Goldstone Beer

Sharing Stories

July 11, 2022 at 9:15 p.m.

BEER

...by Pete MacDoran

Goldstone Beer, Check Behind the Cactuses

Project ARIES was quite an unusual activity that involved many skills from the CALTECH Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, staff composed of many men and women, usually PhD level staff who functioned in a highly coordinated manner. The ARIES name was an acronym for the project’s formal name of Astronomical Radio Interferometric Earth Surveying.

The ARIES team was most unusual due to the fact that it operated a transportable 30-foot diameter microwave antenna in rugged remote environments. These tracking antennas had to operate in a highly time-synchronized environment between two or more stations for hours and were often separated on different continents.

Everyone in the six all-male field operations team had prior Vietnam War combat experience. Like a lot of enlisted men, they felt beer consumption was a serious activity. My really critical field operations person was Lyle Skjervy, a former US Marine, Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) who was mostly a self-taught genius at operating US Navy F4 fighter jet electronic warfare systems to confuse Russian combat aircraft flown by the North Viet Nam adversary.

My team knew that I had been a commissioned officer prior to joining JPL four years earlier. but they were mostly tolerant of me because I was aware of what support they needed to accomplish their assigned missions.

The ARIES team had several US Government assigned motor vehicles in order to transport critical equipment and staff. Because I was the ARIES Project Manager, I was responsible for these government vehicles. I had to sign a bunch of government paperwork. One of the items that was mentioned was ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES ARE NOT ALLOWED IN GOVERNMENT VEHICLES. I didn’t pay much attention to such stuff.

A notice was issued that our assigned government vehicles were to be taken to the official Government Inspection Garage. I relayed that notice from Pasadena to our Mohave Desert operations.

Lyle got the garage notice about his government vehicle and was driving between the giant 210-foot Goldstone deep space tracking antenna and the US government garage, about ten miles away. He happened to remember the case of beer in the trunk of the "government vehicle" as he drove to the garage.

Now, this desert highway had a high-power electric line along the road that had large-sized serial numbers attached to each of the power poles. Lyle pulled over to the roadside that had a large serial number marker on the pole. He got the case of beer out of the car trunk and placed it behind a large cactus plant. Then, he wrote down the serial number of the power pole which was visible from the roadway.

A couple of weeks later, there was another simultaneous observing session between Goldstone, California and Canberra, Australia that ended about 2 am, California time. That meant bars were closed before the JPL team could get to the nearest of them for a beer.

The three-man JPL team was heading away from the giant antenna when the biggest of the beer drinkers launched into his usual griping mood. He "needed" a beer.

It was then that Lyle remembered where he had stashed the case of beer two weeks earlier and, further, that they’d just driven past that power pole number where he could recover the case of beer.

So, he carefully backed up about fifty yards, then stopped, got out his big flashlight, and walked about twenty yards to the large cactus plant, where he casually picked up the case of cold beer.

The other guys were understandably amazed by the arrival of two dozen truly cold beers. The team’s biggest beer drinker now excitedly asked: “What about all those other cactus plants. Do they have beer too?”

Pete MacDoran is a Washington resident and author of Amazon.com : The Old Men Will Die First: A True Story of Cold War Espionage.

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