William Hayward Pickering

William Hayward Pickering was a New Zealand-born American engineer who served as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1954 to 1976, longer than anyone else to hold the post, after emigrating to California as a young man to study at the California Institute of Technology. Working with Wernher von Braun's Army Ballistic Missile Agency team, Pickering's JPL group designed and built the upper stages and instrumented payload for Explorer 1, the first American satellite, launched on a Jupiter-C rocket on January 31, 1958, less than four months after the Soviet Union's Sputnik. Under his direction JPL went on to fly the Ranger and Surveyor missions that reconnoitered and soft-landed on the Moon ahead of Apollo, the Mariner flybys of Venus and Mars, and the early planning for the Voyager missions to the outer planets, establishing JPL as NASA's principal center for robotic planetary exploration. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his contributions to space science, and died in 2004 at the age of 93.