The Joseph Gavin Aerospace Engineering Bookshelf: Centennial Edition

On the centenary of his birth (18 September 1920), I would like to offer a compilation of background research and personal perspectives on one of the space age’s pioneers, Joseph Gleason Gavin, Jr.

His life and career interconnected with a bold new era that saw humans transcend their earthly bounds and set foot on another celestial body for the first time. As Lunar Module (LM) Program Director, Gavin led a team of as many as 7,500 in developing and building the lander that brought twelve astronauts to the Moon’s surface; and which saved three other astronauts as a conservatively-engineered lifeboat during the Apollo 13 mission, when Houston faced its gravest problem of the space race.

Gavin ultimately capped a four-decade year career with the Grumman Aerospace Corporation as its President and Chief Operating Officer, but always remained an aerospace project engineer at heart.

He cherished and maintained strong relations with his schools (Boston Latin and MIT), his service (U.S. Navy, 1942-46), and the diversity of friends and acquaintances that he made along the way.

Among many other fascinating rendezvous with history, seeing Charles Lindbergh and his plane soon after their transatlantic flight in 1927 helped to inspire Gavin’s boyhood dreams of building “flying machines.” Forty-one years later, Gavin would receive Lindbergh at Grumman headquarters and give him a personal tour of the LM, then under construction. Eight months after Lindbergh’s visit, the Eagle would take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to a place where no one had gone before.

Click here to read the story of this engineer-executive’s extraordinary experiences in an extraordinary era of aerospace advances…