Harris Schurmeier
Harris McIntosh Schurmeier 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. He returned to Caltech and received MS and engineering degree in aeronautical engineering.He worked on wind tunnels, and in 1949 was hired by the JPL to calibrate its new 12-inch supersonic tunnel. He then worked on a design of a 20-inch hypersonic tunnel. In 1960, Schurmeier became the head of the newly created Systems Division; he described its tasks as "all the trajectory work and analytical navigation work... preliminary design and the design integration of the spacecraft, the job of integration of the spacecraft to the launch vehicle, the responsibility for carrying out the system testing and launch operations and flight operations".
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 or the mission trajectory engineer, Dick Wallace, gave peanuts to the team, nervous about a failure; after the mission success, "lucky peanuts" became a JPL tradition:
After that Schurmeier became the project manager for the Mariner 6 and 7 missions to Mars ; then a project manager for Voyager program mission to the outer Solar System. He invited Caltech professor Edward C. Stone to become Voyager's project scientist; Stone held this role for 50 years, from 1972 to 2022.
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.
Schurmeier remained active after his retirement: he was on the Galileo mission's standing review board, on the W. M. Keck Observatory project review board, and participated in The Planetary Society's projects, and was a leading systems engineer for its solar sail proof-of-concept Cosmos 1 and LightSail projects.
Personal life
Schurmeier was described in 1964 as " 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