Fred Becker
Fred Becker is a former member of the NSS Board of Directors. He is a lifelong space advocate who has worked within many space organizations to promote space. He first read about space settlement through the writings of Dandridge Cole in the 1960s and found motivation by following NASA through that decade. He is interested in lower-cost space transportation, space settlement, and space-based solar power. He has attended numerous Princeton Space Settlement Conferences, International Space Development Conferences (ISDCs), Space Frontier Foundation, and Mars Society Conferences. He has also been involved in media projects such as “For All Mankind” and other space documentaries.
Fred has been active in the National Space Society for many years, serving various leadership positions in the NSS chapter system, and now at the national level. He edited The Colonist, the newsletter of the former Houston Space Society chapter. He was also active with the former Indiana chapter, the Grissom Space Society; which he is now helping to restart. He has volunteered as a team leader in the Anita Gale & Dick Edwards Space Settlement Design Contest. While living in Florida, he served as chapter Secretary for the Florida Space Coast chapter of NSS, now called the Florida Space Development Council (FSDC), and helped them host the very successful ISDC 2009. Fred serves on the NSS Chapters Committee as Region 5 Chapters Organizer.
In 2010, Mr. Becker was elected to a two-year term as a Regional Director on the NSS Board of Directors. He is also an active member of the NSS Space Settlement Advocacy Committee and Membership Committee, and a key member of a Task Force bringing new life to the “Campaign for the Future” membership recruitment campaign. Fred has championed low-cost (reduced-benefit) NSS memberships as a means to allow anyone to join NSS, and has researched joint memberships with such groups as the AIAA. Mr. Becker is also helping to get the new Outreach Committee fully functional.
As a systems engineer, Fred has worked on many key space programs including Space Shuttle, Space Station, X-33, Atlas, Delta, Pegasus, Taurus, Spitzer Space Telescope, Lunar Prospector, Pluto New Horizons, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and Gravity Probe B. He was part of mission control for the first Shuttle flight and has made one flight aboard the NASA Zero-G Aircraft. During his career, he has worked at three of NASA’s major centers: JSC, MSFC and KSC. He has an electrical engineering degree and has done graduate work in physics, futures studies, and space systems engineering.