New Voice for Apollo

When Apollo 10 streaked smoothly on its course toward the moon last week, it did so with a difference. Paul Haney, for six years the cool and detached "voice" of Gemini and Apollo, was gone. His replacement on the air was Jack Riley, another laconic, low-key newsman, who sees his job not so much "as an announcer but as a supplier of information to the news media."

Riley sat at a blinking console in Mission Control, listening in on the space talk and efficiently translating the alphabet soup of acronyms and numbers to newsmen for nine or ten hours at a time. Getting ready before blastoff, he waded through the documents generated by Apollo 10 (a stack of paper more than a foot high) and interviewed the key men involved. For a month before the mission, he spent 30 hours a week watching flight simulations.

Riley's performance, backed by eight previous flight assignments with Haney, proved to be as smooth as the Apollo liftoff. His visible calm, however, belied the subsurface disputes that have been shaking NASA for the past few months. Until his angry departure last month, Haney, in his role as NASA's public affairs officer, was the man caught in the middle. On one side were the engineers and astronauts, who were determined to maintain as much privacy as possible during the flights. On the other was the press, equally determined to know all about the space shots.

The battle rose to the surface during the flight of Apollo 9, specifically when Commander Jim McDivitt asked to speak to the ground in private to report that Rusty Schweikart was vomiting. When Robert Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, granted permission, reporters protested. As the battle continued, Haney pondered--and then took the position that the right of the press and the public to know was more important than the astronauts' desire for privacy.

The showdown came last month, when Haney and Head Astronaut Deke Slayton collided over whether or not the press could witness a lunar-landing practice session. Slayton won, and four days later NASA's chief public affairs officer, Julian Scheer, gave Haney the news: he was to lose his voice job and accept a special post out of harm's way in Washington. Haney flatly refused the new job, describing the proposed move "like being kicked out of the game on the two-yard line after coming 98 yards down the field." Scheer quickly accepted his resignation. Out is not off, however. Who was down in Houston last week, tracking the Apollo 10 flight in his familiar way, under contract to Britain's ITV? None other than Paul Haney. This time he was not only heard, but seen, although he admits: "I don't have the shape and face for this thing--my face is like a Halloween mask."

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