I wasn't wrong on this one #shorts #history #apollo
1 Video View·Apr 6, 2025
To be VERY clear, I’m certainly not perfect — I did a takedown of my own TEDx talk! — but more often than not I’ve checked and re-checked things in videos, even shorts. And what people often cite as “mistakes” are usually my simplifying things because shorts are like a minute and a half long and I have to make some decisions to simplify things for a general audience. Still!
I recently did a video about the towing fee that Grumman sent North American Rockwell
after the Apollo 13 mission because the lunar module built by Grumman did most of the heavy
lifting and basically towed the command module built by North American Rockwell back home.
Someone pointed out that it wasn't North American Rockwell, it was just North American,
because the merger didn't happen until 1973 and Apollo 13 was in 1970.
The merger happened in 1967.
North American built some incredible planes in the 1950s,
including the X-15, which was the first to almost go into space.
When the company submitted its bid to build the Apollo spacecraft,
it actually wasn't NASA's top choice, but because it had such an incredible
reputation in the aviation industry, NASA awarded the contract.
After the Apollo went on fire in January of 1967,
the subsequent investigation revealed a host of problems with both North
American management and NASA management.
There was so much criticism facing North American for managerial incompetence
that it decided to go ahead with a merger with Rockwell International,
something it had thought about and talked about months earlier but never moved forward with.
The merger happened in March of 1967,
and we can actually see the results of this merger in Gunter Wendt.
Gunter Wendt was the pad leader.
He was kind of the guy that ran everything on the launch pad and was in the White Room
with crews when they got into the spacecraft on the morning of launch.
You can see in this picture of him the morning of John Glenn's launch that he's
wearing a suit with McDonald written on the back because McDonald built that spacecraft.
During the Apollo era, he would have worn the North American insignia,
which he's wearing in this portrait.
But if we look at this picture of him with Fred Hayes during a pre-launch checkout test,
he is wearing the Rockwell insignia on his suit.
So that's it.
Just a quick little managerial history lesson about Apollo.
But also, if you're going to tell a creator that they're wrong in their area of expertise,
make sure you're right first.