Eberhardt Rechtin

The Laboratory was then working on problems of radio guidance and telemetry of missiles, subsequently converted and extended to telecommunications and tracking for deep space vehicles.

He was instrumental in extending the mathematical foundations to phase locked systems operating in severe jamming and noise conditions, to coded digital transmission, and to communicating with high velocity vehicles.

In his later years, this included the development of policies for defense telecommunications satellites, secure communications, network interoperability, survivability under attack, and responsiveness to the National Command Authority, all of which became central to the era's Defense Communications System Rechtin left the government to take a position at Hewlett Packard as chief engineer in 1973.

His new employer had been founded in 1960 as a non-profit corporation to “serve the Air Force in the scientific and technical planning and management of its missile space programs.” At the Aerospace Corporation, Rechtin was responsible for the growth of the company's work on space programs related to national security, including work for the Air Force on a Global Positioning System.

In the professional and academic world, Rechtin was a member of Tau Beta Pi and Sigma Xi, and was honored as a Fellow of both the IRE and ARS in 1963.

In 1977, Rechtin received the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal "For pioneering and lasting contributions to deep-space-vehicle communications technology and for leadership in defense telecommunications."