Wednesday, May 1, 2024
Retired NASA contractor Bob Jordan has enjoyed the publicity the “unsung heroes” of the space program have been receiving.
The engineers, mathematicians, computer scientists ...
They were just as crucial to the historic moon landing as the Neil Armstrongs and Buzz Aldrins.
“It was good to see a little credit given to the thousands of techs and engineers who made it possible,” Jordan, 78, said from his lakeside home in Port Ridglea after the 50th anniversary of the July 20, 1969 moon landing.
Jordan’s one of those thousands.
A field engineer, he helped track Apollo 11’s flight to the moon and back as part of NASA’s Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network (STDN). Jordan’s post was the tracking station on Antigua island in the British West Indies.
“Everything was tense,” Jordan said about the moon landing. “Everything had to be right.”
At the height of the space race thousands of men and women operated the STDN at some two dozen locations across five continents, according to Sunny Tsiao’s book “Read You Loud and Clear!”
They were called the “unsung heroes.”
Jordan, a native of Baltimore, saw many of the stations, some in exotic locales.
“I got to go around the world and check all these sites,” he said.
Consisting of dish antennas and telephone switching equipment, the STDN provided critical space-to-ground communications.
“Regardless of how sophisticated it may be,” according to Tsiao, “no spacecraft is of any value unless it can be tracked accurately to determine where it is and how it is performing.”
STDN began its operation by tracking the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, that was launched into space by the former Soviet Union.
“Over the next 40 years,” according to the book, “the network was destined to play a crucial role on every near-Earth space mission that NASA flew. Whether it was receiving the first television images from space, tracking Apollo astronauts to the Moon and back, or data acquiring for Earth science, the STDN was that intricate network behind the scenes making the missions possible.”
Jordan was a NASA contractor from 1963-70. He worked on unmanned space programs pioneering satellites inclusive on weather, communications, Global Positioning System (GPS) and various research projects.
His involvement with the manned space program started with the late Gemini missions and all Apollo missions up to Apollo 12.
The computers on board the spacecrafts were in their infancy, Jordan said.
“There were no integrated circuits, memory chips or micro processors or advanced computer programming languages,” he said. “The technology was extremely primitive ... people have to realize the technology of that day. It was like smoke signals versus computers today.”
Because the spacecraft had limited memory capability, information to the spacecraft had to be uplinked from the ground, Jordan pointed out.
But to do that, “we had to keep our antenna pointed on that module so we could receive data down from them,” he explained.
Jordan made a key move at one point during a mission. The tracking prediction data he received to point the antenna was off by five minutes during the most critical moon land time.
He went on gut instinct to correct the problem.
“Should a signal loss have occurred my antenna may have lost track disrupting tracking data going off our site to Houston,” he said.
Another time a code had to be converted to continue successful operations.
“It took me six times, but I finally found the solution,” he said.
He explained it this way: “The six times refers to a design change made to the computer which drives the 40-foot dish. Upon loss of control the dish should point straight up or go to the Bird Bath position. Due to the various computer codes from computer to motor drive code just the opposite would occur, thus driving the antenna full speed down level with the horizon into its mechanical brakes.”
Jordan said people were learning on the fly even though they would practice for months.
He is proud of what was accomplished.
“It took a lot of people with a lot of hard work to do a great thing,” Jordan said. “It was a great time to be young and a great time to be alive. I call it the highlight of my life.”
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‘It was a great time to be young and a great time to be alive. I call it the highlight of my life.’
-- Bob Jordan
