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  • Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 by Rick Houston and Milt Heflin
  • Jennifer Ross-Nazzal
Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992. By Rick Houston and Milt Heflin. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015. 368 pages. Hardcover, $36.95.

A tour of the third floor Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) with former flight director Milt Heflin inspired Rick Houston to research and coauthor Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965-1992 with his guide. The MOCR—designated a National Historic Landmark in 1985 for its association with and role in Apollo 11, the first lunar landing—managed and supported many of the historic human space flight missions from 1965 to 1992; NASA preserved this room in an Apollo-era configuration. The MOCR's flight controllers, who had to make mission-critical decisions in seconds, have never received the attention or fame on par with the astronauts or flight director Gene Kranz, [End Page 209] who became a legend after the release of the Ron Howard film Apollo 13 (directed by Ron Howard, Universal, 1995). Through interviews and e-mail correspondence with members of the flight control teams, Houston and Heflin highlight the flight controllers' vital contributions over the years. NASA is often criticized for making space flight seem easy, but the recollections of those "on console" during the missions, when tough calls had to be made, bring such a characterization into question.

Although well-written and engaging, much of what Houston and Heflin included in this volume is well known within the space community. Many of the same stories appeared in the seminal work, Apollo: The Race to the Moon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989) by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox. (Interestingly enough, this book is not cited in the bibliography, but Houston did correspond with Murray in 2014.) Other shared anecdotes, some repeated within these pages, come directly from the memoirs of space pioneers or from earlier interviews the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project conducted.

Oral history interviews have often been considered problematic sources. Interviewees share information historians might not have access to otherwise, but memory is fallible. Go, Flight! relies heavily on interviews to move the story forward but does not explore the challenges this poses. Houston, a journalist interested in space history, raises no concerns about the technique of oral history or how he handled inaccurate or incomplete stories. If Houston grappled with accuracy, it is unclear how he balanced interviews against other primary sources. Interviews and correspondence with interviewees comprise almost half of the sources in the unannotated bibliography; the other listed sources include books, websites—including a few Wikipedia pages—and many unpublished poems and manuscripts from interviewees.

At heart, this is the familiar story of Apollo, as told to Houston by the men working on console in Mission Control. Stories from Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and many early Space Shuttle missions, all flown from the second-floor MOCR, are not included, presumably because they were flown from another room, even though the entire Mission Control Center, Building 30, is considered part of the landmark. By excluding these other missions, Houston and Heflin missed an opportunity to explore thoroughly the changing world of flight operations in the seventies and early eighties. Flight controllers assigned these missions faced their own challenges, from operating twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for extended periods of time during Skylab, to overseeing the world's first international flight, which would have added important and new material to the space narrative. Although the book spans more than twenty-five years (1965 to 1992), the authors dedicated relatively little space to the Space Shuttle missions flown from the third-floor control room, compared to their coverage of the Apollo Program. [End Page 210]

The strengths of this book are the intimate details gathered from interviewees, some revealed here for the first time. Take, for instance, the Apollo 11 landing, a subject covered in many books. Jack Garman, then working in the Flight Dynamics back room, assisted guidance officer Steve Bales working on console in the front room. An alarm rang out in...

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