Robert Gilruth, American Aerospace Engineer
Gilruth keeps up with progress of the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing mission from his console in Houston's Mission Control Center. Robert Rowe Gilruth (October 8, 1913 - August 17, 2000) was an American aerospace engineer. In 1937 Gilruth was hired at NACA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, where he performed flight research and pioneered the recording of data from instruments during flight test, to be later correlated with the pilot's experience. Gilruth became involved in the transition of NACA into NASA. When NASA was created, Gilruth became head of the Space Task Group, tasked with putting a man in space before the Soviet Union. When President Kennedy announced that America would put a man on the Moon before the end of the decade in 1961, Gilruth was unsure that such a goal could be accomplished. He was integral to the creation of the Gemini program, which he advocated as a means for NASA to learn more about operating in space before attempting a lunar landing. Soon the Apollo program was born, and Gilruth was made head of the NASA center which ran it, the new Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) (now the Johnson Space Center) and served as director of the MSC until his retirement in 1972. He oversaw a total of 25 manned space flights, from Mercury-Redstone 3 to Apollo 15. Gilruth died in 2000 at the age of 86.
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