Roger E. Bilstein is Professor of History at the University of Houston/Clear Lake City. He was born in Hyannis, Nebraska (1937), and received the B.A. degree from Doane College, Crete, Nebraska (1959), and the M.A. (1960) and Ph.D. (1965) degrees from the Ohio State University, where he specialized in recent U.S. history. As a student at Doane, he was selected for the Washington, Semester Program, sponsored by American University in Washington, D.C.; at Ohio State, he was named Mershon Fellow in National Security Policy Studies. Before moving to Houston, he taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and the University of Illinois-Urbana. At UH/CLC, he offers courses in the history of technology, and in the history of aviation and space exploration.
Dr. Bilstein was editor-in-chief and contributor to Fundamentals of Aviation and Space Technology (1974); his articles have appeared in Technology and Culture, Aerospace Historian, Ohio History, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, and elsewhere, including original essays in The Wright Brothers: Heirs of Prometheus (1978), and Apollo: Ten Years Since Tranquillity (1979), both books published by the National Air and Space Museum. Dr. Bilstein was named Faculty Fellow in 1974 and 1975 in research programs sponsored by NASA and the American Society for Engineering Education. He was awarded the National Space Club's Goddard Essay Award in 1978, and received the Manuscript Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1979. During 1977-1978, Dr. Bilstein was designated as Visiting Scholar in Aerospace History at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.