RIP John Hodge
 

Who?

One of the very first Flight Directors at NASA...on the console as Flight Director when Gemini 8 (Armstrong/Scott) had it's close call...

Reconstruction here with original audio, event starts at 22 minutes..


A Brit, to NASA by way of Canada - he one of many Brits and Canadians who moved south to the States as a result of the collapse of the Avro Arrow project and the need for a fast expending NASA to find engineers/flight test engineers...

Short obit here by Robert Pearlman:

Former NASA flight director ("Blue Flight") John D. Hodge, who was console when a stuck thruster sent Gemini 8 into a spin, died on May 19, 2021, according to flight controller Sy Liebergot. Hodge was 92.A British-born engineer who worked on the Avro Arrow in Canada before becoming a member of NASA's Space Task Group, Hodge served as chief of the flight control branch at Langley Research Center in Virginia. In addition to being a flight director, Hodge was chief of the flight control division and manager of the advanced missions program office at the Manned Spacecraft Center (today, Johnson Space Center) in Houston.

In 1982, Hodge became director of the Space Station Task Force at NASA Headquarters in Washington. He served as the deputy associate administrator for the space station from 1984 to 1985 and then acting associate administrator from 1985 to 1986.

Link to NASA Oral History - 1999 Hodge Interview

Thanks for posting this. News to me that any 'Brits' were involved with NASA back then.

Courtesy of John Diefenbaker and his cancellation of the Arrow!

Rest in peace...He was a great man, and it's a big loss for NASA.

Yep India Four Two has explained why...not sure if you've read the Oral history in the OP but it's explained there...

John H was for some time deputy to the legendary Chris Kraft, the man who defined the role of Flight Director, so he was a major player in the very early days of Mission Control..but (and as he says in the interview and as also get mentioned in Gene Krantz's bio) he fell out with the boss - TBF a few people got on the wrong side of Kraft- and it could be career ending..John H got let off lightly with a move sideways..

Top of my head a couple other notable Brits..

Tec Roberts

John Tribe

Indeed. Including one or two astronauts if I understood correctly!

I think those early flight controllers and directors were quite a special breed. I assume he wrote a biography? It's passed me by so I will try to find a copy.

0918

Chris Kraft and careers ended...where to start? ..Carpenter is the obvious one...then Apollo7: Eisele & Cunningham never flew again ...(Schirra would have also been a goner but for the fact was retiring anyway)..no doubt a few more along the way...

Not sure J Hodge did but be interested to know...

FWIW this link leads to some old BBC interviews with both John Hodge and Tecwyn Roberts.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/the-br...ndings/zfcrscw

I always thought John Llewellyn was British but he wasn't!

I must have missed the reference to Hodge crossing Kraft, I'll have to re-read Kranz's book soon.

You'd think so wouldn't you...

I'm not sure Hodge "crossed" Kraft as such, but they certainly had a falling out..

In the Oral history (link in the OP) Hodge stated:

"That's the first time Chris and I had a falling-out, which I find I do very often with my bosses. He appointed a whole bunch of new flight directors and I didn't know anything about it before he did that, and I was so pissed off that I decided to leave the operations game."

As far as the Krantz account goes it's on page 227 of my copy of "Failure is not an option..." Krantz states Hodge and Craft had had disagreements over some policy issues and that he believed "Chris thought John was too conservative to be a flight director" ...Elsewhere in the book of course Krantz speaks highly of Hodge, as I guess you'd expect.