began his professional career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joining the MIT Radiation Laboratory in 1942 and working on microwave radar development. He became an associate member of the laboratory's steering committee, and led "Project Cadillac", which developed the forerunner of the AWAC system. At the end of World War II, he worked briefly at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, then returned to MIT as a professor of electrical engineering, and worked from 1946 to 1961 at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT (RLE), ultimately becoming the director. Kennedy administration President John F. Kennedy named Wiesner to chair the President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) in February, 1961. Space program Before Kennedy took office, Wiesner chaired a task force which issued a report to the President-elect on January 10, 1961, warning of "inadequate planning and direction" and "the lack of outstanding scientists and engineers" in its space efforts, and expressing his opposition to manned space flight, saying that Project Mercury "exaggerated the value of that aspect of space activity where we are less likely to achieve success. We should stop advertising Mercury as our major objective in space activities." The Wiesner Report, as it was called, outlined to Kennedy Wiesner's advice to not continue with the manned space program, Project Mercury. The President's Science Advisory Committee highlighted the skepticism of the scientific elite about sending humans into space. Wiesner was not concerned with the political aspects that others in Kennedy's administration were. Wiesner believed that the space program would continue making scientific advancements even without man. Also, he highlighted the disaster that would come out of a failure to place a man into orbit or causing the death of an astronaut, saying it "would create a situation of serious national embarrassment". These two points were among the many reasons Wiesner did not want to send man into space. When NASA decided in June 1962 on Lunar Orbit Rendezvous as the strategy for its Apollo program to meet Kennedy's goal of landing men on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, Wiesner had created a Space Vehicle Panel, chaired by Nicolas Golovin, to monitor and second-guess NASA. The SVP forced NASA to defend its decision to develop the Saturn V launch vehicle and a Lunar Excursion Module, delaying its announcement news conference to July 11, and causing NASA Administrator James E. Webb to hedge by calling the decision tentative,