By Megan McDonough January 24

Milton W. Rosen, a rocket engineer and early NASA executive who led the United States first satellite venture, Project Vanguard, died Dec.30 at a retirement community in Bethesda, Md. He was 99.

The cause was complications from prostate cancer, said a grandson, Michael Shapiro.

Mr. Rosen began his career at the dawn of Space Age, conducting research on the development of radar and missiles at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. At the end of 1945, he teamed with nuclear physicist Ernst H. Krause to establish the labs first rocket development program.

Until then, the United States was limited in its high-altitude experiments, using only a finite supply of captured German V-2 missiles to conduct research. Mr. Rosen believed the labs experience developing and researching missiles during World War II would be the ideal foundation for studying the utility, functionality and design of rockets.

Within months, he, Krause and other colleagues began to design and develop the multistage Viking rockets. The high-altitude rockets, which were launched between 1949 and 1955, helped demonstrate the potential of space exploration.

I feel its inevitable that our youngsters will see a lot more [of space] than we have, Mr. Rosen said in an interview on the early 1950s CBS television show Longines Chronoscope.

From 1947 to 1955, he served as the rocket programs chief engineer and supervised development of the research missiles.

Mr. Rosen later was the technical director of a successor space program, Project Vanguard. More funds and attention were available to space programs after the Soviet Union launched the first satellite to successfully orbit Earth, Sputnik, in October 1957. Explorer 1 became the first U.S. satellite to do so, in January 1958.

A few months later, after a succession of launch failures, Mr. Rosen oversaw the success of Vanguard 1, the first solar-powered satellite and the second U.S. artificial satellite placed in Earths orbit. It remains the oldest man-made satellite in orbit.

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Milton Rosen, rocket engineer and NASA executive, dies at 99