Robert Rowe Gilruth (October 18 1913-August 17 2000) was an American aviation and space pioneer. In the beginning of his career he was involved with early research into supersonic flight and rocket-powered aircraft and then with the manned space program, including the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects. He worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics from 1937 to 1958 and its successor agency, the NASA, until retirement in 1973.

Curtis Emerson LeMay was a general in the United States Air Force and the vice presidential running mate of independent candidate George C. Wallace in 1968. He is credited with designing and implementing an effective systematic strategic bombing campaign in the Pacific Theatre of World War II. After the war, he headed the Berlin airlift, then reorganized the Strategic Air Command into an effective means of conducting nuclear war.

William Alison Anders (born October 17, 1933) is a former United States Air Force officer and NASA astronaut. Anders was born in Hong Kong and was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout. He received a Bachelor of Science degree from the United States Naval Academy in 1955 and a master of science degree in nuclear engineering from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in 1962.

Glenn Hammond Curtiss (May 21, 1878 - July 23, 1930) was an aviation pioneer and founder of the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company, now part of Curtiss-Wright Corporation.

Retired Air Force Brigadier General Charles E. "Chuck" Yeager gained fame as the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound. This historic flight in the rocket powered Bell X-1 aircraft took place on October 14th 1947, at Muroc (now Edwards Air Force Base), California. Muroc field was named after the town of Muroc formed by the Corum (Muroc spelled backwords) brothers in the early 20th century. General Yeager was born Feb. 13, 1923, in Myra, West Virginia.

Paul B. MacCready, Jr. (born September 25, 1925 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American aeronautical engineer. He is the founder of AeroVironment and the inventor of the first practical flying machine powered by a human being. MacCready graduated from Hopkins School in 1943, received his bachelor's degree in physics from Yale University in 1947, a master's degree in physics from Caltech in 1948, and a PhD in aeronautics from Caltech in 1952.

Dr. Hugh Latimer Dryden (July 2, 1898-December 2, 1965) was an aeronautical scientist and civil servant. He served as NASA Deputy Administrator from August 19, 1958 until his death. He was born in Pocomoke City, Maryland, the son of Samuel Isaac and Nova Hill Culver Dryden, and was named after a popular local Methodist clergyman. During the financial panic of 1907, his father lost his job and the family moved to Baltimore, Maryland. As a student he excelled in mathematics.

Elbert Leander "Burt" Rutan (born June 17, 1943 in Estacada, Oregon) is an American aerospace engineer noted for his originality in designing light, strong, unusual-looking, energy-efficient aircraft. He is most famous for his design of the record-breaking Voyager, which was the first plane to fly around the world without stopping or refueling, and the suborbital rocket plane SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004.

Fred Ernest Weick (1899-1993) was one of the United States' earliest aviation pioneers, working as an airmail pilot, research engineer, and aircraft designer. A contemporary of aviation legends Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, he did not receive the same attention as his more glamorous colleagues yet the contributions he brought to the country's struggling aircraft industry arguably outstripped any of his peers. A 1922 graduate of the University of Illinois, …

Richard Harrison Truly (born November 12, 1937) is a retired Vice Admiral in the United States Navy, former astronaut, and was the eighth Administrator of NASA from 1989 to 1992. He was the first former astronaut to head the space agency. Born in Fayette, Mississippi, Truly attended schools in Fayette and Meridian, Mississippi, receiving a bachelor of aeronautical engineering degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1959.

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. was, in his time, an aviator, engineer, industrialist, film producer and director, a playboy, an eccentric, and one of the wealthiest people in the world. He is famous for setting multiple, world air-speed records, building the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 Hercules airplanes, producing the movies "Hell's Angels" and "The Outlaw", owning and expanding TWA, and for his debilitating eccentric behavior in later life.

James 'Jim' Arthur Lovell, Jr., Captain, USN, Ret. (born March 25, 1928) is a former NASA astronaut, most famous as the commander of Apollo 13, which suffered an explosion enroute to the Moon but was brought back safely to Earth by the efforts of the crew and mission control. Lovell was also the command module pilot of Apollo 8, the first Apollo mission to enter lunar orbit.

Luis W. Alvarez (June 13, 1911 - September 1, 1988) of San Francisco, California, USA, was a famed Nobel Prize-winning physicist of Spanish descent, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He was the son of famed physician Walter C. Alvarez and grandson of Luis F. Alvarez, who worked as a doctor in Hawaii and developed a method for the better diagnosis of macular leprosy.

Elmer Ambrose Sperry was a prolific inventor and entrepreneur, most famous as co-inventor, with Herman Anschütz-Kaempfe of the gyrocompass. Sperry was born at Cortland, New York, U.S.A.. He spent three years at the state normal school there, then a year at Cornell University in 1878 and 1879, where he became interested in dynamo electricity. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, early in 1880 and, soon after founded the Sperry Electric Company.

James Smith McDonnell (April 9, 1899 - August 22, 1980) was an aviation pioneer and founder of McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, later McDonnell Douglas. McDonnell (or "Mac" as he was often referred) was a graduate of Princeton University and earned a Master's of Science in Aeronautical Engineering from MIT. After graduating from MIT, he worked for the Huff Daland Airplane Company and Glenn L. Martin Company.

:"This article is not about Robert M. White, American theoretical physicist"Major-General Robert Michael White (born 1924) was a military aircraft test pilot and United States Air Force commander, who broke a number of records with the North American X-15 experimental aircraft during the 1960s, and was responsible for the design and development of several modern military aircraft.

Dick Rutan , aviator and adventurer, made "the world's longest flight" in the airplane "Voyager", the first airplane to circumnavigate the globe without refueling. In realizing his dream, with desire and determination, Dick successfully completed the mission which would earn him world records, international fame and a place in the Smithsonian Institute. On the morning of December 14, 1986, a fuel-laden Voyager took off on the history making flight.

Jeana Yeager is an aviator. She is most famous for flying with Dick Rutan on a non-stop, non-refueled flight around the world in the Rutan Voyager aircraft from 14 December to 23 December 1986. The flight took 9 days, 3 minutes, and 44 seconds and covered 24,986 miles (40,211 km), more than doubling the old distance record set by a Boeing B-52 bomber in 1962. In recognition of this achievement, she received the Harmon Trophy, …

Albert Scott Crossfield, normally referred to as Scott Crossfield, was an American naval officer, test pilot, and USAF astronaut.

Captain Forrest S. Petersen (May 16, 1922 - October 8, 1990) was a United States aviator. Born in Holdrege, Nebraska, he is the son of Mrs. Stella B. Petersen who lived in Gibbon, Nebraska. Prior to entering the Navy he attended the University of Nebraska. He was commissioned an Ensign upon graduation from the United States Naval Academy in June of 1944 and reported to the destroyer USS Caperton (DD-650).

Richard T. Whitcomb (1921, Evanston, Illinois) is an aeronautical engineer who spent most of his career at the Langley Laboratory of the NACA and its successor organization, NASA. In the 1950s, Whitcomb proposed the 'Area Rule'. The Area Rule states that two bodies having the same cross-sectional area distribution will have the same wave drag, as measured in the far field.

James Edwin Webb was the second administrator of NASA, serving from February 14, 1961 to October 7, 1968.

Clarence Leonard "Kelly" Johnson (February 27, 1910 - December 21, 1990) was an aircraft engineer and aeronautical innovator. Johnson worked for Lockheed for more than four decades, playing a leading role in the design of over forty aircraft, and acquiring a reputation as one of the most talented and prolific aircraft design engineers of the 20th century.

Vice admiral William Francis Raborn, Jr., USN (June 8, 1905 - March 6, 1990) was a United States Navy officer, the leader of the project to develop the Polaris missile system, and the seventh Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Born in Bromlow, Texas on June 8, 1905, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1928. During World War II he directed the Gunnery Training Section at the Bureau of Aeronautics.

Joseph Sweetman Ames (1864-1943) was a physics professor at Johns Hopkins University, provost of the university from 1926 until 1929, and university president from 1929 until 1935. He was born at Manchester, Vermont. He is best remembered as one of the founding members of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA, the predecessor of NASA) and its longtime chairman (1919-1939). NASA Ames Research Center is named after him.

Glenn Luther Martin (January 17, 1886 - December 5, 1955) was an aviation pioneer who started the Glenn L. Martin Company, which later became part of Martin Marietta, and today's Lockheed Martin. Martin gave to the University of Maryland, College Park, creating the Glenn L. Martin Institute of Technology, which includes the School of Engineering. The University's wind tunnel also bears Martin's name.

Lawrence A. "Pat" Hyland (August 26, 1897 - November 24, 1989) was an American electrical engineer. He is one of several people credited with major contributions to the invention of radar, but is probably best known as the man who transformed Hughes Aircraft from Howard Hughes' aviation "hobby shop" into one of the world's leading technology companies. Hyland was born in Nova Scotia, Canada but his family moved to the U.S. in 1899, where he was raised in Massachusetts.

Benjamin Robert Rich was the second director of Lockheed's Skunk Works from 1975 to 1991, succeeding its founder, Kelly Johnson. Regarded as the "father of stealth," Ben Rich was responsible for leading the development of the F-117, the first production stealth aircraft. He also worked on the F-104, U-2, SR-71, A-12, and F-22.

Sanford Alexander Moss (1872 - November 10, 1946) was a pioneering aviation engineer, best known for his work on turbochargers at General Electric. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees in Engineering from the University of California. Later, at Cornell University, his doctorate studies resulted in his building a gas turbine engine, similar to a modern jet. After he joined the General Electric Company in 1903, …

Joseph Albert "Joe" Walker was an American test pilot and a USAF astronaut. In 1963, Walker made two X-15 flights beyond 100 kilometers - the edge of space. These were the only powered spaceplane flights past that threshold until SpaceShipOne in 2004. These flights qualified him as an astronaut under both U.S. Air Force and Fédération Aéronautique Internationale rules. Joe Walker was the first person to enter space twice.

Harry George Armstrong, known as "the father of space medicine", was a United States Marine, a member of the United States Army Air Forces, Major General in the United States Air Force, a physician, and an airman. Armstrong served in the Marines during World War I and the Army and Air Force from 1930 to 1957. As Director of the United States Aeromedical Research Laboratory, …

Albert Francis Hegenberger (30 September, 1895 - August 31, 1983) was a Major General in the US Army and a pioneering aviator who set a flight distance record in 1927. Hegenberger graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an aeronautical engineer and served as a flight instructor during World War I. Later, as Chief of the Instrument Branch, Air Service Engineering Division, at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio, …