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Fifteen miles away was NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where engines for the Saturn V rocket were being tested. When these tests took place, Hamilton recalled, “The ground would shake, the house would shake, the windows would rattle. I would run out into the yard, and you could feel it as a rumbling, you could feel it as a low-frequency thump in your chest, and you could see the smoke billowing up on the horizon.

That was real cool, for a kid growing up on a chicken farm.” Listening to the thundering roar of those rockets in the mid-1960s, Hamilton dreamed that one day he might get to work on those engines himself. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and joined the University’s Cooperative Education Program in 1979. That allowed him to take classes one semester and work the following semester for NASA’s Marshall Center. As luck (or fate) would have it, Hamilton’s very first assignment was to work in the exact same place where the Saturn V engines had roared. [Download]