starship-design: Bad News

[Steve VanDevender <stevev@darkwing.uoregon.edu>]

KellySt@aol.com writes:
 > I just got bad news a few minutes ago.  
 > 
 > Rex Finke, who used the E-mail address DotarSojat (Dotar Sojat was
 > the name the green Martians gave John Carter.) was killed Monday, Oct
 > 22, while flying his little Challenger II.  Don't have the accident
 > report yet but from what I've heard it was probably engine failure.
 > 
 > He was a major poster in the LIT group when it was at its height a
 > few years ago.  He also was a great technical source of info since he
 > was on a bunch of space projects.  Probably the most famous being the
 > Orion pulse fusion design project.
 > 
 > He was also a good friend.
 > 
 > His funeral is Saturday 10-27 at 3PM at Miller Funeral Home in
 > Woodbridge, VA.

This is sad news.  I always appreciated Rex's contributions, and I think
of all of us he had the best understanding of the technical problems of
interstellar travel.

Rex wrote an excellent paper that collects and summarizes many of the
results of our discussions on the LIT forums and mailing lists and this
mailing list.  It's highly recommended reading for anyone new to the
list interested in what we've talked about so far.  Some time ago he
gave me a copy that I put up in our mailing list archive in Microsoft
Word (.doc) and Postscript (.ps):

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~stevev/sd-archive/starflight.doc
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~stevev/sd-archive/starflight.ps

I think it would also be appropriate to have a brief memorial statement
as part the mailing list welcome message, if people would like to do
that.  Would anyone like to suggest the wording?