Eberhardt Rechtin, 80, Space Technologist
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Eberhardt Rechtin, who played a key role in the development of space technology during the Cold War, died Friday at Torrance Memorial Hospital after lengthy battles with several illnesses. He was 80.
Rechtin, of Rolling Hills Estates, was chief executive of Aerospace Corporation for 10 years, chief engineer of Hewlett-Packard. and director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, among other positions that placed him at the forefront of American national security. He later joined the faculty at the University of Southern California, creating the school’s first program in aerospace architecture.
Rechtin’s single most important technical accomplishment was his role in creating the Deep Space Network, a system developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that captures communications from distant planetary spacecraft.
Although it may seem routine now to see photos from the surface of Mars on television, the network required the solution of huge technical problems in the 1960s. Not only were signals extraordinarily weak after traveling millions of miles through space, but they also had to be captured by a series of receiving stations as the Earth rotated. Ultimately, the network became a critical part of breakthroughs in planetary science.
“I was told by Nobel Prize winners that it would not be possible really to communicate to the edge of the solar system,” Rechtin recalled in an oral history taken in 1995.
Rechtin grew up Orange, N.J., and at tended Cal Tech on a Navy scholarship. He worked at JPL until 1967, when he was named director of the defense research projects agency. One of his first decisions was to cancel a program to develop a mechanical elephant intended to fight in the jungles during the Vietnam War. He later was named an assistant secretary of defense.
In 1973, he became chief engineer of Hewlett Packard, and in 1977, he was named chief executive of Aerospace Corporation, the Air Force’s systems engineer and architect for space.
In retirement, Rechtin wrote several books on the problem of how to design and develop massive aerospace systems, such as worldwide networks and space stations.
