2012 Issue

16 On 3 September 2011, our colleague and friend, Ken Randle, passed at the age of 88 after a long and distinguished career in aerospace. Ken served in the Navy in World War II. After the war, Ken obtained his pilot’s license and engineering degree from the University of Michigan, and worked in the aerospace industry until his retirement in 1986. K EN WAS PASSIONATE about his causes and a delightful friend. Throughout his career Ken had a driving enthusiasm for aerospace and a spirit of exploration that kept him engaged as a leading aerospace advocate. Ken had diabetes and his health was failing for the last several years. Despite this, and right up to his last days, he remained posi- tive to all around him and active in AIAA and the Utah Engineers Council. Ken and the Grand Tour During the decades he was with us, Ken workedonmany aerospace-relatedprojects and programs. He spent his first year at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) working on the airframe design of the Sergeant Missile System. He was the engineering manager of the Shrike Missile System and held en- gineering management positions until he retired in December 1986. But the stories he told that seem most appropriate at this time are those associated with the Voyager missions. As Ken’s days on this Earth grew shorter he thought back to his days at Sperry, here in Utah, winning a contract in 1966 to help design the Voyager Grand Tour of the Solar System. As Ken’s career progressed, so did the Grand Tour. Voyager 1 and 2 both launched in 1977 as Ken’s aerospace career was well underway. Those of us old enough to remember can recall our thrill as the Voyagers visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and numerous moons. Around the time Ken retired, Voyager 1 and 2 had completed their grand tour of the solar system and their mission was redefined to interstellar exploration. The last quarter century they have been transit- ing the outer reaches of our solar system. Although not on Voyagers’ travel itinerary, many think of the farthest point of Pluto’s orbit, at 6.8 light hours, as the limit of our Solar System. The actual “city limits” are at approximately 33 light hours at the heliosheath. (See Figure 1). This is the last point where the surrounding plasma particles are dominated by the supersonic solar wind. Ken Randle wrote the following as a per- sonal memoir of his work for NASA at the Sperry Corporation. “When I was working for the Sperry Cor- poration in the sixties, we submitted a proposal to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to provide support for their unmanned space exploration programs. Our proposal won and, in July 1966, I took a team of twenty-three engineers to JPL. I had two responsibilities: manage the team and pro- vide the configuration design of spacecraft for the Future Projects Study team.” One of the Future Projects studies was for a grand tour of the outer planets, an ambi- tious idea that became the Voyager mission. Back in the sixties, Gary Flandro, a former employee of Ken’s at Sperry, and a JPL employee on the study team, discovered that the alignment of the outer planets would make it possible to use a gravity assist from Jupiter to go to Saturn and on to Uranus and Neptune. The launch had to take place between 1976 and 1979 to take advantage of an alignment that occurs only once every 175 years. For this discovery, Flandro received an award from the British Interplanetary Society. “At the time, Voyager was the most com- plex unmanned machine ever designed. There had to be a boom for the radioiso- tope thermoelectric generator, another boom for the magnetometer, a planetary astronomy plasma-wave antenna, high-gain antenna, location for a plasma detector, cosmic-ray detector, low-energy-charged- particle detector, infrared interferometer spectrometer and radiometer, and cameras. Voyager would have to survive the intense radiation at Jupiter and operate almost flawlessly for more than a decade. The new spacecraft would need the decision-making Farewell to Ken Randle Throughout his career Ken had a driving enthusiasm for aerospace and a spirit of exploration that kept him engaged as a leading aerospace advocate. By Charlie Vono, Col, USAF Retired