Peter Henry Broussard Jr. was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on July 24, 1927. He attended Louisiana State University and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics and a master’s in mathematics. He then served in the U.S Navy and Army during both Second World War and Korean War. In 1952, he started work at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico as a missile analyst for ground to air missiles being tested at the range. In July 1960, he started working at Marshall Space Flight Center, where he worked on projects like the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV) for Apollo 15 and the Apollo Telescope Mount for Skylab.

Peter Broussard started working on the Lunar Roving Vehicle in the fall of 1969, when he was assigned to serve as SEB on the development of a navigation system for the LRV. After the first successful use of the LRV during Apollo 15, Broussard and his team were asked to investigate the possibility of remote controlling the LRV from Earth so that NASA could use the LRV after the astronauts had left the moon.

In the 1970s, Broussard work on several different projects for NASA. Starting around 1974 to the early 1980s, Broussard lent his technical know-how to the US Bureau of Mines in automating mining equipment. In the late 1970s, he also served as the Chief Engineer for the first couple months into NASA’s development of a tethered satellite system. After retiring from NASA in December 1989, Broussard taught mathematics and statistics at Alabama A & M and Calhoun Community College for 16 years. In 1990, he took part in an oral interview about the NASA space program with Dr. Stephen Warring. In 2006, Broussard donated his NASA-related documents to the UAH Special Collections. He died on May 26, 2014.