The May StL AIAA Honors and Awards Banquet recognizes notable achievements by our community members and will feature a talk about the remarkable accomplishments of the '60s that led to the moon landing.
All are welcome to join the AIAA for this meeting--membership is not required.
Something truly remarkable was accomplished in the decade of the 60’s. We went from the starting point of "0" to placing a human on the Moon in 9 years. The only other project that came close was the Manhattan Project which did not compare with the complexity of placing humans on the Moon. Obviously, the technology developed was groundbreaking but more importantly the attitude of the engineers and the American people was indispensable in achieving President Kennedy’s goal of “... sending a man to the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” within that decade. It required a resolve that has not since been duplicated. Our ingenuity was fueled by our commitment to a goal. If only we could reproduce that today, what could we accomplish?
Earl Mullins is the President and CEO of The Space Museum & Grissom Center Inc. Earl founded the Museum in 1999 and reorganized it as a nonprofit organization in 2008, since then over $30M in NASA assets have been added to the collection. From 2015 to 2019 Earl and retirees from Mac’s Old Team volunteered nights and weekends to build the Grissom Center Museum expansion, which was opened with 5 astronauts in attendance. Earl retired after 23 years as an Industrial Engineer with SEMCO Plastic Co. in 2023 to devote full time to the Museum, and is making efforts to reorganize the museum into a state facility in the future.
