Here at SDL, since we are associated with the university we will occasionally get to hear talks from people as they are passing through. Yesterday, we were privileged to hear from Sy Liebergot. He served as a flight controller (EECOM) with Apollo 13 as well as many other missions. I love hearing from these guys. He described the loneliness and pressure he felt when Apollo 13 experienced the quadruple failure. He explained to us how his training as a systems engineer would usually let him work a problem backwards to the point of origin so that it could then be resolved. But, with this one there were so many things going wrong that it was initially almost impossible to really tell what to do. He said that for two weeks after it happened he would have the same recurring nightmare of things going wrong. Then one evening during the dream he was able to perform every step flawlessly and the disaster still happened. At that point he realized that it wasn't his fault - so he never had the nightmare again. He said that his fellow controllers would rib him about the fact that he initially called it as an instrumentation problem. Sy also spoke to us for awhile about the culture at NASA. Sadly, he doesn't think that "NASA" will *ever* send another astronaut to the moon. He said in the old days that people felt equal with their supervisors and would "tell it like it is". He explained that now they are more interested with "climbing the corporate ladder" so they will sometimes withhold information that may be useful. He also said that NASA has such an aversion to risk that it really makes it difficult for them to envision anything beyond low earth orbit. He did spend a bit of time hawking his book, "Apollo EECOM: Journey of a Lifetime", which can be found at Amazon.com. I think it would be a worthwhile purchase especially since it includes a CD with four hours of audio from the initial, "Houston we have had a problem". There is a short right-up about his talk today in the Herald Journal (aka "the 5 minute newspaper") at http://news.hjnews.com/news/article_5128b18e-4088-11e0-88d1-001cc4c03286.htm... Clear skies, Dale.