John H . Rubel John H . Rubel ( born April 27 , 1920 ) was a business executive in the early post - World War II years of the defense electronics industry , later serving as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy administration . He is regarded as one of Robert McNamara ' s so - called whiz kids and was an early proponent of geosynchronous communications satellites . Rubel was born in Chicago to a well - to - do Jewish family of German origins . Following the death of his father in 1927 , he moved with his mother to Los Angeles , where he attended public schools and graduated from Los Angeles High School . His undergraduate degree , in engineering , was from Caltech , in 1942 . Both to avoid the draft and 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 . Immediately after the war , he returned to Southern California to work for Lockheed Corporation as an engineer . In 1948 , Rubel joined what was essentially a start up company within Howard Hughes ' industrial empire , an organization that eventually became Hughes Electronics ( then a new word ) . By 1956 , at the age of 36 , he was directing most of the avionics business and managing 2000 people . 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 . ( Rubel states that Howard Hughes personally did not like the advertising campaign , which was summarily dropped . ) 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 . When , after Kennedy ' s election , Robert McNamara became Secretary of Defense , Rubel was kept on as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering , one of few outsiders to join the ranks of McNamara ' s whiz kids . As Assistant Secretary of Defense , Rubel is most remembered for his early sponsorship and support of spin - stabilized geosynchronous communications satellites ( notably SYNCOM I and SYNCOM II ) , leading directly to the government charter of COMSAT Corporation ( now a unit of Lockheed Martin Corporation ) , the founding of the Hughes satellite manufacturing business ( now a part of Boeing Corporation ) , and the creation of today ' s satellite communications industry . He also sponsored the creation of the Titan III space launch vehicle , which became a workhorse of the space industry . After leaving the Pentagon in 1963 , Rubel worked for 10 years for Litton Industries . 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 . This shipyard , now a subsidiary of Huntington Ingalls Corp . , is a major private employer on the Gulf coast . Among its first large production contracts the new shipyard produced a fleet of five LHAs ( Landing Helicopter Assault ships ) , designed under Rubel ' s direction , ships with the displacement weight of a small aircraft carrier . A significant majority of U . S . Navy ' s surface warships have been produced in this shipyard since production began in the early 1970s .