Video: Gaze our paunchy interview with Apollo EECOM controller Rod Loe

The EECOM console—that’s, the mission modify console in payment for the electrical, environmental, and (at the origin) communications of the Apollo present and provider module—spoil up being house to an outsized preference of neatly-known names. Most likely most neatly-known is John Aaron, the « trim EECOM » in payment for, among other issues, the « SCE to aux » name that likely saved Apollo 12 from a mission-terminating launch abort. Nonetheless equally educated among EECOMs is T. Rodney (« Rod ») Loe, who turned into once variety sufficient to provide us an hour of his time to discuss about his Apollo memories.

Loe would had been the EECOM sitting on the console in some unspecified time in the future of the Apollo 1 fire, if now not for a straightforward accident: his marriage ceremony anniversary falls on January 27, the day of the fire, and on that day in 1967 Loe had swapped shifts with John Aaron so that he might perchance have an supreme time with his wife Tina (she had arranged a celebratory poker game at their house for some friends).

Pointless to claim, the poker game never had a possibility. Aaron turned into once reportedly so shaken by the events of that afternoon that Loe needed to near inspire as a lot as the house heart and power him house; the following days and weeks of accident investigation and root-scheme sorting out had been grim work certainly. Nonetheless in the dawdle to house, perseverance paid off. Nearly two years later, after Apollo 8 had carried out what most folk at NASA even handed as the gutsiest mission in the final program, Loe chanced on himself over once more alone with Aaron. This time it turned into once at The Flintlock, a most neatly-liked flight controller watering hole. While the remainder of the controllers partied themselves foolish, Loe and Aaron stood in the doorway and marveled at the magnitude of the process they’d ethical helped entire.

On that December evening at the close of the tumultuous, soft year of 1968, Loe turned into once scream material to kick back and simply be a proud American.