Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir by Don Eyles

Author:Don Eyles
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780986385919
Publisher: Fort Point Press
Published: 2018-12-11T06:00:00+00:00

PINPOINT LANDING

I was promoted to Principal Engineer. I thought that sounded very nice. My salary was up to almost $900 a month. My rent in Lime Street was $180. I picked up a hitchhiker near Harvard Square who told me she planned to go to a rock festival in Woodstock, New York.

Less than a week after Apollo 11 splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, George Cherry, Allan Klumpp, Nick Pippenger and I travelled to Houston for a meeting of the Data Priority Panel. For Apollo 12 Pete Conrad and his crew had been given an ambitious goal, a pinpoint landing at a predetermined spot. We were there to help figure out how to accomplish that. The mission was slated for the middle of November. We had to release the new version of LUMINARY in August. If software changes were needed, as they surely were, we would have to work fast.

The Data Priority Panel was chaired by Bill Tindall. The name, inherited from a panel Tindall had led during the Gemini program, was misinformational, like the dingy doorway that leads to the hippest downtown club. The panel’s real business was mission techniques: to determine, once a goal was set, how each mission would be flown. Tindall’s network gained more and more influence as missions began to be flown, almost eclipsing Chris Kraft’s Software Control Board as the place where software changes were hatched and, for all practical purposes, approved. Tindall sat below Kraft in the hierarchy, but he also had a direct connection to the Apollo Program Manager, George Low.

The other key to Tindall’s effectiveness was his personality: lucid, affable, unselfish. Astronauts and flight controllers did not necessarily make it to every meeting they were invited to, but they came to the Data Priority Panel, along with the engineers, and so it became the natural place to discuss and decide operational issues. People came because it was fun — or rather, people who thought operational planning was fun, came. The right people were in the room and they could see progress being made.

Malcolm Johnston found his calling as our regular representative at these meetings. “Carrying Bill Tindall’s bags was the best thing I ever did,” Johnston says. Johnston was the perfect kibitzer, technically savvy, with a masculine old-school manner that inspired confidence in the astronauts with whom he developed relationships. He was careful not to give off-the-cuff answers. His method was to bring questions back to Cambridge, consult around, and return with answers that everybody trusted. Sometimes the answer might be, “No, you can’t do that.” But we hated to say no, so very likely, at the same time Johnston was reporting back, we were bubbling with ideas about how to add the capability.

Tindall’s meetings were important — something like them had to exist if we were to be successful — but his memos were famous. We dubbed them “Tindallgrams” and they even had a distinctive look, using stationery that included an exhortation to

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