Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965–1992 by Rick Houston and Milt Heflin

Go, Flight!: The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965–1992, written by journalist Rick Houston and former NASA flight director Milt Heflin, was published in 2015 by the University of Nebraska Press. Houston kindly agreed to supply me with a review copy of the book.

Go, Flight! focuses its attention on the NASA flight controllers who have made America’s space missions possible. In those historic flights, both the astronaut crews and the flight controllers were highly trained. They worked together to make the moon landings successful.

One classic example of this teamwork, which is highlighted in the book, occurs during the dramatic Apollo 12 launch. When lighting strikes the Saturn V early in the flight, the Apollo spacecraft experiences a dramatic cascade of electrical failures. On the ground, flight controller John Aaron recognizes the particular pattern of errors and calls for the astronauts to flip an obscure switch—SCE to AUX. It told the spacecraft’s signal conditioning equipment (SCE) to use its auxiliary (AUX) power supply. Aboard the spacecraft, commander Pete Conrad was unfamiliar with the switch. But lunar module pilot Alan Bean knew the switch and flipped it, solving the problem. Together, the crew and ground team had used their combined knowledge and training to save the mission.

Go, Flight! presents a view of the space race from inside the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR) in Houston. This room is best known to the public as the setting for the nerdy heroics of flight controllers in the film Apollo 13. In their book, Houston and Heflin provide a fleshed-out portrait of what went on there during the first few decades of the US space program. We learn not only about the flight controllers’ procedures, but also about their culture.

Putting the reader inside the MOCR is a wonderful way to bring a fresh perspective to the Apollo library. The astronaut memoirs, of course, mainly discuss the goings-on inside the spacecraft. General histories of the program typically alternate between mission control, the crew, management, and various other vantage points. By keeping the focus squarely on the MOCR, this book allows us to really get acquainted with the flight controllers and understand their contributions. It also makes the book particularly enjoyable for someone who is already familiar with many of the missions’ general highlights. Seeing these events through the specific lens of mission control gives them more depth and context.

The book’s ripe setting might have been wasted if the research and writing were not up to par, but luckily that’s not the case here. Houston and Heflin have done a tremendous job marshaling a wide array of resources that transport the reader to the heyday of the Apollo MOCR. Two aspects of this research in particular stood out to me: the use of new interviews, and the smart inclusion of snippets from elsewhere in the Apollo literature to corroborate accounts of specific events.

The lengthy bibliography is a testament to the work that was put into Go, Flight! The authors conducted dozens of interviews with retired flight controllers, both over the phone and via e-mail. The decision to use extensive new interviews means that Go, Flight! is jam-packed with fascinating, revealing, and often funny anecdotes about life in Houston and in the MOCR. Some of these tales have appeared elsewhere in the Apollo literature, but there are also many I hadn’t seen before. And even the familiar ones often had a new spin on them. The authors smartly step back and use extended quotes that let the subjects speak for themselves, rather than paraphrasing the interviewees’ words.

However, the authors don’t remain invisible throughout the book. At various points, they add color or context by bringing in a relevant perspective from other Apollo memoirs. On occasion they even weigh slightly conflicting versions of events against each other, drawing both from existing memoirs and their new interviews, setting differing accounts against each other in an attempt to determine what really went on. This historical synthesis is an especially valuable service now, five decades on from the moon landings, when memories are fading and many flight controllers have long since retired.

Go, Flight! is structured chronologically. This makes good sense narratively, as we see the growing expertise and confidence of the mission control team. However, it also makes the differing amount of coverage given to each mission stand out more. In particular, there is very little discussion of Apollo 7 and Apollo 17.

I had expected Apollo 7, with its famously testy exchanges between the astronauts and mission control, to feature more prominently, but there’s just a brief mention of the “mutiny in space.” It seems possible that the flight controllers interviewed for the book may have had little to say on the sensitive subject. And in the case of Apollo 17, the lack of detail could simply be due to the fact that the mission went relatively smoothly—as the authors allude to, one of the most notable glitches was the minor issue of damaging the fender on the lunar rover. Ultimately, the fact that the book doesn’t cover every single mission exhaustively didn’t bug me—the point of the book is to study the people who worked in mission control, not to run down the checklist of Apollo highlights, and in this it definitely succeeds.

The lion’s share of the book covers the Gemini and Apollo programs, but we also get glimpses into the post-Apollo mission control as it existed during the Space Shuttle era. We don’t get an in-depth look at how Shuttle missions were handled, but there’s enough here to give a good sense of how the Apollo-era MOCR veterans transitioned to the new program and handed off the reins to a new generation of flight controllers and directors. This makes for a well-rounded narrative and a satisfying conclusion to the book.

All told, I was a big fan of Go, Flight! As I’ve discovered over the years, the more accounts of the same events that you read, the more the extraordinary events of the Apollo program can feel rote and mundane. Not so with this book. The tightly focused setting of mission control gives the book a distinct voice and perspective, setting it apart from other Apollo books. The extensive research capitalizes on this promising set-up, and the authors have spun their work into an informative, lucid, and often entertaining narrative.