Below Tranquility Base: An Apollo 11 Memoir by Richard Stachurski

Richard Stachurski worked as a flight controller at NASA in the 1960s and 1970s. Specifically, he sat at the NETWORK console, where he monitored the worldwide system of interconnected tracking stations that kept the Apollo astronauts in contact with Houston as the space center rotated away from them. Stachurski published his story using CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, a self-publishing outfit (my copy even includes an individual on-demand print date: Made in the USA, Lexington KY, 14 February 2015.) The self-published nature of the memoir made me wary at first, but I was pleasantly surprised to find the book’s layout, editing, and general presentation to be quite professional. I noticed a few little typos, but nothing more severe than what’s cropped up in similar books from established publishers.

Below Tranquility Base features occasional interludes about the author’s childhood and early career in the US Air Force, but the bulk of the book—as the subtitle suggests—focuses on Stachurski’s NETWORK responsibilities at NASA. Though he isn’t a professional writer by trade, Stachurski mentions in his preface that he belongs to a writers’ group, and his practice shows. The story is well told. As a narrator he comes across as enjoyably conversational and frank. He doesn’t shy away from deploying profanity where appropriate, and more than once I found myself smiling at a skillful turn of phrase. On a broader scale, the story is smartly structured, jumping around in chronology without getting confusing.

Owing to his college education, Stachurski describes himself as a “liberal arts puke,” and his unlikely career path into the NASA Mission Control room makes him an interesting outsider. He is self-deprecating, not omitting events in which he screwed up. He also notes that his position as a flight controller is not quite the life-and-death role played by, for instance, the controllers monitoring life support systems. His humble voice and relatability make the story an enjoyable look into the Mission Control room.

In the middle of the book, when he digs into the meat of the Apollo 11 mission, long sections of the book become essentially an annotated transcript of the dialogue between flight controllers. Pages are flooded with all-caps callsigns and acronyms: NETWORK, FLIGHT, SURGEON, FIDO, EECOM. The author runs the risk of cluttering up the page with the terminology and jargon of the Mission Control voice communication loops. However, Stachurski makes the wise decision to frequently interject explanations of what’s going on in terms the non-expert reader can understand. He explains what he and others in the room were doing while the words were being spoken. Lines that read as flat in a plain transcript are enriched by Stachurski’s explanation of glances, gestures, moods, and other elements of context. He also discusses what he was thinking in the midst of the action—including his own doubts, fears, and frustrations. Even with Stachurski’s explanations, I get the sense that a person going into the book without a decent level of Apollo familiarity might get lost in the sea of acronyms and technical terms. For people who know Apollo well, however, his account is a valuable, insightful, new primary source.

Helpful illustrations from NASA are littered throughout the text (though a few are noticeably low-resolution, as though they were just pulled from a website), and Stachurski includes multiple appendices with additional explanatory material. The appendices break down the various parts of the Saturn V and the Apollo Spacecraft, list and explain acronyms and abbreviations, and (most interestingly, I thought) provide an overview of the Manned Spaceflight Network, the system of antennas and transmitters that made communication with Moon-bound astronauts possible. Stachurski is proud of his NETWORK domain, and with good cause. He notes the far-flung network “is the largest and most complex of all the machines that made America’s lunar landing mission possible.” It’s a fair assessment.

Below Tranquility Base was an enjoyable read, and I recommend it highly. Stachurski’s writing style and insights make it a valuable contribution to the Apollo literature. I was especially impressed as such quality from a self-published work. Stachurski’s success makes me hope that more of Apollo’s 400,000 workers will commit their stories to paper, particularly if they can produce a finished product as polished and well-executed as this.