Born in Henderson, North Carolina, Edward “Ed” Dorsey spent much of his youth working on cars and listening to music. He had a lifelong love of jazz, and of tinkering.
He served in the U.S. Navy before attending Purdue, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1946 with a Distinguished Student honor.
Dorsey began his aerospace career at Experiment, Inc., moving to Utah in 1958 for a job at Thiokol. He started there on the minuteman missile program, and then on the solid rocket boosters that would launch the space shuttle. He came out of retirement to lead the redesign team after the Challenger disaster.
Dorsey earned career accolades from NASA, the National Aeronautic Association and the State of Utah. He and his wife, Hilah, helped fund construction of Purdue’s Neil Armstrong Hall of Engineering. Dorsey was named a Purdue Outstanding Aerospace Engineer in 2000.
William Kessler was born in born in Bronx, New York. In 1956, his mother and stepfather moved to Kokomo, Indiana. After earning a bachelor’s in 1964 and master’s in 1965 from Purdue, Kessler began his engineering career at McDonnell Douglas and earned a chemical engineering doctorate from Washington University in 1974.
Kessler went to work in the Air Force in 1975, and rose to lead the Manufacturing Technology Directorate at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. He became their foremost authority on advanced manufacturing and production technology at the Air Force. Starting at Lockheed Martin in 1997 as VP of enterprise productivity, he reduced manufacturing costs and implemented the Six Sigma program. He led design of a robotic coating system for the F22 that drastically cut costs.
He served as professor of industrial and systems engineering at Georgia Tech from 2007 until his retirement in 2015. Kessler was named a Purdue Outstanding Aerospace Engineer in 1999.
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