The Ultimate Engineer: The Remarkable Life of NASA's Visionary Leader George M. Low (Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight)

This well-researched book is as much a history of NASA as a biography of George Low, and as such is an important contribution to the history of the agency. Jurek's detailed book will appeal to both fans and scholars of NASA and of the engineers like Low who make the agency's spaceflights work.—Sara R. Tompson, Library Journal

From the late 1950s to 1976, the U.S. human spaceflight program advanced as it did largely due to the extraordinary efforts of Austrian immigrant George M. Low. Described as the “ultimate engineer” during his career at NASA, Low was a visionary architect and leader from the agency’s inception in 1958 to his retirement in 1976. As chief of manned spaceflight at NASA, Low was instrumental in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs.

At the end of his NASA career, Low was one of the leading figures in the development of the Space Shuttle in the early 1970s, and he was instrumental in NASA’s transition into a post-Apollo world. Chronicling Low’s escape from Nazi-occupied Austria to his helping land a man on the moon, The Ultimate Engineer sheds new light on one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of the golden age of U.S. human space travel.
 

Richard Jurek is a contributor to the Smithsonian’s Air & Space magazine and website and is the coauthor of Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program with David Meerman Scott. Gerald D. Griffin is a former director of the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston and also served as the deputy director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center and the Hugh F. Dryden Flight Research Center.