NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Seymour "Sy" Liebergot, NASA flight controller during the Apollo program, part 1 of 3

Well, the name of the job was known by the acronym ECOM, which originally stood for electrical environmental and communications flight controller officer. That job evolved out of mercury. And ultimately, it became electrical environmental consumables, which was all of the breathing oxygen and the fuel cell hydrogen and oxygen, all the mechanical systems, the thermal control systems, the air conditioning. Anything that wasn't done by my compatriot, the guide's navigation control system officer, we essentially broke down the spacecraft in half the systems. And my job was to monitor those systems that I just related to you, monitor their health. And if anything went wrong, I'd report it and recommend corrective action, a lot of

which we had worked out ahead of time with our mission rules and our malfunction procedures. And we always like to refer to the ECOM spacecraft systems as the ones that are always a cookin and a perkin, because they were always in the background working and nobody ever paid attention to them, especially the trench or the fightos. They didn't understand what we did anyway and we didn't understand what they did regardless of what they said. So anyway, our job were essentially the life support systems. And if any of our systems failed, we usually would be to the detriment of the crew, the onboard crew. And with regard to how it fit into the overall operation of the moker and the mission operations, we were just there. We didn't do have anything really to do much with mission planning except when we couldn't support the mission with enough oxygen or enough cooling or things like that. Nobody noticed us until something went wrong. Well, in terms of the people that worked

in this room and the manner in which they worked together, we were all fairly young in our twenties and thirties. We all only had this job. We never thought of anything but this job. Nowadays I think some of the flight controllers think in terms of a career ladder because one is there. We only had this job. So we only thought about going to the moon or whatever it was we did. We're all dedicated. That's the only thing we ever talked about. There was an impact on our family lives. Most of us were married. And it had its impact on some of us as time went on. We were all quietly very confident of each other and each other's abilities. That was always proven by our training simulations that we did. If somebody couldn't cut it, they usually went away by themselves because there was just a little

bit too much pressure on an individual to stay if he couldn't hear, well, back in those days, he couldn't do the job. This place was our whole life when it came to the Apollo program. I mean, I was in the Apollo program for the very beginning from all the unmanned missions all the way through to the end. And of course, I did Skylab and the Apollo Soyuz project back in 75 as well. As a matter of fact, we had a dormitory of flight controller dormitory upstairs. And we would, in the early Apollo days, we would sleep in there to be ready just in case we had to be on call for any specialized phase that we were better qualified for as a team. And we had flight controller lounge attached to it, which we could get a little medicinal brandy. If the tension got a little bit too high, you know, little sample bottles. And the idea was we didn't leave them around. The empties around. And unfortunately, somebody did one day. And Chris Kraft found out about it. And

that was the end of our medicinal brandy. Talk to me about, so you said, you know, you looked at it as a job. It wasn't a career, you know, I mean, because this was what you looked at. How important was Apollo to you in those days? What would happen to you if you hadn't done Apollo? Well, if I said that this was, it wasn't just a job to us. It was the job. It was all that we knew and all that we did. So it kind of, there's probably kind of a blurring between a job and a career. A career says, to me, at least, that there's a place to go as you go. We never thought of that. We only thought about what we were doing at the time. It was pretty all-consuming. And I don't think that feeling is diminished over the years as a matter of fact. We pretty much lived and breathed it because we were going to the moon roughly every six months when we had mission rules reviews, which are pre-planned decisions, what we're doing in case of a problem. Or when we had systems reviews

about how the particular systems of the spacecraft operated, we were thoroughly into it. And at every level, at the lowest level, with even Chris Kraft sitting in the room, our opinions and our observations were met and felt and dealt with. We didn't have any compunction out to speak up. There was no compunction until Kraft or Cran's that we were writing he was wrong. Although we got overruled very quickly, we still hung in there if we felt and was expected of us. And that arrogance was kind of imbued in us because we really felt we were kind of ground astronauts. The night of the Apollo 1 fire was dreadful for most of us. Fortunately, I was on duty that night. Friend of mine was acting as assistant flight director and running the ground test we were doing that is called the pad test with the cape. And we were pretty much in

a monitor mode and we participated with commands here if it was required of us. And things are pretty quiet. In fact, I was across street in the hall of the inn having a martini and just be relaxed because I wasn't part of this particular mission. And I can only tell you that Larry Cannon, who's passed away now, told me and told me later in life too that I don't know how to put this, so I'm going to grab it. It left a lasting impression on him to hear the yelling get us out of here, not screaming perhaps. And he had to just listen to it. And he was devastated. As a matter of fact, he said there's probably not a waking moment in his life that he didn't have a flash of that episode in his life. I mean it was really, if I can use him as an example, really had a lasting impression on him.

Everybody was sobered by that experience. But once that part of it was over, everybody including the engineering community here began the investigation phase of it to find what went wrong. How can we fix it? And a lot of the answers are pretty evident how to fix things. And it was astonishing how it all got put together within a year. What about Grant's observation that he realized he had a lot of young faces who had never been through something like that? He's right. I mean, I would say virtually none of us working in the control center ever had an experience with a death associated with any flight. And many of us handle different ways. We either put it out of our mind, or in case of my friend Larry, he couldn't put out his mind because he was too closely involved in it. I think in the main, we just went ahead with the job that we had to do. And we never lost sight of the fact that we needed to get to the moon. And we just kept going.

Tell me about Apollo 8. How much of an important mission you think that was? Was that a highlight for you? With regard to Apollo 8, I may ask that. I think all of us are asked that question, which was the most important or exciting mission during the whole space flight regime that we were involved in. And to a person, we answer Apollo 8. And there's always a little surprise that answer, I mean, we'll have it Apollo 11. And our answer is that Apollo 8 was more important because it was the first time we ever put men or astronauts in orbit around the moon, first time we ever been to the moon. And it was the first time we ever flew an all-up Saturn V rocket. I mean, it was all the first through there. And all the thrill and all the expectations and all the trepidation was there. And when it was over, it was incredible. Remember, we only had one rocket engine that put us in orbit

around the moon and that same engine had to take us out. And so once we did that, I think we were okay. But that was the mission.