Even before he became JPL’s first African American flight project manager, Willis Meeks was already working to ensure he would not be the last.
Meeks, who during a stellar 30-year career at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory led its Ulysses Solar Exploration Project. In retirement, he went on to serve family, church and community.
He died on March 21 at age 85.
“He was a person who championed the less fortunate, anyone he felt didn’t get a fair shake,” said his widow Mag Powell Meeks. “He loved space so much but he also worked beyond that because his whole life has been about helping others.”
Willis Gene Meeks was born on Jan. 19, 1938 in Harlan, Ky. He enlisted in the U.S. Air Force after high school graduation in 1956. He was trained as a missile guidance systems specialist and cryptology supervisor, working in the development and testing of the Minuteman Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, which was and remains the United States’ first line of defense from enemy attack.
Meeks was honorably discharged in 1964 and worked at the Air Force Western Test Range. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cal State L.A. in eight years, juggling marriage and raising four children at the same time. He later studied international business at Stanford University.
He landed at JPL in 1966, serving as network controller for NASA’s Deep Space Tracking Network, then serving as project engineer for planetary space missions such as the Surveyor, Mars and Venus missions, and Helios, the first and closest mission to the sun.
In 1990, Meeks became JPL’s first African American flight project manager, leading the Ulysses probe, a $750 million partnership between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to assess Earth’s solar environment. Ulysses operated for 15 years and was the longest-running spacecraft operated by the ESA.
At JPL, Meeks developed programs to recruit underrepresented minorities at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and…
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