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Thank you for your perspective, RA. You have been where many of us cannot go, and seen, done things that many of us cannot see or do.

I had a FRiend a few years ago whose little company was hired by NASA to transcribe (he and his partner were court reporters) the radio transmissions for the first Lunar Landing. He had some fascinating stories to tell. He was a good story-teller, in the "Quiet Birdman" tradition.

Secondhand information and observations are not as good as being there, but they are far better than not knowing at all. Sounds like you may have the workings of a good book. Give it a whirl.

He had some fascinating stories to tell

How cool :-) I have two that you might like, true stories BTW:

1) As I think back over the years spent in control rooms some of the zanier thing we did come to mind. Oh it's not sending commands to a spacecraft or talking to astronauts in space, but the little things that made the day-to-day operations bearable. One of those things we did involved an initiation for the new kid on the block. This control center (actually every one I have ever been in is like this) had a raised floor. The consoles were the old NASA type and very large bundles of cables would snake down from them into the cableways beneath the engineer’s feet. This would leave a gap between the cables and the edge of the floor. First we would prime" the pump" so to speak. We would talk about all of the small animals and snakes that lived beneath the floor (actually there were none). After about two weeks and sufficient paranoia had set in, an engineer would sneak down under the floor, crawl to the hapless victims console and reach up through the cable hole wearing a big brown furry mitten and grab their ankle. The resulting fireworks were nothing less than spectacular!

2) One of the more interesting things we used to do was “dish rides.” We would climb into the dish and then an operator back in the control room would move the dish around. It was quite a ride at about 120 feet off the ground. My heart would flutter a bit as I walked around that dish (the metal was thin and it would give a little as I walked). If I let myself think about it too much, all I would think about was the steel and concrete 120 feet down underneath that thin metal. The dish antenna weighed more than 30 tons and the radome covering it was over 20 tons.