Lowell Randall

Lowell Randall was a student at Roswell High School when Dr. Robert Goddard moved his rocket development and testing activities from Massachusetts to the Mescalero Ranch near Roswell, NM in 1930. After graduating from high school at the peak of the Great Depression, Lowell could not afford to attend college, so he delivered newspapers and worked for a furniture store to support his wife and child. He installed carpets and drapes in Dr. Goddard's ranch home and asked him for a job on numerous occasions. However, Dr. Goddard had only small grants from the Smithsonian Institution and the Guggenheim Foundation and couldn't afford to hire anyone other than the small team of men that he had brought to New Mexico from Massachusetts. Finally, at the start of World War II, Dr. Goddard received substantial contracts from the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics and the Army Air Corps to develop liquid Jet Assist Take Off (JATO) rocket engines and was able to hire Lowell. The Goddard team moved to the Naval Research Station at Annapolis, MD, where Lowell became the team's Chief Test Engineer. Dr. Goddard died at the end of the war, and his team was hired by the Curtiss Wright Corporation at Caldwell, NJ to develop the rocket engine for the Bell X-2 aircraft, which achieved a maximum speed of Mach 3.2 during a test flight at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Lowell moved to the White Sands Proving Ground (later named the White Sands Missile Range) in New Mexico in 1952 to test Redstone rocket engines, and he later took over a 600-man team at Martin Marietta Corporation near Denver, CO to test the first ten rocket engines for the Air Force's Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile. He then moved back to the White Sands Missile Range and headed up environmental testing of all the missiles tested at the range. He retired to Las Cruces, NM to pursue consulting work and his main hobbies of flying radio-controlled model airplanes and gliders and improving the specific impulse of rocket motors.