For years, AMSAT, the Radio Amateur Satellite Corporation, benefitted from the engineering talents of Dick Jansson, KD1K, whose professional career had included time spent at Sperry Corporation, Martin Marietta, the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and NACA, the forerunner of the US space agency NASA. In retirement, however, Dick focused his lifetime of skills on a variety of AMSAT spacecraft projects, including OSCARS 10 and 13 and the MICROSAT series. He eventually became AMSAT's vice president of engineering.
Dick became a Silent Key on May 13th.
Dick's longtime work with a variety of AMSAT spacecraft inspired his selection as recipient of the Technical Excellence Award at Dayton Hamvention in 1993. He had been a ham since 1972.
A memorial service is planned for Dick in Florida on June 4th. He was 94.