John H. Rubel

He is regarded as one of Robert McNamara's so-called whiz kids and was an early proponent of geosynchronous communications satellites.

To contribute to the war effort, Rubel and his wife Dorothy moved to Schenectady, New York, where he was a junior engineer at General Electric.

Featured in a Hughes advertisement as "the new man", that is, leader in a field that had not existed only a decade earlier—defense electronics, he began to gain national prominence.

In 1959, still during the Eisenhower administration, Rubel was invited to become Assistant Director, to Herbert York, of Defense Research and Engineering in the Pentagon.

He supervised the design of what is regarded as the world's first highly automated modern shipyard, using serial production methods to produce large ships at Pascagoula, Mississippi.