OBITUARIES / PASSINGS / Eilene M. Galloway

Eilene M. Galloway, 102, a retired Library of Congress expert on space law and policy who helped shape legislation creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, died May 2 of cancer at her home in Washington, D.C.

Her involvement with space issues began Oct. 4, 1957, the day the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth. Lyndon B. Johnson, then a Democratic senator from Texas and chairman of the Preparedness Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee, asked Galloway to serve as staff consultant for hearings on space technology and its military implications.

She advised House Majority Leader John W. McCormack (D-Mass.) to establish a space committee. He became chairman of the Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, which recommended creating a national space agency. Galloway suggested that the proposed agency be an administration, thereby giving NASA the ability to plan and coordinate across federal agencies.

Eilene Marie Slack was born May 4, 1906, in Kansas City, Mo. She was a 1928 political science graduate of Swarthmore College and found a series of government jobs after moving to Washington in 1931.

In 1941, she joined the Legislative Reference Service (which became the Congressional Research Service) as editor of postwar abstracts on international relations and national security. She later was named a national defense analyst. Named a senior specialist in 1966, she retired in 1975 but continued as a Library of Congress consultant until 2006.

*

Boris Pokrovsky, 97, a noted Russian opera director who staged many of the Bolshoi Theatre’s biggest productions during the Soviet era, died Friday in Moscow, according to the news agency Agence France-Presse.