Harry Dornbrand
American aerospace engineer
Harry Dornbrand (November 10, 1922 – May 8, 2022) was an American aerospace engineer, and a leading figure in the development of satellite technologies during the early space race era. He served as Vice President, then President of Fairchild Industries Space and Electronics division, Vice President of Fairchild Industries (the parent corporation), and President of American Satellite Corporation, a Fairchild subsidiary. The technologies and projects he developed and managed for Fairchild and NASA in the 1960s and 1970s were critical for the advancement of satellite technology worldwide and pioneered new applications like geosynchronous satellite television broadcasting and orbital scientific experimentation. He was a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 1974 he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal for his success managing the ATS-6 satellite program.
Early life
Harry was born in Brooklyn on November 10, 1922, to a family of Jewish European immigrants. His father Morris, age 9, arrived on Ellis Island in 1899 from Rohatyn, in what was then Austria. Like his father Mechal, Morris worked as a seasonal sweatshop machine operator, sewing pockets on vests in Lower Manhattan during the era of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. Harry enrolled at City College as a student of engineering, and graduated in 1944 with a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. During his time at City College he ran a campus network for delivery of The New York Times.
The public source identifies “Harry Dornbrand” as american aerospace engineer. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Harry, Dornbrand and American.
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This entry incorporates text from “Harry Dornbrand” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.