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: My Dream of Stars: From Daughter of Iran to Space Pioneer by Anousheh Ansari, Homer Hickam Amazon Price: $16.50 Customer Review: Anousheh Ansari's book, "My Dream of Stars: From Daughter of Iran to Space Pioneer" tells a very human and family story worthy of readership by those interested in either human passion or space flight. It is an excellent premier for any person who ha...   Moonshot: The Flight of Apollo 11 (Richard Jackson Books (Atheneum Hardcover)) by Brian Floca Amazon Price: $12.23 Customer Review: I work in space exploration and I really enjoyed reading this book to my 4 year old. It held his attention all the way to the end. After I closed the book he asked me "If I grow up to be an astronaut, will there still be places that no one has been...   Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space by Carl Sagan Amazon Price: $10.88 Customer Review: As a high-school student, I have a unique viewpoint on life, literature, and science. This book was very inspirational to me, and I enjoyed reading it. Sagan got off on some very good points, although he went off on a tangent occasionally. One of the...   Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion: Tesla, UFOs, and Classified Aerospace Tech... by Paul A. LaViolette Ph.D. Amazon Price: $16.32 Customer Review: If you want to learn about the real research into anti-gravity propulsion, this book covers it's history from the 20's onward. The section on T.T.Brown's research even included physical formulas! I'm relieved to report that this book excludes any of ...   The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe Amazon Price: $10.88 Customer Review: Great book, completely flubbed by Amazon. Is it so hard to run a spell check on a Kindle manuscript before publishing it? This book is filled with ridiculous OCR screwups: letters cl being turned into a nonsensical d, for instance. And there are a lo...   Newsfeed display by CaRP

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