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RO N ALD S M ELT
1913–2005
Elected in 1971
“For development of ingenious mathematical solutions to
practical problems of aircraft and space vehicle design and testing.”
BY ALAN BROWN
RONALD SMELT, or Roy as he was generally known, retired
corporate vice president and chief scientist of the Lockheed
Corporation, died on February 17, 2005, at the age of 91.
Roy was one of four children of Henry and Florence Smelt,
born in the coal mining village of Houghton Le Spring in
County Durham, England, on December 4, 1913. He was
educated at King’s College, Cambridge University, and earned
B.A. and M.A. degrees in mathematics in 1935 and 1939, the
latter while working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in
Farnborough, England. He completed his education in 1961,
earning a doctorate in aeronautical engineering from Stanford
University for his dissertation on determination of the drag
characteristics of orbiting vehicles.
His career at the Royal Aircraft Establishment from 1935
to 1948 spanned the initial development of the jet engine and
World War II and its aftermath. He worked with Sir Frank
Whittle on the first flight of Sir Frank’s jet engine while he was
chief of high-speed flight from 1940 to 1945. Roy determined
the characteristics of the German V-1 missile and how to
combat it and was a member of the team that came to the
United States to procure aircraft for Britain prior to the U.S.
entry into World War II. From 1945 to 1948 he was head of
the guided-weapons department, prior to his emigration to
the United States in what is colloquially known as the postwar
“brain drain. ”
289
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290 MEMORIAL TRIBUTES
Roy’s first employer in the United States was the U.S. Navy
Ordnance Laboratory, where he became deputy chief for
aeroballistics research before leaving to become chief of the
gas dynamics facility at the Arnold Research Organization
(ARO), Tullahoma, Tennessee, where he worked from 1950 to
1957. In 1958 he joined the recently formed Lockheed Missiles
and Space Company (LMSC) and stayed with Lockheed until
his retirement in 1978.
His interest in wind tunnels at ARO sparked the de-
velopment of high-temperature facilities at the LMSC research
laboratories in Palo Alto, California, where he became director
of research and was instrumental in turning that facility into
one of the best of its kind in the aerospace industry. He moved
on to become manager of the Discoverer space satellite system
from 1959 to 1960, chief scientist from 1960 to 1962, and vice
president and general manager of the space program division
from 1962 to 1963.
From 1963 to 1978, Roy was chief scientist and a corporate
vice president of the then-parent Lockheed Aircraft Corpo-
ration in Burbank, California. He was responsible for all
corporate independent research and development, he
established the Lockheed Research Council, and he arranged
ties with other notable research facilities in the country, such
as General Motors, Bell Laboratories, DuPont, and some U.S.
Department of Defense establishments.
Roy was elected to the National Academy of Engineering
in 1971 “for development of ingenious mathematical solutions
to practical problems of aircraft and space vehicle design
and testing.” He participated in a number of activities for
the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
(AIAA). He was a member of the NASA Committee on Space
Vehicle Aerodynamics from 1955 to 1966 and chairman of the
Research Advisory Committee on Space Vehicles from 1966
to 1973. He was chairman of the Research and Technology
Advisory Council from 1973 to 1977. Concurrently, from 1970
to 1974 he chaired the Technical Advisory Board to the U.S.
Department of Transportation. He was also an honorary fellow
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RO N ALD S M ELT 291
of the AIAA, honorary director-at-large from 1966 to 1968, and
a vice president in 1968, and he served two terms as president
from 1969 to 1970. In 1978 he was the Guggenheim lecturer for
the International Congress of Aerospace Sciences.
Dr. Smelt served on advisory committees for Stanford
University from 1988 to 1989 and was on the advisory committee
for the NASA–Stanford Center for Turbulence Research. He
was also a member of the American Physical Society, a fellow of
the American Astronautical Society, a fellow of the Cambridge
Philosophical Society, and a fellow of the Royal Aeronautical
Society. From the latter he received the Simms Gold Medal in
1962 for his paper on the Lockheed Agena satellite. He also
gave an invited paper, “Looking Ahead in Aeronautics and
Astronautics—A U.S. View,” as part of the Royal Aeronautical
Society Second Century Papers, in 1969.
Ronald Smelt married Marie Annita Collings on November
2, 1940. They had one son, David. Sadly, they both predeceased
Ronald—Marie in May 1964 and David in October 2004. In
January 1965, Dr. Smelt married Jean Lorraine Stuart, who,
together with her daughter Anne and Roy’s daughter-in-law
Cheryl Smelt, survive him.
