Harris "Bud" Schurmeier

Harris "Bud" Schurmeier was the Associate Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and one of the most distinguished project managers in the history of the space program. In the 1960s he ran the Ranger project that sent the first U.S. spacecraft to the Moon. In the 1970s, he served as Voyager's first Project Manager at JPL. While he retired from JPL in 1985, in 1989 he agreed to manage The Planetary Society's Mars Balloon project, and in the 1990s managed the Society's Mars Rover project. He passed away in 2013.