 In May of 2014, NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center was renamed in honor of Neil Armstrong. So who was Hugh Dryden? Hugh Latimer Dryden was born in 1898, five years before the first airplanes took flight. Hugh was 12 before he saw an airplane himself, and it was a 50-horsepower Antoinette monoplane that could only go 40 miles per hour. Even though it was the first plane he ever saw, Dryden was somewhat unimpressed. He thought that an airship had a much better capacity for cargo and passenger transfer than an airplane. It was an unpopular opinion for a preteen to have, but one that foreshadowed great insight into aeronautics. Two years later, at just 14 years old, Dryden enrolled at Johns Hopkins University. He graduated in 1919 at age 20 with a PhD in physics and mathematics. It was during his tenure at Johns Hopkins that Dryden was introduced to the world of aeronautics, and he grew a job with the National Bureau of Standards. In 1920, he was named Chief of the Bureau's Aerodynamic Section, a post that put him in a good position to direct the Bureau's activities towards his own interests. At the time, Dryden's interests centered around high-speed aerodynamics and compressibility, the phenomenon of air molecules compressing when an object, like an airplane, moves through them at speeds approaching the speed of sound. It was worth pointing out that Dryden was interested in transonic and supersonic flight at a time when the fastest airplanes in the world were barely going 100 miles an hour. This was also at a time when wind tunnels couldn't generate winds fast enough to replicate transonic or supersonic flight. The data Dryden gathered from his experiments with the Bureau was among the first on aerodynamic drag and compressibility at transonic speeds, data that proved invaluable in airplane manufacture and the eventual construction of supersonic wind tunnels. These advances also led to a number of promotions. In the 1930s, Dryden was elected to the Philosophical Society of Washington, was made a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, became the first American scientist to deliver the Wilbur Wright Lecture, and became the Bureau's Chief Physicist. With the outbreak of the Second World War, Dryden's work shifted from research to defense. He became head of the guided missile division of the Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1940, leading the team that developed the Bat Missile. A second wartime assignment saw Dryden travel to Europe in 1945 with the Army Air Force's Science Advisory Group under Theodore von Karman. Dryden's background in supersonic flight and missiles made him the perfect scientist to interview captured German engineers about their technology, including Wernher von Braun, the lead engineer behind the V-2 ballistic missile. Dryden's career took a turn in 1947 when he was named Director of Aeronautical Research with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the precursor organization to NASA that at the time was the leading aeronautical research group in the United States. Like he had done at the National Bureau of Standards, Dryden guided the NACA's research towards his own interests in supersonic and hypersonic flight, and this time his interests lined up exactly with the technology that was available at the time. Dryden began his new job in September of 1947, and a month later, on October 14th, Chuck Yeager became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound in level flight in the Bell X-1 aircraft. Two years later, in 1949, Dryden became the NACA's first-ever director. In this role, he implemented the Unitary Wind Tunnel Plan that allocated joint funding for wind tunnels between the NACA and military and also chaired an Air Force Navy NACA Research Airplane Committee designed to select research programs that could explore problems of piloted flight at high speeds and high altitudes. It was this group that conceived of and stood behind the X-15 aircraft. While the X-15 was still under development in the mid-1950s, Dryden began the shift from aeronautics into space. He became the home secretary of the National Academy of Science, a post that had him reviewing satellite program proposals as part of the United States' International Geophysical Year activities. This made him an ideal member of President Eisenhower's Scientific Advisory Committee on which he consulted regarding the Soviet satellite Sputnik and the question of who ought to lead America's space efforts. Dryden testified before Congress that the United States needed a dedicated space flight agency to respond to the Soviet satellite. He even outlined exactly what this new agency should do, anticipating the NACA's transition into the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration. In spite of his leading role in the country's aeronautics research programs for decades, President Eisenhower passed over Hugh Dryden when he named NASA's first administrator. He selected instead T. Keith Glennon, former president of the Case Institute of Technology. Glennon accepted the post with NASA on one condition, that Dryden serve as his deputy. Though he wasn't the agency's figurehead, Dryden was instrumental in helping NASA gain a steady footing in its early years. He negotiated launch support from the Department of Defense, arranged for NASA to take control of the Army's F-1 engine development program, the engine that eventually powered the Saturn V rocket, and oversaw transfer of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Army's Ballistic Missile Agency into the new space agency. When President Kennedy was sworn in in 1961, he brought with him a new NASA administrator, James Webb, and Webb agreed to the appointment only if Dryden stayed on as his deputy. Dryden accepted the position and threw all his energies behind the Apollo lunar landing program, though he never saw it come to fruition. Hugh Dryden lost a four-year battle with cancer in 1965.