GEORGE ENGLISH
From Bellevue to the Moon and Beyond
When George L. English was a little boy in Dublin during the Great Depression, he, like most boys of his day, dreamed of flying, flying over the town, across the country, some even around the world, and a few others to the moon and into outer space, like Buck Rogers, who they saw on the screens of the Ritz and the Rose theaters downtown.
George lived at 402 Bellevue (Behind Dublin City Hall, then Dublin High School) and 801 Highland Avenue (behind the Laurens County Library) with his parents George W. English, an accountant for Southern Oil Company, and his mother, Lucille Lewis English, a housewife and a charter member of the Dublin Garden Club.
During the early years of the World War II era, the English family moved to Macon, where George graduated from Lanier High School and down the street to Mercer University. After teaching in Florida, English went to work at Warner Robins Air Force as the Regional Personnel Officer for thirteen years.
In the year 1964 as the Gemini Project was in full swing at Cape Kennedy, English followed a lot of friends and his employees and accepted a job with NASA as the Deputy Personnel Director. His primary focus was on the recruiting of engineers for the upcoming space missions. One of those engineers may have been Dr. Robert Shurney, eight years English’s senior and a native of Dublin. As one of N.A.S.A.’s foremost African-American engineers, Shurney was a leader in the training of astronauts in simulated weightless environments, the design of the Saturn V moon rocket during takeoff and the design of the lunar rover for the Apollo 14 mission, as well as better methods of eating in space and working on the first permanent bathroom in space.
“It was a very exciting time,” said English, who take a cut in pay to join the new and exciting world of space exploration. When he arrived in Florida, George lived in Cocoa Beach in less than great living conditions in a community with only one partially paved road which paralleled the coast line.
Many of the men who English hired were heavily involved in the Apollo launches of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Several years later, George English was promoted to Executive Assistant to the Director of Administration and shortly as the Chief of Manpower in charge of nearly 27,000 workers. The beginning of the moon missions saw another promotion for English, this time to Chief of the Management Systems Office as a division chief.
Paramount among the Apollo mission was the Apollo 11 flight which landed on the moon on July 20, 1969. Of English’s most enduring memories was his flight into the KSC in the early morning hours of the launch as his helicopter circled the brightly lit launch pad.
The early termination of the Apollo program sent the Kennedy Space Center and its employees into a depression. Thankfully, government funding allowed the flights of the unused Saturn rockets and command service modules in a Detente' mission with USSR. The mission was designed to bolster US - Soviet relations in the world and in the field of space exploration. The eventual goal was to establish a long term space station in orbit around the Earth, which would be called “Skylab.”
“The Apollo-Soyuz Test program was an important step for us at the time and a real step on the international cooperation , which never bore the fruit that it should have done, you know, the cooperation with the Soviets,” English told interviewer Dr. Patrick Moore in a June 2002 interview.
“We got to fly Deke Slayton who was one of the original seven Mercury astronauts who never got a chance to fly a mission,” English fondly remembered.
During the 1970s, English spent man yours working with high ranking national and world officials in building the strong and sometimes secretly negotiated relationships with the Russian Space Command and other countries.
In 1975, George L. English was promoted to Deputy Director of the Kennedy Space Center, a post which he served in for a decade and a half. In this high ranking position, English spent most of his time in meetings and traveling across the country and around the world.
As English told Dr. Moore, “We could have built a lunar base, which we should have done. We would have been 30 years ahead of the game instead have of having limited use to a space station.” English firmly believed a permanent base on the moon would have led to the exploration of other planets without having to deal with the heavy lifting rockets which had to overcome the Earth’s gravity.
If the Apollo 11 mission was the highlight of his career, then certainly the low point of his career was the fiery loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986. As Deputy Director, English was deeply involved in the search for the causes of the disaster and the steps which the space agency would take to insure that the explosion would never happen again.
Lost in the glory of the manned missions were the thousands of satellite launches. Among some of the more important unmanned missions were the launch of the Hubble Telescope, the Mars missions, solar system probes, and the Voyager and other deep space probes.
George English retired in 1994 after thirty years of service to NASA. Among his most cherished awards were NASA’s Exceptional Service Medal in 1971, the Kennedy Space Center’s Award (highest at the KSC,) and the National Space Club’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.
GEORGE ENGLISH (L) - GREETS FRED HAISE
OF APOLLO 13 (R)
During the last quarter of a century, English has been active in space affairs as a founding member and trustee of the Missile, Space, and Range Pioneers, as a consultant, and as a raconteur of the good ole days at the Cape when the men with the right stuff accomplished President Kennedy’s goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
Well, as you see, George English never made it to the moon, but his crews and support staff did, for it today, fifty years ago, when two daring American astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, came in peace when they first set foot upon the moon.
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P.S. Among the many mementos which astronaut Neil Armstrong carried to the moon was a small pieces of wood and fabric. The fragments came an airplane belonging to two fellow Ohioans. The pieces came their airplane, which they first flew at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903. They of course were Wilbur and Orville Wright. And, the circle was completed.
Credit: Dr. Patrick Moore, N.A.S.A., Dublin Courier Herald, Missile, Space, and Range Pioneers.
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