George Mueller (NASA) - PhD and Ramo-Wooldridge

PhD and Ramo-Wooldridge

Mueller increasingly believed that to move up in the hierarchy he would need a PhD, and he began working towards this goal on a part-time basis at Princeton University, getting up every morning at around 5 o'clock and driving to Princeton to take a couple of courses before driving back down to Holmdel to work all day at Bell Labs. Luckily in 1946 a friend, Milt Boone, who knew a professor at The Ohio State University, encouraged Mueller to help set up a vacuum tube lab and run the communications group at Ohio State.

At Ohio State Mueller taught and did research, focusing his PhD thesis on dielectric antennas. Upon obtaining his doctorate in 1951, he became associate professor. Increasingly interested in the work that the Ramo-Wooldridge Corporation was doing, he arranged a sabbatical in 1953 to them on the understanding he would be made a full professor on his return.

At Ramo-Wooldridge Mueller was a consultant. He got involved in the review of radar designs and the Bell Labs radar for the Titan rocket (which was originally radio-guided). Mueller was peripherally involved with some of the developments of the inertial systems and generally began to help out wherever there was a problem. He was tagged as a problem solver of the moment which turned out to be fun and kept him busy. Mueller admitted in 1987 that at this time he didn't know anything about missiles.

At this time Ramo-Wooldridge had just received a contract from General Bernard Schriever of the US Air Force. It was their first really large contract and they were trying to manage four programs all at once starting with a cadre of only 20 or 30 people.

After returning from his sabbatical year to Ohio State, Mueller taught but was also retained as a part-time consultant to R-W. In 1957 he joined Ramo-Wooldridge's STL as director of the Electronics Laboratories. This Laboratory soon merged with the mechanical group, and then Mueller became deputy of this larger organization. He was also program director for the Pioneer program and then took over as head of R&D . Then STL was absorbed into what became TRW. While working on missile systems Mueller became convinced that all-up testing was essential as "you don't want to be testing piece-wise in space. You want to test the entire system because who knows which one's going to fail, and you'd better have it all together so that whatever fails, you have a reasonable chance of finding the real failure mode, not just the one you were looking for."