The name was practically unknown to the public, but had it not been for Low, The editors could have gone further. But his reputation has grown with time. “He was worth about 10 men.” George Abbey, Low’s technical assistant during Apollo who would go on to oversee the astronaut corps in the space shuttle era, remembered that his boss “was at work long before most people in the morning and long after they left at night.”Low’s attention to detail, and his nearly photographic memory, were legendary. “It was the boldest decision of the space program,” Kraft said.For Low, it was simply a matter of asking the right question: How can we advance the program with hardware that is ready now?

One came just under 70 hours into the flight, when telemetry confirmed that Apollo 8 had successfully slipped into lunar orbit shortly before 4 a.m. Houston time on Christmas Eve.Later, long after the cheers had died down in Mission Control, George Low found a moment to step outside, filled with relief and satisfaction, and look up at the waxing crescent moon. If NASA waited for a similar checkout of the lunar module in Earth orbit, Apollo 8 wouldn’t fly until March of 1969. “And you did so because you knew he sweated the smallest, most minute detail.”Low knew that one of the fire’s overarching causes had been poor coordination of engineering changes to the Apollo spacecraft. Fixing the problem risked making things even worse. “We were all taken aback,” he recalled, when Low proposed the idea for real in August 1968.
“Remember, [the decision on] Apollo 8 came along soon after the Apollo 1 fire.” It took multiple private sessions to overcome the skepticism.

George Low during the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. The Mercury spacecraft had been ready to launch Alan Shepard a few weeks before that. During a meeting with Kraft and Deke Slayton, head of the astronaut office, Kraft mentioned several ways the program could make up for delays due to the fire. “We didn’t want to let the country down.” Waiting until March also increased the risk of losing out to the Soviet Union.

“It was a very countable number of times that the moon was going to be in the right position,” Low said.During this period, he typically put in 18 hours a day, seven days a week.


It was, in fact, George Low’s plan that became the foundation for Kennedy’s “by the end of the decade” challenge.Six years later, when the Apollo 1 fire took the lives of three astronauts and put the moon program’s future in doubt, NASA once again turned to Low. “Navigation to the moon, getting into lunar orbit, the burning of the big engine, the computer programs that were needed for that—we could get all of that out of the way.”The command and service modules, after all, were designed to orbit the moon. He thought that both could figure in a multi-decade program.

Fortunately, Tom Paine, his successor, was enthusiastic about sending Apollo 8 to the moon.Low understood the resistance in Washington, even though he thought the decision was a no-brainer from a purely technical perspective.

“Fun is one of the main reasons for doing anything,” he believed, and he found plenty in the field of aeronautics.

“Low’s idea to circumnavigate the moon was a stroke of genius,” Gilruth said. And it would increase the probability of a successful landing later. But it was not a democracy. People Projects Discussions Surnames View the profiles of people named George Low.


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