WASHINGTON — Eilene Galloway, who helped draft the NASA charter and establish milestone legislation in domestic and international space policy, died at her Washington home of breast cancer May 2 at 102. She would have been 103 on May 4.
In November 1957, Galloway, then a defense analyst, was tapped by then-Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson (D-Texas) to analyze the threat posed by Soviet ICBMs after the launch of two Sputnik satellites.
After that assignment, “space policy became her life’s career,” Linda Billings, a friend and a researcher at the SETI Institute, said in a May 5 interview.
Galloway went on to become Johnson’s point person for space, helping draft the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which established NASA in 1958, and the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws weapons of mass destruction in space and bans nations from claiming space bodies.
It was critical to Galloway that “space be used for the peaceful benefit for all mankind,” her son, Jonathon Fuller Galloway, said in a May 5 interview.
Eilene Marie Galloway was born in Kansas City, Mo., May 4, 1906. She attended Swarthmore College, graduating in 1928 with a degree in political science.
After graduating, she taught for a spell at Swarthmore and worked in various capacities before going to work as a defense analyst with the research division of the Library of Congress during World War II.
Although she retired in 1974, Galloway continued to participate in the space policy debate by lecturing and writing until her death, including a March 30 opinion piece in Space News, “Space Law for a Moon-Mars Program,” and an article scheduled for publication in June in the Cologne Commentary in Space Law, according to Jonathon Galloway.
Galloway was preceded in death by her husband, George Barnes Galloway, and a son, David Barnes Galloway of Laguna Beach, Calif. She is survived by her son Jonathon of Burlington, Vt., a retired political science professor, six grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
Private services will be held May 6 at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington. A public memorial will be held June 6 at the Cosmos Club in Washington.
