The Planetary Society’s very good friend and invaluable colleague, Jim Burke, died this year at the age of 97. Jim was more than a polymath. He not only knew a lot about a lot but he did a lot with a lot: physics, math, biology, engineering and then sailing, piloting, inventing, mentoring, and so much more.

Jim began volunteering for The Planetary Society while he was still working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he was the first manager of America’s first planetary mission: the Ranger spacecraft that went to the Moon. He helped us start The Planetary Report as our technical editor, working with our founding editor Charlene Anderson to create not just a beautiful magazine but a scientifically accurate one.

For our pioneering work on a Mars Balloon, he invented the “snake,” a guiderope that served as ballast and was designed to carry instruments to study the Martian surface. With Society co-founder Bruce Murray, students at Caltech, and other colleagues, he developed the idea. He then helped the Society organize a number of international tests for the system — our first major project. Eventually, the snake made it to a spaceflight program — not at NASA but with the French and Russian space agencies. Jim’s project work continued as he became a principal in our Mars rover test program, and that success led to rovers being used by NASA to explore the red planet. Longtime members may remember pictures of Jim in Death Valley during our Mars rover tests.

After retiring from JPL, he went on to a third career mentoring and teaching at the International Space University. Scores of students now working in industry and the commercial sector are pursuing Jim’s dream of returning to the Moon to explore. He was always a lunar advocate, pursuing the possibilities of what we could learn there and how to utilize what we learned.

There was much more to Jim’s remarkable life than merely the three careers mentioned here — JPL, TPS, ISU — but they are the ones I shared with him. He was a good friend to me and to countless others. And he was the most positive man I ever met — he never said it couldn’t be done.

Louis Friedman,
Co-Founder and Executive Director Emeritus
The Planetary Society