Foil: 28 Panel: 2 Column: 1 Line: 24

Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Sponsor

Honored by:
Louise Silver

Leonard Silver (b. 1944) was fascinated by airplanes and rockets from an early age, building, throughout his childhood and teen years, dozens of model planes and reading voraciously about space and space travel. In 1962, Len began his freshman year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Not surprisingly, he majored in Aeronautics and Astronautics, earning his BS in 1966 and his MS a year later.
In June 1967, Len began work at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (now the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory) as an aerospace engineer in the Apollo Digital Simulation Group, building detailed computer simulations of the spacecraft and the natural environment. These tools would be used to test Apollo's onboard software. He participated in Apollo missions 7 through 17, working on a variety of projects including building the computer model used to test the command module's reentry code, simulating the lunar terrain, and modeling the landing radar. His work on digital simulations for the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz projects was based on the simulators designed previously for Apollo. In 1971, work on the Space Shuttle program beckoned, and shortly thereafter, Len was promoted to Section Chief, leading the development of one of the primary simulators for this new manned space vehicle.
Beginning in 1982, Len's software engineering skills were also applied to more Earthbound endeavors, including projects for a nuclear power plant, a railroad dispatching center, and unmanned undersea vehicles. In 1993, Len's attention was again focused skyward, when he was tapped to join a team working on the Global Positioning System. The group worked on the ground segment of the system, developing test facilities located at Cape Canaveral.
After a 3 3-year career at Draper Lab, Len retired in 2000, just in time to welcome the arrival of his grandson. Since retiring, he has time to pursue another of his childhood interests—model railroading. He's now teaching his grandson to operate the trains on his newly-built layout. Married in 1967, Len and his wife are the parents of two grown children.