John Aaron
John W. Aaron is a former NASA engineer, and was a flight controller during the Apollo program. He is widely credited with saving the Apollo 12 mission when it was struck by lightning shortly after liftoff and played an important role during the Apollo 13 crisis, earning him the highly complimentary appellation of \"a steely eyed missile man\". When he arrived at NASA, Aaron was trained as an EECOM, a flight controller with specific responsibility for the electrical, environmental and communications systems onboard the spacecraft. By January 19, 1965, when the unmanned Gemini 2 was launched, he was already working in Mission Control. When Apollo 12 launched on November 14, 1969, John Aaron was on shift. Thirty-six seconds after liftoff, the spacecraft was struck by lightning, causing a power surge. Instruments began to malfunction, communications dropped out, and telemetry data became nonsensical. The flight director, Gerry Griffin, expected that he would have to abort the mission. However, Aaron realized that he had previously seen this odd pattern of telemetry. A year before the flight, Aaron had been observing a test at Kennedy Space Center when he had noticed some unusual telemetry readings. On his own initiative, he traced this anomaly back to the obscure Signal Conditioning Equipment (SCE) system, and became one of the few flight controllers who was familiar with the system and its operations. In the case that first drew his attention to the system, normal readings could have been restored by putting the SCE on its auxiliary setting, which meant that it would run even under low-voltage conditions. Aaron surmised that this setting would also return the Apollo 12 telemetry to normal. When he made the recommendation, \"Flight, try SCE to \'Aux\'\", most of his mission control colleagues had no idea what he was talking about. Both the flight director and the CapCom asked him to repeat the recommendation. Pete Conrad\'s response to the order was, \"What the hell is that?\" Fortunately Alan Bean was familiar with the location of the SCE switch inside the capsule, and flipped it to auxiliary. Telemetry was immediately restored, allowing the mission to continue. This call earned Aaron the lasting respect of his colleagues, who declared that he was a \"steely-eyed missile man\", the absolute highest of NASA compliments. Aaron was off duty when the Apollo 13 explosion occurred, but was quickly called to Mission Control to assist in the rescue and recovery effort. Flight Director Gene Kranz put Aaron in charge of the Command Module\'s power supply. He was in charge of rationing the spacecraft\'s power during the return flight. He is also credited with developing the innovative power up sequence that allowed the Command Module to reenter safely while running on very limited battery power. After the Apollo program ended, Aaron remained at NASA. He worked on the Skylab program, and was involved in the development of the Space Shuttle software.
