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Brigadier General
Roger R. Bate
Permanent Professor 1962–1973
Vice Dean of the Faculty 1971–1973
B.S., United States Military Academy
M.A., Oxford University
Ph.D., Stanford University
Roger Bate, the Academy’s 12th Permanent Professor, was born in 1923 in Denver, Colorado. He started college at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, in 1941 but then enlisted in the Army. In 1944 he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1947. He spent the following three years as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University in England where he received a Master’s degree in Nuclear Physics. He served in Korea with the US Army Corps of Engineers during the Korean War and was awarded the Bronze Star. From 1953 to 1956 he was loaned to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN, where he worked on design of the military’s first nuclear power reactor; after a year he was appointed Chief of the Reactor Theory Group in the laboratory director’s office. In 1959 Roger was assigned to the US Air Force Academy. In 1962 he was re-commissioned in the Air Force and was selected for Permanent Professor, and in 1963 he was appointed the first permanent head of the Department of Astronautics. He took a year’s leave of absence, 1965–1966, to Stanford where he earned his PhD in Control Systems. Upon his return to the Academy, he expanded the department’s scope to include the study of the emerging field of computer science, as the department members had the greatest need for mathematical computing power. The department was renamed the Department of Astronautics and Computer Science in 1967. It was during this period that he co-authored what has become a classic text, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, which is still in print 45 years later. Roger served as Head of the Department of Mathematics for the fall semester 1967, and was Vice Dean of the Faculty from 1971 until his retirement in 1973. He was promoted to brigadier general at a Department of Astronautics dining-in in 2008.
After his retirement from the Air Force in 1973, Roger joined Texas Instruments Corporation where he eventually became Chief Computer Scientist and Head of the Advanced Software Development Department. After retiring in 1991, he continued his interest in integrated systems development by joining the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. While at SEI, he was the Chief Architect of the Capability Maturity Model Integration suite of products for use by the US defense community. Roger passed away in 2009 at his home in McKinney, TX..