Mr. Stoney was in his early 20s, contemporary out of MIT following service as an airplane mechanic during World War II, when he joined NASA’s predecessor company, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in 1949.
(*96*) at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., he joined a bunch of engineers famend for his or her imaginative work on pilotless plane and rocket know-how.
Mr. Stoney thus was in a key place when the space race started within the Nineteen Fifties, pitting the 2 Cold War superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in a contest to achieve what was seen as the ultimate frontier.
A vital second — and an embarrassing setback for the United States — got here in 1957 with the profitable Soviet launch of Sputnik 1, the primary synthetic satellite tv for pc.
“We were disappointed we weren’t the first,” Mr. Stoney mirrored years later, “but in another sense it reassured us that we were really on the right track — that, boy, we really could get supported from now on, because this was important that the U.S. continue to try to catch up, and we were part of that game.”
Mr. Stoney turned this system supervisor overseeing the event of the solid-propellant rocket often known as Scout. NASA immediately describes the rocket as “one of the most successful boosters” within the historical past of the space company, with payloads producing “critical advancements in atmospheric and space science.”
In the Nineteen Sixties, as ambitions shifted to manned spaceflight, Mr. Stoney was appointed chief of superior space car ideas at NASA’s Washington headquarters and led the superior spacecraft know-how division in Houston. He served in high engineering roles during the Apollo program, whose sign accomplishment was the moon touchdown by astronaut Neil Armstrong in 1969. That 12 months, Mr. Stoney obtained the NASA Exceptional Service Medal for his work on the Apollo mission.
After he had “rubbed the moon dust” out of his eyes, as he put it, Mr. Stoney turned director of NASA’s earth observations packages in 1973, main the event of satellites for meteorological functions in addition to the monitoring of atmospheric air pollution and earth sources.
William Edmund Stoney Jr. was born on Sept. 13, 1925, in Terre Haute, Ind., and grew up in Charleston, S.C., and in Brooklyn. His father was a civil engineer who labored on the Panama Canal, and his mom was a homemaker. Observing her younger son’s curiosity in flight, she as soon as accompanied Mr. Stoney to an airfield the place he flew aboard an airplane piloted by pioneering aviator Clarence D. Chamberlin.
After Army Air Forces service within the Pacific during World War II, Mr. Stoney obtained a bachelor’s diploma in aeronautical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949. He obtained two grasp’s levels, one in aeronautical engineering from the University of Virginia in 1951 and one other in industrial administration from MIT in 1962.
Mr. Stoney retired from NASA in 1978 and later labored within the personal sector, together with with the RCA Corp. on superior robotics and with Noblis, a nonprofit know-how firm.
Mr. Stoney’s first marriage, to Roberta Beckner, resulted in divorce. His second spouse, Joy Scafard Stoney, died in 2016 after 51 years of marriage.
Survivors embody three stepchildren from his second marriage whom he adopted, Catherine Stoney of Vienna, Va., Jeanne Stoney-Disston of Weston, Conn., and Robert Stoney of Herndon, Va.; a son from his second marriage, John Stoney of Austin; seven grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Mr. Stoney had been a member since his 20s of the American Society for Psychical Research and had amassed a group of greater than 1,000 books and different supplies on the paranormal and the potential for life after loss of life.