PROGRAMS:

COMPANIES:

• NASA

LOCATIONS:

Goddard Space Flight Center, MD; Apollo tracking stations in Australia, Spain and California; and USIA in Paris, France; et. al.

COMMENTS:

During the Apollo Mission, I was named Goddard’s Public Information Officer for NASA’s Manned Space Flight Network (MSFN), which was managed and operated by the Goddard Space Flight Center. The MSFN was the “Electronic Lunar Lifeline” for data and communications between the Mission Controllers at the Manned Space Flight Center in Houston, TX, and the Apollo spacecraft out to the moon and back. I supported Apollo missions at each of the three 85-foot Apollo tracking stations around the globe at Goldstone, California; Madrid, Spain; and Honeysuckle Creek, Australia.

APOLLO-8: Represented NASA’s Office of Public Affairs at the Apollo tracking station at Honeysuckle Creek, located near the country’s capitol city of Canberra, on the northeastern coast of Australia.  One of my most interesting responsibilities was to record and caption still photos from the Apollo-8 TV broadcasts to Earth, to provide global newspapers with still prints for publication. Served a similar function at each of the three 85-foot Apollo tracking stations located equidistant around the globe to maintain 24/7 contact with the Apollo when it was not behind the moon.

I experienced great pride in working with the Australians on what I and many others considered to be the most daring of the Apollo missions. Apollo-8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders were the first to leave the Earth’s gravity to fly a quarter of a million miles to the moon where they placed their faith in the successful firing of a rocket to pull them into the moon’s gravitational field and again to boost them free of the moon’s grip to return to earth safely.

APOLLO-11: Joined NASA’s Apollo news team manning the press desks at Cape Kennedy, FL, for the launch, and at the Manned Space Flight Center in Houston, TX, for the duration of the lunar mission. As historic and exciting as were the first human steps on the moon by Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin during Apollo-11, the most memorable event of this mission for me was the lunar landing. So critical and suspenseful were the final minutes of the lunar landing by the “Eagle,” that I confess to have silently feared the loss of two brave astronauts and the possible end of NASA’s lunar landing program.

Controlled by computer, “the Eagle” had overflown its designated landing site and was headed for a football field-sized crater situated amid a field of huge boulders. At the last minute, some 500 hundred feet above the lunar surface, Armstrong took manual control of the Eagle and flew it beyond its original landing site. 

“60 SECONDS,” Mission Control informed  Armstrong and Aldrin about the Eagle’s remaining fuel when it was 75 feet above the lunar surface as Armstrong guided the lander over the crater. 

“THIRTY FEET …. FAINT SHADOW,” reported Aldrin, reading out messages from Mission Control as Armstrong concentrated on finding a safe location to land.

“30 SECONDS,” Mission Control reported when the lander was 25 feet from the surface. 

Although I couldn’t know it at that moment, Gene Kranz, the Apollo-11 flight director in Mission Control two floors up crossed himself and uttered a prayer of “PLEASE GOD” when Armstrong and Aldrin were too busy to reply during the final minute of landing. (I learned of this prayer later when I read “First Man, the Life of Neil A. Armstrong. The Essential Biography,” authored by James R. Hansen in 2005.)

Gene Krantz  told Hansen that “YOU COULD HEAR A PIN DROP” when describing how everyone at the Mission Control consoles swallowed hard, straining to hear what would come next, the Eagle’s landing report or the next fuel read out.

Silence ….

“WE COPY YOU DOWN, EAGLE,” transmitted Charles Duke, the NASA astronaut  serving as the Apollo-11 communicator in Mission Control.

No immediate answer ……. then ……. 

“HOUSTON, TRANQUILITY BASE HERE. THE EAGLE HAS LANDED.” Armstrong reported from the “Sea of Tranquility.” The Apollo-11 lander was five miles beyond its original programmed landing site, settled on the lunar surface.

“ROGER, TRANQUILITY BASE. WE COPY YOU ON THE GROUND. YOU’VE GOT A BUNCH OF GUYS ABOUT TO TURN BLUE. WE’RE BREATHING AGAIN. THANKS A LOT,” replied Mission Control. 

Nine and a half minutes after landing, Armstrong finally found time to describe the extended landing: “HEY HOUSTON, THAT MAY HAVE SEEMED LIKE A LONG FINAL PHASE. THE AUTO-TARGETING  WAS TAKING US RIGHT INTO A FOOTBALL-SIZD CRATER WITH A VERY LARGE NUMBER OF BIG BOULDERS … AND IT REQUIRED FLYING MANUALLY OVER THE ROCK FIELD TO FIND A REASONABLY GOOD LANDING) AREA.”

While so many of us back on Earth literally held our breath during the final phase of the landing, Neil Armstrong apparently wasn’t too concerned, according to James Hansen’s subsequent interview of Armstrong: “….. It looked to me like everything was manageable. ….. I Knew we were getting short; I knew we had to get it on the ground, and I knew we to get it below fifty feet. But I wasn’t panic-stricken about the fuel.”

Armstrong explained that it didn’t really matter once they got close enough to the lunar surface: “We wouldn’t have lost our attitude control if we had run out of fuel. The engine would have quit, but from the distance (height) we were at, we would have settled to the ground safely enough.”

When Armstrong finally made preparations to exit the lander, we NASA personnel and reporters alike quickly abandoned the press desk to gather in a nearby conference room equipped with a large-screen TV. There, we joined the global audience of hundreds of millions viewing the first two humans set foot on the Moon via a live television transmission from the lander.

APOLLO-12: When the U. S. Information Agency requested a NASA representative to help out with the media response in Europe later that year, I flew to Paris, France, to help out. Difficult duty, but someone had to do it.

RETIREMENT OF THE MSFN CALIBRATION AIRCRAFT: During the early years of the Apollo missions, Goddard used EC-121 Constellation aircraft to train and drill operators of the Apollo tracking stations. Becaue they were propellar-driven, these aircraft could fly over the ground stations to simulate the passing of an Apollo spacecraft in orbit. Technicians seated in three instrumented positions on the aircraft represented the Apollo astronauts where they simulate unexpected emergencies or drills to train the tracking station operators.

By early 1969 when these so-called “Cal Planes” were not no longer needed, NASA decided to begin retiring them.  One of them was the  “Bataan,” formerly the personal aircraft of General Douglas R. MacArthur of World War Two and the Korean War fame. We decided to film its last calibration mission, and I flew aboard it with a cameraman to the Apollo tracking station in Madrid. Today, the “Bataan,” restored to its original condition when it served General MacArthur, is displayed in the “Planes of Fame Museum” at the U. S. Army Air Museum, Fort Rucker, Alabama. I like to think that our PR effort for the “Bataan’s” last mission had something to do with its rescue from the graveyard of the other Cal Planes.

VANGUARD APOLLO TRACKING  SHIP: In another cost-cutting move after the Apollo-11 mission, NASA retired all but one of the MSFN’s four Apollo Tracking Ships, which augmented the Apollo ground stations in California, Australia and Spain. This left the USNS VANGUARD as the single tracking ship to support the remaining Apollo missions.

In April of 1970, the VANGUARD became temporarily unemployed for nine months between Apollo-13’s near-disaster and the launch of Apollo-14 in January of 1971. NASA put this Apollo Tracking ship to good use verifying an 80-foot depression in the ocean surface above the five-mile deep Puerto Rico Trench. Dor days on end, the VANGUARD sailed over the depression, all the while tracking Goddard’s GEOS-2 geodetic satellite orbiting the earth. The goal was to establish an accurae baseline for a high-flying saellie altimeter   subsequently used in a successor geodetic satellite.

I learned a hard lesson about how much value reporters overseas place on their holidays when I scheduled a press conference aboard the VANGUARD docked in San Juan, Puerto Rico on July 4 of 1970. The reporters for the Associated Press and the United Press International were not at all happy with me… and their stories showed it. Fortunately, neither story reached mainland USA because I had placed the story with the “Evening Star” for publication July 4, 1970, before I flew to San Juan, jus as a precaution.