Patti Grace Smith, Champion of Private Space Travel, Dies at 68
Source: New York Times
Patti Grace Smith, a federal aviation official who loosened the regulatory reins in Washington to help spur the growth of the embryonic commercial space transportation industry, died on Sunday in Washington. She was 68.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, her brother, Douglas Jones Jr., said.
Appointed in 1998 to a newly created post, Ms. Smith was the first person to head the Federal Aviation Administration’s agency for commercial space transportation.
<snip>
In an email, Elon Musk, the PayPal and Tesla entrepreneur who founded SpaceX, a company that has developed launch vehicles, wrote that Ms. Smith had “helped lay the foundations for a new era in American spaceflight.”
“We are closer to becoming a multiplanet species because of her efforts,” he added.
<snip>
An English major in college, Ms. Smith might have seemed an unlikely pioneer in the rarefied, mostly male vanguard of private investors and scientists who would become captivated by the potential of space travel.
But rocketry was table talk in her native Alabama. (The Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, site of the Marshall Space Flight Center, is a major employer in the state.) And it was a place where she learned to overcome limits imposed by others. She gained valuable experience, she said, as a young black woman immersed in Macon County’s protracted legal struggle to integrate her all-white high school in the mid-1960s.
<snip>
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/business/patti-grace-smith-champion-of-private-space-travel-dies-at-68.html?_r=0
= new reply since forum marked as read
Keith's note: There was a time when Patti was the only person in the entire Federal government who was thinking seriously about commercial space. At that time, no one else really cared. She did. Look what happened.
Keith's update: Patti Grace Smith's "Home-Going" Service:
Mount Sinai Baptist Church
1615 3rd St. NW in DC
Monday, June 13th at 11am
I'm so sad: Patti Grace Smith, my older sister from another mother & the pioneering first FAA Assoc Admin for Com'l Space Transp, has died.
— James A. M. Muncy (@JamesMuncy) June 6, 2016
If @OrbitalATK has not already named its next Cygnus, "SS Patti Grace Smith" should be on their short list.
— NASA Watch (@NASAWatch) June 7, 2016
Tough to handle the passing of two legends in the space policy business at the same time, Dick Malow and Patti Grace Smith.
— Marcia Smith (@SpcPlcyOnline) June 7, 2016
I hope she got to watch the SpaceX booster rocket landing on the platform. She must have enjoyed that one if she could watch it. 
