Looking Back: Six Decades Engineering Peace

A brilliant thinker and outstanding leader, Daniel Fink details his sixty years of innovations and achievements as an aeronautical and aerospace engineer. His was a life of overcoming obstacles, from a crippling polio at the age of fourteen, to engineering an anti-ballistic missile program to protect the United States from the threat of nuclear holocaust. With uncommon honesty and an irreverent wit, this memoir reveals his innermost thoughts and feelings: awe and terror while watching one of the earliest atmospheric nuclear detonations from a C-47 at 15,000 feet; insights from his key position in the Pentagon's Department of Defense during the most dangerous period of the Cold War; pride in his General Electric Space Division team whose contributions to the Apollo program helped make the manned moon landings possible. We cannot help but admire his lifelong tenacity in educating the public about and promoting the intelligent use of our space technology for international cooperation and peace. This was a man who lived deeply, whose passion was to make a difference in the planet he loved so well, and whose joy was in that success. Daniel Fink was a remarkable man, and his is an unforgettable story.