M. Walter Maxwell 1919 – 2012

M. Walter Maxwell earned a BS degree in mathematics and physics at Central Michigan University in 1949. Working with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) from 1940 to 1944, he helped build monitoring stations in Hawaii. He also developed a direction-finding system linked across five of the Hawaiian Islands to assist military aircraft in locating the runway which greatly reduced the losses of aircraft traveling to Hawaii. Afterwards he was a U.S. Navy instructor of Aviation Electronic Technicians at Corpus Christi, Texas until 1946.

In 1949 Walt joined the RCA Laboratories (the David Sarnoff Research Center) in Princeton, New Jersey as an engineer, later becoming a charter member of its new Astro-Electronics Division. Until retirement in 1980 he was manager of Astro's Space Center Antenna Laboratory. Walt had total engineering responsibility for the five ground stations used in Project SCORE, the world's first communications satellite which broadcast President Eisenhower's "Christmas Message from Space" in December 1958.

More than 30 earth-orbiting spacecraft utilize antennas that were designed solely by Walt, including ECHO and all TIROS-ESSA-NOAA weather satellites.
TIROS is an acronym for "Television Infra Red Observational Satellite"; these were the first satellites to provide meteorologists with a world-wide view of hurricanes and other weather patterns, thus credited with enabling early evacuations and the saving of many lives. He also engineered ground-based antenna systems at the Kennedy Space Center for pre-launch communication with the TIROS, RELAY and other spacecraft.

He contributed to the design of the moon-to-earth TV dish antenna on Apollo's lunar rover, providing the first real-time color video of the astronauts as they worked on the surface of the moon, direct to viewers at home. In addition, proof-of-performance testing of all the Lunar Rover antenna systems before launch was performed solely by Walt. He performed design work on the Search and Rescue (SAR) system antennas flying on TIROS-N, which are used worldwide for relaying signals from emergency locator transmitters (ELT) aboard aircraft in distress. He also assisted in the design of many other spacecraft antenna systems, including the data-link antennas on NOAA’s TIROS-M and TIROS-N, and on RCA's SATCOM communications satellites. He served as antenna consultant for AMSAT, as a member of FCC's advisory committee for WARC-79, and as trustee for K2BSA at National Headquarters, Boy Scouts of America.