The Groundling Who Won

AMONG the thousands of groundlings who worked to make Apollo 8 a success, the person most responsible for the flight was a Vienna-born engineer named George Low, who is little known outside the NASA community. Low's title is that of manager of the Apollo spacecraft program, and as such he was in charge of making certain that all the essential hardware, from the spaceship structure down to the smallest switch and relay, was in working order. But Low's role in the Apollo program goes far beyond that: other, higher-ranking officials in NASA agree that had it not been for Low's zeal, there would have been no Apollo 8 flight to the moon.

Low, 42, came with his family from Austria to the U.S. in 1940, when he was 14. He took his degrees in aeronautical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA's predecessor) in 1949, and nine years later became NASA's chief of manned space flight.

At that time, Apollo was a hazy project, with some sort of circumlunar flight scheduled for some time in the unforeseeable future. In October 1960, Low made the first official proposal that Apollo's aim should be to land Americans on the moon. As NASA's Washington-based chief of manned-space-flight programming, Low wrote: "It has become increasingly apparent that a preliminary program for manned lunar landings should be formulated. This is necessary to provide a proper justification for Apollo."

Seven months later, as chairman of a committee investigating the problems of lunar landing, Low provided the facts and figures that persuaded newly elected President John F. Kennedy to declare that the nation's aim should indeed be to achieve lunar landing within the '60s.

In 1964, Low moved to Houston as deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center. That was his position when, in January 1967, Astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Edward White died during a ground test of an Apollo vehicle.

That disaster virtually brought the Apollo program to a halt and threw NASA into chaos. What was needed was a man who could restore order within the program, and Low was the choice. In April 1967, while preparing for takeoff from Washington National Airport in a small NASA Gulfstream turboprop, he was hustled off the airplane and into a nearby office. Recalls Low: "Everybody in the line of command above me in NASA seemed to be there. They asked me to take over management of Apollo. I probably would have liked some time to think about it, but since anyone I might have wanted to consult was already there in the room, there was no point in waiting. I said 'Yes, sir,' and went to work."

Ever since, Low has been working six-day weeks of up to 16 hours a day. The Apollo command module, with all its 2,000,000 parts, was torn apart, reexamined, and extensively redesigned at a cost of $75 million, an operation that set back Apollo's timetable by many months.

Once he was satisfied with the redesigned craft, Low moved fast. Last August, when it became apparent that the earth-orbiting December flight of Apollo 8 would be delayed by problems with the lunar module, he proposed a bold plan: an Apollo 8 moon orbital mission--without the LM. He was more than convincing, and that is why Apollo 8 got the go-ahead for its historic trip.

In expressing his ideas, and in pushing them into reality, Low has earned a reputation of being reserved and distant. He is not a humorous man, nor one given to poetic fantasies. Yet last week he was as thrilled as any of his five children by the feat of Apollo 8. "I looked at the moon after Apollo 8 went into orbit," he says. "It looked different."

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