Jerry Olivieri

A brilliant and uncompromising engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Olivieri specialized in figuring out the cost of future missions -- even when, at times, some of the technologies that would be required hadn't even been invented yet. His strength was keeping his eye on the big picture of the space program: gaining knowledge and understanding. Jerry liked telling his colleagues, "Our job is not to make the incredible possible. Our job is to make the impossible credible." He took those visions to Orbital Sciences Corp. when he left JPL, helping to focus another big picture: the privatization of space so the government doesn't have all the fun. He died October 23 from leukemia after rejecting a bone marrow transplant. He was 37. (This is True author Randy Cassingham delivered Jerry's eulogy. The full text is here.) From This is True for 24 October 1999 Suggestions for further reading: Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach Amazon Price: Customer Review: In many ways I really like Mary Roach's Packing for Mars. It's an extraordinarily inventive approach at space travel and our space program. When the book is good, it's really good. The book is at its best when it looks at how the absolute mundane p...   Voyager: Seeking Newer Worlds in the Third Great Age of Discovery by Stephen J. Pyne Amazon Price: $19.77 Customer Review: Born in 1949, I grew up with Sputnik and Apollo and Voyager. I wanted very much to love this book. Only about half the book is actually about Voyager. The rest is philosophical meanderings on earlier ages of exploration. Perhaps I was just impatient ...   BENEATH - A Novel by Jeremy Robinson Amazon Price: Customer Review: At the end of this kindle book, Mr. Robinson said that his publishers didn't want to publish it, because it was SyFy, and therefore wouldn't sell as well, and therefore would hurt future books of his. Well, Mr. Robinson.... GET NEW PUBLISHERS!!! We...   The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe Amazon Price: $10.88 Customer Review: Shame on the publisher (Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) for the sloppy production of this ebook. The Right Stuff To care so little about the quality of their product is an insult to both the author and his readers. Don't buy the ebook version unt...   Cosmic by Frank Cottrell Boyce Amazon Price: $11.55 Customer Review: Dads aren't perfect, but they are so, so important. Every 12-year-old kid feels smarter than their dad, but every kid needs their dad. This is a wonderful book about taking chances and taking responsibility and how things ar...   Newsfeed display by CaRP

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