Nothing quite like going outside to look up at the waves..... 
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Hi Speakerman - Seeing az how I wuz onna destroyer we were anything but glorious!!!
The old SAC base Mather was the one out in Rancho Cordova - not too far from the old ESS factory!!! McClellan (now McClellan Park - an industrial site) is across town up in North Highlands - which is just a few miles up I-80 from the old Threshold Electronics site.
I remember the DHL crash - I think that was around 97 or 98? They had a B-52 crash back around 1978 and it was fully loaded with fuel and burned for hours. Always nice to see someone from the old stomping grounds around!!! I have friends that live in Rancho and I lived over in Fair Oaks for a number of years.
Hi Robert! Did you play around with the really old dual rail launchers or the single rail one's? Of course now days they just shove the bird down a hole in the deck and don't have to do all of that business of getting the next bird in position to load. The below deck launching system is after my time and I always wondered what they do with a hot bird that won't fly - that usually gets everyone's attention....
After 911 we decided that we really did not want to explain to G-men what were were flying just outside of the metro area.
She's a beauty - but I made it through six years in da Navy without a getting a tat so I don't see any need to start now. I was in the rock 'n roll band business and also worked az a bouncer and bar tender and "met" enough "bad girlz" to last me for the rest of my natural born life. Fortunately for me in those times about the worst thing I caught wuz sum crabs - not like later on when you could get things you had to live with for the rest of your life (if they didn't kill you 1st). A little over 20 years ago I saw the light and stopped doing all of that crazy stuff...... I didn't go completely sane - I just knocked off the really crazy stuff. Then I really screwed up and got married again -
Crap - I was the Air Resources Officer for a company we started up after the base closed. I did the HAZ-MAT stuff too with all of those regulations and somewhere there are a bunch of barrels with my name engraved with indelible ink. The Air Resources stuff for Sacramento County was so nasty that I had to design our own database to track and total all of the stuff for quarterly reporting. The last I heard they were still using that database because they still couldn't find anything else that would do it unless they bought in some outside consultants and paid them $100K to do the same thing. I knew that I should have charged them for that work - but it's to late for that now.
The PWB fab lab wuz right next door to my weather and nav aids repair shop. Do you know if it was it Mike Jones, Leon Richardt, or Bob Clegg running the show then? (Doesn't really matter tho - just old times about a million years ago). Sounds like you were around Edwards AFB or one of doz places where things were "in development" and needed their performance monitored.
My brother in law was darn near stomped to death from a spooked Tennessee Walker. He had some pretty extensive brain damage as a result and was never the same. To bad too - he was a double PhD working for NASA at the time.
Hi,
I mostly worked on the vertical launch and also the high speed communication buses which connected to launchers and many other things. Have good friends that know the rail systems well.... Some of us still get-together several times a year and we email all the time. The 'club' has become known as the Rockteers. Before 911, several were into building and launching homebuild systems on a slightly smaller scale. Well, maybe not all that much smaller....
Robert
