Edward Seymour Forman (December 3, 1912 – February 12, 1973) was an American engineer and inventor known for his pioneering work in early rocketry in the United States.

Forman, along with his collaborators in Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology (GALCIT), demonstrated the first practical jet-assisted take-off (JATO) of an aircraft in the United States.

The family moved to Pasadena, California and Forman attended Washington Junior High School, where he met Jack Parsons, who would become his lifelong collaborator and friend.

[6]: 44–46  Forman was an avid reader of the Barsoom series by Edgar Rice Burroughs,[6]: 46  which is quoted as having influenced a generation of scientists and thinkers, including Carl Sagan.

[7] Inspired by science fiction, Forman and Parsons started building model rockets in their backyards and adopted the Latin phrase Ad Astra per Aspera (through rough ways to the stars)[5][6]: 47 as their motto.

[11]: 6–7 In 1935, a Los Angeles Times article titled “Rocket Plane Visualized Flying 1200 Miles Hour” caught the pair's eyes.

The article covered a paper by William Bollay, an aeronautics graduate student at Caltech, on the works of Austrian engineer Eugen Sänger.

To build the motor and testing rig, the group had to scrounge parts from junkyards and use the earnings from their day jobs,[11]: 10  which Forman later described as a "hand-to-mouth operation".

But soon after, a rocket fuel leak caused extensive damage to the building which happened to house the largest wind tunnel in the world at the time.

However, the subsequent news coverage, focused on the Caltech graduate students-- Smith, Malina and Xuesen, and Forman and Parsons were excluded.

[2] {{{annotations}}} Under contract with the armed forces, these early rockets, called JATOs (Jet-Assisted Take Off), were fastened under the wings of airplanes to accelerate takeoff.

[6]: 194  In 1942, Kármán, Malina, Parsons, Forman and another graduate student Martin Summerfield invested $250 each of their own money to found Aerojet General Corporation for the purpose of manufacturing the JATOs.

The response sent in reply, dated 20 November 1943, was the first document to use the Jet Propulsion Laboratory name,[19] even though as far as Caltech was concerned, the JPL did not yet formally exist.