With billions of dollars of past space research at risk of being lost forever, Dr. Charles Lundquist is running a race against technology and time.  Director of the Interactive Projects Office at the UAH Research Institute, the 85-year-old Dr. Lundquist spent 40 years in high-level positions with the U.S. Army, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, NASA, and finally the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Working as a volunteer since retiring in 1999, he spends his time sleuthing for past research from the Army, NASA and private papers, as well as collecting oral histories from NASA retirees and others. All are added to an archive on the ground floor of UAH’s M. Louis Salmon Library, where Anne Coleman is a reference librarian and head of Archives and Special Collections. The archives preserve continued access for future historians, scholars and students.

The race to save past NASA research is a marathon to catch up with today’s information technologies. Some NASA records on everything from rocket designs to space flight data are being lost after being declared surplus. Some drain away because the media on which they are stored gets reused – as when NASA found it had recorded over its original tapes of the first lunar landing. But a lot of information still exists. It’s just that technology has bounded ahead and older storage media are no longer accessible.

“If any university has the obligation, UAH has the obligation to preserve the records of lunar exploration and of all of that era. At UAH, we have an obligation to create this kind of archive and save this information because the university was really formed as a result of Dr. Wernher von Braun and space research coming to Huntsville…As one of the old-timers, I feel obligated to preserve as much as possible of this important period in history when man for the first time left the Earth to explore space.”

The Salmon Library Archives are open to the public from Monday-Friday, 9:00am-4:00pm, or by appointment.