Richard Passamaneck

Dr. Richard Scott Passamaneck, born December 24, 1939 to Carl and Helen Passamaneck, passed away on November 24, 2020. He is survived by his wife, Diann (80), son Mark (53), daughter Linda (47) and Sister Arlene Duncan. His oldest daughter Michelle, preceded him in death in June of 2020. He also has three grandsons, Kenton (24), Blake (19), and Hunter (16). 

Richard was born and raised in Southern California and graduated from Mark Keppel HS where, as a catcher on the baseball team, he caught three eventual MLB pitchers. His High School guidance counselor suggested he pursue a career in auto-mechanics, but he instead attended Pasadena City Junior College, eventually transferring to UCLA where he earned a BS in Aerospace Engineering. He went on to work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory while completing a MS and PhD at USC, also in Aerospace. He worked on several projects for NASA and DOD with time at 4 National Labs with various security clearances.  Apollo 11 (Moon Landing), SkyLab (First Space Station), Voyager (Jupiter) and LGM-118 Peacekeeper (MX Missile) are just a few of the projects he worked on over the years. He was a brilliant engineer who solved some of the most complex problems in Space Exploration in the 1960s and 1970s, and later Defense and thermal-fluid sciences. He also consulted in the fields of Cardiovascular disease, Auto Racing, Aviation, Oil, Alternative Energy and Forensics. 

He married Carolyn Diann Crawshaw in August of 1962 and they had three children while they lived in California. In 1976, he made a drastic career shift accepting a teaching position at the University of New Mexico. After three years, he went back to research at SERI (now NREL) moving to Colorado.  Shortly, he found he missed teaching and went on to teach at Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado to close out his professional career. He taught Thermal Fluid sciences in Mechanical Engineering for the next 35 years.  In 1988, his Thermodynamics course was rated as the hardest Mechanical Engineering course in the country, a fact which his thousands of students, and his own son, can attest to. He retired in Golden, Colorado in 2015. Many of his books and papers were donated to the CSM Library in Golden, Colorado.

He loved his Wife of 59 years dearly and was proud of the accomplishments of his children, grand children and thousands of students. He enjoyed hunting and fishing in Colorado and was involved in his church his entire adult life.  He expected the best of people and enjoyed most, passing on his knowledge to others.

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