Harold Rosen

Dr. Harold Allen Rosen (20 March 1926 – 30 January 2017 ) was an American electrical engineer, known as "the father of the geostationary satellite", and "father of the communications satellite".

He formed and led the team that designed and built the first geosynchronous communications satellite, Syncom, for Hughes Aircraft Company.

Early life Harold Allen Rosen was born on March 20, 1926, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Career

While still in graduate school, he began working for Raytheon, where he helped develop early anti-aircraft guided missiles, making many innovations in the fields of radar and missile guidance and control. After joining the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1956, and while he was working on the development of airborne radars, the world was catapulted into the space age by the 1957 launch of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite. At the same time, his department's most important program was cancelled. His boss, Frank Carver, challenged him to find a worthwhile new project that could keep the skilled staff gainfully employed.

Stimulated by the possibilities of the new Space Age, Rosen wanted it to be some kind of space program. Because at that time international telephony was very expensive and hard to arrange, and transoceanic television was impossible, he decided it should be some kind of communication satellite since these problems could be solved that way. He began to research what kind of communication satellite system would work best for this purpose. At the time, Rosen was unaware of science writer Arthur C. Clarke's 1945 description of a geosynchronous satellite, but he was aware of the conventional wisdom regarding geostationary satellites, expressed most stridently by the highly regarded Bell Labs, at that time the world's leading communications R&D entity, in a March 1959 IRE Journal titled “Transoceanic Communications Via Satellites,” written by John Pierce and Rudy Kompfner. They expressed the view that geostationary satellites would be too heavy to be launched by the rockets that were then available. And, even if geostationary satellites could be launched, their presumed complexity would prevent them from having a long enough lifetime to be commercially viable. Rosen, in reading their paper, felt otherwise. He reasoned that since Bell Labs designed communication equipment for ground applications, it had little incentive for keeping the weight down. Also, he was confident that his previous experience in guided missile design was more relevant for designing the control system for such a satellite and that the supposedly-complex control system the authors claimed would be necessary would not be needed.

Rosen had an epiphany when it occurred to him that if he used spin-phased impulses on a spin-stabilized satellite, he could have a simple, long-lived control system to go along with the satellite's lightweight electronics. He gathered a small team of gifted colleagues (most notably, Don Williams, Tom Hudspeth and John Mendel) to convert the concept into a design for a practical geostationary communication satellite system. The spin stabilized satellite itself weighed only 55 pounds. The company was dissolved in November 1997. Their sister company, Capstone Turbine Corporation (Tarzana, Los Angeles) received the company's technology and continued to develop and market it after 1997.

After the closure of Rosen Motors, Rosen became a consultant for Boeing in the design of new satellite systems.

Personal life In 1949, Rosen married Rosetta, and they had two sons, Robert (born 1950) and Rocky (born 1966). Rosetta died in 1969. In 1984 he married Deborah Castleman, a satellite systems engineer also working at Hughes Aircraft Company.

Rosen died at his home the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles on January 30, 2017, due to complications from a stroke, aged 90.

Honors and recognitions Rosen has more than 80 patents. He was a Fellow of the IEEE and the AIAA, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. Rosen has received numerous awards which include: 1964 – The Astronautics Engineer Award, awarded by The National Space Club 1965 - Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement 1968 – First Aerospace Communication Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) 1973 – The Spacecraft Design of the Award from the AIAA 1976 – L. M. Ericsson International Prize for Communications, presented by the King of Sweden 1976 – Lloyd V. Berkner Award 1976 – Caltech Distinguished Alumni Award 1982 – IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal 1985 – National Medal of Technology 1985 – NEC Communications & Computing Prize, in Japan 1987 – Inducted into the Society of Satellites Professionals International Hall of Fame 1990 – Arthur C. Clarke Award, in Sri Lanka 1995 – NAE Charles Stark Draper Prize 2003 – Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame 2014 – Philip J. Klass Lifetime Achievement Award – Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine 2015 – Robert H. Goddard Memorial Trophy, awarded by The National Space Club