Gary Flandro

in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Utah in 1957, his Master’s in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology in 1960 and his Ph.D. from Caltech in 1967 as supervised by Frank E. Marble.

The lineage is: Euler, Lagrange, Fourier, Lejeune Dirichlet, Lipschitz, Klein, Lindemann, Hilb, Bar, Liepmann, Marble, Flandro.

His research work with combustion instability of solid rocket motors has “practically solved a challenging issue that had plagued the field for many years,” said Vigor Yang Head, School of Aerospace Engineering Georgia Institute of Technology.

During the summer of 1964 at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Flandro was assigned the task of studying techniques for exploring the outer planets of the solar system.

[1][5] Flandro was recognized for this work first by the British Interplanetary Society (1970 M. N. Golovine Award), and later by NASA (1998 Exceptional Achievement Medal, with the citation: "for seminal contributions to the design and engineering of multi-outer-planet missions, including the Grand Tour opportunity for the epic Voyager explorations").