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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:

Mr. Billerbeck graduated with an Aeronautical Engineering degree from Catholic University, and took postgraduate courses at the University of Maryland and UCLA. His early career was in supersonic aerodynamics as applied in the US Navy Terrier and Talos shipboard defense missiles, and the air-to-air Sidewinder missile.

This was followed by aerodynamic design and analysis on the Probe and Drogue aerial refueling systems built for the US Navy and the Tactical Air Command. An interesting sidelight of this work was participation in the design of a system used by the US Army for the first coast-to-coast demonstration flight of a Sikorsky S-55 helicopter using aerial refueling. A DeHaviland Otter fixed-wing aircraft fitted with a 300-gallon tank and a hose reel acted as the tanker aircraft during this mission.

At the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab he became involved in thermal design of spacecraft. He developed analytical design techniques that were applied to a number of solar and radioisotope-powered satellites in the US Navy Trident program. These satellites provided precise geolocation information to surface and undersea vessels. He also participated in the design of the Anna tri-service geodetic research satellite. His key contribution to this vehicle was the thermal design of a satellite crystal oscillator that achieved a stability of one part in ten-to-the-twelfth per day. This was record performance at that time.

At COMSAT Laboratories he led an R&D team that invented and developed the Nickel-Hydrogen battery cell. COMSAT further developed and extensively tested these batteries, which saw their first operational use in the INTELSAT's series of international communications satellites. Following this pioneer effort, the application of Nickel-Hydrogen batteries became widespread, finding use in a majority of civilian and military spacecraft