Hal Walker
Biography
Born in New Orleans, Louisiana on 28 July 1933, electrical and aerospace engineer and laser system specialist, Hildreth “Hal” Walker, Jr., grew up in Alexandria, Louisiana and later Los Angeles, California. Walker’s life was a story marked by a supportive extended family, which included educators; a curiosity about how things worked; a drive to succeed despite segregation and racism; and a little serendipity. He gained hands-on technical experience working at the Bruno family repair shop in Alexandria and school electrical shop classes.
After graduating high school, Walker joined the U.S. Navy in 1951 and served four years, ending his military career as an electrician’s mate. Discharged from the U.S. Navy, he took a job at the Douglas Aircraft Company, installing radar systems in Navy jet bombers, but there was limited opportunity for advancement, so he left and worked as a laborer with his step-father. He also enrolled in the electrical engineering program at Los Angeles City College on the GI Bill. He recalled the transition from the era of vacuum tube technology to the transistor was quite challenging, stating “Us folk that were primarily developed in the analog era didn't understand digital stuff very easily.” He took jobs as a contractor engineer, including working for RCA on the Atlas ballistic missile in Van Nuys, California. Then he worked on RCA’s Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS0 at sites on the northern Alaska frontier which was part of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. He returned from Alaska, took a break, and started at a laser company called, the Korad Corporation, a subsidiary of the Union Carbide Corporation, in 1964. Hughes Aircraft Company recruited Walker away from Korad to work in its Laser Division where he worked on lasers from military applications.
In 1969, while employed at Korad, Walker led a team that adapted a ruby laser for measuring the distance from the Earth to the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission. Walker, successfully directed a laser beam, from the Lick Observatory in California, at an 18 inch wide reflector mirror that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin had set up on the Moon’s surface. The telescope was operated that day by research astronomer, Remington Stone. This technical achievement, the Lunar Ranging Experiment (LURE), was recognized as IEEE Milestone # 198 and dedicated on 1 August 2019 at the Lick Observatory. The IEEE Milestone citation reads: “On 1 August 1969, Lick Observatory made the first Earth-to-Moon distance measurement with centimeter accuracy. The researchers fired a gigawatt ruby laser at a retro-reflector array placed on the Moon by Apollo 11 astronauts, and measured the time delay in detecting the reflected pulse. This was the first experiment using a hand-placed extraterrestrial instrument.”
Since retiring from Hughes in 1989, Walker founded a laser systems consulting firm, Tech Plus in 1990, and co-founded, with his wife, Dr. Bettye Walker, the African American Male Achievers Network, Inc., (A-MAN) in 1991, to offer mentoring and exposure to science, technology, engineering, math, and business for inner-city youngsters and minorities to foster interest in STEM education and careers.
Walker died on November 24th, 2024.