Met him once in college, I was in the Corps of Cadets at Virginia Tech, which is where Homer Hickam ended up as well. Very humble guy, at least in the few minut

Met him once in college, I was in the Corps of Cadets at Virginia Tech, which is where Homer Hickam ended up as well. Very humble guy, at least in the few minutes I was around him. Fun fact, while at VT he led the creation of the original Skipper cannon. He and a bunch of other cadets thought it was shameful that VT had no cannon and VMI would trot out this little deck gun ("it was really more like a mortar!" according to him) at football games and shoot it off. He amassed a bunch of brass uniform bits and approached a foundry in IIRC Radford about it. They laughed about how a cannon made of uniform brass would blow up, but traded them for gunmetal brass. The first time they fired it was a salute for President Kennedy, but the assassination happened before they had time to drill a touch hole. They rounded up every ketchup squeeze bottle they could find, put the charge of powder in that, and taped a piece of fuse in the spout. The ketchup bottle assemblies were lit and slid down the barrel. Years later, a bunch of drunk cadets on Skipper Crew blew the original up. They kept cramming charges down after misfires, I think they had three in there when it went. The explosion blew up the caisson and threw shrapel, some of which embedded in Slusher Tower and is supposedly still there. The pieces were gathered up, mostly reassembled, and at least when I was there resided in the Corps Museum. Anyway, yeah, rockets!