Michael Osgood

Michael Osgood (1918-2006, aged 88) was an American aerospace engineer and space architect. He was the leading figure in the development of rocket technology in the United States and later a pioneer of reusable single-stage to orbit launch vehicles. As a visionary designer, he is credited with inventing the first version of a recoverable single-stage spacecraft booster, and his contributions influenced spacecraft design. 
He was instrumental from a young age in the development of American rocketry. He helped assist his mentor Dr. Robert Goddard in his pursuit to bring American rocket technology into a premier world status that even German lead space architect Wernher von Braun envied. In the 1940s, he along with Goddard, Robert Truax, Jimmy Doolittle, and others devised a way of pushing American space efforts further. However, only Osgood's career lasted into the 21st century influencing both public and private space efforts. He worked with film companies throughout the 1950s to popularize the idea of human space travel in the minds of the American populace at the behest of industrialist William Winslow. 
In the 1960s, his staff was split between the USAF space effort and SpaceCon, both groups helped facilitate the American lunar landings and establishment of lunar bases into the 1970s. He was instrumental in the development of the joint German and U.S. mission to Mars in 1987. He was made the director of the Redstone Arsenal and as the chief architect of many variations of the Titan rocket family that propelled the Liberty and Pilgrim spacecraft into orbit and to the Moon. In 1967, Osgood was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1975, he received the National Medal of Science.
Osgood viewed single-stage space launch as simpler and cheaper. He realized that to do this he would need to use high specific impulse liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen rocket engines. Afterwards he proposed to make these vehicles reusable. His ideas helped develop the Star-Raker, the Dart, later the Raven spacecraft. He has been described by many as the "father of American space travel," and opening up the Solar System to the free world. He initially opposed a human mission to Mars in favor of O'Neill cylinder space colonies. 
== Inspiration ==
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Bono
Category:Americans
Category:Humans
Category:Characters
Category:Space history
Category:Rocket engineers