Alumnus Marshall Kaplan began successful aerospace career at WSU

In 1979, Marshall Kaplan, BSAeroE'62, became an overnight celebrity when he received a grant from NASA to figure out how to bring Skylab, the 84-ton space station that had been launched in 1973, back to Earth safely. "For the next six months I was interviewed at least once a day, appeared on national television, testified before Congress and was the subject of many national and international news articles," says Kaplan, who was then a professor of aerospace engineering at Pennsylvania State University.

Despite the prestige that came with being known as the "Rock Star of Rocket Scientists" and a successful career as an expert in aircraft, spacecraft and launch vehicle design and engineering, Kaplan says one of his proudest moments is receiving his bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from Wayne State in 1962.

"I am the only engineer in the family and only the second to graduate from a university," says Kaplan, who went on to receive a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. from Stanford University.

"I was one of the last aeronautical engineering graduates at WSU, as the program was being phased out at a time when many other schools were converting aeronautical into aerospace engineering departments," says Kaplan. "The announcement of the phase-out of the aeronautical engineering department (in the mid-1950s) was a disappointment. Several students transferred to other schools, but I did not. As it turned out, I made the right choice, because my WSU education helped get me a fellowship to M.I.T. and, later, another one to Stanford University."

Kaplan, who has banked 4,000 hours as a private pilot, says he has always been drawn to the sky. "As a kid I wanted to be an Air Force pilot, but my eyes were not good enough," he says. "I built flying models and radio-controlled airplanes. In high school, I took mechanical drafting and was really good at it. In fact I worked my way through WSU as a senior mechanical draftsman and machine designer at places like Detroit Automatic Screw Machine Co. So, aeronautical engineering seemed natural for me."

While his work on Skylab may be Kaplan's most famous accomplishment - and he says it changed his life - his career has held many more less-publicized successes.

Kaplan is currently a senior professional staff member at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Research Laboratory. Until recently he was on the research staff at the Institute for Defense Analyses, with responsibilities as senior technical adviser to the National Security Space Office, Missile Defense Agency and the Science and Technology Policy Institute, which supports the President's Office of Science and Technology Policy. He has written three books and authored more than a hundred technical papers.

He is married with two grown children and a 13-year-old daughter at home in Bethesda, Md. In his free time he likes to sail, read and fly. He is currently on his sixth plane, a Piper Arrow. It is a single engine, high-performance plane capable of flying in bad weather. He has also owned three Beechcraft Bonanzas and a Beechcraft Duke.