EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009 - 12

M is sio n C o n t r o l technical leanings to North American Aviation (NAA; Downey, Calif.) as a fresh-out engineer. NAA (subsequently sold to Rockwell and then Boeing over the years) was a contractor for military aircraft, and Liebergot’s tenure aligned with the company’s successful prime-contract bids for the CSM and Saturn Stage II rocket. He fed his curiosity by wandering NAA and watching CSM spacecraft under construction, at all stages and with new manufacturing techniques and technologies. After Liebergot moved to Houston as a supporting NAA engineer, his desire to get still closer to the Apollo operations culminated in a decision to join NASA directly as a flight controller. The Mission Operation Control Room position gave him the chance to see the larger technical picture and, ironically, survey the activities of his former backroom support colleagues in Downey. 12 EE Times | Apollo | July 20, 2009 Generally, the MOCR group was a close-knit and cohesive set of young guys (most younger than 30), and the job of getting to the moon kept the work focused and exciting. Local watering holes gave Liebergot and his group the chance to trade practical jokes and barbs about mistakes made in mission operations. By Apollo 8, Liebergot was a trainee on the EECOM console; by Apollo 9, he was flying solo as a member of the rotating-shift teams that manned MOCR full-time. Apollo 8 was “the most exciting” of the Apollo missions for Liebergot, since it marked manned spaceflight’s first circumlunar navigation and thereby proved we could get to the moon and back. From Liebergot’s engineering perspective, the actual moon landing of Apollo 11, while a fantastic accomplishment, was a “natural result of the methodical progress” made by the earlier missions. Liebergot’s EECOM role came squarely into the spotlight by way of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. When the Aquarius’ CSM cryogenic oxygen tank exploded—following an EECOM directive to have the astronauts “stir the cryos”—Liebergot realized that the very electrical and environmental systems he oversaw had been crippled and were well on their way to dead. The EECOM console had reams of system data streaming across a CRT, but ordinarily, by using programmable limit alarms to flag a problem, broad swaths of telemetry could be more readily digested in a single row of console lights. With Apollo 13, however, the problems were so widespread that everything went haywire. Liebergot recalls that “the scope of failure was hard to fathom,” given the collapse of what were supposed to be redundant systems onboard. “It just didn’t seem

EETimes - Apollo - July 20, 2009

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