Class Notes

Winter 2023-2024 Highlights

A Message From Meghan Lenihan Moulder '10

In Memoriam

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Two alumns pose under giant polar bear ice sculpture

The 1950s and ’60s featured a Winter Weekend hosted by the junior class, which included all sorts of winter fun.

1948

The Ultimate Engineer Book Cover
Author and space historian Richard Jurek has filled a gap in the written history of spaceflight with his new book, The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA’s Visionary Leader George M. Low. A key architect and leader of NASA from the agency’s inception in 1958 to his retirement in 1976, the year he became 14th president of Rensselaer, Low has been described as “Apollo’s essential man,” “one of the unsung heroes of spaceflight,” and “the go-to guy in Washington on the shuttle.” Low’s pioneering work paved the way for President Kennedy’s decision to make a lunar landing NASA’s primary goal in the 1960s, and after the tragic Apollo 1 fire that took the lives of three astronauts, Low took charge of the redesign of the Apollo spacecraft and helped lead the program from disaster to the moon. He then became one of the leading figures in the development of the space shuttle in the early 1970s, and he was instrumental in NASA’s transition into a post-Apollo world. Chronicling Low’s escape from Nazi-occupied Austria to his helping land a man on the moon, The Ultimate Engineer sheds new light on one of the most fascinating and complex personalities in the history of manned space travel. Posted 2020-06-04