Robert Arnold Smith was born on April 8, 1948. He grew up with a sister, Mary Ann, and a brother, James. On January 15, 1971, he met his future bride Cheryl at a bar on a blind date that was meant to be with her friend. Instead, he and Cheryl fell in love, were married five months later on May 15, and lived together in Aurora, CO, until March 1979, when they moved to California due to a relocation with his aerospace engineering career with TRW and the promise of a full-ride scholarship to CSU Dominguez Hills. On August 24, 1984, Robert and Cheryl had a daughter named Melissa.
During his time at TRW, Robert helped construct the Chandra X-Ray Satellite, which launched in July 1999 and continues to send back x-ray images to this day; he would always mention it as “his legacy.” Robert worked at TRW until his retirement in 2002, when he kept busy running his in-home computer programming business.
Robert passed away from Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma on May 5, 2020. A couple of weeks before he lost the ability to talk, he told his daughter, “If there is a company that sends people into space after they are gone, do it for me.” Celestis was found through a Google search, and his wish has come true thanks to the Aurora flight.
