Hey y'all. A quick bit of background, this man isn't actually my real grandfather, but is the husband of my grandmother (my grandfather passed away a decade ago). He is completely disabled at this point and doesn't have many people to talk to (due to family arguments over money which are very sad) and I can tell he is bummed out a lot. Over thanksgiving break I was able to talk to him for about an hour and I could tell he really enjoyed telling his stories.
So what I am asking you is to give me some good questions to ask him that I may not be able to think of. Unfortunately I don't know too much about him, but this is what I have (i'll update with more info from my grandmom if there is interest).
He is in his 80s and I know he worked for a long time in the military with satellite equipment - specifically for navigating planes for bombing. He also said he was one of the first to work with computers in the military. He said he'd never seen a computer before, but was given the chance to take a "computer class" where he then went on to learn and work with computers and satellites. I also remember him talking a few years ago about being responsible for an astronaut suit that was used in some space missions back in the height of the space race. He was solely responsible for that one suit.
I'm sorry that this info is so vague, but I just don't know the man very well. I'd love your help with coming up with some ideas for questions he may be able to answer. I want to get to get his perspective on history as well as provide a dying man with an outlet to share some of his stories and to alleviate some of his boredom.
Thank you all very much for any feedback you can give. I'd be happy to document his responses and share them with you if you'd like :)
what kind of satellites - communication, imaging? for commercial or military use? what did he do? signal processing? image processing? over which country? what kind of orbit? what height? what type of information did he treat? any big scoops?
what did he do exactly - program, run software that was already written, retrieve data?
about the astronaut suit, are they really just layers and layers of regular fabric? how are they maintained, checked for air tightness? how heavy? how did they put them on? did he ever help an astronaut with their suit? if so, who? what happens to a suit after a mission?
those are some of the questions off the top of my head.
He might have spanned the gap between when transmission between satellite and ground was analog, and when it went digital. I have heard that eventually straight radio transmission got overloaded- so much was coming in that the whole transmission band looked like noise, and they were forced to go to digital encoding of the data.
This was also the era when systems engineers become important.
If he was an engineer, you might get some real technical responses to this, and other questions, so you might want to record it. There's also a very good book that's related to this that you might find useful to read as background: Digital Apollo