Science: Space Director

• Share

As Tiros I spun skyward last week, a stocky, dark-thatched man sat in NASA's Washington headquarters, scanning electronic returns and helping nurse the new space baby into orbit. He was Abe Silverstein, NASA's director of space flight programs, and a living answer to the notion that able scientists do not enjoy working for government. Silverstein has been employed by the U.S. government for 30 of his 51 years, and he still likes his job well enough to stay at it for ten or eleven hours a day and for six days a week during peak periods.

As NASA's space flight boss, Silverstein directs the planning of U.S. space missions, the payload design and development, and the research operation once a satellite or probe has been fired. His qualifications are ample. Born in Terre Haute, Ind., Silverstein graduated from hometown Rose Polytechnic Institute in 1929 and, although he had several better-paying offers, took an engineering job with NASA's predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, at $2,000 a year. Starting at Virginia's Langley Aeronautical Laboratory, he helped design the first full-scale wind tunnel, moved to Cleveland's Lewis Laboratory in 1943 and plunged into jet-engine research. Today's

F-100, F-IOI and F-IO4 jet aircraft all have components designed at Lewis. Indeed, says a Silverstein aide, "there is hardly a plane flying that does not have a piece of Abe in it."

A hard-driving administrator with a sharp tongue, Silverstein moved from Cleveland to NASA's Washington headquarters in 1958, bringing with him ten Lewis Laboratory scientists. Recalls one: "We didn't really want to come to Washington. We came purely because Abe asked us to." Since then, most of Silverstein's relaxing pastimes have vanished into space: about all he has time for is taking his three children to the Washington zoo on Sunday mornings. But for Abe Silverstein, dedicated public scientist, the job is worth it.