Wesley Huntress

Who is Wesley Huntress?

Wesley T. Huntress, Jr. is president of the Planetary Society in the United States and Director of the Geophysical Laboratory at the Carnegie Institution. Huntress spent much of his career at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also teaching as a professor at the associated California Institute of Technology, before promotions took him to NASA Headquarters. This culminated in Huntress serving as NASA's Associate Administrator for Space Science, starting in 1993. Huntress became an outspoken critic of reductions in the growth of NASA's science budget, and on Thursday, August 17, 2006, he was asked by then-administrator Michael D. Griffin to resign his position with the NASA Advisory Council. On November 2, 2009, he was named by administrator Charles Bolden as chair of the NASA Advisory Council's Science Committee.

In 2004 he was head on a report, "The Next Steps In Exploring Deep Space", which proposed a vision for a "stepping stone" approach for incremental space exploration using the Moon, Lagrange Points, Near-Earth Objects, and Mars.

Huntress was awarded a B.S. in Chemistry from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics at Stanford University.

During the 1980s, Huntress did game programming on the Apple II computer as a hobby, creating space flight simulator software for subLogic, Edu-Ware and Electric Transit.