Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

So it wasn’t just the authority and the visibility that set the flight director apart, but the job itself. It was the flight controller’s job writ large: Know in technical detail one of the most complex machines ever made. Master a complex flight plan and a huge body of mission rules. Piece together tiny and often unconnected bits of information from multiple sources coming to you at the same time. Do all this under the gaze of the world in situations that might give you only seconds to make life-and-death decisions. If it was not a job for just anybody, it was also a job that had no equal. Reminded of all the ways in which working in the MOCR was tiring and even physically painful, Lunney once replied, “I can only say that I loved it. I thought it was wonderful. Remember the Patton movie? He’s standing by the tank with the battlefield full of dead soldiers and he says something like, ‘May God help me but I love it.’ And when he said that I said to myself, ‘I can relate to that.’”