Today, 21 July, is the anniversary of man’s first step on the moon. To mark it, we examine the legacy of a man from Essex who played a key role in NASA’s 1968–72 Apollo moon missions, including stepping up to avert a life-threatening situation. His work and influence lives on in the US space agency’s launch of the Artemis III flight next year.
The low-earth orbit trial run for future moon landings will use docking manoeuvres pioneered when John Hodge was flight director at NASA. He was on duty during the 1966 space flight by the Gemini VIII spacecraft that first docked one spacecraft with another. When a fault in Gemini VIII led to an emergency return to Earth, Hodge oversaw the perilous re-entry operation and helped bring the astronauts home safely.
The vessel was crewed by Neil Armstrong. “If anybody ever says, ‘What did I do in the space programme?’” he said in a 1999 Johnson Space Center oral history interview, “It was to make sure that Neil Armstrong was around to fly on Apollo.” And indeed Armstrong went on to become the first human being to set foot on the moon, uttering the immortal words “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
A tricky procedure
NASA launched the 1964–1966 Gemini missions to test the techniques needed for lunar landings: long-duration flight, spacewalks, rendezvous and docking. Today such operations seem routine, but they are still developing. In 2027 the Artemis III command module is expected to test dock with two versions of lunar landers.
In 1966, getting two fragile machines to find one another in orbit, align themselves in three dimensions, and join while orbiting the Earth at several miles a second, had never been achieved. Gemini VIII, the first flight for both Armstrong and Scott, was to dock with the separately launched unmanned Agena target vehicle to find out if the linked craft could operate as planned.
Gemini VIII, launched on 16 March 1966, caught up with the Agena and, a little more than four hours into the flight, after a careful visual inspection, made history.
“Flight, we are docked! Yes, it’s really a smoothie,” Scott radioed to the ground.
But, in an unplanned manoeuvre, the joined crafts began to roll. Armstrong undocked from the Agena, but Gemini VIII kept spinning and gained speed, which revealed the fault was a thruster that had failed to shut off, driving the spacecraft into an uncontrolled rotation.
Emergency landing
With fuel draining away and the spin worsening, Armstrong shut down the orbital attitude system and used the re-entry control system to steady the craft, saving their lives but sacrificing the three-day mission, including a planned spacewalk, after only 11 hours in orbit. This presented a new problem: how to bring two astronauts safely back to Earth.
In the 1960s an emergency landing meant using manual switches and procedures at the right settings, in the right order, at the right instant. A mistake could burn the spacecraft up in the atmosphere or place the craft and crew beyond recovery.
Hodge to the rescue
This was a genuine step into the unknown, testing the crew in orbit and the flight controllers in Houston, with particular weight falling on the flight director on duty, Hodge. He had to coordinate the calculations and instructions that would tell the crew when to fire, what attitude to hold, how long to burn, and how to shape a descent that had abruptly become an emergency return.
One orbit later, Armstrong guided the spacecraft in a descent that took it out of range of NASA’s ground stations, landing in the western Pacific, hundreds of miles from Japan, near the waiting Navy destroyer, the USS Leonard F Mason. As Hodge recounted in the oral history interview, the Gemini VIII mission stood out for him “because I dumped Neil Armstrong in the Sea of China.”
Armstrong never returned to space after Apollo 11. He flew two missions, retired from NASA in 1971, and died on 25 August 2012.
From Leigh-on-Sea to Houston
Born in Leigh-on-Sea in 1929, Hodge had graduated with a first in engineering from the University of London. He worked on aviation projects at Vickers-Armstrongs in England before moving to Canada in 1952, where he worked on the Avro Arrow project. When in 1959 the war plane was cancelled, he and a number of other Avro Arrow engineers joined NASA. He remained in mission control after Gemini VIII, witnessing the tragedy with the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 and later leading flight-control teams during the final Apollo lunar landings. He also worked on plans for the International Space Station. Hodge died on 21 May 2021.
Hodge is not the only person from our region to have made an important contribution to the US space programme. The work of Thomas Bacon, an electrochemist from Billericay, made a major contribution to the success of the eleven manned Apollo missions.
Their inspiration lives on in our region, where work continues to promote manned space flight. UK company Gravitilab is developing its East Anglian Spaceport off the Norfolk coast. And on a more light-hearted note, an energy coffee brand sponsored a rocket launch from a field in Norfolk – which like the Gemini VIII mission resulted in a shorter trip than expected, but without loss of life.
Watch this space!
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