A career space engineerGeorge Mueller, who dauntlessly played a part in fulfilling the vision of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 of sending an American astronaut to the moon before the end of the decade, has died on October 12 at his home in Irvine, Calif. He was 97.

A spokesman for the familyArthur L. Slotkin, the author of ‘Doing the Impossible: George E. Mueller and the Management of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Program’, said that Dr. Mueller has died because of congestive heart failure.

On July 21, 1969, the day when Neil Armstrong took his huge leap for mankind on the lunar surface, Dr. Mueller (pronounced Miller) wrote in The New York Times, that it was the day when man’s oldest dream has been turned into a reality. He wrote that on that day the ancient bonds that tied him to the earth were broken.

After three days when the Apollo 11 astronauts came back safely, Dr. Mueller announced, “Today at 11:49 a.m. Houston time, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we conclusively proved that man is no longer bound to the limits of the planet on which for so long he has lived”.

As a boy, Dr. Mueller had been a science fiction and model airplane buff. Dr. Mueller was sworn in as deputy associate administrator for manned spaceflight of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration within 90 days before the assassination of Kennedy in 1963.