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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Mr. William J. Escher

Richard William Foster, influenced by his aviator uncle, undertook flying lessons as a youth and soloed at age 16. While he actively pursued aircraft maintenance and repair activities, his interest eventually turned to rockets and space travel.

As a student in mechanical engineering at Purdue University in 1953-56, he served as a research assistant in the University's unique rocket laboratory. Here he developed a small automatically-operated liquid-rocket demonstration test stand that won him the American Rocket Society's student award in 1955.

During summer recesses he gained hands-on industrial rocket systems experience at Bell, Reaction Motors, and General Electric. He subsequently joined the technical staff of Project Vanguard, the nation's initial scientific satellite program. Assigned to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Vanguard Operations Group at the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, he supported the initial set of Vanguard test vehicle launch operations.

In 1958 he joined the technical staff of the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency working on the Redstone and Jupiter missile propulsion systems. In 1961, with the agency's wholesale transfer to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), he led work on mechanical systems checkout of the first four Saturn 1 booster systems. He later led early studies of advanced reusable space transports powered by hypersonic combined-cycle propulsion systems. Along with other R&D topics, he continued this work at his own company, Teknos, until his untimely passing in 2003.