sciences and technology, Liddle is a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art in London, England. His education includes a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Toledo. Board of directors As of 2014 the B612 Foundation's board includes Geoffrey Baehr (formerly with Sun Microsystems and U.S. Venture Partners), plus Doctors Chapman, Piet Hut, Ed Lu (also CEO, see Leadership, above), David Liddle (Chair, see Leadership, above), and Dan Durda, a planetary scientist. Rusty Schweickart, co-founder and Chair Emeritus Russell Louis "Rusty" Schweickart (b. October 25, 1935) is a co-founder of the B612 Foundation and chair emeritus of its board of directors. He is also a former U.S. Apollo astronaut, research scientist, Air Force pilot, plus business and government executive. Schweickart, chosen in NASA's third astronaut group, is best known as the lunar module pilot on the Apollo 9 mission, the spacecraft's first manned flight test on which he performed the first in-space test of the portable life support system used by the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon. Prior to joining NASA, Schweickart was a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Experimental Astronomy Laboratory, where he researched upper atmospheric physics and became an expert in star tracking and the stabilization of stellar images, a crucial requirement for space navigation. Schweickart's education includes a B.Sc. in aeronautical engineering and an M.Sc. in Aeronautics–Astronautics, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 1956 and 1963 respectively. His Master's thesis was on the validation of "theoretical models of stratospheric radiance". After serving as the backup commander of NASA's first manned Skylab mission (the United States' first space station), he later became Director of User Affairs in their Office of Applications. Schweickart left NASA in 1977 to serve for two years as California governor Jerry Brown's assistant for science and technology, and was then appointed by Brown to California's Energy Commission for five and a half years. Schweickart co-founded the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) with other astronauts in 1984–85 and chaired the ASE's NEO Committee, producing a benchmark report, Asteroid Threats: A Call for Global Response, and submitting it to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS). He then co-chaired, along with astronaut Dr. Tom Jones, NASA's Advisory Council's Task Force on Planetary Defense. In 2002 he