ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 10, 1997 TAG: 9702100030
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: AMSTERDAM
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
Bob Bagnoli would have liked to have come home from work and told his wife what his day was like many times over the years before the couple retired to Botetourt County.
But when you're working on the B-2 Stealth Bomber, or the Thor missile system, or the rocket that put Neil Armstrong on the moon, the federal government expects you to keep your mouth shut.
The secrecy was an "enormous thing," he said. "I couldn't tell my wife where I was going, what I was doing."
That Bagnoli had a hand in such historically important projects might be a bit of a secret to people who don't really know the mild-mannered retiree.
He's had his name in the news lately because of his opposition to Botetourt County's 900-acre industrial, office and recreational facility, Botetourt Center at Greenfield. One edge of it will spoil the idyllic view that led Bagnoli and his wife to buy their home and 6-acre lot when they moved in 1989.
"But I was a person before Greenfield," he insisted.
The New Jersey native graduated from Rutgers University and spent three years in the Navy during World War II before he went to work for Douglass Aircraft in California.
His first big project: designing the electrical system for the DC-8, the first commercial jet transport.
From there, he went to work on the Thor missile, which he said was designed to "fill the missile gap" during the Cold War years. "The Russians could deliver a bomb to us, but we couldn't deliver one to them," he said. So Bagnoli helped develop the United States' first intermediate-range ballistic missile.
Weapon projects were never an easy job from a moral standpoint for Bagnoli. He told his boss flat out once, "I don't like killing people at all, or being at any level that is instrumental in that."
Ultimately, both he and his daughter, a peace activist, came to a recognition that the country had to be protected.
In the 1960s, Bagnoli was chief design engineer for one of three stages of the Saturn rocket that lifted the first lunar astronauts out of Earth orbit and toward the moon.
"That was the most complicated machine that man had ever designed at that time," Bagnoli said. "It's scary, very, very scary, because you know how fragile the whole balance is."
The first lunar mission was a success, but when Apollo 13 malfunctioned, everybody went into a panic.
"Everybody scurries to find out what could have gone wrong with our stage," he said. "Ours was not the failure, luckily."
In the 1980s, Bagnoli was in charge of the creation of the basic structure of the Stealth Bomber. In those days, he was working with such super-secret material he couldn't carry papers when he traveled. He had to keep it all in his head.
Life is a little easier for Bagnoli these days. He spends more time building models of 18th-century sailing ships than thinking about space rockets.
He builds furniture and makes wood and metal figure sculptures in his basement shop, which is outfitted with an elaborate dust collection system worthy of a space-race veteran.
He does not long for his past, he said, but he remembers it fondly and is glad to tell anyone about it now - short of military secrets, of course.
"It was kind of wild and furious and exciting," he said. "We were doing things that no one had ever done before."
LENGTH: Medium: 69 linesby CNB