Gregory P. Kennedy

Welcome to my author page. To give you a little background about me -- I am one of those seemingly rare individuals who was actually born in Washington, D.C. One of the great things about growing up in DC was the Smithsonian Institution. As a teenager, I used to hang out there whenever I had off from school. This led to my first job in the museum field, at the National Air and Space Museum. After 14 years there (with a three year break to serve in the US Army) I headed west to New Mexico. At the Air and Space Museum, I was Associate Curator for Manned Space Flight -- in New Mexico, I became Executive Director of the International Space Hall of Fame.

I've managed other museums in Texas, Kansas and Pennsylvania, all of them related to aviation and space flight. Along the way, I developed a deep appreciation for the achievements and sacrafices made by the early pioneers of space flight. Two years ago, I decided to leave the museum field (after 37 fascinating years). Today, I live in Philadelphia and work at The National AeroSpace Training and Research (NASTAR) Center in Southampton, PA.

My other interests include skydiving, model building and, or course, writing. About the picture -- I was sitting in the gondola of the centrifuge at the former Naval Air Develoopment Center in Johnsville, PA, less than five miles from Southampton. The original Project Mercury Astronauts trained in the NADC centrifuge. The NADC centrifuge is no longer in use, but there is one at The NASTAR Center, where space flight participants are being trained for commercial suborbital space flights.