James W. Plummer

Education and Military Service James W. Plummer received his Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1942, taking as many courses as he could in electronic communications. After graduation from the University of California in 1942, he entered the U.S. Navy as an ensign. He received radar training at Harvard; M.I.T.; and the Navy bases at Corpus Christi, Texas and Ford Island, Oahu, Hawaii. He then reported to Torpedo Squadron 10, Puunene Air Base, Maui, in the Hawaiian Islands.

Plummer served aboard the USS Enterprise (CV-6)—the most decorated ship of World War II—from December 1943 to May 1945. He served as a radar specialist for Torpedo Squadron 10 and subsequently Night Torpedo Squadron 90 (VT(N)-90). His tasks included training crews in the use of radar, establishing and supervising a maintenance shop, and flying with the squadron as a Technical Observer. Subsequently, he served as the ship's maintenance officer aboard the Enterprise and flew low-level observation of Japanese targets on islands in the Pacific.

Geopolitics During his appointment as Under Secretary of the Air Force, Plummer traveled to Iran to meet Hassan Toufanian, the military procurement general under the Shah of Iran. Discussions focused mainly on Toufanian's opinion that US contractors were not performing on US-Iranian contracts, for which he blamed the US Air Force.

Awards and accolades Plummer was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1978 and was designated as a Space and Missile Pioneer by the U.S. Air Force in 1989. He was honored by the Director of Central Intelligence as a Corona Pioneer in 1995. Elected Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and a Fellow of the Astronautics American Astronautical Society. Plummer was awarded the US Air Force Meritorious Achievement Award for his contributions to the Discoverer Space Program; the Doolittle Award from Aerospace Corporation; and the Goddard Astronautics Award, AIAA. In 2005 he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize—one of the world's preeminent awards in engineering—for his contributions to the CORONA project. Mr. James W. Plummer (far right and far left, respectively) and colleagues celebrating the first successful recovery of the CORONA system.

Since its declassification in 1995 , the CORONA project has been praised as a milestone in US history:Developers of this nation’s first film-return photoreconnaissance satellite explored and conquered many technological unknowns of space, lifted the curtain of secrecy that screened military developments within the Soviet Union and Communist China, and opened the way for the more sophisticated follow-on imaging satellite systems....Over its lifetime, CORONA provided photographic coverage totaling approximately 750,000,000 square miles of the earth’s surface. This impressive capability was surpassed only by the quantity and quality of intelligence that it yielded. Without CORONA, the US may well have been misguidedly pressured into a World War III.