It is Friday, October 29th, It is my great pleasure to be here with Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Admiral Inman, it's an honor to be with you today. Thank you so much. ZIERLER: What I'd like to do today is start with a question that really brings us together, and it's a question that has a history that goes back over 30 years.
What was your initial connection to Caltech? How did that come about? I had also done a number of not-for-profits. He also observed my constantly meddling in topics. He asked me one day in if I would consider being a trustee of Caltech. I said, "It's a great institution. I know from reputation. But I'm not a scientist.
It would be wonderful, if you're willing to do it, to help us find our way through the Washington maze. When I was the director at NSA, there were a number of things that TRW did, and usually did well, all still off in the classified side of the house.
That's how I knew TRW and to know what a terrific organization it was. That was why Ruben Mettler came to my attention. Was it ? I think I was already on before the annual meeting in the fall. I was immediately assigned to the trustee committee overseeing JPL. Ed Stone was the director of JPL. He was famous as the project manager for the first intelligence-collecting satellite, of which much has now been written and published.
It was a Rube Goldberg operation where this huge bus had six camera bays in it, and it would take photographs overwhelmingly just over the Soviet Union, and then kick out a bus, a parachute would open, and an airplane flying out of Alaska would hook the parachute, recover it, and bring it back to the house. The bottom of the Pacific Ocean is littered with ones they failed to get. A great breakthrough was when they learned electrical optical relay.
