Causing a stir in space

I checked my emails late last night and the hairs raised on the back of my neck when I saw a note from Sy Liebergot.

To anyone unfamiliar with the space race, the name will almost certainly mean nothing. To anyone interested in the Apollo missions, and most especially the explosion that crippled Apollo 13, Sy's name stands right up there with Jim Lovell, Gene Kranz and the crack NASA team that turned a near disaster into a triumph of ingenuity and fortitude.

Sy was EECOM at Mission Control for the Apollo 13 mission monitoring the electrical, environmental and communications system for the spacecraft, and indeed was in the trenches as a Flight Controller from Apollo 8 right through to Apollo 15, as well as for Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz link-up.

He has agreed to be interviewed for my Masters Dissertation and it will be fascinating the get the views and impressions of a man who saw NASA through its finest hours and was still at the heart of the agency as it sought to find a new purpose and new goals once the Stars and Stripes were flying on the lunar surface.

Sy's put together a lively and comprehensive website, and I'm now adding his book to the disso bibliography.

I went to bed smiling last night, and I'm still grinning this morning.