Nasa flight director ensured Armstrong’s safe landing on near-disastrous mission

‘If anybody ever says, ‘What did I do in the space programme?’,’’ John Hodge reminisced, ‘‘it was make sure that Neil Armstrong was around to fly on Apollo.’’ If not for Hodge, who has died aged 92, Armstrong might not have survived Gemini 8, the near-disastrous 1966 mission on which Hodge was flight director, communicating with the astronauts from Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

Project Gemini was the second of the United States’ three human space flight programmes. It succeeded Project Mercury, which replicated the Soviet Union’s success in putting a man into space, and laid the foundations for

Project Apollo, the series of missions that would lead to

Armstrong setting foot on the Moon. A key aim of Gemini was to achieve the first rendezvous of two spacecraft in orbit. Armstrong and his fellow astronaut, David Scott, were to approach another spacecraft, the Agena, and dock with it, after which Scott would perform a spacewalk.

Having sighted the Agena, they approached it with tentative blasts of their thrusters until they were less than 50 metres away, when ground control gave them permission to begin docking. They approached slowly then, with a satisfying click of the latches, docked on to the vehicle. ‘‘Flight, we are docked,’’ Scott radioed to Houston. ‘‘Yes, it’s a real smoothie.’’

But once the vehicles were locked together they began to spin. By blasting the thrusters, Armstrong stabilised the pair, but once they had ceased it started to spin again. Scott and Armstrong decided to undock but, once separated, Gemini began tumbling even faster. They realised the malfunction must be in one of Gemini’s thrusters. At this point in their orbit they were too far from mission control to consult Hodge.

Hodge knew he had 20 minutes before he would next be able to speak to them – in which time he and his control room team had to plot an emergency landing and save the astronauts’ lives. ‘‘The flight director really was in charge in those days,’’ Hodge said. ‘‘Nobody came in and said to me, ‘Here’s what you have to do.’ They just said, ‘It’s your mission. You do what you do.’ ’’

Armstrong and Scott had intended to land in the Atlantic, but the new site that Hodge decided upon in those 20 minutes was in the western Pacific, near an American destroyer, USS Leonard F Mason, which he hoped would be close enough to pick them up. As Gemini orbited over Hawaii, Hodge had eight minutes to tell them the exact angle and time at which they should fire their rockets, while over Tibet, to reach the East China Sea. Then he lost contact again, unsure whether he had just consigned the astronauts to disaster. ‘‘The question was, would anyone find [Armstrong]? It turned out it was all very accurate, and he landed close, fairly close, to the destroyer, and they picked him up.’’

John Dennis Hodge was born in Essex, southeast England. At school in north London, he was stymied in his ambition of becoming a biochemist when, at the end of World War II, the majority of university places were reserved for veterans. ‘‘The only thing I could get into was aeronautical engineering,’’ he said.

Upon graduating, he went to work in the aerodynamics department of Vickers-armstrongs, the company that had designed the Spitfire. In 1952 he married Audrey Cox, a nurse whom he met at a dance. They had four children, all of whom survive him.

Later in 1952 he and Audrey embarked on what they thought would be a six-month sojourn in Toronto, where Hodge would be working with the aeronautics company Avro Canada. In fact, they would never resettle in England. Hodge became involved in the development of the Avro Arrow, a supersonic aircraft designed to intercept nuclear bombers before they could drop their payload. That project was halted, and Hodge was made redundant. But before he could clear his desk, recruiters from Nasa offered him a job.

With a quick brain and an ability to stay serene under pressure, Hodge fitted in perfectly at Nasa. He became chief of the flight control branch in 1961, and of the flight control division in 1963. The Hodges lived in Friendswood, a suburb of Houston, near many other Nasa employees. With the other British expats, he started a cricket team; he also enjoyed tennis and gliding, and making model planes.

One of the stresses of Hodge’s job was a constant awareness of how easily a malfunction could take an astronaut’s life, and on January 27, 1967, what he feared came true. Apollo 1, for which he was flight director, caught fire during a rehearsal. Its three astronauts, Roger Chaffee, Edward White and Virgil Grissom, died. ‘‘You understand that risk is there,’’ he later said, ‘‘and when it happens it’s terrible.’’

Asked in 1966 whether he would trade his place in the control room for a seat in a rocket, Hodge replied: ‘‘I don’t think I’d do that. I’d like to go on a trip, there’s no question about that, but the job I have is tremendously exciting.’’ – The Times