Jerry Elliot High Eagle was possibly the first Native American to work in NASA mission control. He worked for NASA for over 40 years, from the Apollo moon landings up until the space shuttle missions. He was a trained physicist with both Cherokee and Osage heritage and played a crucial part in saving the Apollo 13 crew when an explosion meant they might not get back to Earth alive.
The story of Apollo 13 is told in the Tom Hanks film Apollo 13. The aim was to land on the moon for a third time following the previous two successful lunar missions of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. That plan was aborted on the way there, however, after pilot James Swigert radioed his now famous if misquoted words “Okay, Houston … we’ve had a problem here”. It was a problem that very soon seemed to mean they would die in space: an oxygen tank had just exploded. Instead of being a moon landing the mission turned into the most famous rescue attempt in history – could the crew of James Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise get back to Earth before their small space craft turned into a frozen, airless and lifeless space coffin.
While the mission control team worked with the crew on how to keep the command and lunar modules habitable for as long as possible (they were rapidly running out of breathable air, water and heat and had lost electircal power), Elliot worked on actually getting the craft back to Earth. He was the “retrofire officer” for the mission which meant he was an expert in, and responsible for, the trajectory Apollo 13 took from the Earth to the moon and back. He had to compute a completely new trajectory from where they now were, which would get them back to Earth as fast and as safely as possible. It looked impossible given the limited time the crew could possibly stay alive. Elliot wasn’t a quitter though and motivated himself by telling himself:
“The Cherokee people had the tenacity to persevere on the Trail of Tears … I have their blood and I can do this.”
The Trail of Tears was the forced removal of Native Americans from their ancestral homelands by the US government in the 19th century to make way for the gold rush . Now we would call this ethnic cleansing and genocide. 60, 000 Native American people were moved with the Cherokee forcibly marched a 1000 miles to an area to the West of the Mississippi, thousands dying along the way.
The best solution for Apollo 13, was to keep going and slingshot round the dark side of the moon, using the forces arising from its gravity, together with strategic use of the boosters to push the space craft on back to Earth more quickly than on those boosters alone. The trajectory he computed had to be absolutely accurate or the crew would not get home and he has suggested the accuracy needed was like “threading a needle from 70 feet away!” Get it wrong and the space craft could miss the Earth completely, or arrive too fast to reenter earth’s orbit and return through the atmosphere.
Jerry Elliot High Eagle, of course, famously got it right: the crew survived, safely returning to Earth and Elliot was awarded the President’s Medal of Freedom, the highest American honour possible, for the role he played. The Native American people also gave him the name High Eagle for his contributions to space exploration.
Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
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