As Space News prepares to celebrate its 15th anniversary, we wanted to take a look at some of the people who have made a difference in civil, commercial and military space since 1989.

Space is an industry filled with thousands of highly accomplished people and this list, compiled by the Space News editorial staff with contributions from Space.com and readers, is merely a sampling of individuals who made a significant contribution, not a hall of fame list.

Strong arguments can be made for any number of people left off the list. We hope you have as much fun debating it as we did ...

The Top Ten

1. Rene Anselmo, the Maverick Who Created an Industry

“Truth and technology will triumph over bullshit and bureaucracy.” That oft-repeated quote by Rene Anselmo was both motto and battle cry for PanAmSat, the commercial satellite services company he founded in 1982. With extraordinary vision, an in-your-face style and the determination to do whatever it took to gain a foothold in the satellite business, Anselmo almost single handedly shattered Intelsat’s global monopoly on satellite communication services.

He was the kind of man who paid no attention when people told him he was fighting impossible odds or chasing a market that did not really exist. In fact, he saw the market much more clearly than his competition. “His impact was huge. He saw the market for video and satellites before anyone else and saw that the old satellite telecom market was going nowhere,” said Clayton Mowry, President of Arianespace, Inc., the U.S. marketing arm of Europe’s launch services company.

With Anselmo’s guidance, PanAmSat made the use of satellites to distribute video services, particularly to cable companies, a thriving business, said Mowry, a former director of the Satellite Industry Association. Today the company has more than two dozen satellites around the world providing full-time television program distribution, direct-to-home television services, special events coverage, business communications networks and Internet access. Its value was set earlier this year at $3.1 billion, the price that Rupert Murdoch’s DirecTV got for PanAmSat in a sale to the private-equity companies Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. LP (KKR), Carlyle Group and Providence Equity Partners Inc.

Getting there was not easy. It required someone with Anselmo’s unflinching self-confidence and willingness to risk all in his fight to upend the status quo. Several industry officials interviewed for this article said Anselmo was one of those entrepreneurs who was willing to mortgage his home — whatever it took -- to keep his company afloat in the early days. “He definitely put his money where his mouth was through the years,” said industry analyst Jimmy Schaeffler, of the Carmel Group.

A Boston native and World War II Marine Corp veteran, Anselmo moved to Mexico after the war, but later returned to the United States to help run the Spanish-language television network Televista and later to co-founded PanAmSat. PanAmSat gained a foothold in the television market by providing satellite services for private commercial communication networks like the ones international conglomerates use to connect far flung manufacturing operations around the globe or to provide data connections between hundreds or thousands of retail outlets and corporate headquarters.

The company launched its first satellite in 1988. A year later it signed on Cable News Network as its first commercial customer. CNN used the company’s PAS-1 satellite, which was located in geostationary orbit above the Atlantic Ocean, for international broadcasting to Latin America. In 1991 PanAmSat announced plans to become a global service provider with the construction and launch of three additional satellites.

But U.S. and most foreign telecommunications regulations prohibited the company from tapping into public telephone networks. In a 1991 interview with Space News, Anselmo decried the fact that Intelsat, a consortium owned by more than 100 governments or heavily regulated, government-controlled telecommunications companies with national monopolies, had so much influence over the rules that governed satellite communications.

“I find it ludicrous that they can make the rules. They decide who can launch an international satellite, how they can operate and how many transponders they can use,” he said. Anselmo broke Intelsat’s monopoly with an audacious style that made him impossible to ignore and ultimately made PanAmSat so successful that Intelsat had no alternative but privatization.

He shoved his way into the gentlemanly, bureaucratic and slow-moving satellite industry and was innovative and relentless in his efforts to force political change. He took out full-page ads in the Wall Street Journal such as one that was an open letter to U.S. President Ronald Reagan urging him to open up the satellite telecommunications market. With the help of a cartoonist identified on the PanAmSat’s Web site as Neal Walker, Anselmo made the company’s mascot, a cartoon dog named Spot, infamous. He took out paid advertisements featuring irreverent Spot urinating on the leg of some politician to whom Anselmo wanted to send a message. The cartoons worked and brought national attention to Anselmo’s fight to break Intelsat’s monopoly. The chain-smoking Anselmo died of lung cancer at the age of 65 just two days before the company’s initial public offering. His legacy was an entire industry -- one he created almost single-handedly.

2. Daniel S. Goldin, Architect of a Faster, Better, Cheaper NASA

Love him or hate him -- and there are legions in both categories -- Dan Goldin dominated the space scene for the 10 years he served as NASA Administrator.

That decade was one of tremendous change as NASA entered a politically driven and often difficult partnership with the Russian space agency at a time of substantial budget cuts. Goldin came to NASA after being recruited by the staff of Vice President Dan Quayle, who headed the White House National Space Council. Goldin replaced retired Navy Vice Adm. Richard Truly, who had clashed with the Space Council.

At the time the agency was planning two large multibillion dollar projects -- the Earth Observing System and what then was known as Space Station Freedom -- as well as considering building more space shuttles. When he took the job, Goldin promised to focus on science value over what he characterized as “spectaculars.”

He canceled a twin of the Cassini spacecraft that was supposed to rendezvous with a comet. He also set about cutting back the agency’s plans for the space station. Unlike Truly, Goldin rejected the idea of building more space shuttles and said he would push for the development of a new space launch vehicle. That program, the X-33, was eventually canceled after NASA and Lockheed Martin had together invested  more than $1 billion in its development.

“People forget that when Dan took over the agency it was at a precipice. There were a lot of questions about its future,” said Courtney Stadd, who was a staffer at the space council when Goldin started and later became NASA chief of staff in the early days of the current Bush administration.

“There was general consensus the agency had become top heavy with too many ‘Battlestar Galactica’ style projects,” Stadd said.

Goldin became synonymous with the effort to build spacecraft more quickly and for less money -- a movement best known as better, faster, cheaper. During his tenure, NASA went from launching a few large satellites per decade to launching several each year.

“Many of the programs that are getting kudos today were initiated by Goldin during his tenure,” Stadd said. “There were some major failures, but they have been transcended by a lot of successes."

Ed Weiler, a 20-year veteran of the Hubble Space Telescope program and space science chief under Goldin, told Space News in 2001 that he was not among the early converts to the faster, better, cheaper mission management philosophy. “Back in the early ‘90s, I was very skeptical of doing a lot of small explorers and things like that and learned my lesson,” he said. “I found out that the science community was even more innovative than I thought.”

Goldin’s transformation of NASA’s unmanned satellite programs is considered one of his big successes; he also has been criticized for not making similar changes to streamline human spaceflight programs, particularly the space station.

“But that job,” said one industry official, “is a difficult challenge and one that remains today.” Goldin was many things. He was a visionary who could be decisive, persuasive and charming, particularly one-on-one. He also had a reputation for being mercurial and heavy handed at times. When Lockheed Martin emerged as the only bidder in an effort to consolidate NASA’s ground systems operations across the agency, Goldin insisted that Boeing submit a bid. Boeing, which had determined its chance of winning the contract was slim, relented and submitted a bid. Lockheed won the contract. Goldin also was never shy about criticizing the aerospace industry publicly for things like not spending enough money on independent research and development in areas like rocket propulsion.

That propensity ruffled a lot of feathers but also earned him praise for his willingness to challenge the status quo. A former agency employee said one of Goldin’s biggest failings in 10 years was not developing a cadre of new leaders in NASA who embraced the need to change the agency and make it more efficient. “He often was a one-man show and he failed to institutionalize the kind of changes that were needed to put a sustained cultural reform in place and develop a recruitment strategy that grew talent from within -- particularly in the spaceflight area. He failed to develop a legacy so that there was enough depth in the bench.”

Next page: The Top Ten Continued