Gary Flandro
Gary Arnold Flandro is an American aerospace engineer, best known for the discovery of planetary alignment of outer planets that made possible the Voyager program. He is the professor for the Boling Chair of Excellence in Space Propulsion at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, and the Vice President and Chief Engineer for Gloyer-Taylor Laboratories.
Biography
Gary Arnold Flandro was born on March 30, 1934 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Utah in 1957, an MSc and PhD in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology supervised by Frank E. Marble and Fred E. Culick, with a thesis on the "Sergeant rocket combustion instability problem and the associated roll torque puzzle".The Grand Tour program
In 1964, Flandro, then a summer student at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was assigned to study possible trajectories for the outer planets mission, and found out that the rare planetary alignment of the giant planets allows a mission he called "the Grand Tour". Such alignment occurs every 175 years; Flandro calculated that the best option was to launch spacecraft in 1977. Gravity assist maneuvers were already known, but according to Flandro he was the first to notice the opportunity to visit the giant planets. Flandro himself was familiar with gravity assists through Krafft Ehricke's works and lectures. According to Flandro, many experts were sceptical and didn't believe that the mission he discovered was possible:Homer Joe Stewart published an article about Flandro's discovery in a local newspaper. It mentioned the usage of Jupiter's energy, as Flandro put it "the spacecraft speeds up, but Jupiter slows down". The article stirred some students to organize the Pasadena Society for the Preservation of Jupiter's Orbit, who then protested the JPL's idea of "messing up Jupiter's orbit", which Flandro called a great prank. In 1966, Flandro published a paper on the discovered mission and the assosiated gravity assists.
NASA was reluctant to finance the proposed Grand Tour mission of four spacecraft, but it eventually transformed into the smaller Voyager program of two spacecraft.
Further careerFlandro graduated in 1967, and became an associate professor at the University of Utah. He has worked at UTSI and possessed the Boling Chair of Excellence in Space Propulsion since 1991, until his retirement in 2009. According to Vigor Yang of the School of Aerospace Engineering of Georgia Institute of Technology, Flandro's research on combustion instability of solid rocket motors has “practically solved a challenging issue that had plagued the field for many years”.AwardsFlandro received the British Interplanetary Society's M. N. Golovine Award in 1970 for his Grand Tour discovery, and in 1998 awarded the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal, with the citation: "for seminal contributions to the design and engineering of multi-outer-planet missions, including the Grand Tour opportunity for the epic Voyager explorations". In 2018, he received the Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award.He was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 2008. In 2008, he was also awarded the General Henry H. H. Arnold Award. Personal lifeFlandro is married and lives in Tullahoma. He has three sons; one of his sons, Tom, is working for Boeing as a composite structures engineer on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.Selected publications; Grand Tour |