William Taylor, 62; Chief Space Station Scientist Began Student Program

William W.L. Taylor, a co-founder of a project that turned thousands of high school students into radio wave researchers, died of a heart attack July 16 at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 62.

A former chief scientist of NASA’s Space Station Freedom, Taylor was president of INSPIRE -- Interactive NASA Space Physics Ionosphere Radio Experiments -- one of the pioneering successes in NASA Sun-Earth Connection Education. The program engages high school students in observing and recording radio waves made by human beings and occurring naturally.

The program, which was created by Taylor and high school physics teacher William Pines in 1989, has provided audio frequency radio receiver kits to more than 1,700 students and other groups over the last 16 years. In 1992, students from nearly 1,000 schools set up a network of ground stations across the country to record data from an experiment on the Atlas-1 space shuttle mission.

“There’s no way we could afford to fund thousands of professionals,” Taylor said at the time. “The students are helping us do research in space physics to an extent not possible without them.”

A native of Portland, Ore., Taylor earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Redlands in 1965 and a master’s and doctorate from the University of Iowa.

From 1975 to 1978, he worked at NASA headquarters as a program scientist for Spacelab 1 before moving to Redondo Beach to work for TRW as a department manager for space sciences.

He returned to NASA headquarters in 1990 as the chief scientist for Space Station Freedom and was a visiting senior scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge. He later worked at Raytheon Information Technology and QSS Group Inc.

He was principal and co-investigator for numerous NASA missions and performed education and public outreach for the IMAGE mission. He was also the lead U.S. scientist for ACTIVE, a U.S.-Soviet project.

Survivors include his wife of 28 years, Kathleen Franzen.