As a radio engineer for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, “Tay” was the principal investigator on several experiment packages taken to the moon on Apollo missions. He also worked on the Mariner 10 probe and the Galileo project.
As a ham radio operator, Howard enjoyed combining his space knowledge and radio knowledge to bounce radio signals off the moon to talk to the other side of Earth. In the 1970s, Howard realized that if people built the right kind of antenna and receiver, they could get TV transmissions by directly tapping into the networks’ satellite program feeds. He created the first known home satellite TV receiver in 1976, and in 1979 he wrote The Howard Terminal Manual to explain to others how to do it. The book spawned an industry: today more than 20 million U.S. households have home satellite TV dishes. He died November 13 when he crashed his small plane near his home in California. He was 70.