Space pioneer Joseph Purcell dies

Growing up in Richmond, Joseph Purcell had a dream to lead a small group of men to a goal.

"He had a lifelong dream to go to the [U.S.] Naval Academy," said a son, Craig Nunnally Purcell of Baltimore.

After graduating as captain of the Cadet Corps at John Marshall High School, he entered the academy in 1947. The next year he was medically discharged from school after suffering a head injury during battalion football play.

For a time, "it was like he was lost. He didn't know what to do; he was in a fog," his son said.

He decided to earn a physics degree from the University of Richmond. He graduated in 1951 and went to the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, where he became a project engineer on sonar and anti-submarine warfare systems.

Mr. Purcell, who was selected to participate in the first U.S. space effort in response to the Soviet Union's launch in 1957 of Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, died of complications of dementia Wednesday in a Baltimore assisted-living facility. He was 80.

A funeral will be Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at Evangelical Presbyterian Church, 710 Ridgely Road in Annapolis, where he was a member.

One of 150 employees transferred from the Naval Laboratory to Project Vanguard at Cape Canaveral, he got in on the ground floor as U.S. scientists began a race with Russian counterparts for dominance of space.

He was among the first group of engineers brought into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration at its creation on Oct. 1, 1958.

"There was a lot of risk," his son said. "You had to have the stomach for failure. There were no standards. It was 'How do we do this?'"

Mr. Purcell came to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland in 1958 as the first head of the spacecraft electronic instrumentation section and later headed the Space Electronics Branch.

He managed the first successful Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, one of the early telescopes looking into deep space, which earned him the NASA Distinguished Service Medal -- it was believed to be the first time NASA had given the award to a civilian outside of an astronaut, his son said.

Telemetry, the tracking of manned or unmanned flights from remote locations by wireless or wired means, was his specialty. "He was a quiet kind of guy. He wouldn't raise his voice. He would talk about black holes and the science of what satellites were doing," his son said.

During the 1960s, Mr. Purcell led the integration test and launch crew of the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory III, which studied the Earth's atmosphere, the magnetosphere and the space between Earth and the moon.

He was responsible for communications and data-handling on the Advanced Orbiting Solar Observatory and was its tracking scientist.

He retired in the late 1980s, worked for the Fairchild aerospace company and then retired to a home he had built in Annapolis, Md., near the Chesapeake Bay, where he sailed in his Sailmaster 22 sloop.

He was the widower of Bettie Dorsey Purcell, who died in 2005. In addition to his son, survivors include another son, Benjamin Dorsey Purcell of Annapolis; and four grandchildren.

Contact Ellen Robertson at (804) 649-6115 or .