"No Man Walks Alone"

Thomas G. Pownall was a mountaineer from a West Virginia hamlet of 700 souls. He rose to become CEO of Martin Marietta Corporation (now Lockheed-Martin Corporation) and was a dominant figure in the world of aerospace technology in the second half of the twentieth century. During this span American aviation progressed from a twenty-foot fuselage with a biplane effect to the most modern of faster-than- sound space vehicles, bringing with it a race to the moon. In all this, Thomas Pownall was at the center. In the view of many, Pownall was the outstanding leader in the aerospace industry. This book includes a diagram featuring Pownall's epoch-making breakthroughs. More than sixty photographs demonstrate the range of his influence from photographing the surface of Mars, vacationing with astronaut Neil Armstrong and the pair's wives, to hanging around Bob Hope and President Ronald Reagan. This is the story of the man from the mountains of West Virginia who took the world of aerospace and aviation by storm.