Stewart David Nozette (born May 20, 1957) is an American planetary scientist, technologist, and consultant who worked for the United States Department of Energy, the United States Department of Defense, DARPA, the United States Naval Research Laboratory, and NASA. He is also a convicted felon for attempted espionage and fraud against the United States. The FBI arrested him on October 19, 2009, charging him with attempted espionage after a sting operation which Nozette's lawyer claims amounted to entrapment. At trial, Nozette admitted attempting to sell U.S. classified information to someone he believed was an Israeli Mossad operative, but was in reality an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation employee. He pleaded guilty to one charge of attempted espionage and was sentenced, under the terms of a plea bargain, to thirteen years in prison. After serving time at the Federal Correctional Institution, Terre Haute, Nozette was released on November 13, 2020.
Personal life and education Nozette was born in Chicago, Illinois, on May 20, 1957, to Helen and Morris Nozette. He grew up in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood and earned a B.S. in geosciences with honors and distinction (University of Arizona, 1979), and a Ph.D. in Planetary sciences (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983). He worked a couple of summers in the 1970's as a guide-lecturer at the Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago) while he was home from the University of Arizona.
Career In 1983-1984 Nozette was co-director of the California Space Institute, affiliated with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. From there he went to the University of Texas as an Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering Austin, Texas. In the early 1990s, Nozette, as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative's 'Brilliant Pebbles', conceived the idea (and then led the mission) of the Clementine spacecraft as a means to both provide a test bed for the development of lighter, more cost effective advanced space technology, as well as to obtain data for the Moon. Nozette and colleagues' bistatic radar results from Clementine claimed to support the discovery of water on the south pole of the Moon. Although the significance of the result was questioned, measurements made by subsequent Lunar missions have supported the hypothesis that the Moon holds substantially greater reserves of water than had been thought based on Apollo program results and confirmed Nozette's original findings. The engineering model of the Clementine spacecraft, which Nozette worked on, hangs in the Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC. Over the course of his career, Nozette held high level security clearances and worked on sensitive United States nuclear and satellite programs. He held a Q clearance, top secret clearance, and was read into multiple special access programs. He held Top Secret security clearances to study nuclear material with the United States Department of Energy, and was on the National Space Council under President George H. W. Bush. From 1989 to 2006, Nozette held a security clearance as high as top secret and handled documents relating to national security. He left the employ of the U.S. government in 2006. Nozette worked as a technical consultant for Israel Aerospace Industries between 1998 and 2008. After he left the government job, Nozette was heavily involved in India's extraterrestrial Moon probe, Chandrayaan-1. He was a principal investigator of the Mini-RF instrument on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and a co-investigator on Chandrayaan-1. Nozette was also the president, treasurer and director of the Alliance for Competitive Technology (ACT), a non-profit organization that he organized in March 1990. In 2006 ACT acted for Mississippi State University in bringing together MSU and British microsatellite manufacturer SSTL to form Infinisat as part of a $20m earmark in the FY05 and 06 NASA budget for NASA Stennis Space Centre courtesy of Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran. ACT was also involved with the $40m earmark in the same budget, courtesy of Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, for MSFC’s lander programme.
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