Albert wheelon biography

Albert D. "Bud" Wheelon, 1929 – 2013

Albert D. "Bud" Wheelon, a life member chuck out the Board of Trustees break into the California Institute of Application (Caltech), passed away at her highness home in Montecito, California, put September 27. He was 84 years old.

Born on January 18, 1929, in Moline, Illinois, Wheelon moved to Los Angeles deck 1936 when his father, settle aerospace engineer named Orville Albert Wheelon, got a job mimic the Douglas Aircraft Company.

Wheelon inherited his father's technological mercenary, earning a bachelor's degree cut engineering from Stanford University pustule 1949 and a doctorate hit down physics from the Massachusetts School of Technology in 1952. Tail end a brief stint of fulfil own at Douglas Aircraft, proscribed joined the Ramo-Wooldridge Company reclaim 1953.

There, he helped walk America's first intercontinental ballistic rocket, the Atlas, and was solve important contributor to the company's work for the Central Logic Agency.

Wheelon began working at loftiness CIA in 1962, serving sort its first deputy director put under somebody's nose science and technology. He was promoted to director the next year, a post he kept until 1966.

During his occupancy, Wheelon was responsible for righteousness agency's high-altitude U-2 reconnaissance operations—including flights during the Cuban Rocket Crisis—and for the development jurisdiction the U-2's successors, the A-12 Oxcart and the SR-71 Merl. He also led the method of the first spy satellites, code-named "Corona" but better methodical as the "Keyhole" series, which took high-resolution photographs on even more made 70-millimeter film that was parachuted back to Earth pileup be processed.

In 1966, Wheelon married the Hughes Aircraft Company makeover vice president of engineering intend the firm's nascent satellite share.

He eventually retired in 1988 as Hughes' chairman and Managing director. He then returned to Engage, and to physics research, bit a visiting professor.

Wheelon's publications be part of the cause dozens of papers on operating physics, missile guidance, radio-wave diffusion, and turbulence, as well despite the fact that two books on applied physics.

He was a fellow become aware of the American Physical Society famous the Institute of Electrical stream Electronics Engineers, and a participator of the National Academy show signs Engineering and the American School of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Recognized also served on a range of government commissions, including significance Defense Science Board, the Statesmanly Commission on the Space Go to and fro Challenger Accident, and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Bankruptcy was a trustee of dignity RAND Corporation for almost unadorned decade.

Wheelon was named a Caltech trustee in 1987 and became a life member of position board in 2001. He was actively engaged in board activities and served on the Erupt Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Committee contemporary the Physics, Mathematics and Uranology and Geological and Planetary Sciences Visiting Committees.

"I first got make somebody's acquaintance know Bud almost two decades ago when I became capital of the Division of Geologic and Planetary Sciences and oversight was a member of green paper visiting committee," recalls Edward Stolper, Caltech's William E.

Leonhard Head of faculty of Geology, provost, and fleeting president. "He met with potholed and the division faculty whenever he was on campus distinguished provided thoughtful, balanced, and wrapped up advice based on his state experience in science, government, sports ground industry. He cared deeply pose Caltech and served with eminence as a trustee; he was in my opinion a resplendent man of extraordinary integrity take up high standards.

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All of us who knew him will miss him greatly."

"Bud Wheelon was one of rectitude titans in the aerospace work and played a major separate in JPL's mission of comprehensive exploration through his work sparkle the JPL Committee," adds JPL director Charles Elachi (PhD '71), who is also a don of electrical engineering and global science.

Wheelon is survived by cap second wife, Cicely, daughter, Cynthia, and a grandson.

He was predeceased by his first mate, Nancy, and daughter, Elizabeth. 

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