Dore Credit - via Richard Martin

Personal: Male. Born in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Dore, son of an automobile salesman of Irish descent, grew up in Whittier, California, and graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1945. He did pioneering work at Convair from 1954 on re-entry from orbital velocity, the effects of drag and aerodynamic heating on launch vehicles during ascent. He later became a prominent manager in the Atlas program, very important in the early years as a performance analyst and project point man. NASA credited him with for convincing them that the Atlas would do the Mercury mission. Dore was a vocal advocate for using the aircraft approach to reusable launch vehicle design in the 1960's.