Pete Rustan, spy satellite designer, dies

Pete Rustan once devised a way to keep Air Force planes from being damaged by lightning. He led a project to build a spacecraft that performed important scientific experiments on the moon. He earned a PhD while serving as an Air Force intelligence officer. He became a designer of spy satellites.

All of those achievements came after he made a daring escape from Cuba to come to the United States.

Col. Rustan retired from the Air Force in 1997 but went back to work after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, at a federal agency so secretive that its budget, projects and accomplishments are classified information. His job was to lead research efforts in satellite reconnaissance for the military and CIA.

He might have been unknown to the general public, but Pedro L. "Pete" Rustan was something of a legend in the tight-lipped world of aerial intelligence and engineering. No one who worked with him is at liberty to say exactly what he did for a living.

Yet this much is true: When Rustan retired last August from the little-known National Reconnaissance Office, the Navy SEAL unit responsible for killing Osama bin Laden presented him with an American flag that flew at its forward operating base in Afghanistan.

On June 28, Rustan died at his home in Woodbridge, Va. He was 65 and had prostate cancer, said his wife, Alexandra Cary Rustan.

Any single element of Rustan's life -- political escapee, scientist, military officer, satellite designer -- sounds like the stuff of fiction, but he embodied them all.

"This guy was intense," said Daniel S. Goldin, a former NASA administrator who knew Rustan for 20 years.

When Goldin took charge of NASA in 1992, one of his goals was to build spacecraft that could be deployed quickly and could produce important scientific results at relatively little cost. His slogan was "faster, better, cheaper." Early in Goldin's tenure, then-Maj. Rustan stepped up to help him meet his goal.

Rustan later went to work at the National Reconnaissance Office, which was created in 1961. Its existence was not officially made public until more than 30 years later.

All we know of Rustan's work at the NRO is that he helped design and manage spy satellites.

Even though his work was confidential, Rustan often traveled to theaters of war and was known to troops on the front lines -- including members of SEAL Team 6, the elite commando unit that killed bin Laden on May 2, 2011.