Comments From Gimmick Command – Rocks, Rockets, and Resumes!

I’ve had many people ask me what led me to work on NASA and USAF rocket programs, and how can I work on Resumes also? Like any great career (or careers), it starts off with humble, small beginnings. For many people it’s childhood, and I’m no exception.

As a very young boy, I remember staying the night over at my Grandparents house in Muskegon, MI on the shore of Little Black Lake. My Grandfather had a large group of Life Science Library books that caught my fancy even before the age of three!

My favorite one at that time was called Weather. I also became very captivated by another one called “Matter”. Of course, I like the ones called “Ships” and “Flight”. But it was the one called “Man and Space” that I loved most of all. Each time I was over, my Grandfather would read a little excerpt of each page as I went through it over and over and over and over again is often little boys do! I was mesmerized. Captivated. Even inspired.

Then there were the late Saturday morning trips to the House of Hobbies in Muskegon, MI, where we would visit and look at trains, airplane/ship models, model rockets, and other various things.  It only fueled my desire to get them and learn more.

My Grandfather was very much in tune with my interests.  For Christmas one year, when I was about eight years old, (the same age that my son Luke is), I got a model of an SR 71 blackbird that he help me put together. It was a fantastic president greatly inspired me.

There was also my Grandmother who got me a Lego set that I spent hours building into a space-themed robotic command base.  This would lead me into building MANY Lego sets (including some that I talk about in the last Memory Lane article I just wrote).

She also got me a 50-in-1 Electronics kit set from Radio Shack.  Sets of electronic do-it-yourself kits helped inspire my heart and mind for science. I’d spend many hours building them, putting them together, and spend even my Saturday nights trying electronic “shot in the dark” games with the electronics that I put together.

When I was 6 1/2, I was too sick to go to school because I had chickenpox, my Grandparents bought me a plastic Space Shuttle from the store that had opening and closing doors. They also got me some Kindergarten and First-Grade books of Astronauts to go along with watching John Young and Robert Crippen fly on the first Shuttle Flight STS-1.

My Grandfather helped me put together my first model rockets, and aircraft models like that SR-71 Blackbird he helped me with when I was 8 . I would launch them over at his place in the nearby clearing, granted that they didn’t go so high they would wind up getting caught in a tree and be unrecoverable.

Then, of course, there were the old slide shows that my Grandparents would put on for us every so often. My Grandfather was a traveling evangelist and traveled from church to church across the country to preach. In between meetings, he would visit spectacular locations throughout the west. He knew pretty much every part of the Four Corner States better than the back of his hand.

The whirring fan motor, incandescent-lighted, and overheated projector would show slides that my Grandfather used with his old style 1970s’ Canon camera.

Pictures of places and things, like the Grand Canyon, were pretty exotic compared to Western Michigan where I grew up.

Not that it isn’t gorgeous there, it has the Great Lakes and lighthouses, but just in a different way.

I was captivated by the West. Probably the greatest reason is that there were so many geographical and geological features similar to the surface of worlds beyond Earth. Mars, Titan, and other moons where it might be possible one day to land spacecraft

Finally, there’s artwork. My Grandfather about five years before I was born painted a fantastic oil painting of Mount Baker and the landscape just to the east of the mountain. I saw this painting, was captivated and wanted to go see them one day. I inherited the painting on my 43rd birthday, and it now hangs over the desk where I’m writing this article right now.

We have to remember these little things that we do with our children and other young people.  It could shape and inspire them. Little did my Grandmother know that I would work on real Rockets recognized in use by NASA in the Air Force for the launch of man craft and high-priority satellites.

I would never have known that I’d work for ULA, jointly owned by Boeing and Lockheed, the latter being the same company that manufactured the SR-71 just like my old airplane model.

And finally, I never would’ve expected that I would wind up moving to the same area of all that gorgeous western scenery on the Rocky Mountains and even down to the Sonoran Desert that includes Phoenix, Tucson, countless desert mesa vistas, and the abundant Saguaro cactus fields.

It’s experiencing that I will always treasure and love. My Grandparents lived to see NASA’s EFT-1 rocket launch in December 2014, on a Delta IV rocket that had eight, flight-critical avionics units under my technical leadership.

When the Orion spacecraft landed with parachutes in the water, I suddenly had a flashback to when I was 6 1/2 years old reading that Astronaut book that my Grandfather got me, remembered seeing a picture of Apollo in there, and I suddenly realized “Oh my gosh! I just launch the successor of Apollo!” After I stopped hyperventilating for 10 minutes, I thought again, “What does somebody do when they have achieved the world like this?”

My Grandmother passed away just a few months after the EFT-1 launch after struggling with a long illness. She was 91. My Grandfather lived another 17 months before passing away at age 98. This is them holding my oldest Savannah who is now 13.

The last time I saw my Grandfather, he couldn’t remember too much anymore and was 97% deaf. But I did get to show him another video of the EFT-1 rocket launch, and I was able to tell him “You were a great inspiration for this!”

This picture was taken during the same visit, and it would be the last time I would see him before he left this Earth five weeks later.  The Mount Baker picture he painted 47 years before was just above the clock on the upper-left side of the picture.

Why do I say all this? Is there a passion or a dream that you had as a child? Who loved you enough to help encourage you and inspire you? Not only do you want to respect and value those who loved you enough to help you, but you also want to follow through on that dream and vision make it happen. I’m taking steps to do that with my own family, namely my wife and children in doing simple things such as going on this hike at Garden of the Gods.

That’s one reason why I started The Great Galactic Space Gimmick. Besides inspiring space, science, and celebrating it, I want people to feel inspired to chase their dreams! I’m surrounded by achievements that my grandparents, as well as my parents, were very much a part of inspiring me to do. My Grandfather’s painting is on the wall . . . and YES, those are the Earthnauts on the left side! 🙂

Besides just working on rockets, and besides being an Engineering Consultant, I feel very strongly about helping other people do what passionate about and they know if they did it it would be a benefit to the world. That’s why I presently work on resumes for my company Rocky Mountain Resumes LLC. My goal is to help inspire as many people as possible to pursue what they really enjoy doing versus just “going with what’s available and just settling for that”. Yes, you do need to work and do things for a bit if we have to, but don’t stay where you’re at especially if you know you’re meant for more!

Whether your rocket and science engineer, space blogger, resume writer or whatever, follow after your dream especially the ones that will help and bless other people on this earth. My grandparents did that while they were alive here, and that is something that I definitely want to do as well!

So to answer the original question . . . the answer is YES.  You can do more than one thing that you love.  Rockets to Resumes, it’s a great group of career paths . . . and like my Grandparents were . . . a waypoint of inspiration.  Love to talk more about this with you and other readers anytime you’d like!  Please contact me and we can talk more!

For the Great Galactic Space Gimmick, I’m Gimmick Commander Ben Faltinowski! 🙂

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