12
Legacy
Jerry Bostick was working late, as always.
When there was a flight to be flown or a sim to be simmed, the MOCR was almost always the best place to find Bostick or any of the others who showed that same kind of single-minded focus and dedication to their job. There was a television station over in Nassau Bay that carried a live television feed from the MOCR during flights, and one night, his son Michael spotted him. The young man promptly informed his mom Linda that there would be no need to fix Bostick a plate for dinner—he had seen his dad eating a hot dog at his console. It was not the first time, and it would not be the last, that Bostick had grabbed something quick to eat, nutritious or not, tasty or not, and gone right back to work in the Trench.
Bostick had a life before 20 July 1969, and he had another afterward. That was the way he gauged events for decades, even well into his seventies, by whether they took place before or after Neil and Buzz landed on the moon.
As proud as he was of his country for putting together such an ambitious program and seeing it through to fruition, as proud as he was of his and his friends’ roles, he had all but missed the 1960s. Eight full years of his life had been dedicated to this vision, and it was, he said, to the detriment of his family. The hot dog incident was not an isolated one, and he had missed events bigger than just a meal. He was in the MOCR when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders read the Genesis story, and while it was one of the most memorable moments of his life, the fact remained that he was not with Linda, Michael, and daughter Kristi on Christmas Eve that year.
Apollo 11 represented a peak in both his career and his life. President Kennedy’s deadline had been met with room to spare, the impossible achieved, but a troubling thought kept nagging at him. Jerry Bostick was barely a month past his thirtieth birthday, and now that he had reached the mountaintop, the only direction he could possibly go was downward. The questions piled up, one on top of another.
What is next? What do we do for an encore? What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life? Am I going to be content working here in the MOCR?
Work was not going to suffer, because Bostick could not begin to imagine giving it anything less than his very best. Still, his life was changing. He had sported a crew cut for as long as he could remember, but he began to let his hair grow long and even went so far as to give a mustache and beard a try. He wore “hippie” clothes—bell-bottom pants, paisley shirts, and wide, white belts. He got himself the 1968 Corvette he had always wanted, not that it worked all that well.
The biggest change was the most painful of all. In 1972 Bostick moved out of his house and into an apartment near the Houston space center. “It makes no sense now and it didn’t help anything then,” Bostick wrote in an unpublished manuscript. “Mike and Kristi visited me there, but I deeply missed being with them at home. The hardest part was spending Christmas alone. I didn’t know what the answer was, but being separated from Linda and the kids wasn’t it.”
Terry Watson was at a similar professional crossroads. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was over, and NASA was not going to be flying for several more years. He did not particularly care for the weather in Houston, so he turned in his resignation. He traveled around the country, visiting family and friends and unwinding. “After working in mission control and after working the Apollo program, especially right out of college, it’s a real hard act to follow,” Watson admitted. “There were a number of years of soul searching of what do you do in life? What’s meaningful?”
Watson helped a buddy in California with his automotive business. He went back to Texas for a bit, then hit the East Coast. He got the opportunity to take care of a sailboat in the Bahamas for a few months, sailing it down from Annapolis, Maryland, and back again. Freelance photography? He did that, too. He landed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, transferred to Goddard for a few months, went back to southern California, and eventually landed a job at TRW.
As it was for Jerry Bostick, Apollo 11 was also a turning point for Bob Carlton. Up until then, it was nothing unusual, nothing out of the ordinary at all for him to be at the Mission Control Center as late as midnight or 1 a.m. He came home dog tired, got four or five hours of sleep, and then trudged back out the door to start the routine all over again.
He saw daughters Deborah, Pamela, and Mary Ellen for maybe thirty minutes over breakfast, and that was it. It was only after he gave up his spot at the control console after Apollo 11 that Carlton’s tensions eased. He fully understood and appreciated being able to play a part in one of the most stunning achievements his country ever accomplished, but it came with a price. “It robbed them of their father for several years,” said Carlton, his voice somber. “If I had it to do over again, I’d never do it. The impact to my family, as far as I’m concerned, was just not worth it. My children lost their daddy for the key part of their life growing up.” His wife, Bettye Jo, “hung in there” with him, and they remained married until her passing in 2004.
As difficult as it must have been for Carlton to think that he had not been a good father to his children, middle daughter Pamela Womack insisted that her childhood was not nearly as harsh as her father seemed to think it was. She was hurtling headlong into her teen years by the time the late 1960s rolled around, as self-absorbed as anybody might be during that sometimes turbulent phase in life.
Her dad was spending a lot of time at work, and there were times when it was difficult to dial down that intensity once he did make it back home. More than once, he startled his girls’ friends when they called by snatching up the phone and barking, “Go!” He was, to put it lightly, tightly strung. Pamela came to understand that it was a phase just like her own adolescence, and it lasted only about three years as the march continued to Tranquility Base.
She was admittedly “clueless” about what Carlton was doing—lots of kids had fathers who were involved in the space program, and the astronauts were just guys that Carlton happened to talk about on a first-name basis. The flights were always on television, at least the early ones, so that was really no big deal, either.
Ho hum, another mission.
Pamela visited the National Air and Space Museum in her mid- to late twenties, and it was then that what Carlton had helped accomplish finally sank in. The sacrifice of the three years when her father was either gone from home, or cranky when he was there, turned out to be worth it. “During all the years before and after, he was a model and devoted dad who took us places and did things with us and generally put a lot of himself into maintaining a quality relationship,” said Womack, a professor in the Lone Star College System in Texas. “I understood that it was just situational and was not emotionally scarred by it.” Of course, Pamela added, she was her dad’s favorite. But do not mention anything to her sisters, she cautioned, because Deborah and Mary Ellen were each under the “illusion” that they were his favorites.
Carlton and Merlin Merritt both exercised their faith in various ways during their post-NASA careers. Carlton researched and wrote an absolutely massive book of more than seven hundred pages titled The Entire Endtime Sequence as Foretold by Jesus Christ. Merritt, on the other hand, taught Christian education and math courses at Baptist University of the Americas in San Antonio for nearly a decade. He had seen several things take place during the flight of Apollo 13 that he simply could not ascribe to coincidence. “There were things like a hurricane over the landing area that just miraculously moved out of the way, that even the weather people couldn’t explain,” Merritt said. “The ability for us to prolong the electrical power in the Lunar Module batteries and the oxygen supply was miraculous.”
Some MOCR marriages crumbled, but plenty were able to withstand the rigors of NASA’s heyday. Chris and Betty Anne Kraft; Glynn and Marilyn Lunney; Gene and Marta Kranz; Milt and Betty Windler; Gerry and Sandy Griffin; Arnie and Ellie Aldrich; John and Cheryl Aaron all stayed the course, and the list could go on. Rod Loe searched for just the right words to describe what it had meant to him to have had the support of wife Tina for more than half a century of marriage. She and the other MOCR wives were “a special brand of ladies” who held down the fort at home while their husbands were off doing the “man on the moon” thing.
It was a fact that had not been lost on MSC director Bob Gilruth, who sent out tokens of NASA’s appreciation to several spouses a few weeks after the Apollo 11 landing. Tina Loe received one of the packages. Its contents were framed and hung on the wall of their Houston-area home, where they remained for more than forty-five years. There was plenty of NASA “crap” on the walls of their game room, but this was something different, something special. Dated 14 August 1969, Gilruth’s brief note was eloquent in its sincerity.
The successful landing of man on the moon and his safe return to Earth is truly one of the most historic accomplishments of this decade. I am sure you are justifiably proud of the part your husband played in this great national achievement. I am well aware of the personal contributions which the families of our team have made. With this in mind, I am enclosing a memento of the lunar landing which I wanted you to have. Please accept my thanks for the magnificent support that you, other wives, and families have given our Apollo program.
The letter was accompanied by a replica of the plaque that was attached to the front leg of Eagle’s descent stage, and read by Armstrong during the EVA.
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.
Another note, this one addressed to Loe, meant every bit as much to the former EECOM. His son Greg wrote a brief article for JSC’s The Space Center Roundup for Apollo 11’s twentieth anniversary, and not knowing if it would get printed or not, shared a copy with his father. Greg remembered the two of them spending time together, often at the Singin’ Wheel, and learning for hours on end how to play shuffleboard with his dad’s coworkers. He was one of them, Greg said, a member of the “Inner Circle.”
That, though, was not the focus of the younger Loe’s story. One day in May 1969, the two of them went in search of Mother’s Day flowers for Tina. There was a florist near MSC, and as they approached the entrance, they met a gentleman who was coming out of the building. When Loe introduced his six-year-old son to the man, he shook hands with Greg and chatted for a few moments. When the man left, Loe knelt down next to his son and spoke.
Do you know who that is? That is Neil Armstrong. We’re going to make him the first man on the moon.
Greg was forever changed. He had met many of his father’s friends from work, and some of them had probably been astronauts. Armstrong was the first to register. “At that moment, I was no longer a six-year-old child,” Greg wrote. “I was a six-year-old dreamer. No longer would I look into the sky and see only a sunny day or clouds and rain. From then on, I would look into the sky and see great men in great machines going where no one had gone before. Men doing things other men had never even tried.” After the Star Trek reference, Greg continued, “But most of all, in the sky I saw the men who made it happen. The men who created the machines. The men who launched them. The men who put others up there and brought them back safely every time.”
The very next line was the best one of all for Loe.
For the first time, I saw my father.
“Greg remembered all that, and put all this into a letter,” said Loe, choking back the emotion. “He said, ‘I knew right then what I wanted to do. I wanted to follow in their footsteps.’ That meant a lot. That was a neat letter to get.”
There is no way to fully describe how completely dreadful the 1974 made-for-television movie Houston, We’ve Got a Problem turned out to be.
The script was written by Dick Nelson, who also penned episodes of Dynasty, CHiPs, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Barnaby Jones, and Murder, She Wrote, and directed by Lawrence Doheny, who went on helm shows like Magnum, P.I., Charlie’s Angels, Baa Baa Black Sheep, The Rockford Files, Adam-12, and The Six Million Dollar Man. The best that could be said about the movie was that it was apparently made with the full cooperation of NASA and Johnson Space Center. Scenes were filmed in the MCC hallways and control room and actual audio from the mission was used throughout, Tom Stafford had a line or two during a simulator scene, public affairs officer Robert T. White portrayed himself, and a handful of real-life controllers like Bob Heselmeyer were used as extras. That was where any semblance of realism began and ended. Stafford was lucky that only the top of his head was shown during his brief appearance, but stars Robert Culp, Gary Collins, and Sandra Dee were not as fortunate. Each stumbled through what surely was the low point of their respective careers.
This was the very worst soap opera imaginable. A FIDO tried to cope with his difficult, possibly unfaithful, and ultimately suicidal wife. She managed to make a miraculous recovery after swallowing a bottle of pills, was present in the viewing room for the landing, and afterward walked off arm in arm with her husband. The father of a Jewish EECOM passed away during the flight, and the son skipped the funeral despite his rabbi brother laying the mother of all guilt trips on him in the MCC lobby. Another controller missed a custody hearing, but only after berating his son on the phone for crying. Topping it all off was the underlying story of retro officer Steve Bell and his concerned spouse Lisa, portrayed by Culp and one-time real-life wife Sheila Sullivan. Bell had a heart attack a year before Apollo 13 and had to figure out a way to get through the stress of the flight without keeling over.
At one point, Lisa asked what was going to happen to the families of the crew and to her if the crew did not make it home alive. They were sitting on a couch in their den, comfy and cozy in their pajamas.
How about a punch in the mouth?
As opposed to a dead husband, I guess I’ll take a punch in the mouth.
Moments later, more drama.
Babe, I’m gonna bring these guys home. I am. Because I’m the best retrofire officer that ever came down the damn street.
And then . . .
I can’t cut my next physical, so this is the last go around for me. I’ll ride it all the way down and I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care. That is not as selfish as it sounds.
As the mission neared its conclusion, Bell was in great distress as he read off his calculations for the reentry. With great dramatic flair—or not—the beleaguered retro gave coordinates for the splashdown, exited the MOCR, and suddenly collapsed to the floor in the hallway. The credits rolled with husband and wife holding hands in the hallway, not knowing if he would live or die.
Heselmeyer was one of those who volunteered as an extra, and he came away understandably disappointed by the experience. All the machinations that went into getting the film’s light and sound just so impressed him not in the least. “It was a lot of sitting around and waiting, waiting, and waiting,” Heselmeyer said. “Then you’d do your scene, and you’d sit around and wait some more. It was not my cup of tea. To this day, I view movies differently because of that experience.”
It would not have taken much to improve on the flick—a cast of sock puppets, maybe—but for nearly twenty years, it appeared that Houston, We’ve Got a Problem would be it for Hollywood’s interest in the flight. Thankfully, that was not the case. The documentary Apollo 13: To the Edge and Back debuted on WGBH public television in Boston on 20 July 1994, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, and something even bigger was brewing on the opposite coast of the United States.
Michael Bostick, more than twenty years removed from spotting his dad eating a hot dog on television back in Houston, was by then a vice president at Imagine Entertainment. The space program was literally a part of his DNA, and when he heard that Jim Lovell and coauthor Jeffrey Kluger were in the early stages of putting a book together on the flight, it piqued his curiosity.
The book Lost Moon was not even a book yet, just a ten-page outline, but that did not stop Michael Bostick from bringing it to the attention of Imagine Entertainment cofounder Brian Grazer. Michael filled in the blanks for director Ron Howard, and the deal to obtain the movie rights was closed with a conference call that ended at about 1 a.m. in New York, where Howard was in the process of setting up production for his next movie, The Paper.
Jerry Bostick was at best skeptical. He thought of other space-themed projects like Marooned and cringed. When he went to see that one way back when, he had gotten up and left in the middle of it. The plain truth was that Bostick was unsure his own son, Howard, Grazer, or anybody else for that matter could pull it off. When Howard asked him why, Bostick pulled no punches.
I’m a space guy. I don’t like space fiction. I’m just afraid that unless you’re going to make a documentary, you’re going to screw it up.
He came around, convinced by Howard that the movie was going to be both exciting and as accurate as possible. It did not hurt that the one-time child actor also thought that Marooned was a terrible movie, or that to make sure of the minutiae, Bostick, Gerry Griffin, and Dave Scott would be hired as technical consultants.
Just as it had for the television movie two decades before, NASA offered use of the actual MOCR for filming. To get the kind of shots he wanted to get, not to mention going to the expense of moving a film crew and equipment to Houston for a month or so, Howard and Grazer knew that it would be impossible to take the agency up on its offer. Instead, production designer Michael Corenblith built a nearly identical replica of the room on Stage 27 at Universal Studios. It was one of the largest stages in town, and had most recently been used during filming of Jurassic Park.
There were only a handful of minor differences between the Hollywood version and the real thing in Houston—each console now featured a reading light, to help with lighting for close-up shots; to save on weight, the viewing room had six windows instead of three larger ones; and the front left corner of the room came inward an extra inch because of a large overhead beam. Set decorator Merideth Boswell added small touches like duplicates of the Trench’s matchbooks, razor-sharp pencils, ashtrays, and well-worn access badges. “It was overly accurate, I would say,” Bostick began. “It was dimensionally accurate to within an inch. The carpet was an exact match, including coffee stains.” Corenblith had gone so far as to ask Bostick if he had been present the day the viewing-room windows were installed, to see if there might be a way to duplicate its exact three-window setup.
One of the first assignments Howard gave Bostick and Griffin was to teach what he called “Flight Controller’s School” that would last maybe three or four hours. Bostick dreaded the thought, far more than he ever had some tough simulation. Surely, the thirty-six members of the cast who were going to portray him and others in the MOCR were just a bunch of Hollywood prima donnas. They had their script, knew their lines, knew how to act, so what did they need him for?
Michael was there, and so were Howard and Jim Lovell. Instead of three or four hours, the session lasted for a day and a half and it stopped only when Howard insisted they had a movie to make. The questions of the actors were intelligent ones, too.
What’s the difference between a guidance officer and a guidance, navigation, and control officer?
Could a flight controller possibly speak directly to the crew?
Who had the final say in the room?
During Apollo 13, did the controllers ever go home or stay somewhere on campus at MSC?
That was the question that tripped up Griffin.
“I lived just a mile or so out that way,” he said, pointing to a corner of the set. He caught himself, and added, “Actually, I didn’t. Out that way is Los Angeles. I lived in Houston. I’m going to have to keep reminding myself of that.”
Hanks proved his keen interest over and over again. He teased Jerry Bostick about his accent, born from his upbringing in rural Mississippi.
Go, Flight, Bostick would say as he demonstrated conversations on the comm loop.
Go, Flight, Hanks would repeat, drawing it out almost like Forest Gump himself would have.
Once filming began on 15 August 1994, Hanks, Bill Paxton, and Kevin Bacon showed up on set to read their lines for the air-to-ground exchanges. Their own filming had not yet begun. For a scene in which controllers watched the television broadcast from space that immediately preceded the explosion of the oxygen tank, Hanks perched himself atop a nine-foot ladder in front of the screen to read his lines. Although Bostick had sweated bullets before meeting the Academy Award winner, he should not have worried. “I was amazed that all of these actors were so interested in what we had done, and thought it was so great,” Bostick said. “Hanks is a space nut if you ever saw one. He engaged me in these space trivia contests, and finally I just quit, because he would always win. He could name the flight crew for every American and most of the Russian spaceflights, up through the first four shuttle flights, and he could tell you where he was when they launched.”
Released on 30 June 1995, the movie Apollo 13 was a smash hit. Earning more than $355 million worldwide, the blockbuster won Academy Awards in 1996 for Best Film Editing and Best Sound. Like few things ever before, the movie brought the work of mission control front and center into the public consciousness. It made stars of Gene Kranz, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Sy Liebergot. Kranz had been on duty as flight director when the accident took place, and that, along with his dynamic personality and signature crew cut, made him Howard’s flight director throughout the movie.
As portrayed by actor Ed Harris, Kranz never slept, never ate, and worked almost every shift for the rest of the flight. Glynn Lunney was played by veteran character actor Marc McClure, who appeared in only a handful of scenes. Gerry Griffin and Milt Windler—the flight’s other two “real-life” flight directors—were never mentioned. Howard’s reasoning was simple. He told Griffin and Bostick that with a three-person crew in peril, their families, and a control room full of people, he simply could not have twenty main characters. That was good enough for Griffin and Bostick.
It was Jerry Bostick, in fact, who indirectly came up with the film’s iconic “Failure is not an option” line. During pre-production, he sat down with screenwriters William Broyles Jr. and Al Reinert over lunch to discuss life in the MOCR. When one of them asked, as people almost always asked, if anyone in the room had ever panicked during the mission, Bostick never flinched.
That never happened. When bad things happened, we just as calmly as we could would lay out all of the options and failure was not one of them.
Bostick sensed that Broyles was distracted, bored, maybe, to be talking to a nerd from NASA. It must have been his poker face, because they knew almost immediately that Bostick had given them a gift, wrapping up in a nice, neat bow the MOCR’s attitude from the start of the crisis to its conclusion. “It kind of sums up the collective effort of anonymous people, trying to solve problems and save other people,” Broyles said in a 1999 interview. “To me this was kind of the core of how most of us would like to feel. We’d like to feel that our efforts would add up to something bigger than ourselves, that things we’re doing every day might make a difference, that we’re part of something that matters.”
Ironically, Kranz did not meet Harris during production of the movie. The veteran actor instead went through the extended interviews that the former flight director did for the To the Edge and Back documentary to pick up on his mannerisms, and his efforts led to an Oscar nomination as Best Actor in a Supporting Role. After the movie’s release, Jim Lovell wound up with more speaking engagements than he could possibly ever accommodate and he turned to Kranz for help. Both signed up with a speaking agency in Washington DC, and when Kranz penned his 2000 autobiography Failure Is Not an Option, that led to a pair of documentaries on the History Channel. “Frankly, it really never slowed down for the first three to four years,” Kranz said. “Then, I started speaking to the military and about that time, my book comes out. That boosted it again. This thing has just been a series of events.”
Liebergot was portrayed by Clint Howard, who appeared in many of his director brother’s films. Since the movie’s debut, Liebergot cowrote his own autobiography Apollo EECOM: Journey of a Lifetime and has done extensive speaking and autograph signings around the world. “I try not to get the big head over it,” Liebergot said of his role in the MOCR. “I don’t feel motivated to embellish my career. I’ve never embellished it, and I know people who have done exactly that. It’s exciting enough. I don’t need to be saying things that aren’t true and end up with the disgust of my fellow teammates.”
Four years after being retired from active service, the third-floor control room was once again modified. Only this time, its appearance was changed to resemble what it had looked like during the days of Apollo.
For the people who worked in the room, it was a chance to reconnect with their past. There were times when Gene Kranz walked in and could hear the sounds and the voices, Jay Greene’s maybe, Dick Thorson’s, or Steve Bales’s pumped-up pronouncement during the hectic descent phase of Apollo 11.
Go!
The people who excelled in the room were people like Charley Parker, who were anxious to go to bed at night just so they could get up the next morning and go to work. “I’m very proud of the culture that we established in the room,” Kranz said. “I’m proud of the people who grew to maturity in that room. I’m proud of the people who faced the risks associated with our business and were willing to stand up to it, to make the risk acceptable. I’m proud of the way we handed over to the next generation.”
Ed Fendell could well understand the emotional reaction many have had to visiting the MOCR. It was the same overwhelming sense of history as when he visited the Reichstag in Berlin. Fendell, who is Jewish, cried when he visited the former home of the German parliament and site of Nazi propaganda and military events during World War II.
He walked outside to compose himself, and once he did, started walking again. Walking near the Berlin Wall, he encountered a graveyard for those who had been killed trying to cross over from East to West Germany during those terrible Cold War years. He cried again. Fendell found that same evocative spirit on Ellis Island, where he could point out the manifest, complete with signatures, from when his father’s family came to the United States. In the main hall, he could sense the same kind of ghostly images from the past as Kranz did in the MOCR—every age, every country, every language, every kind of clothing.
It was from that kind of humble beginning that Fendell ventured forth into the MOCR. “I basically was a young man jerking around,” he said in describing his Connecticut childhood. He worked in his father’s “dinky” little corner grocery store. His father had been a bus driver and a trolley car driver prior to that, and they never had a lot of money. The Fendells always had a clean place to live and had enough food, but they were not driving a big car like the family down the street, either. He had no goals, and little to no interest in the classroom. Fendell was not even sure, given the amount of studying that he did, how he ever managed to get even an associate’s degree in merchandising.
How he made it from that point to becoming an important part of the Apollo-era team is one of the MOCR’s great stories. “Somehow, I’m in the middle of this fricking thing, this incredible, historic thing,” Fendell said. “People know who I am. A lot of people, either then or later on, really respect me. To be one of those people is so lucky, so incredibly lucky, it’s unbelievable that it’s me.”
With the passing of time came a bit of philosophical perspective and, yes, maybe even some wisdom. “We all thought we were so shit hot,” Fendell said. “Later on, when I got older and got going, I realized that it wasn’t that we were so shit hot. What it really was, was that we were led and mentored by such an incredible group of guys. It was leaders like Kraft, Kranz, Lunney, and others who made Apollo happen.”
The Apollo astronauts, and the moonwalkers in particular, garnered the lion’s share of fame, if not fortune. The majority of those who worked in the MOCR went on to live in relative anonymity, their exploits a thing of the past. And while John Aaron had been unsure if there was a story to be told about Apollo 13, it was Jerry Bostick’s experience on that Hollywood movie set that convinced him that what he had helped accomplish really did matter after all. Bostick was amazed when autograph requests started showing up from all over the world, an average of maybe one or two a week. He can laugh about talking to young school groups, and having a little girl ask if all the astronauts and flight controllers were as old as he was. Thinking as quickly as he did in the Trench, Bostick grinned.
The ones who are still alive are.
Bostick stepped back in time on a movie set 1,450 miles from Houston, but better yet, he could do so in the real thing once it was restored to its late-1960s, early-’70s appearance. He walked into the room and was almost immediately in awe. Bostick would sit down on that familiar first row and think of things he had not thought of for half a century or so.
Did we really all work in here and do the things that we did?
Am I dreaming this?
John Aaron, Bostick concluded, put it best, as he so often did.
For the first time since the dawn of mankind, Glynn Lunney added, the moon had been entrusted in large part to the MOCR. That made the task in front of him all the more special. “To me, it was a somewhat sacred and noble enterprise,” Lunney said. “I had the sense that we were doing something for the human species that had never, ever been done before. It was actually so big that people shied away from thinking about it. When President Kennedy said we were going to the moon, that was a big shock to everybody. My God, he must be crazy. Eight years later, we did it.”
When he visited the room, Lunney had a sense of visiting a cathedral, a holy place where very special things had happened. It was a feeling Lunney’s generation passed on to the flight controllers of the Space Shuttle era. None of them had more of a respect for the room, or for the people who had worked there, than Milt Heflin.
So many of the old guard had played a crucial role in his career, it was almost hard to keep track of them all. The Space Shuttle was designed to land like an airplane, so following the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project there was no need at NASA for ocean-based recovery forces. Where did that leave Heflin? Enter Rod Loe, who told the Oklahoman to come work for him and learn how to be a Space Shuttle flight controller. Bill Peters and Jack Knight took him under their wing, providing him with the guidance he needed to qualify as a backup flight controller for the shuttle’s 1977 Approach and Landing Tests. Once on that team, it was flight director Don Puddy who built his confidence and moved him into a prime assignment for a portion of the tests.
By then, he really wanted to become a flight controller. He supported Bill Moon from the SSR back room for the first launch of the Space Shuttle, STS-1, on 12 April 1981. More than thirty years later, Heflin could still hear the whining sing-song sound of the strip-chart servos as they recorded the operation of the fuel cells and power systems. Heflin did a good job, and a couple of years later, Moon encouraged him in his efforts to become a flight director.
“You marketed not only your current but your previous work experience in recovery very well,” Gene Kranz wrote in his critique of Heflin’s flight director interview. “This is a very important part of your background that I think has contributed to your overall maturity as an operator and will provide you a good background as a FD.” The coveted role was Heflin’s, one of seven flight directors who were hired in 1983.
26. Just as so many of the Apollo-era legends had served as mentors to him, Milt Heflin played a vital role in the careers of flight directors he helped select. Shown here is the 2005 class that came under Heflin’s tutelage. On the front row are Michael L. Sarafin, Holly E. Ridings, Ginger Kerrick, and Kwatsi L. Alibaruho, while Michael P. Moses, Brian T. Smith, Dana J. Weigel, Robert C. Dempsey, and Richard S. Jones make up the back row. Courtesy NASA.
The going was not always smooth. After serving as flight director for four missions prior to the Challenger accident, boss Tommy Holloway had serious reservations about Heflin’s ability to continue. Rather than cut him loose, the chief of the Flight Director Office told Heflin exactly what he needed to work on and outlined a plan that he had already set up to make sure those improvements happened. Heflin did not wash out, and was the Orbit 1 flight director for STS-53, the last flight flown out of the control room on the third floor. It was one of six missions Heflin worked in that grand space—two as an EECOM and another four as flight director.
In a very real and very significant way, it was people like Heflin who connected the past to the present, the third-floor MOCR to the future of human spaceflight. He stood on the shoulders of legendary flight controllers to make it as a flight director himself, so much so that he became the head of the office. It was Heflin who hired Kwatsi L. Alibaruho, the first African American flight director, in a nine-member 2005 class that also included Michael P. “Mike” Moses, Brian T. Smith, Dana J. Weigel, Robert C. “Bob” Dempsey, Richard S. Jones, Michael L. Sarafin, Holly E. Ridings, and Ginger Kerrick.
The torch Chris Kraft, Glynn Lunney, Gene Kranz, Gerry Griffin, and so many others passed to him was the same one he handed off to his class of flight directors. His predecessors took a dream, developed and nourished it, and the dream was safe with those new hires. There was no Star Trek–like way to instantaneously beam anybody anywhere, and until that kind of transport is developed, it would be up to people like Alibaruho to watch over the spacefarers who rode a controlled explosion into space and a fireball back to Earth. They would need a fire in their bellies, and the arrogance that goes with being able to handle that kind of job.
Best of all, Heflin was close to all the unsung heroes, past and present. He was one of them. To him, it was a priceless gift.