Visiting Don Lind

Picture of the Day for 12/10/2014. Today is my birthday and I celebrated it in the most perfect way a space nerd could. I drove two hours north to spend an hour visiting Don Lind, the first Mormon astronaut, along with his wife Kathleen. They were so gracious to invite me into their home. They are both smart, talented, and lovely people. 

I learned a lot about Don's role at NASA. I didn't realize he was such a big deal behind the scenes on the Apollo missions. He was responsible for the tools used on the lunar surface. Lind said if he didn't design something himself then he personally approved the designs for the tools. You can read an interesting article about his role on the Apollo program here. He was assigned to one of the later Apollo missions that eventually was canceled. He was also on several back-up crews for Skylab. It took him 19 years at NASA before he finally made it into space in 1985 on the space shuttle Challenger, nine months before that spacecraft exploded. He later learned his flight had the same O-ring issue and the shuttle came within 3/10 of a second of exploding. 

I enjoyed chatting with Kathleen just as much as I did with Don. She is the one who wrote Don's biography. I've started reading it and she is a very good writer although she's very modest about that accomplishment.

They were telling me that years ago they were so busy with work and church activities that they decided to take a Thursday-night art class together so they could spend three hours together. Both of them are very good artists and they showed me all of their artwork hanging on the walls of their home. Don painted this picture of his space shuttle launch. The shuttle is surrounded by God's hands, depicting how he believes he was projected on the flight.