Harris M. Schurmeier

Harris McIntosh Schurmeier (July 4, 1924 – November 23, 2013) was an American aerospace engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, best known as the project manager of the Ranger lunar program and Voyager program to the outer planets. After the first six Ranger spacecraft failed, Schurmeier implemented new quality control and testing procedures that led to three consecutive successful missions from 1964 to 1965. He later served as Voyager's first project manager from 1972 to 1976.

Early life and career Harris McIntosh Schurmeier was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on July 4, 1924. His father was "a pickle manufacturer". The family moved to Winnetka, Illinois when he was a teenager. Schurmeier wanted to become either a pilot or an engineer. He enrolled at Caltech in 1942; in 1945 he received a BS in mechanical engineering and in 1947 became a US Navy pilot.

Schurmeier was assigned as a project manager for the failing Ranger Lunar program. The first five Rangers failed, and Schurmeier replaced James Burke with a mandate to change the program. To fix the program, Schurmeier established an independent Quality Assurance Office of 150 personnel and adopted "Mariner's failure reporting system" and its system of "engineering change control and design freezes". Ranger 6 failed, but the next mission, Ranger 7, succeeded and transmitted thousands of photographs; the program continued with successful Ranger 8 and 9 missions.

During the launch of Ranger 7, either Schurmeier gave peanuts to the team, nervous about a failure; after the mission success, "lucky peanuts" became a JPL tradition:

Louis Friedman, a friend of both Stone and Schurmeier, who was involved in the Grand Tour program planning before it was transformed into Voyager, acknowledged Schurmeier's role in the program

In April 1976, before the Voyagers were launched, Schurmeier was promoted to JPL's assistant laboratory director for civil systems, which later became JPL's Defense and Civil Programs. Schurmeier led it until his retirement in 1985.

Personal life Ranger Project Manager, Harris M. Schurmeier, posing with Ranger II as a wizard with two bunny-suited ghost friends standing behind him (JPL was founded on October 31, the day of Halloween) Schurmeier was described in 1964 as "[the one] who looks, behaves and thinks much like a ground-bound astronaut", who had "a cheerful, softspoken, unassuming personality that nevertheless is incisive and imperturbable". JPL director William H. Pickering once called Schurmeier "a very well behaved young man".

Schurmeier was an experienced pilot, flight instructor, motor gliderist, a surfer, a skier, and a sailor. In 1964, The New York Times article described his hobbies as: "he is a leader of a laboratory clique known as "The Syndicate". Its members spent weekends on such projects as building "hot-rod" catamaran boats loaded, often to the dunking point, with mast and sail."

After retirement, he became an avocado farmer and a utilities commissioner in Oceanside, California. He met his wife Betty Jo Parris in 1949, when she was a mathematician working on a wind tunnel; she died in 2009. They had four children.

Awards 1965 NASA Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal 1969 NASA Exceptional Service Medal 1973 a fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 1981 NASA Distinguished Service Medal 1983 elected to the National Academy of Engineering

He was also a member of the Supersonic Tunnel Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Sigma Xi.

Selected publications