Apollo EECOM: Journey of a Lifetime by Sy Liebergot

Every Apollo mission had a hierarchy of people responsible for its success. On the front lines, at the tip of the spear, were the astronauts aboard the spacecraft. Immediately behind them were the flight director, flight controllers, and launch personnel. Further back were the workers who constructed and tested the spacecraft. Back even further, years before, were the mission planners and spacecraft designers whose decisions would affect everything that came after.

Responsibility for mission success did not necessarily lessen at the lower rungs of this hierarchy; the Apollo 13 disaster was traced back to failures in design and manufacturing. But those at the top carried the most immediate responsibility. The astronauts and flight controllers had to act in real time to avert disaster; they did not have the luxuries of going back to the drawing board to redesign a part or returning to the factory to rebuild a botched switch. At every moment they stood at the brink of failure. The term “steely-eyed missile man,” famously applied to flight controller John Aaron after he coolly averted a potential abort of the Apollo 12 launch, is a fair way to describe Apollo flight controllers in general. Sy Liebergot has certainly earned it.

Liebergot served as the Electrical, Environmental, and Consumables (EECOM) flight controller from Apollo 8 through Apollo 15. He is best known for his work during Apollo 13, when the readouts on his monitors suddenly seemed to go haywire. He soon discovered he was looking at much more than a simple instrumentation failure. Liebergot was among the first to recognize that the spacecraft's problems would preclude a lunar landing and jeopardize the lives of the crew. In Apollo EECOM: Journey of a Lifetime, he tells that story and a range of others covering his entire life up until the book’s publication in 2003.

A few things quickly become apparent when flipping through Apollo EECOM. First, the book was clearly not written by a professional ghostwriter. This is a good thing, by the way. Many Apollo memoirs are cowritten by pros, and while this doesn’t necessarily make any of these individual books bad, it can have the effect of giving them a sameness.

There is no such sameness in sight here. Liebergot writes chapters as short as a paragraph and as long as several pages, dedicating each to a singular topic. The text is not smooth and writerly but raw and to-the-point. Some early chapters are simple bulleted lists of “signs of the times,” snippets of pop culture that Liebergot remember from his youth. Occasional sentences are set in italics and as their own paragraphs for emphasis; the effect feels somewhat cheesy at first, but I soon adjusted to it and appreciated the technique for its ability to force the rest of the book to halt so these sentences can make a point.

The book is heavily illustrated with photos. It’s clear that Liebergot dug through some old photo albums to provide images for his entire life story, and this choice is a huge asset to the book. We see photos of his parents, of his Army days, of various points of his career, and of his post-NASA years. We also get to see several documents and illustrations that add flavor and character to his story. His parents’ naturalization application, memos and security badges, and a diagram of the Mission Control Center (MCC) layout are among those included.

The book’s two forewords are written by Ron Howard and Clint Howard. Ron directed the film Apollo 13, in which Clint portrayed Liebergot. The Howards praise Liebergot’s rise from humble and difficult beginnings, and I echo them. His childhood is fraught with a drunk, lawbreaking father, a severely scizophrenic mother, and crippling poverty. Yet he excelled in school, enlisted in the US Army just after the Korean War, earned an engineering degree, worked for an Apollo contractor, and finally became a NASA employee. The story is truly inspiring, and the matter-of-fact way in which it is told makes the author comes across as humble and genuine.

Of course, the meat of the book is Liebergot’s work during the Apollo program. This portion of the book shines. Though there was no co-author, Liebergot did collaborate with an editor on the book, David M. Harland. Harland is a noted space historian whose works include The First Men on the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12: On the Ocean of Storms, detailed recountings of those two missions. He is among the preeminent experts on the Apollo program, and he assisted Liebergot in the technical aspects of the story that may have become hazy more than forty years after the events discussed. As a result, it is easy to trust in these technical details and simply enjoy the stories that surround them. Liebergot brings a large collection of anecdotes to his book, and they fit neatly into the concise, topical chapters. Among my favorite were the stories dealing with the flight controllers’ relationships with the astronauts. Liebergot also presents his candid opionions on the flight directors he worked with, including Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz. The stories here are a useful companion to Kraft and Kranz’s own memoirs (Flight: My Life in Mission Control and Failure Is Not an Option, respectively).

The book also includes a CD-ROM with supplementary material, including three hours of audio from the MCC, dozens of photos, and video of an hour-plus lecture given by Liebergot to aerospace students. The video and images are fairly low quality, which isn’t too surprising considering the book’s age. The mission audio is fascinating though, covering some of the tensest moments in Liebergot’s career. He discusses these moments in the text of the book, too, giving the lengthy clips some helpful context.

I thoroughly enjoyed Apollo EECOM: Journey of a Lifetime, and I recommend it. It’s a short book at barely 200 pages, but it feels packed with content. The staccato chapters remove the need for a lot of unnecessary connective tissue. Liebergot’s unique writing style, personal photos, and inspiring story combine to make this one of my favorite Apollo memoirs.