Aside from a few famous names like Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz, the people who worked in NASA’s Mission Control during the space program’s glory days remain largely anonymous. But that doesn’t make their personal stories any less compelling than those of the astronauts inside the spacecraft they so closely watched over.

These flight controllers worked inside the “Cathedral,” the third floor of Building 30 in the center of the Johnson Space Center’s sprawling campus. They were always watching, running the missions and ready to make split-second decisions. Now a new book, Go, Flight!, brings these flight controllers to life by providing an illuminating look at NASA in the days during the Gemini and Apollo programs, when the agency was more freewheeling and less buttoned down.

Above all, the dedication of these “steely eyed missile men” to their tasks stands out. Inside the doors of Mission Control it was all business. Was there really never any BSing? “Never,” the book’s coauthor and long-time Flight Director Milt Heflin told Ars. But outside Mission Control? They worked hard. They partied hard. And here are some of their stories.

John Llewellyn

Take John Llewellyn. “You’ve heard of work hard, party hard?” Heflin asks. “There was no one back in the day who partied harder than he did. Nobody could keep up with him. But when he walked into Mission Control and closed that door, the party hard switch was off and he was a consummate, outstanding flight controller who you could trust.”

Llewellyn was marked by his earlier service in the Korean War. Before he turned 19, Llewellyn landed at Red Beach during the Battle of Chosin and months later joined the vicious fighting at the Chosin Reservoir. During freezing conditions, as Chinese troops circled the hill he was on, Llewellyn killed an enemy soldier that came into his foxhole. He then spent the night there next to the dead Chinese soldier.

Terry Salvi

Terry Salvi

Terry Salvi

Terry Salvi

Terry Salvi

Terry Salvi

Rick Houston

Llewellyn carried those memories into Mission Control. Short-tempered, sometimes profane, he was also perhaps the most brilliant flight dynamics officer NASA has ever known. And that position in Mission Control is responsible for the flight path of the vehicle.

The book recounts several Llewellyn stories, many of which seem stupendously out of place with today’s straitlaced space agency. Perhaps the anecdotes are all the more enjoyable because of this. The book tells one tale of when Llewellyn overslept a shift during the Gemini 5 mission in 1965:

“He raced into work, and after not being able to find a parking spot for his Triumph TR3, drove up the steps to Building 30 and parked directly in front of the door. That stunt got his car pass yanked, but Llewellyn was not deterred in the least. He responded by parking a horse trailer across the street from the main gate and absolutely, positively rode his horse into work. That was Llewellyn, born a hundred years too late, a Wild West devil-may-care gunslinger if ever there was one.”

Llewellyn died in 2012 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors.

Ed Fendell

Ed Fendell may have followed the most unorthodox journey to Mission Control given that his formal education consisted of a merchandising degree from a junior college in Massachusetts. He joined the Army Reserves while in junior college, and after graduation he signed up for the Air Force. Then he took an IQ test that changed his life.

“When they gave all this IQ test that they did, I was up at the top,” Fendell says in the book. “I didn’t know I was smart. I had no idea. I got into air traffic control, and the next thing I knew, was first in my class.” He worked for the Federal Aviation Administration after leaving the military, and from there Fendell landed a job with NASA to serve as a capcom officer at one of the remote sites. Before NASA had satellites to communicate with its spacecraft, it stationed teams around the planet to keep line-of-sight communications with the crew.

That was a time, during the Mercury and Gemini missions, when Chris Kraft and the other leaders of Mission Control were making it up as they went along. There were no books or training programs. And Fendell, formally trained only in marketing, fell into it. Everyone worked together, and when you screwed up, you learned from it and weren’t expected to make the same mistake twice. Debriefings didn’t occur in a space center conference room, Fendell recalls in the book, but rather in the Hofbraugarten German restaurant about 10 miles away in Dickinson.

“The only people who went to that party were the flight controllers and the astronauts—no one else,” Fendell says in the book. “There was no ‘I’m bringing my girlfriend.’ You went down there, you drank beer, and everybody talked about you and they talked about all the shit that you did wrong. Everybody listened and heard and when somebody stood up there and said, ‘That damn Fendell did the following thing’… You stood there and took it, or you packed up and went home.”

Fendell learned, and he ended up at the INCO console during the Apollo missions. He was responsible for ensuring all data and voice communications between the ground and spacecraft were linked.

John Aaron

So why were the men from such disparate backgrounds in early mission control successful? According to the book’s co-author, Heflin, it’s because they prepared so diligently. The story of the Apollo 12 launch and the actions of Flight Controller John Aaron illustrate this idea.

About 36 seconds into the flight of the second human mission to the surface of the Moon, lightning struck the rocket. However, flight controllers didn’t know it at the time. What they did know is that they had lost data from the spacecraft as their displays stopped updating. Warning lights blared inside the spacecraft. It seemed like they probably would have to abort the mission, as the spacecraft was flying blind.

During all of this, John Aaron was watching from his EECOM station, which monitors the vehicle’s fuel cells and cabin pressure. As his mind turned over, Aaron recalled a test from more than a year earlier of a system inside the command module that was used to power up the spacecraft on the ground. His mind clicked. When Flight Director Gerry Griffin asked him how his systems were looking, Aaron responded cooly, “Flight, EECOM. Try SCE to Aux.”

Griffin had never heard of that switch before. He didn’t know where it was located. And in the middle of this chaos, Griffin was worrying mostly about when the best time to abort the mission might be. “Say again? SCE to Aux?” Griffin said. But he trusted his flight controller implicitly, so without further hesitation, the instruction was passed up to commander Pete Conrad inside the capsule. Conrad didn’t know where the switch was either, but Alan Bean did. He flipped it. Data came flooding back into Mission Control, and they were able to reconnect fuel cells to the spacecraft.

Aaron had saved the day. “That’s the only mission we can think of where a single individual made that kind of a call,” Heflin said.

After the incident, the great Chris Kraft, the original flight director who had written most of the original rules for mission control, came into the room. Aaron soon felt a hand on his shoulder. “That was a great job, young man,” Kraft told him. There was no higher praise, from no greater man, for someone working inside Mission Control.

Mission Control today

The book recounts the tales of flight controllers from 1965 to 1992, the years the third floor flight control room was in operation. The last mission flown from that room was STS-53, and the room is now designated a National Historic Landmark. Because of the time period, most of the stories in the book are about men, although the flight control rooms at Johnson Space Center have become a much more diverse place since then.

Heflin worries about his counterparts today. The size of flight operations at Johnson Space Center shrank 40 percent after the shuttle’s retirement in 2011. When Mission Control tracks human launches, they are from Baikonur, in Kazakhstan, completely under the control of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. And while the International Space Station requires care and vigilance, it’s more of a continual process rather than the cadence of regular missions.

“Unfortunately, what it means for today is we’re not flying missions often enough or close enough together,” Heflin said. “What happened back during Apollo and carried into Skylab and into shuttle is there was always a battle rhythm at the Johnson Space Center and the Kennedy Space Center. We were flying or preparing for a launch continuously. I don’t know how you keep a team that crisp today by having these big gaps between flying.”