The NASA Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field started off as a National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics – NACA, NASA's predecessor – engine research laboratory back when Jimmy Dolittle and Roscoe Turner were pushing biplanes around the sky. In fact, to old timers at the Center, it's still known as The Lab.

       When I worked there for a couple of contractors, it was the Lewis Research Center – LeRC because the Langley Research Center had already claimed LRC.

       Once again, I was in a situation where I started as a purely technical writer – writing door-stop sized manuals for LeRC-developed software – and was found out to be able to put words together in an interesting way. Soon I was doing more promotional work. Believe me, I didn't mind.

HoST – Hot Section Technology: A Project History

The HoST Project studied what took place inside the hot section of gas turbine engines in order to improve efficiency and generate predictive engineering analysis tools and computer codes.

       As the project was drawing to a close, I was assigned to write a history of the project to preserve the things learned by the effort.

       What the project director and I learned was that no matter how closely you husband your funding, if another project has cost-overruns, your money will be used to balance the budget.

       HoST had its funding pulled to fill in another project's gaps and the money needed to keep on the project vaped. A pity since we were 90 percent finished. The manuscript now lies in my trunk and the project manager's basement.

This was a booklet I wrote that described the NASA Glenn facilities used for propulsion research at the center.

       The audience were manufacturers and other research agencies who could make use of NASA's facilities by acting in joint ventures: NASA would provide the facilities and industry or academia would put the results in the public domain.

       Lots of pictures and technical data about the research facilities.

This was a booklet geared more toward start-ups and smaller businesses that profiled the facilities and organizations at the Center and how these could be used to help regional business.

       Lots of pictures and Sunday-supplement type writing.

This was a promotional booklet aimed at gear-heads: Each of the facilities was described in the type of technical details that potential users would need to know to take advantage of research and development facilities that NASA Glenn had to offer such as Reynolds Number capabilities, test-stand resources, and other things like laser-interferometry such as was pictured on the cover.

       Once again, lots of pictures, but this time deeper technical writing.