In 1966 I (Gordon Young) was working  in Las Vegas at the Nevada Test Site on the  U.S. Nuclear Rocket Program designed to create a rocket as shown here powerful enough for a trip to Mars.  The only problem was that it could not be used for a first stage rocket because of the radiation release and the only use would be outside of the atmosphere in space.   Only a rocket that powerful could be used  for a manned trip to Mars and the likelihood of that in the 1960s was small.  I worked in "Neutronics" as a designer of electronic equipment for measuring radiation in many areas of the project.  




 
 
One project was to design a calibration facility to allow technicians to calibrate screwdriver adjustments  on measurement instruments without exposing themselves to any radiation.  I designed the unit shown in the next two photos which allowed the instrument to be calibrated by electrically operated screwdrivers while the operator watched on television.  A creative need existed to provide a relatively simple yet effective calibration facility and I learned to work with many technologies from radiation to controls to motor drives in this project.  Now I have moved to coordinating the efforts of others in a number of areas for clients.
















I was able to contribute to the control room instrumentation used for tests and helped design an optical device called the "ostrich" which was lowered into the intensely radioactive engine after tests to take photos of the inside. This sort of project was truly unique in all the world and was a good way to improve creativity.








A product designed for another company while I worked on my masters degree  was a  reactor power monitor which covered eleven decades of power for reactor operation.  My masters thesis was on a nuclear battery which was unlike any other since then.  (It worked, but needed more research than I had time for in a masters program)

It was a fascinating job, but one could see there was not a large commercial  need for these products.  Nevertheless, there was much learned in design, and the opportunity to build things that had never been built before was a great thrill.  
The thrill of discovery was something that remained with me year after year and made me want to solve as many problems "first time" as possible.  It is my belief that there is a creative "mindset" that allows those who have  it to tackle  any problem because they truly believe any problem, no matter how difficult, can be solved.