Longtime JPL Director Put U.S. in Space Race
William H. Pickering, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory director who pulled together the nation’s first successful satellite launch in only three months and who later led the exploration of the solar system that culminated with the landing this year of two successful rovers on Mars, died of pneumonia Monday at his home in La Canada Flintridge.
Known affectionately as “Mr. JPL” and “Rocket Man,” the New Zealand native who helped open the door to the stars was 93.
“Dr. Pickering was one of the titans of our nation’s space program,” said the current JPL director, Charles Elachi. “It was his leadership that took America into space and opened up the moon and planets to the world.”
“More than any other individual, Bill Pickering was responsible for America’s success in exploring the planets,” said former Caltech President Thomas E. Everhart. “Under his leadership and vision, the field of planetary science grew into a distinct and cohesive new discipline.”
It was a dismal October Saturday in 1957 when the United States public learned that the Soviet Union had launched a grapefruit-sized satellite called Sputnik into orbit around the Earth, trumping U.S. efforts 10 years into the Cold War. Before that time, Pickering once said, the public had paid little attention to the nation’s rudimentary space program.
“The existence of the Sputnik was a great shock to the people of the United States,” Pickering later recalled. “They suddenly realized that the Russians, who they thought of as peasants, had launched technology that was circling above them several times a day. That horrified people.”
U.S. authorities initially dismissed the Soviet feat because Sputnik 1 was so small. Within a month, however, the Soviets had launched a second Sputnik, this one large enough to carry a dog, and the American military came under great pressure to catch up with, if not surpass, the “Red Menace.”
The U.S. effort was entrusted to the Navy, which had scheduled the launching of a Vanguard satellite in December. But that effort had fallen well behind schedule, so authorities hedged their bets by turning to the Army, which had been building missiles at JPL and at the Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Ala., under Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who developed rocketry for the Nazis during World War II.
Von Braun’s team built an upgraded Redstone rocket, while Pickering’s JPL team built a three-stage solid propellant assembly for the upper stages of the craft.
JPL also constructed the satellite, whose payload was a Geiger counter constructed by radiation physicist James Van Allen of the University of Iowa to measure cosmic rays.
Last, but not least, the JPL team set up a global network of tracking stations to receive signals from the satellite.
The pressure intensified when the Navy’s Vanguard blew up on its launchpad on Dec. 7, 1957, in the full glare of the media.
On Jan. 31, 1958, just 83 days after the team had received the go-ahead, Explorer 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. Pickering, who was waiting in Washington, D.C., could not declare the launch a success until the satellite had completed its 90-minute orbit. “At the designated time, I phoned JPL, and they had a phone link to the tracking station in the desert,” he recalled. “The time went by, and went by, and no signal. It was eight minutes before we got a signal, and it was the longest eight minutes of my life.”
Shortly after midnight, Pickering, Van Allen and Von Braun held an exuberant news conference in Washington at which they displayed a model of Explorer 1 over their heads in a picture that marked America’s entry into the space race and Pickering’s proudest moment.
“When I reflect about the red tape that exists these days, I find it absolutely incredible that we were able to do it,” Pickering told The Times some years ago.
The rapid launching of Explorer was “one of the more astounding things that happened in space ever, and maybe in science and engineering in the 20th century,” Everhart said
That satellite and Explorer III, which was launched in March 1958, discovered the Van Allen radiation belt, which encircles the Earth. Pioneer III, a modified Explorer launched in December of that year, discovered a second, higher radiation belt when it reached an altitude of 63,000 miles.
In 1958, Congress created NASA to oversee the civilian exploration of space and divided the quest into three broad areas: near-Earth satellites, deep space missions, and manned space travel.
Pickering chose deep space for JPL, sending the lab on a quest that eventually would lead to the moon and all the planets except Pluto.
“I was delighted to hold a contract that said, in essence, ‘Go out and explore the depths of the solar system,’ ” he recalled.
“That was a critical decision that shaped the future of JPL and resulted in Southern California being the gateway to the solar system,” said former JPL director Ed Stone.
The Russians, meanwhile, had been launching ever-more-powerful rockets into space and even orbiting the moon, leaving the United States a continuing second fiddle in the space race.
“It was not until 1962, when we successfully launched the JPL-designed Mariner II to the planet Venus that we could claim a significant technological ‘first,’ ” Pickering said.
That feat landed Pickering on the cover of Time magazine. “It is a proud first for the U.S.,” the magazine wrote. “No achievement by Russian cosmonaut or U.S. astronaut nor experiment made by any of the myriad other satellites that have been shot aloft has taught mankind nearly so much as he has learned already from the improbable voyage of Mariner II.”
In 1964, JPL launched Mariner IV to Mars and, the following year, Pickering was again on Time’s cover. “The undulating whine of JPL’s computers seemed to change subtly into a cry of exaltation” as engineers received word of the craft’s arrival, Time reported. “Mariner had made it.”
Under Pickering’s guidance, the JPL team also sent the Ranger and Surveyor probes to the moon, returning pictures and digging into the soil to show that the Apollo spacecraft could safely land on the lunar surface.
Pickering was “one of the giants who shaped the American space program,” said Louis Friedman, head of the Planetary Society. “He helped shape JPL and made it what it is today. His legacy lives on after him.”
Among other awards, Pickering received NASA’s Distinguished Service Medal and the National Medal of Science, which was granted by President Ford in 1976. He also was knighted in 1976.
William Hayward Pickering lived a life that could have been the subject of a science fiction novel. He was born in Wellington, New Zealand, on Dec. 24, 1910, but was sent to live in Havelock, on the South Island, at the age of 6, when his mother died. His pharmacist father was working in the tropics, an environment that he did not think fit for young sons.
He boarded at Wellington College, where his interest in science was sparked by his math teacher, A.C. “Pop” Gifford, who was in charge of the school’s observatory. It was there that he got his first look at the heavens. But his route to his space achievements would turn out to be circuitous.
As a teenager, he became something of a celebrity in the town by building its first crystal set, a forerunner of today’s radios. Pickering and schoolmate Fred White built an early radio station, communicating with others around the world in Morse code.
He completed a year of study at Canterbury College before an uncle persuaded him to enroll at a new university in California called Caltech, where he received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in physics.
After graduation, he returned to New Zealand. But the lack of jobs there sent him back to Caltech, where he spent the rest of his professional career. He became a U.S. citizen in 1941, although he continued to be revered as a national hero in his native country.
He was drawn to JPL in 1950 because of his studies in telemetry, the art of receiving data from a distant instrument. By 1954, he had become director, a position he held until his retirement in 1976.
With a growing interest in energy sources, Pickering spent two years working at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Saudi Arabia before returning to Pasadena to start his own company, Lignetics Inc., which has plants in Idaho and West Virginia. Lignetics uses sawdust from lumber mills to produce compressed fuel pellets for home space heaters, artificial fireplace logs, campfire starters and animal bedding.
Pickering never lost his interest in space and was at JPL in January when the Mars rovers made their landings.
He was married to Muriel Bowler for 60 years before she died in 1992. He is survived by his second wife, Inez Chapman Pickering; and a daughter, Elizabeth Pickering Mezitt. His son, William Balfour, died two days before Pickering’s death.
A memorial service will be held at 3 p.m. Saturday in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech. His family has requested that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the William H. Pickering Scholarship for New Zealand Graduate Students at Caltech.
More to Read
Sign up for Essential California
The most important California stories and recommendations in your inbox every morning.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.