45-Year NASA Pioneer Set To Retire

In the next few weeks, a vital part of NASA will leave the space program. JoAnn Morgan is retiring, after 45 years with the space agency. During her tenure, she's seen the Kennedy Space Center evolve out of what was once the Army Ballistic Missile Center. That was just after she arrived at Cape Canaveral, a fresh-faced 18-year old girl on a summer college internship. "I started work on a Monday," Ms. Morgan said in a recent telephone interview with ANN. "On Friday, I was working on my first launch." Young JoAnn stood out in the parking lot measuring visual aspects of the launch. "They handed me a device and told me I was part of the team."

She never left her teammates. She was there on the good days when launches went just right. She was there on the bad days, to share the grief and start the process of rebuilding. But soon, JoAnn will retire. She won't be there anymore.

JoAnn Morgan, Meet John Glenn (And Gus Grissom and Alan Shepherd...)

Ms. Morgan was in from the very start of manned flight. She knew and appreciated astronaut-pioneers like John Glenn. She worked with him on the Mercury project when Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. She worked with him again decades later when Glenn flew on a space shuttle. "His mind is still incredible," she recalls. She also worked with Gus Grissom and remembers vividly the loss of his Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7. The event stunned JoAnn and other workers at the fledgling space agency. "Losing a spacecraft is a terrible tragedy in our business," she said. Did Grissom pop the hatch, causing the capsule to sink? "No," she said firmly. "I don't think so." Grissom, she remembers, was an irascible pilot with a driving dedication to perfection. "He was a nice guy," she said at first, finding the right words to say in appreciation of a very tough cookie. "He was crusty and grumpy, but I had a lot of respect for Gus." She remembers his absolute dedication to the mission.

Homecoming

She also remembers, years later, standing at Port Canaveral as Liberty Bell 7, covered in barnacles, was brought in after being rescued from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. She saw it again after it was restored. JoAnn Morgan was just as impressed with the recovery of that bit of history as were we all. 

Her memories of Gus Grissom, sadly, don't end there. Ms. Morgan continued to work NASA launches, specializing in communications and data flow. She was working on the day Grissom died in the fire that roared through the Apollo 1 capsule as it was undergoing pre-flight testing. "Communications were crappy," she said. "They didn't work with a flip." She worked on the problem for endless hours until, just before she left for the day, Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chafee climbed into the spacecraft to conduct their part in the tests. "We didn't know the crew was going to be out there. That made it even worse.

"We had already had numbers of missions where the vehicle blew up or the trajectory went awry," she recalled sadly. "But this was the first loss of a crew. It was hard on the whole team. And yet -- " here, she pauses remembering the steely determination that developed nationwide after the fatal fire -- "it was a different environment then. Everybody was with us. We just had to say what we needed and we had it." With that sort of can-do attitude, NASA was on the moon two years after the Apollo 1 tragedy.

Monday, in part two of JoAnn Morgan's story, she talks about breaking the gender barrier at NASA, about the moon landing and the disasters that destroyed both Challenger and Columbia.

FMI: www.nasa.gov