James Murray Rennell Frost

 Jim

 Jim and his big sister Thela

Jim, Amy, Lachlan and Bill a couple of years back at our house with a piece of the Red Baron's plane

Bill's dad passed away on Thursday 27th February 2014 aged 90. We were so lucky that Bill had been over in Adelaide barely three weeks before and had spent a lovely weekend with him, before he had a stroke and was then unconscious for 2 weeks before he finally passed away, and the kids had been over in late 2013 with Bill for his 90th birthday so we all have wonderful memories of Jim and he lead a very rich and fulfilling life.

The following is the obituary that Bill wrote about his father that shows what a wonderful man he was:

James Frost, a rocket scientist from the days of the major launches at Woomera and frequent guest on Rocket Range documentaries, has died aged 90 in Adelaide.

Jim Frost was born in 1923 at Swan Hill.  As a boy he moved frequently due to father's poor health (a WW1 veteran whose lungs were affected by exposure to mustard gas and phosgene).  Jim moved with the family to Hamilton, Rochester, Dunedoo and finally Sydney where at 15, his father died and his mother sold their furniture to make ends meet.

He was a good student at Sydney Boys High School and went on to earn an Engineering Degree at Sydney University.  Many times the curious young student watched the man chalking the word 'Eternity' on the pavements of Sydney.  He heard the desperate fire of the guns as they tried to stop the Japanese submarines in Sydney Harbour and once watched the Army shell a Japanese submarine, with one shell falling short into a unit in Bondi.  His occupation was classed as 'exempt from war service', so he designed landing craft for the Americans.  Explosives were in ready supply and an occasional prank for the student engineers was to place a tiny quantity on the tramline and lift the wheels 1 cm off the tracks, but he only ever would admit that 'some of his friends' might have participated.

Post war he joined the Long Range Weapons Establishment at Salisbury in South Australia where he was in the new and exciting field of rocketry.  In a war-ravaged economy, where regular overseas travel by air was undreamed of, he set off on his first overseas work trip aged just 24, to England on a flying boat.  This took 9 days and each night involved landing on a major river such as the Ganges, the Nile and finally the Thames.  A charming couple he met on the flying boat were 'Black Jack' Galleghan and his wife.  Galleghan had only been freed three years before from the horrors of the responsibility of Allied Commandant of the infamous Japanese prisoner of war camp in Changi, Singapore.  In England, Jim studied the lessons being learned from the German V2 program, specifically techniques for tracking and controlling rockets in flight.  When Australia's first satellite was launched in 1967, it was powered by what was essentially a modified V2 rocket.

Jim was literally a rocket scientist - there were 30,000 parts on these rockets and his speciality was making sense of those parts used for flight tracking.  Highly skilled operators used a kinetheodolite, a converted two-seater anti-aircraft platform now equipped with a theodolite and camera to track the flight path.  The role of the instrumentation team was to ensure that the primitive computers of the day could interpret, plan and predict rocket paths - reconciling the onboard instrumentation data with the observed data in the new and exciting discipline of telemetry.  These days, your Android or Apple phone can do most of this, but in Jim's day it required an engineering degree, slide rule, logarithmic tables and knowledge of spherical trigonometry.  Sophisticated timing was the key and Jim & a colleague designed the Frost-Moran chronograph, still used 30 years later.

In 1953 he married his wife Marian, who he first met at the Weapons Research Establishment, his companion for the rest of his life.

In 1957, when the Soviets literally shocked the world by launching a satellite into orbit, Jim was the Adelaide team leader of the small group of volunteers, part of a worldwide science program called Moonwatch.  Millions of people watched in awe as the rocket that carried the satellite circled the earth, but only a tiny handful including Jim and his group ever saw the tiny little satellite itself, not much larger than a grapefruit.  Australian Moonwatch groups were the first to see and report Sputnik and Jim's group, perched on the roof of the Physics building at the University of Adelaide, recorded their observations with a cine camera, a Doppler graph and a line of small telescopes originally built for WW2 tanks.

It wasn't too long before the secretive desert town of Woomera beckoned and Jim, Marian and two children moved to the distant desert town, then at its peak in the halcyon days of a major expansion.  Frequent rocket firings, pilotless aircraft and numerous scientific and military tests kept his interest high.  Woomera was a very isolated town at the end of a 180 kilometre dirt road, where Commonwealth police permanently on duty stopped anyone who was not on official business.  Jim and Marian threw themselves into the life of the town, with music, theatrical performances, desert photography and natural history excursions.  A third child was born and some lifelong friends made.  Trips to destinations such as Alice Springs could be taken, travelling (with permission) straight up the centre of the rocket range where few passenger cars ever ventured and a breakdown would lead to a wait of several days for assistance. 

After five years in Woomera, the family returned to Adelaide and Jim and Marian bought their house in Toorak Gardens, now in debt to the bank for several thousand pounds.  This was to be his home for the rest of his life and as the use of Woomera for rocket firing waned after 1970, Jim continued to work for the Defence Research Centre Salisbury until his retirement.  His final role was to project manage and input a lifetime of knowledge on behalf of the department into Dr. Peter Morton's wonderful book 'Fire Across the Desert', an official government publication launched in 1989.  On Jim's last day before his final admission to hospital, Jim's son showed him some pages in the book where his photographs of Sturt Desert Peas and other wild-flowers feature.  "Yes, I took those on a Saturday morning", was the instant response.

With retirement, his interest in music, growing Australian native plants and geology flourished and right until the end, he was a frequent concert-goer. 

He is survived by his sister Thela, wife Marian, three adult children and five grand children, who appreciated his insight, wide ranging interests and the love he had for his extended family.

Jim Frost, Defence Scientist, 1923 - 2014.