Roger R. Bate

Roger Redmond Bate[1][2] (17 January 1923 – 18 March 2009)[3] was a brigadier general, Rhodes Scholar, professor, and scientist who had held a variety of positions with the Air Force, Texas Instruments, and the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

[4] Born in 1923 in Denver, Bate began college at Caltech as a chemistry major studying under Linus Pauling in 1941.

During World War II, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps on 10 December 1942 and entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point on 1 July,1944.

[1] He graduated in 1947 and spent the next three years studying as a Rhodes Scholar at the Magdalen College, Oxford, UK, where he earned a B.Sc.

As a young Army captain, he was sent in 1959 to be an instructor at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. His assignment, he explained later, was to help set up the Department of Astronautics there.

[5] Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, which Bate co-wrote with Donald Mueller and Jerry White was first published in 1971 and, unusual for a technology text, is still in print and still used in college courses and by professionals.

After retiring from Texas Instruments in 1991, he continued his interest in integrated systems development by joining the Software Engineering Institute.

While at SEI, General Bate was the Chief Architect of the Capability Maturity Model Integration suite of products.

He was awarded the Legion of Merit twice in his military career as well as the Bronze Star Medal from the U.S. Army during the Korean War.