John Newcomb
NASA Langley Engineer and Author John Newcomb Dies
“An engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center during the critical Apollo years and those that successfully landed Viking on Mars, John Foster Newcomb passed away March 10, 2016. In the early heady days of space exploration, Newcomb worked on the Lunar Orbiter Project which placed five Lunar Orbiters around the moon, a mission critical to the success of the Apollo Project. The Lunar Orbiters photographed and mapped the moon, giving researchers insight into the best potential landing sites for the crewed Apollo missions.”
Keith’s note: John Newcomb and I recently exchanged voicemails about his book but never managed to talk. I wanted to talk to him about his Lunar Orbiter experiences. He spoke at NASA HQ just last week – but NASA does not tell people about these events. Now he is gone. Dammit. I’m glad he was able to write this book and speak to people about it such that we know what it was like to do crazy things that no one has ever done before.
John spoke at the Goddard Engineering Colloquium on Monday March 7.
He described how the Earth rise picture taken by Lunar Orbiter was
totally unauthorized, and how big shot managers declared that anyone working on taking an Earth photo would be fired on the spot, then described the surprise when the photo lab guy figured out what was in that first Earth rise image. He still had his “5 for 5” button, issued to the Lunar Orbiter team members for their five successful missions in five attempts, unlike other lunar missions that were “5 for 7” or “3 for 9”.
He also described how his team was reviewing the final command sequence for the Viking lander, the last command load to be uplinked to the lander before it was cut loose from the orbiter. A red telephone that was a direct line from the White House rang, President Ford was calling to see how it was going, and John’s boss told the president to call back later because his team was busy.
The first color images from Viking showed a blue sky on Mars because of a faulty color calibration, it was later corrected to show the pink sky we all know and love today, but not before Gerry Soffen walked around the lab humming the “Blue skies, smiling on me” tune.
The title of his book came from a Nobel laureate scientist who objected to giving the Lunar Orbiter project to Langley, because “those guys are just a bunch of plumbers”.