Will I be Writing a Book About JWST?

With Dr. Robert W. Smith (l) in 2011.

Since the successful launch of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on December 25, a few people have asked if I will be a writing a book about JWST to follow my recently published book, Not Yet Imagined: A Study of Hubble Space Telescope Operations (NASA, 2021).

The answer is no, and there is a story behind that ‘no.’

There is an excellent book on JWST being written by Dr. Robert W. Smith, who also wrote the classic study of how Hubble was conceived and built, a process that also took decades. His book on Hubble, The Space Telescope, A study of NASA, science, technology and politics, was first published in 1989, before Hubble was launched, and an updated paperback version was published in 1993.

His book contains many insights on how astronomers overcame divisions within their ranks to win government approval for Hubble, and then it outlines the work that went into building this space observatory.

Since it explained one of the most prominent space programs of its time, I purchased Dr. Smith’s book for my library when it came out and read it with great interest. Dr. Smith was based at the National Air and Space Museum and Johns Hopkins University when he wrote that book, and he later moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where he became chair of the Department of History and Classics at the University of Alberta.

As the new century began, I had written my first book of space history, Arrows to the Moon: Avro’s Engineers and the Space Race (Apogee Books, 2001), and I decided to earn a master’s degree in space studies at the University of North Dakota. When I completed that degree I decided to pursue further studies, and a promising avenue appeared at the University of Alberta.

I visited Dr. Smith in 2003 to inquire about studying the history of technology with him as my faculty advisor. I remember that he encouraged me to pursue studies for a Ph.D. That day we also discussed plans for a gigantic new space telescope that had just been named after the late NASA administrator, James Webb.

I spent the next few years on my Ph.D. studies, benefitting from Dr. Smith’s guidance and the many insights he had gained about Big Science projects such as the Hubble Space Telescope. By then, Dr. Smith had begun closely following the development of JWST, and I occasionally helped him with that work as graduate students often do.

My own Ph.D. studies focused on the years between World War II and the beginnings of the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s. That resulted in my dissertation, which became a book, The Bomb and America’s Missile Age (Johns Hopkins, 2018).

After I completed my dissertation, NASA was looking for someone to write a history of Hubble operations. Since Dr. Smith was working on his JWST book, he was unavailable for that project. Although I had not previously thought of writing a book about Hubble, I was available. With Dr. Smith's encouragement, I competed for that job and was selected in 2014 to write the book that covers the first three decades of HST operations. While writing that book, I received a great deal of helpful advice from Dr. Smith.

While at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center as I conducted research for my Hubble book, I regularly looked in on JWST, which was being assembled in a gigantic cleanroom there. JWST appears in my book, and scientists hope to coordinate obervations between the two space telescopes once JWST begins operations.

Both the Hubble and Webb telescopes are highly expensive and complicated, and both underwent challenging development processes before they got to their launch pads. The pre-launch history of JWST goes back more than two decades, so Dr. Smith’s upcoming book will be a substantial one. I don’t know the title yet, but I am looking forward to reading it when it is published.

I hope to write at least one more book to add to the six I have already written. I haven’t settled on a topic, but I have been keeping busy during the pandemic writing papers on the history of space astronomy in Canada.

Looking over JWST from the viewing room at Goddard Space Flight Center, 2016.

Not Yet Imagined: A Study of Hubble Space Telescope Operations

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is the most famous astronomical instrument of its time and one of the best-known robotic vehicles ever put into space. Its launch and deployment into low-Earth orbit from the Space Shuttle Discovery in April 1990 appeared to fulfill the plans and dreams of astronomers since the beginnings of space exploration to place a telescope beyond the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere.

The first images from Hubble contained a stunning surprise: the space telescope’s main mirror had been precisely ground to the wrong shape. With the future of NASA on the line, scientists and engineers devised fixes for the spherical aberration afflicting Hubble, and astronauts flying on the first of five shuttle servicing missions to HST installed new instruments that restored the space telescope’s capabilities. Within weeks HST produced the breathtaking images and other data that astronomers and the public had long anticipated, and Hubble went on to become a symbol of American technological and scientific prowess.

My latest book, Not Yet Imagined: A Study of Hubble Space Telescope Operations, has been published by the NASA History Division. Its e-book versions are available for free download at https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/not-yet-imagined.html. Free hard copies of this book are available from the NASA Information Center, info-center@hq.nasa.gov, 202-358-0000, Suite 1U72, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546. One per customer please.

This book documents the history of HST from its launch through its first 30 years of operation in space. It focuses on the interactions among the general public, astronomers, engineers, government officials, and members of Congress during that time. The decision-making behind the changes in Hubble’s instrument packages on servicing missions that made HST a model of supranational cooperation amongst scientists is chronicled, along with HST’s contributions to our knowledge about our solar system, our galaxy, and our universe. Not Yet Imagined also covers the impact of HST and the images it produces on the public’s appreciation for the universe, and how HST has changed the ways astronomy is done.

Ian Sharp, Entrepreneur, 1932-2021

By Chris Gainor

Special to the Globe and Mail

July 23, 2021

The information technology companies of today with networked computers and casually dressed staff from diverse backgrounds were unheard of fifty years ago. Yet a company that met that description was headquartered in the heart of Toronto’s financial district in the 1960s through the 1980s.

That company was I.P. Sharp Associates, a Canadian software and communications firm that was a world leader in terms of networking and organization in the decades before the internet revolutionized business and life. Its unorthodox but beloved leader was Ian Sharp, who died in Sarasota, Florida, on July 16, a few months after being diagnosed with lung cancer. He was 89.

I.P. Sharp Associates, also known as IPSA, pioneered many computer networking applications that were years ahead of their time, including database systems to support financial markets and the aviation and energy industries, a real-time global financial system to manage interbank money market exposures, an international stock settlement system, a real-time energy trading platform, and an international stock borrowing and lending system, among others.

Under Mr. Sharp’s leadership, the company was also famous for its lack of hierarchy and its informal style of work. Its employees were posted around the world and were described as “an eclectic mix of people” who didn’t fall within the racial, gender or credential limitations of the last century.

Ian Patrick Sharp was born on March 25, 1932, in Dublin, Ireland. His Irish mother and Scottish father resided in London, but his mother insisted on going home to give birth. He was raised in London and Leeds, with a wartime evacuation back to Dublin. He later trained as a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force during his National Service, then studied engineering at Cambridge University.

While working as a management trainee in the British steel industry, Mr. Sharp was put to work on a Ferranti Pegasus computer, a 1950s British computer that like most similar machines of the time used vacuum tubes to control electrical currents.

When the computer project wound down, Mr. Sharp decided to seek opportunities elsewhere and emigrated to Canada in 1960. In Toronto he found work as chief programmer at Ferranti's Canadian branch, Ferranti-Packard Ltd., where he headed a small team that wrote the operating system and compilers for a mainframe computer, the Ferranti-Packard 6000.

Most computers of the time were mainframe machines that filled large rooms and required cooling systems and large amounts of electrical power. Their computing power was only a small fraction of that available on today’s smart phones. As the 1960s began, transistors and other semiconductor devices, which used less power and took less space, replaced vacuum tubes and opened the door to more powerful and sophisticated computers.

The FP 6000, which Mr. Sharp called a “great giant beast” of a computer, was one of the first computers capable of multitasking. Only six of the computers were sold, with customers including the Saskatchewan Power Corporation, the Toronto Stock Exchange, the Department of National Defence, and the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Ferranti and its Canadian branch were withdrawing from the computing field at the time the Ferranti-Packard 6000 came into production, but the computer became the model for a generation of more powerful mainframes built by another British maker.

While on a trip to London in 1961, Mr. Sharp interviewed and hired a programmer at Ferranti named Audrey Williams who wished to transfer to the Canadian branch. They married in 1963 and had a son and a daughter. Although Mrs. Sharp took time out for family duties, she worked as a programmer at I.P. Sharp throughout its existence and organized the annual Christmas party for employees’ children.

When Ferranti-Packard folded its computer division, Mr. Sharp and six colleagues formed I. P. Sharp Associates in 1964. Over the next 23 years the company grew into a multinational enterprise, with about 600 employees in 60 branches in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. I.P. Sharp’s Fortune 500 clients included Morgan Stanley, Hitachi, McGraw Hill, the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank, British Petroleum, Xerox, Credit Suisse, and Kodak.

While the roots of the internet are commonly credited to the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. military starting in 1969, I.P. Sharp Associates was often on the scene with its own versions of internet technologies during those years before the internet became widespread in the 1990s.

In work championed by one of the firm’s co-founders, Roger D. Moore, IPSA made time available to customers on its mainframes across Canada and then farther afield. Said Mr. Sharp: “You hear a lot these days about the cloud. What we were doing in those days was the cloud.”

The firm also hired the developer of the APL computer language, Kenneth E. Iverson, to work with Moore and others to advance the language to a version known as SHARP APL. It also offered its own form of email in APL long before email become commonly available, and it was widely used in the company for business and personal purposes.

Mr. Sharp was well known for giving free rein to very bright and driven employees – casual dress and flex-time were taken for granted at I.P. Sharp. “Our company had incredible diversity, but at the time we didn’t realize it,” said former employee Hugh Hyndman.

One of Mr. Hyndman’s colleagues, Jane Minett, remembers going to work for the company after having been introduced to it as a customer. She was appointed the manager of I.P. Sharp’s Calgary office at age 26, which raised eyebrows in the city’s still conservative business environment of the 1970s.

Already by 1973, I.P. Sharp had an electronic mail system known as Mailbox. Leslie Goldsmith was a 16-year-old high school student that year when he managed to overcome the system’s security features, and so he was hired to build an all-new email system called 666 Box that was more secure. “In 1973, that was a bold move,” he said. I.P. Sharp’s early email and networking systems often ran afoul of telephone and communications monopolies in various parts of the world, something Mr. Sharp called a “constant irritation” that he had to deal with.

“Ian never sought the limelight and was content to do well for the customer in any way he could,” Mr. Goldsmith explained. His colleague Lib Gibson had a story to illustrate the point: “I remember people urging Ian to dump a painful, overdue Morgan Stanley project. There was no contractual penalty. ‘But we gave our word,’ said Ian. That was the end of that.”

Both Ms. Minett and Mr. Hyndman said the soft-spoken Mr. Sharp’s style was a textbook example of management by walking around. He made a point of conversing with employees at all levels of the company and let them make their own decisions. Ms. Gibson said he did not choose employees based on credentials, and he did not punish failure, which freed people to take risks. “He would never set anyone up for failure though – and would be there when you needed an ear,” said Roseanne Wild, Mr. Sharp’s longtime assistant.

“The people the company recruited had a variety of backgrounds, often with a strong mathematical orientation,” former employee Scott Remborg remembered. “In interview situations Ian was less interested in someone’s Computer Science background and more interested in what else they knew. He knew the company could teach people particular skills so he would, with a wry smile, ask ‘so what else do you know?’”

Reuters, which wanted to move into the field of financial databases, acquired I.P. Sharp Associates in 1987, but the company’s spirit of enthusiasm and camaraderie lived on. Twenty-seven years after the sale, 200 “Sharpies” gathered in Toronto for a party to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the company’s creation.

Another legacy of I.P. Sharp Associates involves the notable careers its employees led after the company wound up. Ms. Gibson, Mr. Goldsmith and Ms. Minett were among several former I.P. Sharp employees who were involved in building business information services for The Globe and Mail. Ms. Minett, Mr. Remborg and other I.P. Sharp alumni helped create Sympatico, an early national internet provider jointly run by Bell Canada and other Canadian telephone carriers.

Mr. Sharp retired in 1989. He and his wife had already began spending winter breaks on Longboat Key on the west coast of Florida, and soon they became residents and eventually U.S. citizens. In retirement, Mr. Sharp became an avid tennis player, hanging up his racquet only eight weeks before his passing. His enjoyment of Bridge moved online when the COVID-19 pandemic began last year. Mr. Sharp was a longtime volunteer for Meals on Wheels, and he helped out other charitable causes.

Mr. Sharp is survived by his wife of 57 years, Audrey, daughter Helen, son Matthew, and three grandchildren.

2021 - Another Turning Point for Spaceflight?

The year 2020 saw the end of the long gap between launches of crewed spacecraft from American soil when the first Crew Dragon spacecraft departed Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Station nearly nine years after end of the Space Shuttle program.

This year is heralding the end of an even longer gap in human spaceflight – the decades that have passed since anyone has flown beyond low Earth orbit.

That began when Apollo 17 returned home from the Moon in December 1972, and NASA’s sights shifted to LEO with Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, the Space Shuttle, and then what became the International Space Station.

There was no serious talk of humans going beyond LEO until the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 in 1989, when President George H.W. Bush announced his Space Exploration Initiative, which called for permanent occupation of the Moon and a human voyage to Mars. The initiative met a hostile reception in Congress and little enthusiasm from NASA, then still recovering from the Challenger disaster.

The initiative’s failure and the effort involved in getting the ISS into space squelched further talk of escaping near-Earth space until 2004, when President George W. Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration, which led to the end of the Space Shuttle and the beginning of the Constellation program that targeted a return to the Moon and eventual exploration of Mars.

When Barack Obama became president five years later, his administration proceeded to terminate the shuttle. Constellation was wound down, although Congress retained parts of it in the form of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, which is still being built today. During that time, Orion was targeted for missions to asteroids, a goal that had little support outside the administration.

The signature space effort of the Obama years became the Commercial Crew program that built on a smaller initiative from the George W. Bush years, which began bearing fruit with last year’s first SpaceX Crew Dragon missions. While the Ares rockets from Constellation were cancelled, the Space Launch System replaced Ares at the insistence of Congress.

President Donald Trump’s administration became well-known for working hard to overturn Obama administration policies and having the compliment returned starting this year by the administration of President Joe Biden. The big exception to this rule is turning out to be space, including Trump’s creation of the U.S. Space Force.

Commercial Crew continued without interruption through the Trump years, and Trump and his NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine launched the Artemis program with the goal of landing humans on the Moon, including the first woman, no later than 2024. Like earlier NASA human exploration proposals, Artemis envisions a long-term human presence on the Moon and expeditions to Mars. With the exception of the 2024 deadline, Artemis survived intact through the transition to the Biden administration.

The Biden administration’s endorsement of Artemis in February broke the pattern of short-lived NASA programs aimed at sending humans beyond LEO that didn’t survive the administration that created them. A common thread between Artemis and the programs that preceded it, starting with Constellation, is the Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System to carry it to space.

The new administration’s decision to continue with Artemis, which greatly increases the likelihood of new human flights to the Moon, could make 2021 a turning point in the history of space exploration. Most of the story of Artemis remains to be told, including its first test flight, scheduled for late this year. And questions still remain over major elements of the program, notably the Lunar Gateway and the Human Landing System.

With Artemis nearing the launch pad, there will be work for historians examining the lengthy roots of that program and the complicated politics over the past two decades that led to today’s U.S. human space exploration programs.

This is also the year when long promised and long delayed advances in space tourism are becoming reality, in the form of suborbital flights by Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin spacecraft and the first purely private flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon. The seventh decade of the era of human spaceflight holds potential unseen since its first decade.

The Royal Astronomical Society of Canada in the 2020s

In the last weekend of June, the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada completed its second Virtual General Assembly, a socially distanced version of its annual get-together whose history goes back more than 60 years. This virtual event marked a major turning point for the RASC, heralding the arrival of a new and younger generation of astronomers who will lead the society well into the 21st century.

Its keynote speaker, Emily Calandrelli, may not be known to those of us who came of age during the Space Race, but she is a rock star to younger space enthusiasts. Calandrelli hosts and produces a hit series on Netflix, Emily’s Wonder Lab, and she has a major presence on social media. She spoke about the importance of attracting women and girls to science and technical occupations and outlined the often difficult history of how they were ignored and marginalized in the past by NASA and other space organizations. Calandrelli appeared on the General Assembly’s first day, specially designated as Youth Day. The following day another powerful woman in astronomy was also featured: astrophysicist Katie Mack, who laid out scenarios for the future of our universe.

A presentation that will be long remembered came from Hilding Neilson of the University of Toronto, whose work includes integrating indigenous knowledges and methods into how we view the universe. His thought-provoking and timely talk on astronomy and colonization not only spoke to how indigenous perspectives of our universe have been missed, but also to how colonization is taking away our skies in the form of light pollution and satellite constellations. Front and centre at the General Assembly were young members of the RASC’s new Next Generation Committee, notably Emilie Lafleche, a talented student who hosted many sessions.

The RASC is especially close to my own heart because I first joined it when I was young, and I served as its president from July 2018 to June 2020, taking office just as the RASC was marking its 150th anniversary. During the early months of my term I had time to write a couple of blog entries about the society, but the responsibilities of that job took me away from this blog. Since I remain on the board of directors, my RASC work continues, and now I am finally getting back to writing about the experience of leading the RASC in this time of change and challenge.

In June 2019, the Society held an in-person General Assembly at York University in Toronto, a successful event that included announcements of new programs including the Rudolph Dorner Telescope Museum at the RASC National Office in Toronto. The GA featured a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 with James Hansen, the author of First Man, the acclaimed biography of Neil Armstrong.

It almost goes without saying that the final months of my time as president in 2020 were taken up meeting the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our executive director Phil Groff and his staff helped shift our activities from in-person to virtual formats, and our 30 centres all across Canada did likewise. These measures have helped keep our society of 5,300 amateur and professional astronomers active amidst the public health measures that have become all too familiar to all of us. Our 2020 General Assembly was supposed to take place in Vancouver, but the organizers of that event managed to overcome the jarring challenges of the pandemic to create a successful and memorable Virtual General Assembly featuring Canadian Astronaut Josh Kutryk, exoplanet expert Sara Seager, and CBC’s Bob McDonald, amongst others.

Even without the pandemic, there was a great deal of work to do at the RASC. As president, I was involved in renewing our flagship publication, SkyNews, by bringing a young new editor, Allendria Brunjes, on board after I served as interim editor for a single issue. When Randy Attwood retired as executive director after an unmatched career of service to the RASC, we selected Phil Groff as his successor. With the help of expanded fundraising, the society has been able to increase the services it provides to astronomers around Canada. A remote telescope located in California for RASC members and those learning about astronomy has come on line.

Over the past few years, the RASC has been engaged in making itself more welcoming for women, visible minorities and LGTBQ+ people through measures such as an anti-harassment policy and an Inclusivity and Diversity Committee. Both of these actions have won wide support around the society, but opposition came from a handful of individuals. Their actions caused unexpected and unwelcome challenges to board members and others, including many of our younger members, whose response inspired and sometimes prodded us on the board to work harder to make inclusion and diversity a reality in the RASC.

My successor as president of the society, Robyn Foret, fostered the creation of the RASC’s Next Generation Committee, whose members provided much of the energy and ideas that made our recent Virtual General Assembly a success. Our work continues, and much more remains to be done to ensure that the RASC reflects the face of Canada in the third decade of the 21st century.

The legendary Canadian astronomer Helen Sawyer Hogg once wrote a book called The Stars Belong to Everyone. That title was adopted for the RASC’s 2021 Virtual General Assembly, and it is the rallying cry of the Society as it enters the post-pandemic world.

John D. Hodge, NASA Flight Director, 1929-2021

March 16, 1966, was one of the most eventful and dramatic days for America’s human space program as it geared up to put astronauts on the Moon. That day an Atlas launch vehicle lifted off from Cape Kennedy and carried an Agena rocket into orbit. From a nearby launch pad 100 minutes later, Gemini 8 launched atop a Titan II rocket to begin chasing the Agena.

Aboard Gemini 8 were two first-time astronauts who would go on to legendary careers, Neil Armstrong and David Scott. At the Mission Control Center in Houston, that mission marked the first time that someone other than Chris Kraft was lead flight director. A soft-spoken Englishman named John Hodge was on console.

Six hours and four orbits after Gemini's launch, Gemini 8 and the Agena became the first spacecraft to dock in space, reaching an important milestone for the upcoming Apollo missions to the Moon. But a half hour later, the docked spacecraft banked without explanation and then began to spin nearly out of control while out of contact with the Earth.

When communications were re-established, Armstrong reported: “We’ve got serious problems here. We’re tumbling end over end up here. We’re disengaged from the Agena.”

Flight Director Hodge tried to make out the garbled transmission from Gemini. “Did he say he could not turn the Agena off?”

“No, he says he has separated from the Agena and he’s in a roll and he can’t stop it,” CAPCOM Jim Fucci replied.

Hodge was faced with the first life-and-death emergency situation in the U.S. space program. It was quickly established that the dangerous spin was caused by a stuck thruster on Gemini, not the Agena. But because Armstrong used re-entry thrusters to bring Gemini under control, the mission rules said Gemini had to return to Earth as soon as possible.

Hodge ordered Gemini 8 back home, and so Armstrong and Scott splashed down safely in the western Pacific Ocean after less than 11 hours in space rather than three days later in the Atlantic as planned.

The dramatic events of that day were the climax of Hodge’s career as a flight director, but he went on to prepare Apollo for the lunar landings that followed the first landing on Apollo 11, and he later played a key role in the early days of the program that led to the International Space Station. Hodge passed away on May 19, 2021, at his home in Virginia at age 92.

At the time of Gemini 8, John Dennis Hodge, then 37, stood out from most NASA flight controllers with his English accent, his graying hair, his pipe and his tweed jackets. Born in Leigh-on-Sea, England, on February 10, 1929, grew up in London and he studied aeronautical engineering at the Northampton Engineering College, now City, University of London, graduating in 1949. His original plan to study biochemistry had been frustrated when veterans of World War II got first choices for university positions.

He went to Vickers-Armstrong for a 12-month apprenticeship, followed by another two years in the aerodynamics department. His interest was in supersonic flight, but the British government, nearly bankrupted by the war, was cutting back.

His new wife, the former Audrey Cox, wanted to travel before settling down, and opportunity beckoned at just outside of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where Avro Canada, an offshoot of the Britain’s Hawker Siddeley Group, was about to start work on a Mach 2 supersonic jet interceptor known as the CF-105 Avro Arrow.

So Hodge began work in 1952 at Avro Canada, where almost from the beginning he worked on the Arrow. “I did the [jet engine] intake and the ram, all the inlets. Then they needed a guy to take over the airloads group. I was put in that job.” Later on he moved to flight testing on the Arrow.

The soaring cost of the Arrow program had always concerned the Canadian government, and on the day in 1957 the first Arrow was rolled out of the hangar, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, sending an unequivocal signal that nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles were becoming the major threat to North America in place of the bombers that the Arrow were designed to defend against.

The Canadian government abruptly cancelled the Arrow program on February 20, 1959, throwing 2,000 engineers and thousands of others out of work. This was just months after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had been established in the United States and charged with launching humans into space in Project Mercury.

“Most Americans thought that Mercury was going to be a fly-by-night reaction to Sputnik that wouldn’t last that long,” Hodge said. “That was the general expectation. Most serious engineers in the States weren’t the least bit interested in the Mercury program. So that left it wide open for the younger people.”

In March, leading officials from NASA flew to Toronto and hired 25 British and Canadian engineers from Avro Canada to work on Mercury as part of the Space Task Group in Hampton, Virginia. Another six were hired soon after, and in 1961 NASA announced that STG would move to Houston, Texas, in the Manned Spacecraft Center that a decade later was renamed the Johnson Space Center.

Hodge was hired for his variety of experience, especially in flight test, and was one of the most senior members of the group from Avro. Because of the urgency of NASA’s mandate, the immigration procedures for the new hires were completed in record time, and the Avro engineers reported for work at STG in April, 1959.

Assigned as the assistant to Chuck Mathews, the head of the operations division, Hodge quickly became involved in drawing up the mission rules for Mercury. These rules would, among other things, cover decisions on whether to continue a mission or abort it when a problem cropped up. Along with others from Avro, Hodge was heavily involved in setting up Mercury’s round the world tracking network.

As Mercury geared up in 1961 and 1962, he became Kraft’s deputy as chief of the flight control division. For the first three Mercury orbital flights in 1962, Hodge was assigned to the tracking station in Bermuda, ready to take over as flight director if the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral experienced a serious problem. Moments before John Glenn was launched on his historic orbital flight on February 20. 1962, Hodge had to call a short hold in the countdown while he dealt with a problem with the computer in Bermuda.

The final Mercury mission was Gordon Cooper’s Faith 7 flight in May 1963 that was due to last 34 hours. NASA decided to implement 12-hour shifts with two teams of flight controllers. Chris Kraft, who had been flight director for every previous Mercury flight, became flight director on the day shift and Hodge was designated flight director on the night shift. Hodge became the only person other than Kraft to take the reins of Mercury control.

“I can’t remember anything spectacular during that period,” Hodge said of his first shift as flight director. “Most of the time I was on, we were planning for the next phase and [Cooper] was asleep. Our job was really a planning function. Which is a job I sort of took over in later missions, when we started going to Gemini and Apollo. My reputation was for planning for future events, which was a job I liked doing anyway.” One lesson learned during this flight was that two shifts of flight controllers probably wouldn’t be enough for longer duration flights, so flights in Gemini and afterward had three daily shifts of flight directors.

Early in 1965, the Gemini program began in earnest with the new Mission Contol Center in Houston nearing completion. The robotic Gemini 2 mission, and the first crewed Gemini flight, the three-orbit Gemini 3, were controlled from the Mercury Control Center at the Cape under Kraft, while Hodge served as flight director in the backup center at Houston.

The four-day mission of Gemini 4 in June 1965 was the first flight to be controlled from the new control center in Houston, and the first to be controlled using three shifts of flight controllers, rotating each day. In April, NASA announced four flight directors for the upcoming Gemini missions in 1965: Kraft as mission director and flight director on the first shift, The second shift worked under a 31-year-old newcomer to the ranks of flight directors, Eugene Kranz. Hodge was put in charge of the third shift, also known as the planning shift. Glynn Lunney was named as backup flight director.

Each flight director took a colour that would be used to designate their team. Hodge chose blue, making him blue flight, in charge of the blue team. Kraft chose red, Kranz white, and Lunney black under a tradition that long endured.

By the time of Gemini, Hodge was head of the MSC’s flight control division, supervising a large group of engineers. He had the responsibility of building up the group of flight controllers for Gemini and Apollo, and so he was hiring people “left, right and center.” Between flights, his flight controllers were busy planning missions; drawing up documentation, flight plans and mission rules; and closely reviewing results from previous flights. As well, they worked on simulations of flights, mainly possible flight emergencies, with the astronauts in spacecraft simulators hooked up to the flight control rooms.

The flight control setup continued through the missions of Geminis 5, 6 and 7. Hodge was involved in helping Gemini 5 overcome fuel cell problems to that nearly curtailed its mission, and then with the dramatic rendezvous in space involving Geminis 6 and 7. When Kraft moved to preparations for Apollo in 1966, Hodge became lead flight director for Gemini 8, and after that flight, he too moved on to Apollo.

When Gemini wound up at the end of 1966, Hodge was given a NASA Exceptional Service Medal for “planning and directing the flight control aspects of manned space flight missions and in developing highly proficient flight control teams necessary for the conduct of the missions.” Shortly before that, Hodge flew to his ancestral home to receive an honorary doctor of sciences degree from the University of London.

Kraft, Hodge and Kranz were set to return to their original rotation for the first crewed Apollo flight in February 1967, and Kraft and Hodge were on console in Houston on January 27 when a fire consumed the pure oxygen atmosphere inside the spacecraft, killing astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, Edward H. White and Roger Chaffee.

Hodge was involved in the work of investigating the fire’s causes and making needed changes to the spacecraft. On January 22, 1968, Hodge worked his final shift as a flight director during the robotic flight of the first lunar module in Apollo 5.

While both Kraft and Kranz rated Hodge highly for his intellect and ability as a planner, and Hodge’s actions in Gemini 8 won universal praise, his two colleagues said he was not known as an effective manager. Kranz described Hodge in his memoirs as someone who sought more consensus and was more philosophical and thoughtful than his peers.

Hodge had become a U.S. citizen in November 1964, and he and his wife had two sons and two daughters, who all survive him. In 1961, he and other British engineers who worked for the space agency formed a NASA cricket team that played a game against William and Mary University in Virginia.

From July 1968 to his departure from NASA in June 1970, Hodge was manager of Advanced Mission Programs at the Manned Spacecraft Center. By then, he was already working on the Apollo missions that would follow the first lunar landing. “I was beginning to worry that no one was looking at the second lunar landing. The whole organization was concentrating on the first, and it seemed to me that if you have 10 or 12 sets of hardware, you have to start worrying about the rest of the program,” he said.

By February 1969, Hodge’s group had written specifications for a Lunar Module that could stay longer on the Moon, carry more equipment such as a lunar roving vehicle down to the Moon, and bring more lunar samples home. That spring, his group also drew up changes to be made to Apollo's Service Module to allow the placement of scientific instruments to photograph and measure the Moon. Hodge’s office was also charged with looking beyond Apollo to programs such as a permanent space station, a reusable spacecraft, and trips to Mars.

After leaving NASA in June 1970, he spent most of the next 12 years working on advanced transportation concepts in various positions at the Department of Transportation, first in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and later in Washington, D.C. From 1974 to 1976, he did similar work for the Urban Transportation Development Corporation in Toronto, Ontario, a corporation owned by the Government of Ontario that is remembered for developing elevated transit systems in Scarborough, Ontario, Greater Vancouver B.C., and Detroit.

“I had the job of sort of looking to the future,” Hodge said of his work for the Department of Transportation. “What directions technically and politically and all that kind of thing could we take the department to be useful in the field of transportation? It was a tremendously broad subject and I had a wonderful time. We did a lot of studies on the future of the air traffic control system. We did a lot of stuff on high-speed railroads, looking at passenger situations, and came to the conclusion that there was nowhere in the United States where railroad passenger traffic made any sense at all. It would never be profitable.”

While he worked on advanced planning at NASA, he befriended another engineer named James Beggs, and they met again working at the Department of Transportation. When Ronald Reagan became president of the United States in 1981, he selected Beggs to be Administrator of NASA, and Beggs’ call for NASA to develop a permanent space station got Hodge’s attention.

In May 1982, Beggs announced the formation of a space station task force headed by Hodge, who controversially refused to consider designs advanced by the Johnson Space Center and the Marshall Space Flight Centers, and refused to even suggest what the station might look like in order to protect the station from critics who would look for deficiencies. The Task Force instead focused on canvassing potential users for a space station on what they would want out of a station, and also put out study contracts to major aerospace companies for station concepts.

The U.S. military wanted nothing to do with the station, and others in the administration opposed it because of the cost, but Beggs, his deputy Hans Mark and Hodge and his team eventually won over the president, who announced his support for a space station in his 1984 State of the Union Address, followed by Congress.

In April 1984, Beggs announced the formation of an interim office of space station at NASA headquarters, headed by Phil Culbertson, with Hodge as his deputy. The office was made permanent on August 1, and Hodge became deputy associate administrator for space station.

The space station team also began work on defining what the station would look like and, more importantly, who in NASA would do what. Hodge envisioned a station operating in a standard equatorial orbit from Cape Canaveral supported by two robot platforms where experimental work could go on without concern for human contamination. Hodge stressed “operational autonomy” in his design concepts for a station that could operate independent of ground control. The former flight director realized that the cost of maintaining the ground control infrastructure would drive the station’s costs to a prohibitive level.

NASA began to undergo a series of changes triggered in part by the departure of Beggs as administrator in late 1985. Soon NASA was reeling from the impact of the Challenger disaster, and later in 1986, Hodge was given a reduced role as infighting grew between NASA centers for their shares of station work. Hodge explained: “I made the bureaucratic mistake of trying too many things at the same time. New ideas in management, technical management. By this time, NASA had become stodgy, very bureaucratic.”

He left NASA for the last time in 1987 and became a consultant based at his home in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., where he said he enjoyed “picking and choosing who I’ll work for.” At the time of Apollo 11, NASA had given Hodge another NASA Exceptional Service Medal, and he won a NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal in 1985 for his work on the space station.

Hodge’s passing came two months after that of fellow flight director Glynn Lunney and nearly two years after the death of Chris Kraft, leaving Gene Kranz as the only surviving member of the original generation of NASA’s flight directors. The space station he helped bring to reality underwent many design and management changes after Hodge left NASA, becoming the International Space Station prior to its long-delayed start of construction on orbit in 1998.

NASA Looks at the History of Commercial Space

A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop a Falcon 9 rocket at Pad 39A (SpaceX photo)

With the commercial space industry finally moving to a central role in spaceflight with the first flights of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, the NASA History Program Office appropriately chose this time to look back at the history of Commercial Space.

This recognition took the form of a symposium held virtually on Webex, NASA and the Rise of Commercial Space: A Symposium to Examine the Meaning(s) and Context(s) of Commercial Space, which took place March 17, 18, 19 and 25, 2021. The sessions will be made available for review online, and later on in the form of a publication.

Speakers included historians and other academics, entrepreneurs, scientists, promoters, regulators, journalists, and officials from NASA and the military, all of whom joined the meeting from various locations around the world, most memorably Astrosat CEO Steve Lee’s Final Session keynote from inside a sailboat off the coast of Scotland.

The symposium began with journalist Eric Berger’s account of SpaceX’s difficult early days, and then the first full day of discussions on March 18 focused on what constitutes Commercial Space, and the legal and entrepreneurial frameworks that surround it.

The symposium featured the relationship between private enterprise and government in its various guises such as customer, regulator, and supporter. Eminent historian Roger Launius discussed possible models for commercialization on the Moon such as the Antarctic legal regime for future scientific research and the National Park model for tourism there. Launius and Wendy Whitman-Cobb of the USAF School of Advanced Air and Space Studies also recalled how the U.S. Government’s relationships with railroads and the commercial air industry offer lessons for Commercial Space.

Rick Sturdevant of the U.S. Space Force, Deganic Paikowsky of Hebrew University and others discussed how the dual military and peaceful uses of space technologies affect how they are regulated. And as Sturdevant and other speakers pointed out, U.S. military and other government procurement has shifted away from buying launch vehicles to procuring launch services.

To me, the most interesting presentation of the day also opened the discussion that was the topic of the following morning – the efforts to encourage space commercialization in the 1980s, the early days of the Space Shuttle program. Harvard historian Matthew Hersch outlined what he saw as the hard-won lessons of the shuttle years for those who expected the shuttle to open space to commercialization.

Shuttle supporters and commercial spaceflight advocates in the 1980s were disappointed when their assumption that the shuttle’s promise of low-cost space access would open markets to Commercial Space did not come to fruition. Hersch also argued that another mistaken belief was that winged space vehicles such as the shuttle were the inevitable form of future spacecraft. Efforts in the past to commercialize new technologies had often failed until the government offered subsidies and incentives – and that applied to the shuttle as well.

Scott Pace, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, opened the March 19 panel on the shuttle era by providing some of the flavor of the time. He recounted meeting physicist and space colonization advocate Gerald K. O’Neill and then joining other libertarian space advocates to fight the “socialistic” Moon Treaty of 1979 that was seen as a threat to private enterprise in space and therefore was never ratified by the United States.

John Logsdon, Pace’s predecessor at the Space Policy Institute, addressed the space policy of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, including the beginnings of policies explicitly aimed at commercializing space activities and ending NASA’s monopoly on many space activities. That period was also known for the beginnings of the private provision of launch vehicles, hopes for microgravity research, and rivalries between U.S. government agencies to regulate private space efforts. Many of the Reagan space policies were driven more by ideology than facts, Logsdon said.

Going beyond the outsized hopes for the Space Shuttle and the ideological fervor of the Reagan Administration, Texas A&M historian Jonathan Coopersmith spoke about the entrepreneurial energy of the time, stoked by the idea that space was “the next big thing.” But space was not different than other technologies that emerged in a boom that was followed by a bust, he said. The 1980s and 1990s saw many false dawns for Commercial Space. One of the most studied failures of the era was the U.S. government’s attempt to commercialize civil remote sensing, explained at this event by Brian Jirout of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Pace concluded that we are now at last entering the commercial era in space. Looking back on the last 40 years, Logsdon said, “the market worked.” At more than one point, I got the impression that the Space Shuttle was in fact an impediment to the commercialization of space, contrary to the intentions of its creators.

The present day was represented by speakers from NASA who are facilitating commercial applications available on board the ISS and other NASA spacecraft and facilities, and from some customers, including Adidas researcher Henry Hanson, who is doing microgravity research to make better balls, running shoes and foam.

Steve Lee, whose Astrosat firm provides remote sensing and other space services, told the symposium that he doesn’t go to space conferences to do business. Instead he looks elsewhere for potential customers who need space products or space solutions. Lee has found that Earth observation and other space products are often overpriced, and many space firms try to do too much – they may be good at launching, building and operating spacecraft, but maybe they aren’t so adept at analysing the data they obtain.

I came out of the conference with some ideas about why space commerce is flourishing now relative to a generation ago, but no conclusions. Some of today’s successes may be the result of a shift from traditional space contractors to a new generation of firms like SpaceX and entrepreneurs like Steve Lee. Some of it may come from continued encouragement from NASA and the military. Or it may be the shift from the U.S. government designing, buying and operating rockets and spacecraft to simply purchasing the services, supporting the builders and freeing them to sell their services to other customers. Another possibility is that Commercial Space has simply gone beyond its first boom and bust cycle, and now is gaining a firm footing.

One omission that stood out for me was the lack of profile given to the original Commercial Space activity, communications satellites. While the NASA History Office, as it was then, hosted a conference on communications satellites in 1995 and published papers from that event, the field of communications satellites has continued to evolve since that time, as symbolized by the launch of 60 SpaceX Starlink satellites from the Kennedy Space Center on the eve of the symposium’s final session.

The symposium could have benefitted from more content on the evolution of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which played a major role in the rise of space firms and is reshaping the U.S. space program. Nevertheless, the talks and panels, many of which aren’t reported here, provided much food for thought on the history and future of Commercial Space.

NASA Acting Chief Historian Brian Odom reports that attendance at the meeting neared 700 people at one point and generally stood at about 300 people throughout the event. This attendance and the ability to bring in speakers and participants from around the world who might otherwise not be available may point to future virtual symposia once we move into the post-COVID-19 world. Virtual meetings do not provide much opportunity for offline conversations between participants, so perhaps in the future NASA might consider livestreamed symposia conducted on site augmented with virtual speakers.