Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

And so Markley went away to produce the first edition of the loose-leaf notebook that he and his staff would prepare for Shea every week for the next 165 weeks. Each notebook ran to more than a hundred pages and was on Shea’s desk by close of business Thursday. Shea would get up at 4 A.M. Friday and start to annotate it, usually with technical comments and instructions, occasionally with remarks such as “You’ve gotta be kidding.” He would work on the notebook intermittently from Friday morning through the weekend and return it to Markley on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon, everyone in the ASPO network would have gotten his response from Shea. With the annotated notebook in his hands, Markley became the action officer. “I’d take this notebook, and then I’d fan it back out very quickly and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got these questions and I want the answers in the notebook by this Thursday.’ We’d get the answers back and then we’d take Joe’s marked-up notebook and start off in the front, anything he had marks on. We’d have the answers there. And then we’d have the brand-new section with the newest status too.” The scrawled notations to and fro were a way of keeping up “a running communication,” in Shea’s words, without having to type up long memos. “Even if I didn’t see [the project officers] directly, I’d at least been in touch with them, and they’d been back in touch with me.” “I’d never seen it done before and I haven’t seen it done since,” recalled the project manager for the...