Homer Newell

Homer Newell was an American mathematician and physicist who rose to become NASA's associate administrator for space science and applications, the agency's third-ranking official, serving from 1967 to 1974 under four successive NASA administrators. In the early 1960s his office effectively controlled or influenced nearly every uncrewed civilian spaceflight mission flown by the United States and its allies, drafting NASA's founding plan for robotic lunar and planetary exploration and establishing the procedures the agency used to select which scientific experiments would fly on its missions; during this period his program oversaw development of the first American civil weather, communications and Earth-resources satellites alongside the Ranger, Surveyor and Mariner robotic missions. Colleagues credited him as a driving force, sometimes called the spark plug, behind the emphasis on space science when NASA was created in 1958, work that grew out of his earlier career studying the upper atmosphere with sounding rockets at the Naval Research Laboratory. He wrote several books on the history and practice of space science, including Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science, and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center maintains a library named in his honor; an asteroid, 2086 Newell, also bears his name.