posted 06-15-2025 05:54 PM               

From his self-prepared obituary:

In 1961, he responded when the National Space Club announced a national historical essay competition on the exploration and uses of outer space. Early the next year Hall received word that he had won the first Robert F. Goddard Historical Essay Award, National Space Club, for 1962. He repeated this accomplishment with another National Space Club Goddard historical essay award in 1963.

When in the fall of 1966 Hall graduated from the California State University at San Jose, he applied as a public historian, researching and writing histories for NASA at the California Institute of Technology's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), then responsible for national space exploration at lunar distances and beyond in the solar system.

In early 1967, Hall joined the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, as its historian. There he researched and wrote a history of NASA's first successful lunar probe, "Lunar Impact: A History of Project Ranger," published by NASA in 1976.

Upon completing the Ranger history, Hall joined the Air Force History and Museums Program as an historian at Headquarters Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Nebraska, where he contributed weapon system acquisition studies and portions of the classified annual command histories (1977-1980). He subsequently served as Deputy Command Historian at Headquarters Military Airlift Command (MAC) in Illinois (1980-81), and then as Chief of the Research Division and (concurrently) Deputy Director of the Air Force Historical Research Agency (the service archive) at Air University in Montgomery, Alabama (1981-1989).

posted 06-16-2025 02:58 PM               

Selected in 1998 as Chief Historian of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), an intelligence arm of the Department of Defense that acquires and operates the nation’s reconnaissance satellites, Hall researched and wrote classified histories of these programs until he retired in 2003. He subsequently worked for a contractor at the NRO declassifying 25-year-old reconnaissance records until his ultimate retirement in 2008.