| Robert Rowe Gilruth | |
|---|---|
Gilruth at NASA Manned Spacecraft Center |
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| Born | October 8, 1913 Nashwauk, Minnesota |
| Died | August 17, 2000 (aged 86) Charlottesville, Virginia |
| Occupation | Director of NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, now Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center |
Robert Rowe Gilruth (October 8, 1913–August 17, 2000) was an American aviation and space pioneer.[1]
In the beginning of his career he was involved with early research into supersonic flight and rocket-powered aircraft and then with the manned space program, including the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. He worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics from 1937 to 1958 and its successor agency, NASA, until retirement in 1973.
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Gilruth was born in Nashwauk, Minnesota. He attended and completed high school in Duluth, Minnesota. Gilruth received a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota, and received his master's degree in 1936. While there he was a member of the Professional Engineering Fraternity Theta Tau, of which he was later inducted as a Hall of Fame Alumni.
In the NACA Report R755, Requirements for Satisfactory Flying Qualities of an Airplane, published in 1941 he defined a set of requirements for the handling characteristics of an aircraft. Until this point, no set of guidelines for pilots and aircraft designers existed.
Gilruth also pioneered the recording of data from instruments during flight test, to be later correlated with the pilot's experience [2]. Nowadays this is the standard technique.
When NASA was created, Gilruth became head of the Space Task Group, tasked with putting a man in space before the Soviet Union. When that didn't happen, Gilruth suggested to President John F. Kennedy that the United States should announce a bigger goal, such as going to the Moon. Soon the Apollo program was born, and Gilruth was made head of the NASA center which ran it, the new Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) (now the Johnson Space Center). Gilruth served as director of the MSC until 1972 and oversaw a total of 25 manned space flights, from Mercury-Redstone 3 to Apollo 15.
In the 1996 TV movie Apollo 11 Gilruth was played by William Mesnik. In the 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon he was played by John Carroll Lynch.