John Llewellyn
Keith’s note: John Llewellyn, Apollo era flight controller “Black RETRO”, died on Tuesday. Details to follow.
“Houston, We’ve Had a Problem”, Jim Lovell
“In Mission Control the Gold Team, directed by Gerald Griffin (seated, back of head to camera), prepares to take over from Black Team (Glynn Lunney, seated, in profile) during a critical period. Seven men with elbows on console are Deke Slayton, Joe Kerwin (Black CapCom), Vance Brand (Gold CapCom), Phil Shaffer (Gold FIDO), John Llewellyn (Black RETRO), Charles Deiterich (Gold RETRO), and Lawrence Canin (Black GNC). Standing at right is Chester Lee, Mission Director from NASA’s Washington headquarters, and broad back at right belogs to Rocco Petrone, Apollo Program Director. Apollo 13 had two other “ground” teams, the White and the Maroon. All devised heroic measures to save the mission from disaster.”
I had an opportunity to speak with him a few times — a gregarious and larger-than-life character. A true Space Cowboy and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.
John once rode a horse into work, passing the guard showing his badge because he had a few too many tickets and could not drive his vehicle to support his role in MCC. The story has it that he tied the horse to a No Parking sign in front of Bldg. 30, he made his shift however.
From an online bio of Gene Kranz:
“With the Gemini 6 launch coming up, all the controllers were pulling exhausting double shifts. Llewellyn got himself into trouble when he went home to sleep. When he didn’t show for White Team’s next turn in the control room, Kranz had the previous shift’s RETRO give him a call. Llewellyn raced to work and, without thinking of the possible consequences, drove his car across the lawn and up the stairs. Perhaps he thought he had found the perfect parking place at the building’s main entrance, but security personnel weren’t amused. Lunney and Hodge had his parking pass suspended and told Kranz, “Llewellyn has got to learn a lesson. Having to walk on site will maybe put a dent in his thick skull.” Kranz doubted it and Llewellyn proved him right when he showed up with his own horse the very next day.”
email from John Bain: “Years ago (in the 80’s) JSC had a thriving Co-Op program. Students overlapped and had quite an organization where they tried to pass along interesting things that they had learned. Each new Co-Op was given a checklist of things they had to complete their first semester. Things like seeing mission control, talking to an astronaut, touching the Saturn 5, etc. One item on the list was to meet John Llewellyn. Typically the Co-Op would try to make an appointment and would go by John’s office (Bldg. 4?) and try to get him to tell a story. He had a few:
1) Apollo 15. They were having trouble getting the Rover deployed and in the middle of the night they wanted to see a piece of hardware that was locked in another building. John had his truck up on the sidewalk ready to crash through the doors when security showed up to unlock the building.
2) Notorious visits to the “Swinging Wheel”.
3) Visits to Telephone Road where arguments were often settled in a fistfight.
4) Judo matches between John and Gene Kranz
5)…
John frequented the Outpost some during its heyday and was always quick with a story or joke. This is where I met him. In these social settings you could tell everyone loved working with John for his exploits and fun-loving attitude, but if you really dug it out, you learned that John was a real NASA technical expert whose opinion was truly trusted.”
Memories came back after reading this, since I was part of the group that came up with the towing bill at Grumman along with Sam Greenberg and others in the Flight control lab. Dennis Frasca
This brings back memories as one of a group of guys who came up with the towing bill while working in Grumman’s Flight Control lab located in plant 5. I still have a pre-signed copy of that towing bill framed on the wall in my office at home. Dennis Frasca
John Llewellyn was a great man.
He was a foundational member of the team that created the mercury, gemini, and apollo mission operations – particularly the mission control architecture, including the worldwide networks of humans and machines that supported it.
He was a flight controller (“RETRO”) for many early unmanned and manned missions, from before Mercury through Skylab. The career of a giant.
He was the guy in the MOCR who took technical control of Apollo 13 after the accident, and figured out what was wrong, and figured how to bring the crew back.
He was an astrodynamicist, GNC engineer, systems engineer, an experimentalist in thermal protection systems, and one of the few guys in those early days who knew how to write code.
John earned the extreme loyalty and fast friendship of many of the early astronauts, as well as Gene Kranz, Kris Kraft and his other MOCR colleagues. He did _whatever_it_took_ to accomplish the mission: He could be a hard-driving wild man, fighting, cursing, rattling people’s cages.
Today’s NASA would never tolerate someone like him, and in a nutshell that explains what has gone wrong with NASA.
Before he was in the spaceflight business John was a marine in the Korean war. He was one of the “Chosin few”: The UN forces at Chosin reservoir that were surrounded and vastly outnumbered by Chinese troops, but who escaped after 17 days of very heavy fighting.
Men who go through things like that are not cowed by bureaucracies or bureaucrats. They know what real risk is. They do what they need to do.
He named the first row of the MOCR “the trench” because it reminded him of when he was a Marine in the trenches, with all hell breaking loose around him and shell casings piled everywhere (in the MOCR it was the pneumatic tubes that shuttled message to and from the back rooms. The instant messaging of its day).
There was a third trench in John’s life that fewer still know of: The trench deep in the Pacific ocean where he sent Apollo 13’s LEM (with its nuclear power sources) to rest after it had saved the crew.
Yes he was a cowboy. And I mean that literally: The kind who rides a horse and ropes steer. He ranched in Texas and in Belize. He was a straight shooter in all senses of the word. I am glad I knew him. He will be missed. He will be remembered. He will always inspire us.
Sorry, but the LM (not LEM, reacronymed early in the program) had no nuclear power resources. It had batteries which were barely able to provide enough power to complete the mission due to weight constraints. I was on the launch team.
With all due respect, I think you are wrong on this. According to numerous authoritative sources, the LM on Apollo XIII carried a SNAP-27 RadioIsotope Thermal Generator (RTG) to power the ALSEP (lunar science package). This RTG contained 44,500 Ci of plutonium oxide which was to be left on the lunar surface had the mission gone as planned.
E.g.: From the DOE document “Atomic Power in Space: A History” http://www.osti.gov/accompl…
“The detached Lunar Module broke upon re-entry, as anticipated, while the graphite-encased plutonium-238 fuel cask survived the breakup and went down intact in the 20,000 foot deep Tonga Trench”
This is entirely consistent with the transcripts of John Llewellyn’s interviews with the JSC Oral History Project. The relevant passage is on page 13-6 of http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/his…
I stand corrected and apologize. Forgot all about the ALSEP with the RTG.
Well, it makes me smile to hear all these interesting stories about my father. Today is my birthday and I have been thinking about how lucky I was to have him as my dad. His survival skills were intense and I hope that he passed them on to me. I am proud that he was buried at Arlington National and he would have enjoyed the attention. Thanks to all that remember him fondly.
My father was an interesting person.
If ever there was a man I wish I could have had the opportunity to meet it would have been John. After watching failure is not an option John’s low drag 0 BS approach to life is something I admire the hell out of in today’s phony plastic banana world. Heaven just got allot more interesting.