Melvin Sheldahl Anderson

Williamsburg, Va. – Melvin (Mel) Sheldahl Anderson was born on 12/13/1930 in Des Moines, Iowa and died on 2/10/2025 in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Mel is survived by his wife of 66 years Peggy Anderson (Keiser) and two children Shannon Anderson and Sharon Palmer (Anderson). Mel has six grandchildren, Esther and Melanie Palmer, John and Thomas McIntyre and Sara and Willa Watney. Mel is preceded by his brother Edsel and his children John and Karlin Roberts Anderson.
Mel was raised in Sheldahl, Iowa amongst a large clan of his Swedish-Norwegian immigrant relatives. One of Mel’s formative early jobs was working for his Uncle Martin, picking houses up from their foundations and moving them to new locations. Mel learned many lessons that applied to his engineering career.
He received his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Iowa State expecting to build bridges for a career, but ended up working for NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) and later NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration ).
Mel started working for NACA in 1952 in Langley, Virginia, and stayed at Langley through his career. He worked on a variety of projects for NASA including Mercury, Apollo, Viking, and the Space Shuttle. He was typically involved early in a project, helping to make sure it was structurally stable.
NASA sponsored Mel to pursue higher education and he received his Masters and Doctorate in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech while working at NASA.
NASA also sponsored Mel to pursue research at the University of Wales in Cardiff. In his career, he had the chance to author a number of papers and attend many international conferences including conferences in the USSR, Australia and China. After he retired from NASA, Mel worked at Old Dominion University doing teaching and research.
Mel enjoyed many sports, but his greatest passion was for skiing. He often made sure to get his money’s worth on the slopes by skipping lunch or grabbing something to eat on the lift. Mel skied until he was 87 and in his later years, he did start to take lunch breaks and would even call it a day as early as 2:00.
Asked to name his favorite achievements, Mel mentioned running a marathon, and designing the heat shield for the Viking lander.
His funeral will be at St Mark’s Lutheran Church in Yorktown, Virginia at 1PM on Saturday February 22nd.