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Scale Models, Art, Outreach, and Engineering

delta_rocket
Mike at the base of the Delta II rocket that launched the GLAST satellite in 2008 

Welcome

This website is a somewhat autobiographical description of my involvement in and promotion of space exploration. The purpose is to provide this information on my history to people who do not know me that well or do not know of my background. I hope it comes across as more of a resume than a self-promotional bragging list. My areas of interest include aerospace engineering, space history, art, scale models, and space exploration.

My Artwork

If you came here to look for my artwork, just jump right to it at this link. There, I also talk about the different media I have tried and where it has been leading.

Contact

I have on-line presence in several places, depending on the topic.
Email:  michael dot mackowski at gmail dot com
X (aka Twitter): @mjmackowski
Facebook personal: https://www.facebook.com/mjmackowski
Handbooks for Scale Spacecraft Modeling (Space In Miniature):  spaceinminiature.com
Facebook for SIM:  https://www.facebook.com/spaceinminiature
Unusual uses for NASA's Gemini spacecraft:  https://lostgeminimissions.wordpress.com
LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-mackowski-1abb537/
Flickr (personal photography):  https://www.flickr.com/photos/mjmackowski/
Instagram (mostly art and models): mjmackowski
International Plastic Modelers Society (former) Region 10 Coordinator:  https://ipmsr10.org

Beginnings

It was little more than a toy, but the telescope on a wobbly stand in the backyard was my first window to the universe. The view thru the eyepiece into the light polluted city sky still showed stars and planets and a bright Moon. But my first view was almost scary, as the image seemed to shimmer and move. The object was supposedly a bright star, and it was round and ghostly, and the shaky stand had no chance of providing a steady image. So this boy wondered what he had seen. The image was a large transparent disk. Could this little scope truly show a star as something so large? Had I chanced upon some alien cosmic artifact?

Months later I would realize the little telescope was simply out of focus, but this first brush with the stars begat my curiosity of all things above and beyond the Earth.

scope

Cousins

Larry Mackowski was my favorite cousin. He was a few years older so of course he was cool. He was into rock’n’roll and did neat things. He had model ships and airplanes. We had awesome birthday parties at his house with all our other cousins. Larry also had a telescope.

Once I was visiting, I think it was around Christmas time, and Larry had a pile of photos and brochures about NASA spacecraft and the moon and Apollo and all sorts of cool stuff. He was using this for a high school report on the space program. I asked where he got the materials and he said you could write to NASA and they would send you pictures and booklets about space. For free!

facts


Pretty soon I was writing to NASA and found all sorts of neat free publications they would send you. I also discovered catalogs they had for other books and posters and things that cost very little. That’s how I started collecting NASA publications and this was not a small influence on getting me interested in the space program.

Space Race

Like many of my generation, I was inspired by the race to the Moon.

In my grade school, the teachers would roll in televisions and we would watch in awe at the brave astronauts blasting off from the Florida beaches. Apollo 11 landed on the moon on a Sunday afternoon and we took pictures right off the TV screen.

apollo11

I was hooked. I had to be part of this. An astronomer, a scientist, or maybe even an astronaut.

First Models

By high school I was seriously into scale model building. I built pretty much everything, but I was mostly into cars, airplanes, and of course, spacecraft. I built the original Star Trek Enterprise, all the Revell Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo kits. My brother and I did some model rocketry, too.

At some point I started scratchbuilding. The first one was the Surveyor lunar soft landing probe. I built it from photos to no particular scale. I used wooden swizzle sticks (then popular for mixed drinks), car model hubcaps, pieces of cardboard, and other bits from mostly car model kits. I sent a photo of it to the AIAA Student Journal and they published it, which I thought was very cool at the time.

surveyor

In high school I filled a display case with my models. Some were speculative, like taking paper plates, stacking a layer between them, adding some fishing bobbers for fuel tanks, and turning all of that into a futuristic spaceship. I still have some of them.

That Memorable Christmas Kit

One Christmas I got the big 1/48th scale Apollo CSM-LM with Saturn Launch Adaptor. I remember spending a good chunk of the holiday break building it. I still have it and treasure it.

The neat thing about it was that it had all these moving parts. It came apart so you could simulate an entire Apollo moon mission. The Launch Escape Tower came off. The SLA petals unfolded on hinges and you could pull off the CSM and dock it to the LM. The lander had fold out legs. Awesome when you are 15 and NASA is about to land people on the Moon for the first time.

Engineering as a Career

My mom’s cousin was an engineer and we visited them in Pasadena when I was in high school. I looked up at the Moon on Christmas Eve in 1968, deliberately burning into my memory the image of the Moon in the sky knowing that, at that instant, there were three people in a small spaceship in orbit about it. I was 15.

I think that’s when I figured a degree in engineering was my route to the space program. Being an astronomer might be neat, but I frankly didn’t think I was smart enough, as a PhD would be really difficult, and jobs in engineering seemed more likely than one in pure science.

kitt

A year or two later we took a family vacation to the Southwest. That probably inspired my brother to go to college in New Mexico, and me, Arizona (after one year at home at Marquette). Arizona had a great climate, a good engineering program, fairly low out of state tuition, a co-op engineering program, and a broad undergraduate astronomy program (photo of Kitt Peak, above). In Tucson, I could take several astronomy classes and still major in engineering. I would learn about the things astronomers study with their space-borne instruments, making me more valuable as an engineer since I would have more understanding of the mission the satellites would be designed for.

The Elf Hive

While in school in Tucson, there were some interesting folks that either lived there or came thru town. We had a Eric Drexler speak on nano technology. He was an early proponent of space colonies.

I visited the tiny office of the then-new L5 Society and their leader, Keith Henson. Their goal was to start building space colonies once the Space Shuttle would start flying. They were dead serious and could not understand why it should take more than a couple of years to design and build a space habitat for a few hundred people. I appreciated their enthusiasm but was disappointed at their naivete.

Creativity: Engineering and Art

My basic yearning in life is to be a creative person.
I was able to do all of that in college. The learning part was obvious, and below are some early examples of some of the other outlets for my creativity.

viking
This is a 1/12th scale model of the Viking Mars lander I built my senior year in college, around 1977.

mural
This is a mural I painted in the student lounge in the aerospace engineering building. The building has since been demolished.

I still enjoy building models and doing paintings today, as I have been doing this for a long time. See my Facebook page (Michael Mackowski) for my latest projects. I like to write and publish newsletters and magazine-style publications (see last page of this site).

sedona
1997 watercolor study of Sedona, Arizona

More About My Art

Recently (early 2022) I spent some time trying to figure out where I was heading with my art hobby. What was I trying to achieve? What media should I be using? How can I get better results with my acrylic landscapes? How can I paint looser (since I doubt I will find the time to get better at representational paintings)? Can I find a technique or approach that I can take when I travel?

I wrote up a lengthy essay on this that you can see at this link.

Huntsville

One reason I went to the University of Arizona was that they had a co-op engineering program. This is where a student takes off from a semester of study to go work in their field. You get experience, a preview of your career, and some money. I needed to help finance my way through school and this would prove to be very helpful on my resume. A student from Purdue transferred to the UofA and brought his connections to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center with him. I was accepted into this program in my sophomore year, after only a single semester in Tucson.

So there I was in Alabama, still a teenager but now a NASA employee. Pretty cool for a kid who just a few years earlier discovered free NASA photos in his cousin’s bedroom.

skylab_73
Mike in the Skylab mock-up in Huntsville, 1973

Southern Discomfort

While the idea of being a young NASA engineer was incredibly cool, the reality of living in three cities over a span of four years was a hit on my social development. At that age, young men are very interested in getting to know young women, and when you change cities every 3 or 6 months, it makes it difficult to make friends, much less relationships. It all worked out, but it was not always easy.

I spent three semesters at Marshall, from 1973 to 1975. These were six month stints, from January until June. This span included the launch of Skylab, which was a Marshall program. I ran into Werner von Braun in an elevator, and with some other co-ops, went to the Apollo-Soyuz launch in 1975. This was the last Saturn rocket to be launched.

ASTP
ASTP Launch, July 15, 1975

McDonnell Douglas

McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company (MDAC) hired me as an electrical engineer in 1977. It was completely serendipitous that they assigned me to work on power systems. I went with them because they were in the Midwest (my other options were in California, which seemed too crazy and crowded) and they were clearly in the space business. They built satellite power modules for NASA Goddard and were working on a new type of battery using nickel hydrogen technology. They were also bidding on the Galileo Jupiter probe and were developing an auto-activated silver zinc battery for that long mission.

By 1981 the Reagan administration was threatening to cancel the Jupiter mission. NASA had just accomplished an exciting Pioneer mission to the outer planets and now this was to be the first orbiter at the King of Planets. The mission was delayed and restructured multiple times. Although MDAC did not win the contract for the probe, the battle to save Galileo motivated me to get involved in promoting space to the public. It had been too many years between planetary missions and there was no way we could let Congress stop the exploration of the solar system.

probe
McDonnell Douglas concept for the Galileo Jupiter Probe, 1977

Meanwhile, I led studies on nickel hydrogen battery technology for satellites, built a prototype battery, dissected failed cells, and in between supported the Modular Power Subsystem program. An especially fun program was a laser hardening research program. The US was concerned about directed energy threats to satellites so we developed special reflective coatings and tested them by shooting up satellite components with a high power laser.

battery
Nickel Hydrogen battery cells, circa 1979

MDAC kept trying to get into the satellite business. St. Louis had Mercury, Gemini and Skylab (the Airlock module) as their space heritage and they put in a serious bid for the Space Shuttle program. But MDAC had never built a complete satellite and we could never break into that business. We had the technology but our costs were always too high and we could never overcome the experience of companies like TRW, Lockheed (Sunnyvale), or Ball.

Heritage and Hope

McDonnell Douglas was a very cool place to start one’s career. The place reeked with history and the promise of future technology. You could take a walk around the assembly hall where they were building F-4 Phantoms. I was around when the first F-15s and F-18s were rolled out. I walked thru the test building with its huge 24 foot vacuum chamber where Gemini and Skylab were built and tested. Famous astronauts walked these halls only a few years prior. My mentors were guys who built John Glenn’s capsule. What a place to be!

chamber
McDonnell Douglas photo of 24 ft chamber

We built the Aft Propulsion System pods for the Space Shuttle orbiter. We were way behind schedule on that so they put everyone and their uncle on drafting boards to get drawings released. I worked overtime for months after only a year or so with the company cleaning up wire harness installation drawings. That was a pretty low point. Doing blueprints at a drafting table was not my idea of designing new spacecraft. The hours and work environment were not particularly motivating.

But eventually there came new programs to make up for that. We build a commercial electrophoresis experiment that flew on the Shuttle with the first non-government astronaut. Charlie Walker sat three desks over from me in the big engineering bullpen. He was also a hard core space enthusiast and he positioned himself to make three Shuttle flights. The Challenger accident put an end to that program, but we were still involved in very ambitious space industrialization concepts. I think the coolest thing was having “Advanced Space Programs” on my business card.

And perhaps the most ambitious program that I became involved with was the National Aerospace Plane (NASP), also known as the X-30. This was to be a single stage to orbit manned vehicle that took off from a runway and used multi-cycle engine technology to fly itself into orbit. What an audacious concept! I did trade studies and research to come up with the best electrical power system for an aircraft with no rotating machinery like traditional aircraft where you could tap power. That was where I learned to use a spreadsheet on a PC. I’ve been doing power system trades that way ever since. Of course that program tried to do more than the technology of the day would allow, so it eventually was cancelled. But it was fun.

NASP
NASP concept for runway to orbit

The St. Louis operation’s only real hardware in unmanned space was the Modular Power Subystem, part of NASA Goddard’s Multi-Mission Modular Spacecraft (MMS). Working on those programs (Solar Max, Landsats 4 and 5, TOPEX, GRO, etc.) firmly established me in the space power world. MDC St. Louis was never able to get into the satellite business, and eventually the MPS program started to fade. They tried to get involved in the Huntington Beach division’s space station work but that didn’t pan out, either. I did a nine month cross training stint in marketing but that never meshed well with my mellow personality and it soon became obvious that St. Louis had no future in the space business.

Spaceweek

The attacks (from various fronts) on space programs like the Shuttle and Galileo (Jupiter orbiter and probe) and reactions to the Challenger tragedy and controversy over military programs like Star Wars identified a need for spokesmen for space advocacy. I didn’t see many people doing anything about it, so I attempted to fill that role, and had some success, at least in the St. Louis area.

My personal involvement began in April of 1981 with the battle for Galileo and my discovery of Spaceweek. The Spaceweek movement was a public outreach centered on the July 20 anniversary of the first moon landing. It was too late to pull off a Spaceweek event in the summer of 1981 but this was the start of organizing the space activist community in the St. Louis area. I made contacts with the St Louis Science Center and the local AIAA section and we planned events for July of 1982. I found some members of the L-5 Society at Washington University and they put me in touch with a reporter at a St. Louis television station which really helped our initial publicity campaign. Eventually I found other like-minded people and we formed a local chapter of the L5 Society, later part of the National Space Society.

Through these organizations, we sponsored many public displays, put on special events, held seminars, wrote letters to the newspaper, did television and radio interviews, and gave numerous talks to schools and civic groups. The goal was to have the St. Louis Space Frontier Society (SLSF), and its technically knowledgable members, be the resource the media would contact to get an independent opinion on space topics. The tricky part was establishing our technical credentials without speaking on behalf of our employer (this was reserved for the public affairs department). It turned out to be a win-win. McDonnell Douglas happily sent requests for speakers our way, and we could provide the media with info and opinions independent of the constraints of a large government contractor.


spaceweek
Spaceweek mall display, 1983

The first St. Louis Spaceweek (1982) was a week long series of events that came off nicely with decent attendance. For that first effort the biggest problem was paying for speakers and other expenses. The Star Trek II movie came out in June and we did an advance screening as a fund raiser. We also made t-shirts and sold those. The resultant media coverage, the real goal of the program, was a bit disappointing but we were happy with this first effort.

On the Fringe of Space

One of the problems was that pro-space groups often came across as a bit on the fringe. For example, the January 1982 issue of L5 News ran an article titled “Space Colonies can Stop Nuclear War”. That’s just silly and that sort of thought process made it difficult to get mainstream aerospace companies willing to work with groups like L5. This was clear from a meeting I had with MDAC president John Yardley. He was sympathetic but corporately there was little he could offer.


news


Meanwhile the national L5 Society held their first Space Development Conference in April and I was able to attend several of those over the years. Occasionally I was able to get McDonnell Douglas to sponsor my expenses. Through these conferences and our associations with the national L-5/National Space Institute, AIAA, and Spaceweek organizations, we made a lot of contacts and established a good reputation for putting on successful outreach programs in St. Louis. The subsequent years were more successful in terms of publicity. We were learning how to do this, how to be promoters.

The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 16, 1983 - "Space Activists Go into Political Orbit, with Far-Out Goals"

During the 1980s we had some fairly successful Spaceweek programs. Speakers included John Yardley, Charlie Walker (MDAC astronaut), Torrance Johnson (JPL Voyager scientist), Bruce McCandless (astronaut), Wendell Mendell (planetary scientist), Bob Overmyer (astronaut), Rep. Harold Volkmer (NASA appropriations committee), Kerry Joels (NASM), Warren James (JPL), Marcia Smith (CRS), Charlie Duke (astronaut), and many others. This continued for ten years or more, into the early 1990s.

overmeyer
Astronaut Robert Overmyer at a 1983 Spaceweek event

St. Louis Space Frontier

In the early 1980s the cold war was in full swing and Reagan’s Star Wars program added some complications. Some space advocates saw it as an opportunity to develop the technology needed for large scale space development. Others saw it as counter to the peaceful exploration of space. The Carter and Reagan administrations decimation of the planetary exploration program resulted in no NASA launches beyond Earth orbit from 1978 (ISEE-3) until 1989 (Magellan). So there were a lot of dynamics going on - the new Shuttle program, a lack of planetary missions, Star Wars, a thriving Soviet space station effort, controversy over funding for the Space Station, and the emergence of grass roots groups expecting to build space colonies within the decade.

VP_fair
SLSF exhibit at the 1985 VP Fair

With Spaceweek as a focus project, the local chapter of the L-5 Society was up and running by 1982 as the St. Louis Space Frontier. A high school science teacher (Tom Becker) got on board and we started doing a lot of work with K-12 students, teachers, including a lot of talks to kids. In addition to Spaceweek, we had a speakers bureau and I gave about one talk each month for a couple years in the late 1980s. By 1987 the national planners for the SDC were asking the St. Louis chapter to plan the educational track for that conference. By this time I had developed a “Satellite Design Class” that could be adapted for presentations from grade 4 through adults. I still use an updated version of this presentation in 2012. We promoted the “MIr Watch” program to observe the Soviet space station during its twilight overhead passes (where’s ours?). See this link to a video of some of the local television news coverage we got for Mir Watch. Meanwhile Bill Proxmire was trying to kill the Space Station.



Somehow the company got wind of my enthusiasm for space. After my wife and I attended the first Space Shuttle launch on our own, the company sent me as a guest to the STS-5 launch. I think they had slots for such guests since this was the first McDonnell upper stage (PAM-D) on the shuttle. I was written up in the company newsletter in 1990 (below). We started an employee club for space enthusiasts. We had exhibits at festivals like Earth Day and the VP Fair (July 4th celebration at the Arch). What great times!

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Mir Watch

vision
McDonnell Douglas newsletter article


I did TV and radio interviews, networked with local science museums, attended several International Space Development Conferences (and got McDonnell to pay for them). In 1988 I was elected to the Board of Directors of the National Space Society. By the next year, SLSF had 89 members, 56 of which were NSS members. In 1990 we did a space education workshop for teachers which was very successful. This included Young Astronauts, Parks College, Gifted Resource Council, Civil Air Patrol, etc. We (“we” being the local Spaceweek committee and the SLSF) were recognized for our work by receiving the L-5 Society’s outreach award in 1988 (below) and the St. Louis AIAA section awarded me the “Civic Award” in 1990 (?) for my outreach activities.

award
St. Louis Space Frontier won this chapter award in 1988

But by the early 1990s the SLSF leadership was getting frustrated and burned out. The Science Center had their own agenda and was not always enthusiastic about hosting our Spaceweek activities. The SLSF club was involved in a lot of other events (NSS symposiums, mall exhibits, etc.), but it was never clear that we were really accomplishing anything. The battle in Congress for space station funding seemed never-ending and frustrating. One of our leaders described the general public as:
It became tough to keep this up.

Moving On

The recession of the early 1990s hurt aerospace hard and the fall of the Soviet Union hit defense budgets. McDonnell was laying people off and there was no future there for someone interested in the space business. Fortunately an understanding manager identified a need for a power systems engineer at a McDonnell Douglas office in Maryland. While we had a lot of friends after 15 years in St. Louis, some of them were similarly affected so in 1992 we decided to head east and I was soon working as a contractor on NASA Goddard programs.

That was a very smart move professionally. In St. Louis I was lost in a company focussed on tactical missiles and weapons systems.

In St. Louis I also had over extended myself with volunteer activities, becoming involved in too many groups. After moving to Maryland, it made sense to take a break. With two NASA centers (Goddard and HQ) right there and being the nation’s capital, there was little call for local citizen space advocates. So I took a hiatus from explicit advocacy and spent more time with my young family.

I met good people at NASA and learned some very useful satellite design skills. After a couple of year the McDonnell Douglas office in Maryland became involved in an interesting new opportunity. Because the NASA contracts came and went every few years, this office was looking for other types of work. We wound up involved with supporting Motorola and their ambitious Iridium program.

This enabled me and my family to move to Arizona in 1996 where both our parents lived. And I got to work on one of the more interesting and fast paced efforts in my entire career.

Iridium

While living near Washington DC was interesting from a cultural point of view, the lifestyle was a bit hectic and the local and national politics was often too much to deal with. Getting a chance to live near family in Arizona and work on a commercial program as audacious as Iridium was a great opportunity. One example of the unique and innovative aspect about Iridium was that they applied redundancy at the spacecraft level. Each vehicle was mostly single-string, so if one satellite failed, you just plugged in another satellite. The incremental cost of spare satellites was cheaper than developing an ultra-reliable spacecraft.

Then there were the aspects of launching 14 satellite in 8 days from three different continents. I did not travel to the launch sites (except once to Vandenberg) but I did a lot of testing and launch operations support from Arizona. It was a challenge and a lot of fun coming up with ways to control and keep track of so many vehicles on orbit. From a power systems engineer perspective, it was the world’s best battery life test you could imagine.

iridium
Mike at Vandenberg payload processing facility with several Iridium satellites

Another pleasant part of Iridium is that it may have been the best camaraderie of any group of engineers I have ever worked with. We had a lot of social outings and holiday parties. These were gatherings at peoples homes, although there were very nice company-sponsored events as well. It was a great team, and even though I was a contractor (still a McDonnell Douglas/Boeing employee) in a big company (Motorola) environment, I was treated as much a team member as any Motorola employee.

Iridium was a fascinating program and an engineering wonder, but a business bust. Once all 98 satellites were up and running, the cellular phone industry had become ubiquitous, greatly reducing the need for a service like Iridium. Follow on programs like Teledesic soon faded away and it was time to move on again.

Family

Living in Arizona was great for my family. My parents had retired there from Wisconsin back in the 1980s and my wife's parents and some siblings lived in the Phoenix area. After many years of having no family nearby this was a nice change.

Arizona

When Iridium wrapped up I reluctantly left Boeing (who had bought McDonnell Douglas) and followed many of my co-workers who moved over to Spectrum Astro, and that has worked out very well. Spectrum Astro was ramping up on a number of missile defense programs and needed engineers. This finally gave me the opportunity to be the power system lead on several programs, including Swift, GLAST/Fermi, and Landsat 8. Around 2004 Spectrum Astro was bought by General Dynamics, and after that didn’t work out, the unit was purchased by Orbital Sciences in 2010. In early 2015, Orbital Sciences and ATK merged to form Orbital ATK.

Meanwhile, the grass roots space movement had lost its momentum, at least from my perspective. I’m not sure if it was that we finally got a space station (that battle was won) and innovative programs like the DC-X were actually seeing hardware, so perhaps there was less incentive for citizen activists. Maybe it was just my personal perception as there was no advocacy club in Phoenix. Several attempts were made to start a chapter of the National Space Society but I didn’t have the energy to do it all myself again. Eventually (around 2011) a Phoenix NSS chapter was established well enough that they were having regular meetings at a fixed location. But it wasn’t like the 1980s in St. Louis.

I hooked up with the local AIAA section and focussed on working with K-12 schools. We did some outreach with schools, science fairs, and events like the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin’s and John Glenn’s spaceflights, and a Science and Technology Festival. Orbital has been very supportive for some of these outreach events. We held the 2011 celebration of 50 years of manned space flight, a Yuri’s Night event in 2011 and a forum and tour all at Orbital that year. In 2012 I was awarded a national level Sustained Service award from AIAA. In March 2015 we co-sponsored the first SpaceUp Phoenix un-conference (which I personally headed up) and that went very well.

There has been slow progress in growing the Phoenix chapter of the National Space Society. In early 2013, I became the chapter president and have held that post thru 2016. The Phoenix Chapter of NSS now has regular monthly meetings and participated in several Yuri's Night events each April. On my own, I was able to attend the local Space Access Conference in 2013. In May of the same year, I participated in a space modeling panel at Spacefest in Tucson, which was a lot of fun. I had a scale model display and hands-on paper model activity in the STEAM area of Spacefest VII in June of 2016 and also exhibited at Spacefest in 2017 and 2018. My thoughts on current topics in the space world can be found on the Phoenix NSS blog at nssphoenix.wordpress.com although I pretty much stopped posting opinion pieces at the end of 2015.

aiaa
AIAA exhibit at a teacher resource fair in 2010

wind_tunnel
Mike with a cardboard wind tunnel developed thru the AIAA section


The nation is still in a space funk. We never committed to a real follow-on to the space shuttle. The shuttle was a technological wonder but operationally a wrong turn. It never delivered on the idea of lower cost via reusability. You don’t need a manned vehicle to deliver heavy payloads to orbit. Splitting crew delivery from cargo makes sense, and having it done “commercially” (whatever that means) is a good approach. I like the approach of having private industry develop a new generation of Earth to LEO crew taxis as it frees up NASA to focus on deep space opportunities. If private companies can make a buck mining asteroids, that would be wonderful.

But we can’t seem to decide on what to do next regarding true exploration. This is not a new problem. We’ve done all the cheap and easy missions so it is not obvious what the next step ought to be. A manned Mars mission is too risky for a president to support politically and anything less is too conservative (wimpy) so we end up doing nothing.

The activist organizations (NSS and newer ones with more focussed agendas like the Moon Society) are still around but they seem to have less urgency. After all, we have an exciting robotic Mars program and a functioning space station that has been continuously occupied for over twenty years. Wasn’t that our goal in 1990?

In the early 21st century the role of these organizations is in flux. Years ago if you wanted to learn about the latest news in space exploration or if you wanted to hang around with people interested in that subject you had to join a club and attend a meeting or go to a conference. Now you can do all of that on the Internet. I have a difficult time coming up with a reason to join the National Space Society.

In 1987 the SLSF had a discussion on how to be more successful as an organization. We were looking at what we were selling. It was more than just memberships and newsletters. Joining our group would not get you merely a subscription, but also access to a social group for like-minded people, an opportunity to network with people with backgrounds in aerospace, education, library service, etc. But now you can do all that on line. You don’t need a “meat-space” organization. At least that seems to be the current trend. But I believe that virtual associations are lacking something. There is much to be said about face to face get-togethers, but this website is not the place to delve into that topic.

Scale Models

I’ve been building model kits since I was a youngster, and it should not be surprising that I have specialized in building models of space vehicles. I’ve already mentioned that my first scratch built project was a Surveyor back in junior high school. I have done a lot of kits as well as many super-detailed and scratchbuilt models since then. In order to build accurate models of historical spacecraft I had to do a bit of research and digging. Fortunately my time as a co-op student at NASA Marshall and my early days at McDonnell got me access to a lot of interesting historical resources. As I have also always enjoyed writing, and the related creative outlet that was originally called desktop publishing, as well as feeling somewhat of an obligation to share what I found, I have written several modeling handbooks related to historical space topics. So I build models and then write about how to build them.

apollo
1/48th scale Apollo Lunar Module from the Monogram kit with a lot of added detail

Space In Miniature

More info on this activity can be found on my website, www.spaceinminiature.com. That is where I describe my publications and make them available for sale to hobbyists. There are also many photos there of model I have built over the years, as well as some hard to fund reference info and photos from Mercury and Gemini programs, for example.


I have also been active in the International Plastic Modelers Society, having been a member since 1974 and attended many national and regional conventions that this group sponsors. I have given seminars on real space modeling for many years at the national events, and was head judge for their Space and Science Fiction division from around 1990 though 2007. In the 1980s I had a regular column on space models in their quarterly publication. I have held many positions at the local club level in St. Louis and Phoenix and was very involved in running their national conventions in 1983, 1991, 2004 and 2010. Currently I am the regional coordinator for the four state Region 10 (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah).

ipms
Judging sci fi figures at the 2012 IPMS National Convention


I have also built some models for my employer, going back to missile concepts in St. Louis and satellite designs for McDonnell Douglas and now Orbital. Recently I have been developing paper models of Orbital satellites which have been used by our NASA customer for their educational campaigns (Landsat 8 and ICESat 2).

2004_Swift1 sm  IMG_3236
1/20th scale model of the Swift satellite (left) and a 1/48th scale paper model of ICESat 2 (right)


In early 2019 I finished a paper model of the InSight Mars lander, since apparently no one else had made one available. This is available (in two versions) on the Space In Miniature website.

insight

Recent Personal Appearances and Related Outreach Activities

I still do a fair amount of outreach to students and the general public although not as much as I used to. See this link for a listing of some of my activities thru early 2024.

Exploring Pluto

In July of 2015, the curtains were pulled back on the one of the deepest, darkest secrets of the Solar System, and Pluto was revealed. The New Horizons spacecraft traveled for almost ten years on a journey to explore this small dwarf planet. With this mission, humankind has completed the initial reconnaissance of all of the classical planets. In other words, the fly by of Pluto was the last time we saw the details of one of these planetary bodies for the first time.

Think about the significance of this. This initial exploration of the solar system has taken over fifty years, from the Mariner 2 Venus fly by in 1962 and the first close-up images of Mars by Mariner 4 in 1964. Some of us who were born at the right time have seen all of these unveilings. Each new space probe changed our view of the planets from fuzzy blobs in telescopes to crater and mountain covered worlds in their own right. As the spacecraft and instruments got more sophisticated, more and more details and wonders were revealed. These achievements surprised us with craters on Mars, volcanoes on Jupiter’s moons, geysers on a moon of Saturn, rings around Uranus, and on and on.

But poor Pluto lies at the edge of the solar system, demoted by some from real planet-hood to merely a “dwarf” chunk of rock and ice. It took over twenty-five years from the initial proposals for a Pluto mission to the July 14, 2015 close encounter.

I think that the true significance of the New Horizons mission is not what has been revealed about the surface features of Pluto, but what it tells us about ourselves. We will never again have a first encounter with a historical planetary body. This means we have sent our robot emissaries to all the major bodies in the Sun’s family. That is an incredibly historic and momentous achievement. This event is more about what humanity is capable of doing than about how many craters are on Pluto. This is an achievement for humanity, for all of the people of Planet Earth, not just for the scientists and engineers. In these times when there is so much news about death and hatred, it can remind us that we are one people all living together on one small planet in a very large universe. Perhaps it can inspire us to look beyond our petty differences and ancient prejudices and consider ourselves as one humanity, joined by our common bond to this fragile planet we call home. Perhaps by conceiving the heavens, we can flourish on Earth.

My Memoir

Around 2012, I decided that I ought to write up a detailed history of the various activities noted in this website. I found that you can self-publish books (hard copy and digital) on Amazon, so I took all the old notes I kept from St. Louis, wrote a chronology, and then turned it into a narrative. I added some description of my more recent activities in Arizona, and that turned into “Adventures in Space Advocacy - A Personal Story of Space Activism.”

This book tells the story of my involvement in grass roots advocacy for a more robust American space program. The book is an account of the activities, successes, failures, and impact of space advocacy groups I was part of in St. Louis, Missouri and Phoenix, Arizona. The first part of the book is a chronology of the St. Louis space community from the nascent years of space activism in the 1980s. The second part covers the author’s efforts as a space activist in Phoenix some twenty years later.

This history is a narrative developed from the my personal notes and recollections as a member of the local chapters of the L5 Society and the National Space Institute (later to merge into the National Space Society). It closes with some reflections on whether those dreams of a hopeful future from the 1980s had any effect on the realities of the 2010s.

My hope is that historians of the space movement will find this to be an interesting first-hand account of grass-roots efforts to promote space exploration to the public. Similarly, current space activists can learn from these examples of how to execute large pro-space events.

The book (ISBN 978-1-5115-6491-5) is now available via Amazon in print and digital formats at this link:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WDMVWDW

Hard copy ($8.95 plus shipping), Kindle edition ($4.95)

Retirement

I turned 65 in 2018 and decided (since that made me eligible for Medicare) I would retire that year. I hung around work long enough to get the design phase completed for a main power electronics box for a program I was supporting (STPSat-6, eventually launched over three years later). I also stayed to support the launch and early orbit operations campaign for the ICESat-2 satellite we built in Gilbert, AZ. That was a nice way to wrap up a career. And by that time, my employer completed the transition to becoming Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems. My last day at work was Oct. 4, 2018.

In retirement I feel like I have never been busier, but at least I get to pick what I am busy doing. Maura and I are doing a number of fixer-up projects around the house and I am spending a lot of time downsizing. It takes time to get rid of things you spent a lifetime collecting. But we are making progress. We are also traveling a bit, trying to escape the summer heat by heading to cooler places during those months. I've also picked up on my wife's genealogy hobby and have researched my Polish ancestors back into the 19th century.

More models are getting built. The Gemini collection project is mostly complete (photos below) and I wrote it up as another SIM book. I was hoping to spend more time on my secondary hobbies (painting, fishing, etc.) but have made little progress there. I’d really like to learn to do 3D CAD design so I can get custom model parts printed but I have not even scratched that itch. I still do some space activism and outreach, and kick-started the local AIAA Section back into gear after a few years of dormancy. That meant
I had to be Chair for those two years (2019-2021). I helped organize another SpaceUp Phoenix on March 23, 2019 but have slowed down a lot on K-12 outreach. I need to let that go and have a younger generation take on that effort. COVID slowed down a lot of those activities but it looks like we are recovered as of this writing in early 2024. I am still very involved with AIAA and have been their History Committee Chair since May 2022.

gemini

My initial collection of Gemini concept vehicle models

mars_lander    MODS    one_room    interceptor

Later additions to the Gemini fleet

So life goes on and I stay very busy. The best way to keep up with me is my personal Facebook page, the Space In Miniature Facebook page, the Space In Miniature website, and my Flickr photo albums.

Thanks for your interest.

mike

Mike Mackowski




This site updated 4/18/24