Aiming at Targets: The Autobiography of Robert C. Seamans, Jr.

NASA SP-4106 in the NASA History Series, published by the NASA History Office, Washington, D.C., with a cover photo by George Tames dated 1967. Foreword by Willis H. Shapley, a colleague from Seamans’ Bureau of the Budget days who joined NASA in 1965 and later reviewed the manuscript. Four chapters (Liftoff, The NASA Years, The Air Force Years, and Reentry) trace Seamans from his 1918 birth in rural Massachusetts and MIT training under Charles S. “Doc” Draper, through more than seven years at NASA as Associate Administrator under T. Keith Glennan and then Deputy Administrator under James E. Webb — part of the Webb–Dryden–Seamans “management triad” described in his introduction to Apollo Expeditions to the Moon — to his later posts as Secretary of the Air Force during Vietnam, president of the National Academy of Engineering, first Administrator of the Energy Research and Development Administration, and dean of MIT’s engineering school. Three appendixes gather selected documents, a biographical appendix, and a full career chronology. The preface credits Seamans’ wife Gene as a constant collaborator, noting her family newsletter, affectionately called the “Seamans Messenger,” and their five children and twelve grandchildren.