launch: 	4 October 1960 at 19h58 UTC,
from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's LC-17B,
by a Thor-Able-Star (Thor Ablestar 293 AB005).
Orbit: 	
Decayed: 	
Mission: 	
----
Transit 3A
Type: 	Navigation
Sponsor: 	U.S. Navy
Launch: 	30 November 1960 at 19h50 UTC,
from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's LC-17B,
by a Thor-Able-Star (Thor Ablestar 283 AB006).
Orbit: 	
Decayed: 	
Mission:
----
Pioneer P-31 
Spacecraft:  	P-31 / Able VB (Atlas Able 5B)
Chronologies: 	1960 payload #42 ; 1960 21st loss ; 96th spacecraft.
Type: 	Lunar probe Sponsor: 	NASA / U.S. Air Force
Launch: 	15 December 1960 at 9h10 UTC,
from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's LC-12,
by an Atlas Able (Atlas D 91D / Able-5).
Orbit: 	None.
Mission: 	This was third and last attempt by NASA to launch a probe
to orbit the Moon in the 1959-60 period.
Able VB mission, as with Pioneer 5 and Pioneer P-30, was to enter lunar orbit.
Scientific objectives included studying radiation near the Moon, recording
the incidence of micrometeoroids and detecting a lunar magnetic field.
Planned lunar orbital parameters were 4,300 x 2,400 kilometers with a
period of 9 to 10 hours. The spacecraft had a slightly different
scientific instrument complement from that of its predecessors.
Unfortunately, the Atlas-Able booster exploded 68 seconds after launch at
an altitude of about 12.2 kilometers. Later investigation indicated that
the cause was premature Able stage ignition while the first stage was
still firing. 
----
Source: 	Jonathan McDowell's Master List
Mark Wade’s Encyclopedia Astronautica ;
National Space Science Data Center's PIONY ; TRW Space Log ;
A. Siddiqi, SP-2002-4524, p. 26 ;

Around 1960, while with STL (Space Technology Laboratoried), I worked on some of the first satellite navigation systems. We were doing it in reverse. Navigating a missle from multiple doppler ground stations. Today, 2x2 inch little GPS receiver(made in China) can pick up to 12 satellites. The system I worked on filled a trailer. About 16 racks of equipment not including the computer which was in a seperate building. Todays 2x2 box does the same thing. Then the system was vacuum tubes and transisters. No Integrated circuits. Our RF (radio frequency) was 401 Mhz. Each antenna on the ground was a directional array of 5 helixes.

I was working with the project for 2 years. My participation was minor. I was responsible for the analog to digital interface. Today it would be a chip. Then it was a rack of cards using discrete transister, diodes, resisters, et cetera. The computer was in a seperate building. It used magnetic core memory and only had about 12 kbytes of memory. The programs were very simple, fixed point(integer) arithmetic. No user interface. Just blinking lights and toggle switches. Program was hardwired into core memory. Today we would call it an embedded system. The input data was radio doppler data, the output, radio commands to the rocket. The commands were pitch(up/dpwn), yaw(left/right) and shutdown( to stop the rocket engine). The rocket had an autopilot. It was an analog device with gyroscopes used to fly the rocket an a stable trajectory. It contained a simple list of commands for a nominal trajectory. The ground computer computed the corrections to achieve the proper orbit. After the GGS project I worked with the Tech Support Staff at STL's Florida Operations. It was mostly using solid geometry, statistics, analysis of variance and filtering. The problem was to compare data from one or more tracking systems to data from a missile's inertial guidance system. Then we would look at the differences in different coordinate systems and try to assign them to an error model. It involved a lot of coordinate transformations. It also involved knowing some of the physics of atmospheric refraction, CW and pulse radar,the geoid, accelerometers and gyroscope errors, etc.

General Precision, Aerospace

STAFF Program (Stellar Acquisition Feasibility Flights) We demonstrated the use of a star tracking telescope mounted on an inertial platform in the payload of a Polaris rocket under powered flight.(1965)

Divorced Helen and Married Jean

More wonderful wives than I deserve.

TRW

Worked on program to monitor the checkout and launch of the Centaur rocket.(1968)
Participated in the launch of Surveyor SC-6/AC-14, Surveyor SC-7/AC-15, Mariner Mars-F, ATS-E, and others

ENSCO

Worked on the ARPANET project. This included building an interface between the Terminal Interface Processor (TIP) and a Sigma 7 computer. We also wrote and tested the required device drivers. What then required a seperate computer, a bin of cards, and programs in the host is now compressed into a net interface chip. We also helped write software for a telescope designed to photograph satellites.

Planning Research Corp. (PRC)

This company did engineering support for the Space Shuttle under contract to the National Aeronautica and Space Agency (NASA). I worked on software for the liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen loading systems for Space Shuttle. Was System Manager for a VAX-1180 computer.I was very proud of our collection of hard drives which totalled almost a Gigabyte of memory. One job of which I was very proud was writing programs to calibrate the TACAN navigation system using data from the MSBLS landing system. This permitted the first Shuttle landing at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to occur on schedule. Another interesting task was programming in Pascal for a computer to control the various air conditioning systems for the launch pad and Shuttle. I also worked on a Management Information System (MIS) to keep track of the many engineering tasks being performed by PRC for NASA. The last job was the Digital Intercom System for the Centaur Payload Operations Control Center(CPOCC). The plan then was to launch a Centaur rocket vehicle from the Shuttle payload bay. That overly ambitous project was abandoned when the shuttle Challenger was lost. Actvity slowed and eventually I was transferred to Lockheed Space Operations Company.

Lockheed Space Operations Company (LSOC)

At Lockheed I was with a team building the software for the Operations Intercom System-Digital (OISD)at KSC. I retired from LSOC in 1995.

Retirement

My wife and I developed a Critical Parts Tracking System (CPTS) For Trans=Med Inc. This was a system to provide parts traceability for the developer of a Donor Organ Transporter System. My wife and I developed a Graphic User Interface for the AdminUx product using TCL/Tk.

Last Situation

Until recently (Jan 2006), my wife, Jean, and I lived in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Then we moved to Winter Haven, Florida, and bought a house only one block from our daughter Martha and her family.

Current Situation

In November 2008, John, Jean, Martha, Javier and Daniela moved to Vero Beach, Florida where we have just bought a beautiful six bedroom home.

May 30, 2009

Today my older brother Bushrod Washington Hopkins died at the age of 93. He had a long productive life. He would say he spent most of his life under water. That is because he was an marine engineer at sea much of his life. I regret that our paths seldom crossed and I didn't know him very well.

Magazines I Read

   Linux Journal
   Quaker Journal
   Scientific American
   Technology Review
   Atlantic
   National Geographic.