Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

And once Flight had remembered, calculated, ordered his priorities, and made the decisions, he had to communicate them. “It’s very important to be able to communicate what you want to get done in as few words as you can,” Cliff Charlesworth observed. “I used to spend time on my own thinking about how to do that—‘How can I say what I want to say so that this guy will understand in the fewest words?’ Because you didn’t always have a lot of time to sit there and laboriously go through it.” Thinking about what to say “slows you down,” Charlesworth continued. “I used to sit [beside the flight director’s console] when, say, Glynn was on the console, and even as quick-witted as he is, I’d get ahead of him sometimes, when the problems started coming in. I’d scratch my head and say, ‘Why is that?’ It’s because I wasn’t having to talk, and he was.”