The Science Guy
By AL WHELESS, Daily Dispatch Writer
There are actually two Wright Flyers on display in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., if you ask Jim Tart.
One of them, a small plane built by Orville and Wilbur Wright, successfully sparked aviation when it was launched in Kitty Hawk, N.C. in 1903.
The other, a Scout rocket, got its nickname as a Wright Flyer because it helped lay the groundwork in the late 1950s and early 1960s for the United States’ manned space flight program.
The project team that developed the Scout included Tart, a Henderson High School graduate and Vance-Granville Community college faculty member who has always been fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through the air.
“During World War II, I used to lie out in Bertie Gibson’s yard on Carolina Avenue and watch B-17s in formation heading for Europe. I was 8 years old.”
Tart recalled making newspaper kites when he was a kid in Henderson. “We used to say the conservative newspapers were not as maneuverable and the liberal ones were hard to control.”
When he went in the Air Force in 1954, Tart soon discovered that he got motion sickness when he flew in planes. To try to overcome the malady, he would hitch rides with pilots whenever he could to build up his immunity. At the time, he was stationed at Keestler Air Force Base in Mississippi.
When Tart got to Felker Field on the James River in Virginia, he agreed to maintain the flying club’s radios in exchange for flight time.
“I ended up getting my pilot’s license in 1958 for $159,” he recalled while sitting in the electronics lab at Vance-Granville. Surrounding him were dozens of computers, the work horses of the electronics engineering technology program which he runs.
Tart went to work for NASA in the instrument research division at Langley, Virginia in 1959. “Our job was to make sure that man could fly safely in space and get back home safely,” he said. Tart was at Langley until the mid-1960s.
The Scout project team used instruments to determine how many times a space vehicle might be hit by micro-meteorites. It was one of many successful experiments that had to be conducted before manned capsules in the Mercury project could be sent into space.
Tart received the E.H. Rietzke Achievement Award in 1963 for his work on the development of a telemetering system that helps eliminate the communications blackout that occurs when a spacecraft re-enters the earth’s atmosphere.
Telemetry means recording or “multi-plexing” different measurements like breathing, heart rate, cabin temperature and body temperature on different tracks in a spacecraft. When engineers back on Earth receive the information, they decipher it at a ground station.
For 45 years, Tart has held a pilot’s license. “I flew anything with a single engine and a prop on it. If I hadn’t been flying, I wouldn’t have gotten into NASA. You had to be doing that or making model airplanes.”
Tart worked for the U.S. Government more than 12 years, including a few years at the Research Triangle Institute in Research Triangle Park.
After the early 1970s, he “semi-retired” for awhile, but it didn’t work out. “My pocketbook drove me back,” Tart added.
“I went to school about nine years over a long period of time,” he said. Tart has numerous degrees, including an MBA and a Batchelor of Science from Liberty University. He received an applied science degree from the Capitol Radio Engineering Institute in Washington, D.C.
Tart got two associate degrees at VGCC in the late 1970s. One was in Electronic Engineering Technology. The other was in Industrial Management.
The 18-year-old Electronic Engineering Technology Program that Tart heads at Vance-Granville “is one of the most difficult programs out here, except for nursing,” he said. “We need students. We now have less than 30.”
A lot of math is involved in electronic engineering, according to Tart. He called it a drawback for the students and also a challenge.
“Our students are following the progress of the two robots NASA sent to Mars in June that will land there in January,” he said. “Our students built two robots in their robotics systems classes and will relate their models to the Mars Exploration Rovers. Every kid that loves science should be involved with this space exploration. It beats video games by a long shot.”
In his lab over the holidays, Tart grew some crystal formations whose shapes were largely influenced by Earth’s gravity. Somewhat similar crystals grown in Sky Lab are not subject to gravity and therefore grow equally in all directions.
“These I am growing just to give students a view of crystal formation.”
Tart is 70. He said no one in the school administration talks much about his future retirement from VGCC because it’s difficult to hire teachers in his field “at this level”.
On January 28, Tart and his wife, Elizabeth, will have been married 50 years. They have a daughter, Joette, and a granddaughter, Julie Yancey.
Tart seems happy about the world’s reaction to another venture in his life.
He has owned a guitar since he was 15 or 16 years old, but admits he can’t play it. “I did study music for a short while at Lackey Music Center in Newport News, Va. I think I was the worst student they ever had.”
It came to good use, though, when Tart decided to write a hymn in 1997. “Bring In The Harvest” can now be heard on more than 1800 Christian radio stations on Earth. Some of them are in countries such as South Africa, England and Australia.
The hymn was his first and last, so far.
“It was just one of those things,” he said when asked how he came to put down on paper some of his spiritual feelings. “I am not a religious person as such, but I am a Christian. I hold Christian values and family values.”
As for how he can believe in Christianity and be a scientist at the same time, Tart said “I spent all those years in a lab. I found science and God are just perfectly coordinated. “I’m just teaching His physics.”
What is taught in math and physics is just the discovery of creation, according to Tart. “Everything has to be explained mathematically, which means there must be somebody back there doing the tuning. There is always an equation that defines what we see.”
The writer can be reached at mailto: awheless@hendersondispatch.com .
Photos by Ashley Ayscue, Daily Dispatch Photographer
