Wilmot N. Hess - Career

Career

  • 1954 - Lawrence Livermore Labs, working on nuclear weapons. Frequent travel to Nevada Test site.
  • 1957 - Radiation Lab in Berkeley, to work at the bevatron and on the health physics team.
  • 1959 - Project director of Plowshare (peaceful uses of atomic bombs) at Livermore. Technical advisor at the Nuclear Test Ban Conference in Geneva.
  • 1961 - Director of Theoretical Division at NASA. Measured cosmic ray neutrons in space and was the first to make a quantitative energy spectrum on them. From "Wilmot's World": "I always felt a little bit like a fraud as Director of the Theoretical Division, not really being a theorist."
  • Goddard Space Flight Center. From "Wilmot's World": "My years at Goddard were very happy and productive. The space program was just a few years old. I organized a series of Friday afternoon seminars on space research. Almost every week we heard about something brand new about space. The director of Goddard was an aeronautical engineer, Harry Goett. He was a fine man with a research background and gave us a lot of freedom.... My own research was on the Van Allen radiation belt. (We developed) a theory to explain how solar protons can diffuse inward and gain energy in the Earth's magnetic field. This quantitatively explained the observed Leo Davis protons."
  • 1966 - Director of Science and Applications for Apollo Moon Program, in Houston.
  • 1969 - Director of the Research Labs of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) in Boulder, CO.
  • 1981 - Director of National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, CO.
  • 1986 - Director of the High Energy and Nuclear Physics Program at the Department of Energy (DOE), Washington, D.C.
  • 1996 - Retired. From "Wilmot's World": "I have much enjoyed wandering through Space Science and meteorology and oceanography and changing fields every decade. I think it was a lot more fun than staying in one place and doing one thing all my life...."

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