Albert Hibbs, 78, Scientist and Voice of NASA Missions -- Rest in Peace

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Subject: Albert Hibbs, 78, Scientist and Voice of NASA Missions

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Date Posted: March 02, 2003 10:25:23 EDT

Albert R. Hibbs, a veteran space scientist who helped build the United States' first Earth orbiter then was the popular voice of NASA missions to the planets, died on Monday in Pasadena, Calif. He was 78.

The cause was complications after heart surgery, according to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he ended his career in 1986 as the director of space science.

Dr. Hibbs joined the laboratory, operated in Pasadena by the California Institute of Technology, as a research engineer in 1950. After a variety of technical assignments, he became system designer for Explorer I, the country's pioneering scientific orbiter launched from Cape Canaveral in 1958.

The American public soon came to know him as the NASA spokesman who explained the intricacies of space flight in simple language. He described the Ranger and Surveyor missions to the moon and other flights without pilots to Venus, Mars, Mercury and Neptune.

His role as spokesman led to a job as host of an NBC children's program, "Exploring," in the 1960's. For his work there, he won a George Foster Peabody Award in 1963.

Dr. Hibbs wrote more than 70 scientific and technical papers and two textbooks. He also wrote an undergraduate textbook, Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals, with his friend Richard P. Feynman, the Nobel physicist. He wrote a foreword for Dr. Feynman's 1985 book, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

A native of Akron, Ohio, Albert Roach Hibbs was a 1945 physics graduate of Caltech. He received a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Chicago in 1947 and a Ph.D. in physics at Caltech in 1955.

Dr. Hibbs is survived by his wife, Marka Oliver Hibbs; a daughter, Victoria P. Hibbs of Pasadena; a son, Bart, of Altadena, Calif.; a sister, Agnes Jones of Tucson; a stepdaughter, Alicia Cortrite of Santa Monica, Calif.; a stepson, Lawrence Wilson of Pasadena; and three grandchildren. His first wife, Florence Pavin Hibbs, died in 1970.

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