President Gerald Ford, space program connoisseur

President Gerald Ford, who will be buried Wednesday, didn’t have as much technological cache as say ex-vice president Al Gore, but his participation in some of the nation’s most significant space program technology developments gets him into the hall of fame at least. A story on the NASA site recently noted that while Ford was only in the White House for 895 days but during that time he witnessed the first joint space mission between the United States (Apollo-Soyuz) and the Soviet Union, saw his nation land the first spacecraft on Mars (Viking I) and was there for the rollout of the first space shuttle (Enterprise). Beyond that the story says as a member of the House of Representatives, he was one on the committee that oversaw the establishment of NASA from the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics in 1958. Ford, the 38th President of the United States, died last week at age 93. Ford assumed the office in August 1974, following the resignation of Richard Nixon.