Word: apollos
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Ever since, Low has been working six-day weeks of up to 16 hours a day. The Apollo command module, with all its 2,000,000 parts, was torn apart, reexamined, and extensively redesigned at a cost of $75 million, an operation that set back Apollo's timetable by many months...
AMONG the thousands of groundlings who worked to make Apollo 8 a success, the person most responsible for the flight was a Vienna-born engineer named George Low, who is little known outside the NASA community. Low's title is that of manager of the Apollo spacecraft program, and as such he was in charge of making certain that all the essential hardware, from the spaceship structure down to the smallest switch and relay, was in working order. But Low's role in the Apollo program goes far beyond that: other, higher-ranking officials in NASA agree that...
...that time, Apollo was a hazy project, with some sort of circumlunar flight scheduled for some time in the unforeseeable future. In October 1960, Low made the first official proposal that Apollo's aim should be to land Americans on the moon. As NASA's Washington-based chief of manned-space-flight programming, Low wrote: "It has become increasingly apparent that a preliminary program for manned lunar landings should be formulated. This is necessary to provide a proper justification for Apollo...
...moved to Houston as deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center. That was his position when, in January 1967, Astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Edward White died during a ground test of an Apollo vehicle...
That disaster virtually brought the Apollo program to a halt and threw NASA into chaos. What was needed was a man who could restore order within the program, and Low was the choice. In April 1967, while preparing for takeoff from Washington National Airport in a small NASA Gulfstream turboprop, he was hustled off the airplane and into a nearby office. Recalls Low: "Everybody in the line of command above me in NASA seemed to be there. They asked me to take over management of Apollo. I probably would have liked some time to think about it, but since anyone...