This website is dedicated to W. Albert Ragsdale, known to friends as Al but the Apollo astronauts called him "Rags". I know this because while working with Al at NASA Langley, we invited the legendary John Young to come fly a lifting-body simulation he and I put together, and when he disembarked Al was waiting to great him. "RAGS! So good to see you!" he exclaimed. HShortly afterward, Young wrote a letter to the center director saying the simulation flew well, no doubt, because Al Ragsdale "could make a brick fly."

Over the course of his career working for NASA (intially at Johnson Space Center, where he was heavily involved in developing the Lunar Module fixed-base simulator, or LM-SIM, and later at Langley Research Center in Hampton Virginia) he formulated the now-famous Ragsdale's Rules, a clear explanation of how life in the fast-paced, trendy world of digital simulation works.

Here are his rules, used with his permission.

• Ragsdale's Rules
• A clever haiku Al wrote of the Rules
• The Rules with explanatory text
• An autographed copy of the Rules from the office we shared

I hope you find them as interesting, useful and applicable as I do. Thanks for sharing, Al!

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-- Bruce Jackson 260712