This is an edited transcript of an oral history interview of Louis Friedman conducted by Amir Alexander and Peter J. Westwick. Louis Friedman was a co-founder, together with Bruce Murray and Carl Sagan, of the Planetary Society and served as its executive director from 1980 to 2010. Louis Friedman was born July 7, 1941 in New York City and raised in the Bronx. He graduated high school in 1957 and obtained a BS in applied math and engineering physics from Wisconsin in 1961 and a master’s degree in engineering mechanics from Cornell in 1963. He worked at AVCO Space Systems in Wilmington, Massachusetts from 1963 to 1968, working on spacecraft navigation and trajectory analysis for civilian and space missions. He obtained a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT in 1971, with a thesis titled “Extracting scientific information from spacecraft tracking data.” From 1970 to 1980 he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he conducted mission analysis and planning for the Mariner-Venus-Mercury, Voyager, and Galileo spacecraft, program development for the Venus Orbital Imaging Radar (later renamed Magellan), and development and design for the Halley Comet Rendezvous using a solar sail; he then led the Mars program in the late 1970s. From 1978 to 1979, he was an AIAA Congressional Fellow on the staff of the subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. In 1980 he left JPL and cofounded, with Bruce Murray and Carl Sagan, the Planetary Society, a political advocacy group for planetary exploration. From its founding he served as the society’s executive director, overseeing, among many other projects, its initiatives in solar sails, international collaboration on Mars missions, the Mars balloon, and SETI. He retired as the Planetary Society’s executive director in 2010. [Object file name], Aerospace Oral History Project, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
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