ENGINEER JOINED NASA DURING SPACE RACE
William E. Stoney Jr., an aeronautical engineer who made important contributions to NASA’s mission during the space race as a developer of early rockets and a lead engineer on the Apollo program, died May 28 at a rehabilitation center in Ashburn, Va. He was 96.
The cause was complications from a fall, said his son Robert Stoney.
Stoney was in his early 20s, fresh out of MIT following service as an airplane mechanic during World War II, when he joined NASA’s predecessor agency, the National
Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in 1949.
Working at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., he joined a group of engineers renowned for their imaginative work on pilotless aircraft and rocket technology.
Stoney thus was in a key position when the space race began in the 1950s, pitting the two Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in a contest to reach what was seen as the final frontier.
A critical moment — and an embarrassing setback for the United States — came in 1957 with the successful Soviet
launch of Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite.
“We were disappointed we weren’t the first,” Stoney reflected years later.
In the 1960s, as ambitions shifted to manned spacef light, Stoney was appointed chief of advanced space vehicle concepts at NASA’s Washington headquarters and led the advanced spacecraft technology division in Houston. He served in top engineering roles during the Apollo program, whose signal accomplishment was the moon landing in 1969. That year, Stoney received the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for his work on the
Apollo mission.
After he had “rubbed the moon dust” out of his eyes, as he put it, Stoney became director of NASA’s earth observations programs in 1973, leading the development of satellites for meteorological purposes as well as the monitoring of atmospheric pollution and earth resources.
William Edmund Stoney Jr. was born on Sept. 13, 1925, in Terre Haute, Ind., and grew up in Charleston, S.C., and in Brooklyn. His father was a civil engineer who worked on the Panama Canal, and his mother was a homemaker.