Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

fait accompli, so Mathews’s refusal was presented to Webb along with the suggestion that they ought to talk Low into taking the job. Webb thought it was a terrific idea, and nothing would do but that they call Page Terminal at National Airport and have them hold Gilruth’s and Low's plane. Webb, Seamans, Phillips, and Mueller all piled into Webb’s official car, went out to the airport, and “persuaded” George Low. In recounting his selection as head of ASPO to NASA historians, Low never wavered from the official version. 1 By good luck as much as anything else, the Apollo Program seemed to get the right men at the right time. In 1963, they needed an impatient, charismatic man who would seize the spacecraft and pull it through North American. Because much of Houston was preoccupied with Gemini during this period, they also needed a man who liked to do everything himself. They got Joe Shea. In 1967, they needed a “knitter of people,” in Glynn Lunney’s graceful phrase, someone who could win the trust of the disparate elements in Houston and bring them together as a working whole. They got George Low. Except in ability, Low and Shea were mirror images. They were both born in 1926, but instead of Bronx working-class Irish, Low was Viennese Austrian, the son of a well-to-do manufacturer, educated in private schools in Switzerland and England before his widowed mother brought Georg Wilhelm to the United States in 1938. Instead of a systems engineer working on nuclear missiles, Low ...