Robert Seamans

• 1. Introduction

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  Robert Channing Seamans Jr. sat down for his last television interview in the autumn of 2007, speaking about the guidance and navigation system that helped carry Apollo astronauts to the Moon. He did not see it aired. The episode of the Discovery Science Channel series Moon Machines reached viewers shortly after his death the following summer. Seamans was an MIT professor by training, yet his career carried him through space, defense, energy and engineering leadership. How does a specialist in aircraft and missile controls end up shaping a space agency, a military service and a brand-new energy office? And what did each of those jobs ask of him? The answers begin in a Massachusetts classroom and a laboratory devoted to instruments.

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• 2. Training an Engineer

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  Salem, Massachusetts, is where Robert Seamans was born on the 30th of October 1918, to Pauline and Robert Channing Seamans. His great-great-grandfather was Otis Tufts. He attended Lenox School in Lenox, Massachusetts, then earned an engineering degree from Harvard University in 1939 or 1940, a date the record leaves uncertain. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, known as MIT, he completed a master's degree in aeronautics in 1942. A doctorate in instrumentation followed there in 1951. In 1941, the same period as his master's work, he started teaching at MIT, and he stayed until 1955. He began as an instructor and was an assistant professor by 1945. Promotion to associate professor in the Department of Aeronautical Engineering came in 1950. Alongside the classroom he worked as a project engineer in the Instrumentation Laboratory and served as chief engineer of Project Meteor. He also directed the Flight Control Laboratory. The next stop was industry, where missiles were the focus.

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• 3. Missile Electronics at RCA

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  In 1955 Seamans left the university for the Radio Corporation of America, usually shortened to RCA. His first role there was Manager of the Airborne Systems Laboratory, paired with the title of Chief Systems Engineer in the Airborne Systems Department. Three years later he moved to Burlington, Massachusetts, as Chief Engineer of the Missile Electronics and Controls Division. His work throughout this stretch stayed close to what he had studied at MIT, which was the control of aircraft and missiles. Government advisory work had already begun to run beside his day job.

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• 4. Advisory Seats

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  From 1948 to 1958, Seamans sat on technical committees of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the body that came before NASA. The Air Force called on him next. He consulted for its Scientific Advisory Board from 1957 to 1959, then became a full member of the board until 1962. An associate advisor role carried him from 1962 to 1967. Between 1966 and 1969 his reach extended across the Atlantic, as a National Delegate to a NATO group called the Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development. By 1960, these years of committee work had put him in a position to join the space agency itself.

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• 5. Inside NASA

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  NASA hired Seamans in 1960 as Associate Administrator. Five years later, in 1965, he moved up to Deputy Administrator. He kept many of the general management duties from his earlier post, and he also took on the job of Acting Administrator. Much of his time went to the relationship between NASA and the Department of Defense. He served as Co-chairman of the Astronautics Coordinating Board, where the two organizations compared notes. The arrangement worked in both directions. NASA stayed informed about military developments and technical needs, and Seamans could tell the Defense Department which space programs had uses for national security. In January 1968, he resigned from the agency.

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• 6. Secretary of the Air Force

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  President Richard Nixon appointed Seamans in 1969 as the ninth United States secretary of the Air Force. Funding was shrinking, but he argued that the service still had to modernize its aircraft technology against threats nobody could yet name. His answer was an inexpensive, research-driven program that produced a range of development options. The Air Force could then choose among them as specific dangers appeared. Prototypes built under the program remained in use into the 1980s. Seamans had accepted the post for two years. He offered to stay two more, on one condition: that the United States end its military activity in Southeast Asia. He retired on the 15th of May 1973, and John L. McLucas replaced him.

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• 7. Chairs and New Agencies

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  Within months of leaving NASA in January 1968, Seamans returned to MIT as a visiting professor. In July of that year he received the Jerome Clarke Hunsaker professorship, an endowed visiting post in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The chair honors the founder of the Aeronautical Engineering Department. During this time he also advised the NASA Administrator as a consultant. After his Air Force years, he became president of the National Academy of Engineering in May 1973. That role ended in December 1974, when he became the first administrator of the new Energy Research and Development Administration. MIT welcomed him back in 1977, and in 1978 he became dean of its School of Engineering. In 1981 the trustees of Aerospace Corp elected him their chair.

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• 8. Family and Honors

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  On the 13th of June 1942, in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, Seamans married Eugenia Merrill. They had three sons, Robert III, Joseph and Daniel, and two daughters, Katharine Padulo and May Baldwin. Eleven grandchildren followed. Recognition came from scholarly societies and universities. He joined the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1964 and the American Philosophical Society in 1975. Honorary doctorates arrived from Rollins College in 1962 and New York University in 1967. Norwich Academy awarded one in 1971, and the University of Notre Dame and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute each followed in 1974. In 2001, the Sea Education Association named a new sailing research ship SSV Robert C. Seamans, honoring its former Chairman and Trustee. In the 1998 HBO miniseries From the Earth to the Moon, the actor Dann Florek portrayed him. Seamans died on the 28th of June 2008 in Beverly, Massachusetts, at the age of 89.

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