The former head of the European Space Agency (ESA) rocket programme, Antonio Fabrizi, has died after a long illness at the early age of 67. Under Fabrizi’s tenure as ESA Director of launchers, ESA built the Vega small launch vehicle, allowed Soyuz to operate at the Guiana Space Centre, and sponsored far-seeing research into air-breathing rocket engine technology at Reaction Engines in the UK. Meanwhile the Ariane 5 continued to operate with excellent reliability.
Fabrizi studied engineering at the ‘La Sapienza’ University in Rome, Italy. His career started with BPD in 1975 where he worked on Ariane 5 booster improvements. Since 1990 he moved to and from Fiat Avio working on various space transportation systems at director level including the Cyclone and Vega programmes. Antonio Fabrizi became ESA’s Director of Launchers in 2003. We give our condolences to his family and friends.
Post script: We also say goodbye to the gifted Nobel-prize winning mathematician, John Nash, who was killed with his wife in a car crash. Nash, whose early life story is portrayed in the film, ” A Beautiful Mind” (2001), originally came up with “Game Theory” which is nowadays put to all sorts of good and bad uses in defence, economics and local taxation. These include using the concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) to prevent nuclear war, and employing a combination of greed and fear to induce companies and individuals to buy into something they normally would not (e.g. getting telecom companies buying frequency licences at exorbitant prices, inducing householders to agree to paid parking permits etc).
