(Note: LRL = Lawrence Radiation Lab., after 1971 Lawrence Livermore Lab (LLL); after 1980 LLNL = Lawrence Livermore National Lab).
Interview with Fred Seward (Frederick D. Seward) by Jonathan McDowell, conducted at the Center for Astrophysics in Oct 2023, discussing Fred's pre-SAO days.
Fred says he was born on 1931 Dec 28 in Goshen, NY. He grew up in an old Victorian house on a 10 acre plot of land, run as a sanatorium, Goshen's Interpines (est. 1890), run by his grandfather. His father was a psychiatrist working there.
He attended Goshen High School. His inspiration to do physics was from his high school teacher Harold C. martin; his undergrad thesis advisor Frank Shoemaker; and his PhD advisors Parker Alford [Willam Parker Alford, 1927-2011] and Harry Fulbright. He went into science because he 'liked numbers better than people'. G
Fred reports that he did a BA in Physics at Princeton from 1949 to 1953; he went on to the U. of Rochester to do a PhD in nuclear physics from 1953 to 1958. Graduate school 'saved him from going Korea' with a draft deferment - Ike said that the nation needed scientists.
His PhD was "Inelastic Scattering of Protons by Magnesium, Chromium and Other Elements From 3.5 To 7 MeV". After his PhD he joined the Lawrence Livermore laboratory, working on in the nuclear physics group on the linear accelerator under Stanley Fultz (Canadian from Winnipeg, d. 1972 Jun 18 at age 53). He then switched groups to the nuclear emulsions group under Chuck Gilbert, working with experiments on Discoverer satellites. This later became the X-ray group. He was part of the Readiness Group which maintained readiness to measure the X-ray flux from nuclear tests after the test ban treaty. Under the Vela Program, they asked `what are the natural backgrounds that might look like nuclear explosions?'. They searched for X-ray bursts. Seward built the X-ray counter instruments, flown on four Agena [JCM: i.e. CORONA] flights. They saw nothing that could be confused with a nuclear explosion.
Fred recalls attending a Vela oversight committee that met at Aerospace Corp. (El Segundo), with representatives from LRL, LANL, Aerospace, USAF. With Jim Carruthers, he flew Nike Apache rockets from Kauai and Johnston Island to observe the flux from the Project DOMINIC STARFISH test shot. Fred became leader of the X-ray group in 1962 when Chuck Gilbert left after the DOMINIC tests. He led the group from 1962 to 1977. Livermore's rocket X-ray detectors were built by Dick Hil, Rod Grader, Charles Swift, and Arthur Toor. The group included Jack McCord, an ex-naval-aviator with Navy contacts. They began a program of Readiness flights with Sandia rockets and 12" diameter payloads. They linked up with the Navy who wanted to test the Iris rocket and a floating launcher [JCM: the Hydra-IRIS project, launching sounding rockets from the sea to study the South Atlantic Anomaly.] The payloads were recoverable - but only the first test one was successfully recovered! The payloads included atmospheric debris samplers with petals, launched from Kauai; these needed to be recovered but never were. A flight with an Honest-John Nike Nike and an LRL-built payload showed that Sco X-1 had a thermal spectrum. Later rockets used Sandia-built payload sections carrying LRL instruments.
Among his scientific results he showed that Sco-X1 had thermal X-ray emission; discovered southern sky X-ray soruces including ones in LMC; and developed soft X-ray detectors; and showed that old SNRs were bright in that soft X-ray band.
In comments on other groups, Fred noted that Phil Fisher from Lockheed (LPARL) had an experiment on OAO1 that would have been 2 years ahead of Uhuru, but it failed. He noted that Princeton (with no NASA involvement) ran a guest observer program for the OAO-3 Copernicus mission and that may have been the first GO program, preceding IUE and Einstein.
In 1975-76 Fred visited the UK on sabbatical from LLL. He worked with Ken Pounds' group at Leicester for nine months, and then at Len Culhane's group at MSSL for 3 months, where he worked on the MSSL X-ray spectrometer for Ariel 5. He found an argon line in the Earth flourescence spectrum.
He returned to LLL for six months but the readiness program was disbanded, and Fred went to SAO (Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory). He had contacts - at LLL, Hans Mark had appointed Fred to committees including the first HEAO committee, led by Nancy Roman. Fred felt they were not given enough time to read proposals and that it was hard for an outsider to break in to the tight circle of existing PIs.
In 1977 he joined the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory as part of the Einstein Observatory project. He retired in 2005, transitioned to emeritus status and is still doing science.
See also Family tree