Robert M. Bowman (born 1934) was the former Director of Advanced Space Programs Development for the US Air Force in the Ford and Carter administrations, and a former United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel with 101 combat missions. He holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Nuclear Engineering from the California Institute of Technology. Despite his involvement with space programs and defense, he emerged as an early public critic of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, also aka "Star Wars") during the Ronald Reagan administration. On The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour, he called it "the ultimate military lunacy, easily overwhelmed and vulnerable".[3] Bowman founded the Institute for Space and Security Studies, and its publication Space & Security News (1983) (ISSN 1071-2569), and authored two books on the subject of SDI. He is also a critic of an outgrowth of the SDI program, the Bush administration’s proposed National Missile Defense.[4] For several years he has been active with Veterans for Peace and Vietnam Veterans Against the War as a speaker.[5][6][7] He had also been a member of the Peace Commission of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington.[8] In 1998, Project Censored cited Bowman's article "Our Continuing War Against Iraq," in the May 1998 issue of Space and Security News as one of the few (along with Bill Blum of the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Dennis Bernstein) covering what they deemed the fifth most censored story, "US Weapons of Mass Destruction Linked to the ...