About Rick Houston and Milt Heflin

Rick Houston is a journalist with twenty years of experience and a special interest in spaceflight history. He is the author of Wheels Stop: The Tragedies and Triumphs of the Space Shuttle Program, 1986–2011 (Nebraska, 2013) and Second to None: The History of the NASCAR Busch Series.

Milt Heflin worked for NASA for nearly half a century, including on the prime recovery ships during splashdown and post-landing activities for Apollo 8, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, Apollo 17, each of the three Skylab flights, and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. He later became a flight director who led the mission control team during the flight of STS-61, widely considered one of the most important missions of the entire thirty-year Space Shuttle program. At the time of his retirement, he served as associate director (technical) at Johnson Space Center.