APPRECIATIONJerry Grey
BY BEN IAN N OT TA | [email protected]A
erospace America was Jerry Grey’s “baby,”
but in learning more about his profession-
al life following his death last month, I now
understand that this magazine was just
one of several long-lasting professional
passions for him.
For us, Grey was our founding publisher and
editor emeritus. He led the launch of Aerospace
America in 1984 as the successor to AIAA’s Astro-
nautics & Aeronautics magazine. When I joined the
staff in 2013 as editor-in-chief, one of the fi rst things
I did was call G re y, who by then was retired and
dividing his time between London and Florida.
His advice was to continue to capture the imag-
inations of not just specialists but also anyone fas-
cinated by aerospace. Tone would be important, he
said, but no relevant topic should be off-limits.
Sometimes conventional thought had to be chal-
lenged. His profession deserved a magazine like that.
I hung up the phone ready to get to work.
This was classic G r e y. “He emboldened me,”
recalls Elaine Camhi, my predecessor as edi-
tor-in-chief, who counted Grey as her mentor.
When Camhi became the magazine’s top editor
in 1991, she recalls running guest editorials in her
fi rst few issues. She did not have a science background,
and she believed some thought it “iffy” to have a
woman in charge. “Finally, Jerry said to me, ‘ Yo u
know, yo u’re going to run out of friends soon.’” She
asked Grey why anyone should care what she thinks.
He said: “ I t ’s not that they care what Elaine Camhi
thinks. They care about what the editor-in-chief of
this magazine thinks.”
Camhi began writing editorials.
“He gave me the courage to fi nd — to tap into —
my potential,” Camhi adds. “He probably did that with
a lot of his students,” she says, referring to his decades
as a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey.
One of those students was William Sirignano,
now dean emeritus of the University of California,
Irvine, who as a graduate student took a rocket
propulsion course taught by G r e y. “I always remem-
ber him as smiling, not frowning, even if he maybe
wasn’t happy with what I did,” says Sirignano.
Grey was also renowned. When early versions of
the engines for the Redstone and later Saturn launch
vehicles exploded during testing, Grey was amongthose who researched the mystery. “A s To m Wolfe
wrote, ‘our rockets always blew up,’” Grey noted in
a 2005 email interview with historian To m Crouch
of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
Grey and other researchers in 1960 proposed
one explanation for this combustion instability: The
natural frequencies in the combustion chamber
were amplifi ed by the size and shape of the com-
bustion chamber, as well the design of the injector
plate that directed the fuel and oxidizer into the
chamber. Grey and colleagues called it the sensitive
time-lag theory.
They went on to test this concept in a series of
static engine fi res at the Princeton laboratories. “ We
blasted dozens of copper rocket nozzles across the
cattle-grazing fi elds adjoining Princeton’s Forrestal
Research Center,” Grey told Crouch. This and other
research led to changes in the F-1 engine in the
mid-1960s, including enlarging the diameter of the
fuel injector holes, Sirignano says.
By the 1990s, Grey had reached the status of
elder statesman. In 1993, he shared his views on
humanity’s future in a New Yo r k Times profi le, “En-
counters: Where the Bay Meets the Sea, Thoughts
of a Life in Space.”
“Eventually I would like to think of the earth as
a park-like place we could come back to visit from
time to time,” Grey said. “There will come a time
when we will have no choice but to expand beyond
the planet, if the human race is to survive.”
Humanity “cannot stay still,” he said. ★Staff reporter Cat Hofacker and associate editor
Karen Small contributed to this report.aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org | MARCH 2020 | 11Jerry
Grey’s
obituary
is in the
AIAA
Bulletin
on Page
59.