A Kansan Conquers the Cosmos presents the story of Alan Glines, who began working with NASA in 1966 and was part of Mission Control during the height of the space program. Full of fun and excitement, Glines’s autobiography offers a first-person glimpse into four decades of the field of aerospace.He traces his own history from the beginning of his career through to the present and shares interesting anecdotes and histories of NASA and the American space program. From his days a science fiction-obsessed youth who ran a theater as if it were mission control to his various experiences in NASA, Glines attained the Mission Control spirit and dedication that he has lived for decades-that is, being on the playing field and being all you can be, all the time. Over four decades, he has acquired an extraordinarily rich tapestry of experience in the aerospace worlds of research and development, and command and control, exploring no fewer than seven geographical and intellectual career paths over the years. As a man whose career, teaching, and speaking efforts continue to inspire others today, Glines’s story is a detailed and unique and the aerospace industry in America from the inside.

A Kansan Conquers the Cosmos

or, "Spaced Out All My Life!"By Alan Glines

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Alan Glines
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-6441-9

Chapter One

Alan Meets His First Control Console: The KU Stage Lights

My affinity for control consoles, which eventually led me to Apollo Mission Control and my life's work in aerospace, began in 1959 at the University of Kansas (KU)—at the University Theatre, of all places. Control consoles are not like Captain Kirk's chair, where he commanded the Enterprise with voice callouts to his team. However, the other positions on the Enterprise had control consoles similar to mine at Apollo Mission Control.

A console can be as simple as a PC on a desk but is usually designed with more than one CRT (TV screen) and many indicator lights and push buttons that provide all the control, monitoring, and communications capability required by each position. One is connected to the console via headset and microphone, which frees one's hands to adjust video, press buttons, and select channels to communicate with colleagues.

Control consoles became a main theme early in my life, before I took over the ultimate control consoles at the "center of the universe." Starting in 1966, the center of the universe for much of my adult life was in Building 30, NASA Mission Control, at the brand-new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas (later the Johnson Space Center). The three-story building looks like six with the addition of another five to ten feet of false floor and false ceiling space required for all the cabling in the building. More about this incredible place later.

The heart of the Mission Control Center (MCC) is the main control room comprised of approximately fifteen consoles (Figure 1). This is what's usually seen on television. We knew that room as the MOCR (pronounced "MOH-kerr"), which stands for Mission Operations Control Room. But I'm not there yet.

In 1959, in a small room at the back of the brand-new University Theatre at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, I was a long way from Captain Kirk's Enterprise starship and many years from my console at the Apollo Mission Control Center in Houston (MCC-H). As a matter of fact, NASA's first Mission Control Center (MCC-K) had just been built for Alan Shepard's first flight into space in May 1961. It was located in a blockhouse near "missile row" on Cape Canaveral in Florida, adjacent to what is now called the Kennedy Space Center.

But in 1959 I was only sixteen years old, and I was drunk with power! There I was: a nerdy guy in total control of a major university summer production, manning the lighting console at the back of the balcony in the University Theatre. It was opening night of the play The Member of the Wedding. And thanks to Dr. Arthur Kean, the play's director, I was in charge of the house lights and all the stage lighting for the run of the play. I was well trained by Dr. Kean to perform the lighting cues on schedule throughout the opening and subsequent three weeks of performances. Captain Kirk would have been proud!

How did I get there in the summer of 1959? The story starts with my tenth-grade Speech class teacher, Mrs. McAlester. That class was the beginning of my long association with, and love of, live theater and show business. I was one of five lucky students selected for the Midwestern Music and Art Camp, a full summer of concentrated theater training at the University. There were only twenty-five of us under the concentrated care of the University Theatre faculty.

What an opportunity! I had no idea at the time, but I was smart enough to realize that it was a great adventure for this nerdy Kansan who had never been so far away from home on his own. I had journeyed to Kansas City once with my Little League baseball team to see Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Yogi Berra, and the rest of the Yankees play our Kansas City team, but that was it.

The full KU summer camp included our theater division along with other fine arts divisions, such as band, orchestra, chorus, ballet, and painting. The slang term for the long-running camp was "Band Camp." And it wasn't too much like a real camp; rather, we all stayed in modern university dormitory rooms. Everyone fit into the Carruth-O'Leary dormitory, I remember. It was within easy walking distance of all our theater locations.

More than six thousand high school students attended this camp. I had looked forward to meeting loads of people, but our theater schedule filled each day from morning to late evening. I met only a few people outside our group at the social events. Jeff ( a colleague in the theater group at the camp) and I used to sneak over to the ballet division to watch all those beautiful girls dance in their tutus. (The second summer, I fell in love with one. She was a small blonde lady from Oklahoma City named Cherri—my first true love. But I am getting ahead of myself!)

Our theater group came from high schools all over the state, Wichita and Kansas City, the larger metropolitan areas. With five of us from Independence, a town of ten thousand, we were somewhat over-represented. No matter. One or two camp members were from as far away as Des Moines, Iowa, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, as I recall.

Our normal day consisted of a heavy schedule from dawn to dark. In the morning we were scheduled in classes that included stagecraft for production. Afternoons were filled with a variety of backstage work, putting our morning classwork to use at the theater. We helped get a college production ready for performance, doing such tasks as scene building and cutting spotlight gels, and got training in makeup, sound and lights, and scene changing while at it.

The evenings were set aside for the rehearsals for our major production, Once in a Lifetime.

We were surprised to learn that we would be preparing and performing in a three-act musical production during our summer there. What a challenge for us "green" actors from high school! It made the intensity of our summer similar to traditional summer stock theater, and called for us to rise to the challenge, each with our own character and contribution to the show. The setting was the KU University Theatre with its new facilities and talented, capable faculty.

What I appreciated from the start was being treated as responsible college students instead of high school students. As a result, that is what we became: responsible. (Perhaps more so than we ever became!) Additionally, we had immediate responsibility for other acting roles in small one-act plays directed by the theater graduate students as part of our morning classes. And casting began immediately for all parts in Moss Hart's musical, Once in a Lifetime, directed by Dr. Jack Brookings. He had more confidence in us than we had in ourselves.

I knew nothing about that show and, thankfully, was cast in small parts where my singing, such as it was, was relegated to the background—nearly a non-singing part. (I was not a trained singer at all.) I say "thankfully" because that freed up more of my time for what was coming as the most important experience of the summer for this small-town nerd.

I first met Dr. Arthur Kean as a teacher of one of our morning classes in theater arts and crafts. I don't remember much about his class except it included a lot of stagecraft basics that were new to me. In getting to know his students, Dr. Kean had an ulterior motive. He needed staff for other work! He needed bodies for some of the backstage jobs on the college production because the usual availability of students was far less for the summer than the regular school year.

The brand-new University Theatre was a modern and well-equipped facility. For its main stage productions, it sparkled with the latest in high-tech lighting instruments. Technical control for all the lights and sound were optimally located in a soundproof booth at the rear of the balcony overlooking the audience and stage. In this room I met my first control console in the real world. Up to this point, science fiction novels had provided me with a wealth of imagined starship controls throughout the galaxy. Now I was about to venture into console control of my own starship called the KU University Theatre. "Beam me down, Scotty. This sixteen-year-old is ready to control from my first console!"

I lucked out. The technical director of the theater was my morning teacher, Dr. Arthur Kean. I guess from his perspective he lucked out, too. In his class he had a kid from Independence who was interested in more than just becoming a star actor. I loved the technical side of that new theater, something I had never seen before.

As I got to know Dr. Kean in class, he apparently saw my interest in the lighting side of the business. It wasn't long before he asked me if I wanted to help run the lights for the college production. He didn't have to ask me twice! He would be happy to teach me all I needed to learn about the console operation of complex matrix power-driven group master dimmers. I agreed without hesitation.

Now, understand that the incredible control that I would have every night of the production was not like the starships I had flown throughout the galaxy in my imagination. But the down-to-earth side of me knew that this was the reality I had prepared for all my life. And I loved it!

I was honored to be offered this responsibility and told Dr. Kean that I would work hard to assure a perfect production every night. However, some of the lighting tasks in the evening conflicted with rehearsals for our high school production. I lucked out again in that I had only a few small parts in Once in a Lifetime. This allowed me, with some innovative scheduling by Dr. Kean and Dr. Brookings, to make all the Dr. Kean lighting design setup evenings for the college production and not miss any rehearsals that included my multiple parts in Once In a Lifetime.

To this day, I remember with fondness the many evenings that just Dr. Kean and I worked late on the main stage, with him at his makeshift worktable at sixth row, center, in the audience and me in the booth at the light console. We were setting the light levels for all the instruments that determined the lighting design for the scene areas on the large stage. In some cases, Art (he let me call him by his first name) made notes for changing the color of some of the instruments (spotlight gels). Those cases required more work the next day when the full stage crew was available. A color change meant that one or more spotlights had to have their color gel changed before Art and I could resume the setting of light levels.

Once all the light-level settings were complete for all the scene areas, along with all the night or daylight varieties that had to be created, then the new levels were drafted into a detailed lighting-change script that I was to follow during each production night. And once Dr. Kean set the lighting-design script for all the scenes over the span of about ten evenings and preset the scenario for the lights among the dimmers, all that was left was for me was to follow the script. Pretty simple, huh? Not much artistic skill required. Well, the power this sixteen-year-old had over this university production never produced a dull moment.

My power trip at the controls on the console started with me dimming the house lights to signal the start of the performance. The console was full of sophisticated power-driven dimmers with multiple masters to control all the on-stage scene transitions. For me it was a perfect match of my love for the technical with my burgeoning love of the theater. I did not have the opportunity to pilot the Enterprise at warp 9 throughout the galaxy, but I was the only kid on the entire college crew. Wow! What a power trip! And this was real.

On opening night for The Member of the Wedding, I think I was more nervous in my new high-tech role as lighting master of the universe (at least at KU!) than I was as an actor in my various small roles in Once in a Lifetime.

"Beam me up, Scotty! Life doesn't get any better than this!"

Little did I know that this first real control console experience would be a key indicator and early theme of my upcoming life at a console of much more complexity and wide-reaching control within our solar system on the Apollo Program.

Chapter Two

Radio Station KIND (Console 2)

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was partially responsible for helping me acquire my second control console job.

Back in Independence in 1960, at the end of my junior year in high school, my drama teacher and director of the school plays was Mrs. Margaret Goheen. She approached me one day in April to ask if I'd be willing to contribute to the city's Memorial Day services at the cemetery by delivering Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. I agreed and began memorizing the famous speech.

I found some of the passages rife with opportunities to add a little drama to Lincoln's words, so I looked forward to (perhaps) delivering a rousing version of his speech with gusto. In the end, I chickened out, because I realized that the words themselves carried their own weight of the sorrow of those Civil War dead.

As well, the somber tone of the ceremony at the cemetery discouraged me from too much drama. And, in thinking about it at the Gettysburg cemetery, I decided that Lincoln's words were just right if delivered clearly. So I toned it down some.

My voice projection level I still maintained so all could hear among the several hundred gathered that day. What I did not realize about the crowd was that everyone there had come mostly to pay tribute to a lost loved one. Perhaps some lost ones were also veterans of some war since the Civil War.

The words are stirring even today:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might long endure. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly, advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Some phrases in the speech never die. I noticed that President-elect Obama paraphrased them in his acceptance speech on November 4, 2008: "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from this Earth."

During my address, I first thought that I was being quietly interrupted at about the point of "We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives."

But I was wrong. It was not an interruption. A small chorus of sniffles was building in response to the power of those words. And I was a little shocked, so I adjusted my tone to finish on a quieter note. I had the personal satisfaction of what I thought was a reasonable repetition of President Lincoln's most famous words. I'm not saying that I am anything close to Abraham Lincoln in my delivery. It is just that those words are so powerful and that speech was so short and to the point. They instantly captured the tremendous sorrow of the day.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from A Kansan Conquers the Cosmosby Alan Glines Copyright © 2010 by Alan Glines. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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