The completed plane became a platform
for Joe’s education as a flight engineer.
“I knew I wanted to get into flight testing,”
Joe said. “I would take the Flut-R-Bug and
calibrate the airspeed and the rate of climb
using a stopwatch.”
The homebuilt-to-spacecraft transition
can work in reverse too, as Hoot Gibson, EAA
219551, an avid model aircraft builder in his
youth, demonstrated.
“When I was at NASA it occurred to me:
all the things I do to build radio-controlled
[RC] model airplanes are similar to what is
needed to build a homebuilt airplane,” he
said. “Sometimes it could take me a year [to
build an RC model]. Well, I could be making
a homebuilt.”
Hoot bought a Cassutt one-place racer in
1983 and started rebuilding it, redesigning the
wing in the process. “I finished it right before
my first launch. I was in a bar with the direc-
tor of flight operations, and somebody brought
up that I had just finished building an airplane
and his ears picked up. ‘Oh, is that right? And
when were you planning to fly this thing?’ I
said that I probably wasn’t going to even try
until after the mission. He said, ‘I think that
would be a very good idea.’”
By the time Hoot had flown five shuttle
missions and ascended to chief of the
Astronaut Office, a lively community of
Johnson Space Center homebuilders was set-
tled at Houston’s Ellington Field (KEFD).
MISSION FOCUS
Determination is a critical component of an
astronaut’s character, something to which
every homebuilder can relate. In the late 1970s
NASA began accepting engineers and scientists as well as test pilots into the astronaut
corps. But the bar was set high. NASA favored
