Petty Officer 2nd Class Andrew Jackson, a 2003 computer engineering graduate of Missouri S&T, had several pairs of eyes on him Wednesday, as he prepared to take down "a wayward satellite soon to hurtle to Earth with toxic fuel," reports the Kansas City Star.
“I’ve done a whole bunch of these” missile launches, the fire controlman said in a telephone interview Thursday from aboard the USS Lake Erie. “But there was a lot more tension this time.”Eventually, he set the controls to fire at the precise moment. The result was the latest shot heard round the world — a U.S. Navy cruiser blasting to bits a doomed U.S. spy satellite. The three-stage Standard Missile-3 launched from the guided missile cruiser screamed into space Wednesday to strike the dead and soon-to-lose-orbit spacecraft.
Jackson said all was quiet on the ship after the missile tore more than a hundred miles into the sky, long minutes until the report that it had apparently hit the target.
“Then there was a whole lot of cheering,” said Jackson, who went to North Platte High School in Dearborn and later received a computer engineering degree from the University of Missouri-Rolla. “Lots of high-fives all around.”
