Bruce C. Murray | Former jet lab chief, 81

Bruce C. Murray, 81, former Jet Propulsion Laboratory director, died Thursday at his home in Oceanside, Calif., said Charlene Anderson, a longtime friend and former colleague at the Planetary Society.

In 1980, Mr. Murray cofounded the Planetary Society with the late astronomer Carl Sagan and astronautics engineer Louis Friedman as part of the quest to save JPL and the planetary exploration program.

"Bruce was an extremely strong personality, but brilliant. I worked with a lot of smart people in my time at the Planetary Society, but Bruce's mind was the mind I admired most for the way he could slice through a problem," Anderson said. "He was forceful and dynamic."

Mr. Murray took over JPL in 1976 when the Viking program was putting landers on Mars, Voyager was touring the solar system, and the Apollo program was winding down.

According to JPL, Mr. Murray disagreed with NASA's focus on the search for life during the Viking missions to Mars. He said it was premature because the craft's biological instruments would not provide adequate results. As it turned out, that was right and probably helped him get the job at JPL when William Pickering retired.

Before taking the job at JPL, Mr. Murray took a sabbatical from the California Institute of Technology, which manages JPL, to read up on management and came back convinced that to survive, the laboratory would have to embrace change, said colleague John Casani, who is now retired, but was the project manager on the Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini missions, and later chief engineer at JPL.

Mr. Murray ran into a lot of internal opposition because of that thinking, Casani said.

"Bruce Murray was a pioneer and undisputed leader in unmanned space exploration," said Dave Stevenson, a Caltech professor of planetary science.

In fact, Stevenson said, Murray was named Caltech's first planetary science professor in 1963.

As NASA focused on the space shuttle program and low-Earth-orbit capabilities, it cut back on the planetary program.

Mr. Murray stepped down as director in 1982, returning to the department he started at Caltech. - AP