Dr. Jai N. Gupta is an internationally recognized leader in the development and expansion of America’s space program.
In 1979, he founded EER Systems, a company that, from its earliest days, played an important role in the advancements of the nation’s space program. The company began operating with two small analysis contracts from NASA and the Department of Energy. It grew quickly and has an impressive history of assignments in major NASA missions. These included the Cosmic Background Explorer, the Broad Band X-Ray Telescope Experiment, and the Gamma Ray Observatory.
In 1990, Dr. Gupta accepted the challenge of expanding access to the final frontier by proposing that EER design a small launch vehicle for the nation’s first orbital commercial space launch and recovery system.
With the support from NASA and EER’s own investment of nearly $50 million, within a few years EER Systems had designed, developed, and readied for launch the country’s first commercial launch complex, a new launch vehicle dubbed to “Conestoga,” and a spacecraft with a recovery module – a complete transportation system for providing unmanned access to and return from space.
Unfortunately, the first launch of the system in 1995 ended with a failure of the vehicle minutes after launch. EER Systems attempted to gain support for a second launch, hoping to prove this mini-space transportation system could be an alternative to the Space Shuttle for small payloads, but was unsuccessful. At the time, national publications such as Aviation Week and Space magazine agreed that such a system could provide FedEx-type service to the space station – a service that in retrospect would have been invaluable after the Columbia shuttle disaster.
Dr. Gupta holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, which was awarded in 1974. He received a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from The Indian Institute of technology, New Delphi, India, and, in 1992, was awarded that prestigious institute’s first Distinguished Alumni Award.
The citation accompanying the award recognized Dr. Gupta as “an outstanding technologist, an able administrator, and, above all, a humanist who has earned a name for himself in the international community.”