Seen and Unseen

You Must Be the Kid Who Goes to MIT

On this day in 1966, on my 20^th birthday, I was at CBS News at the Kennedy Space Center. I was a writer for Walter Cronkite, for our live coverage of the launch of Gemini 10 the following day.

How in the world did that happen?

It was my third summer at CBS News, between my junior and senior years at MIT. (You can read about my first and second summers at CBS in my posts on 12/19/25, 5/25/26 and 6/9/26)

Unlike my first summer, in broadcasts, and my second summer, in newsroom operations, in 1966 I was in election operations, preparing for the 1966 off-year elections. My assignment was to a unit that “collected votes” – worked to coordinate volunteers across the country to go to the polls on election night and telephone the results to CBS in New York.

The theory was that the network that “collected” votes most quickly would be able to post election returns faster, and that if all went well, the numbers on the CBS vote boards would be higher than the numbers on the NBC boards; again, the idea was that viewers switching between CBS and NBC would stay with CBS because it would seem we were ahead.

(A few years later, I was working with our new science editor Earl Ubell, a brilliant physicist who had become a journalist at the New York Herald Tribune. We pointed out that the votes we “collected” had no statistical significance, so we created the “CBS Raw Vote Estimate” – just random numbers that would be slightly larger than the reported vote totals. Over the course of election night, the RVE numbers would gradually converge with the actual vote totals as they increased. Statistically, it was just as valid as anything else we were doing election night. CBS management thought the idea was ridiculous. But Earl and I had some fun with the idea.)

Our election office was not in the CBS Broadcast Center, where all of the newsrooms and broadcast studios were located; instead, we were several blocks away. But after hours and occasionally on weekends, I used my CBS ID to go to the Broadcast Center to watch the broadcasts being produced.

Another major difference was that, for the first time, my hours at CBS were weekday daytime, normal working hours, instead of the overnight or 4 to midnight. Looking at my 1966 diary, that meant I could have a social life, including seeing one girl who I thought was the cat’s meow. And in my diary I can now read that I was seeing her two or three times a week. Meow. But I digress.

Late one afternoon, I was in the CBS network newsroom when Richard Salant, President of CBS News, briskly walked through, saw me, and came up to me.

“You’re the kid who goes to MIT, right?”

“Yes, Mr. Salant.”

“You must know about the space program.”

Huh?

“I am not at aero and astro major, but I do anchor Gemini coverage on the MIT radio station.”

“Good enough. Catch the next flight to Florida. Cronkite needs another writer.”

Stunned, my first thought was, “This must be a mistake.” I stood there and looked around. Someone – I don’t remember who – had seen and heard the exchange and told me I’d better head to the airport, and by the way, here’s how you get a plane ticket and a hotel room.

Fortunately for me, the next flight to Melbourne, Florida, was not until the following morning. So I crammed, starting upstairs in the CBS research center. Think of Katherine Hepburn’s office in the movie “Desk Set” and you get the idea, except it was entirely staffed by very young women.

Told that I was heading to Florida to join the CBS crew covering Gemini 10, they swung into action. In minutes they were stacking in front of me the reference manuals and loose-leaf notebooks for the Gemini spacecraft, the Titan launch vehicle and the major subsystems and subcontractors.

I took them all home and pulled an all-nighter. And of course I had the prep that I had done and MIT faculty I had interviewed to anchor hours and hours of MIT radio live space coverage (for details see my 1/29/26 post, “Dennis Sager”).

The next morning, I flew to Florida and reported for work at the “CBS News Flight Deck,” an office in a Ramada Inn near the launch site. I was half the age of most people there, and also the only person who was not white. Ditto at the CBS trailer at the launch complex, where the newsroom was inside the trailer while Cronkite anchored from the roof.

My editor was Clint McCarty, who was polite but seemed somewhat skeptical about this teenager sent from New York. And of course the managing editor was Walter Cronkite, who must have been more than somewhat skeptical. I vividly remember his first assignment.

“Give me 20 seconds on gimbal lock.”

I froze.

“You know what is, don’t you?”

“Um, uh, yes of course I know what it is. Inertial navigation was invented at MIT by C. Stark Draper (whom I knew!), and it relies on integrating acceleration readings in three dimensions from internal gyroscopes. When the gyro gimbals align, they cannot move freely, degrading the guidance system. So yes, I know what it is, but I’m not certain I can describe it in 20 seconds.”

Cronkite frowned. “OK, 25.”

My first attempt was 45 seconds. By the third of fourth try, I had it down to what he wanted.

Once I became accustomed to the often staccato rhythm of the trailer newsroom, during downtime I started to explore the press site and the launch complex. And that is when I started to understand the space program.

Astronauts will tell you that, in orbit, there is a space “smell.” But space doesn’t smell: What the crew smell in orbit is the spacecraft interacting with particles and radiation that are largely absorbed by earth’s atmosphere. Once above the atmosphere, in orbit (or heading to and from the moon), there’s a metallic smell on board.

Similarly, from my first three years at MIT, I learned about the ghost in the machine. That term has specific meanings in philosophy (mind and body) and computer programming (software built on top of older software). That is not how I am using the term.

Machines are not invented by other machines: they are invented by humans. And the human inventors rely on their culture, education and even childhoods as they create and build new machines. Consider automobiles: British cars are different from Italian cars, and Russian cars are very, very different from British or Italian cars. They share the same basic technology, but if you look under the hood of a 1960s Citroen it is so different from any American car of the time that, as the phrase goes, “it is intuitively obvious to the most casual observer” (who knows anything about cars) that they are very different.

And so to the space program: First, it was entirely a military enterprise. Looking now at my Gemini press credentials, they gave me access to the “Cape Kennedy Air Force Station” and to the “Air Force Eastern Test Range.” Cape Kennedy was a military base. I had grown up on and around military bases, from my father’s frequent visits and my mother’s entertaining the troops. So I knew the culture, the people (the astronauts were all military officers) and even many of their jokes. Returning to the launch complex during Gemini missions, it was as if, to use the phrase used in Vietnam, I had to “breathe in.”

Part of that culture was tradition. Manned space was new, but it already had traditions. One was that on the night before launch, the three network anchors – Cronkite for CBS, Frank McGee for NBC and ABC’s Jules Bergman – would each host a table for dinner at a local greasy spoon, Fat Boy’s Bar B Q. In addition to network staff gathered around the tables, each anchor always invited an astronaut (not anyone flying the next day!). Wally Schirra, who flew on Mercury 8 in 1962 and then Gemini 6 in December, 1965, was a Cronkite favorite – and three years later sat next to Cronkite as the CBS analyst during the first moon landing.

But I had noticed a sign in the restaurant’s window: “We do not cater to interstate commerce.” That was a code in the South, meaning the owners of that facility did not want any part of the then new federal laws banning segregation in restaurants and hotels. And sure enough, there was an unexplained delay serving our table. Cronkite got up from his chair, went over to the other two anchors, and the three of them went into the kitchen . Suddenly our table was served.

Back in New York, I was told that Cronkite had led the anchors into the kitchen to tell the owner that if didn’t serve us, all thee networks would do a story about it during launch coverage the next day. But Cronkite never said anything about it to me, then or afterward.

Back to Gemini 10 and launch coverage: In addition to leaving earth from a military base, the astronauts’ launch vehicles were military. The first U.S. unmanned earth satellite was launched on a Redstone military rocket designed and built in Alabama, and it was the Redstone that launched the first Americans into space, Alan Shepard, on a short sub-orbital flight. Later came the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile that launched John Glenn and the others who flew the one-person Mercury spacecraft into orbit.

The Gemini was launched on a Titan ICBM, a major step forward from the Atlas and Mercury. Its engineering was so good that there were some at MIT who called it “elegant.”

There was, of course, a big difference between launching an Atlas or Titan missile with a nuclear warhead and launching an Atlas or Titan with people on top. To be “man rated” required layers of security to make certain, as President Kennedy famously said, the US could bring a pilot back alive – from space and later from the moon. Many of the people and those video displays in launch control and in mission control in Houston were newly added, to focus specifically on the health and safety of the people going into space.

Which brings me to the Gemini spacecraft, from McDonnell in St. Louis. Designed to carry a two-man crew instead of Mercury’s solo pilot, Gemini was not just larger: It seemed a generation ahead of the Mercury; some even said it was superior to the first Apollo spacecraft that were designed to carry astronauts to the moon. (Those first Apollo spacecraft had to be replaced and updated after a flash fire that killed three astronauts aboard an Apollo on the launch pad at the Kennedy space center.)

The ghosts in the Gemini were from St. Louis. McDonnell engineering was legendary, including the (more or less) contemporaneous F4 fighter bomber, used widely in Vietnam -- and which I had studied at MIT under one of my favorite professors, William Kaufmann. Kaufmann’s oft-repeated “The F-4 is a hard plane to beat” kept coming to mind as I studied and later visited mockups of the Gemini spacecraft. Same engineers, same ghosts.

To me, the entire Kennedy Space Center was one huge organism. Once I understood more about the parts, the entirety came more into view. One small example: Holds.

CBS and the other networks broadcast hours of live coverage of each manned mission, going on the air more than an hour before launch and providing live coverage of space walks and other highlights, ending of course with splashdown and recovery. For launch coverage, that meant we were on the air when the countdown would suddenly stop. That was a cue for Cronkite and the other network anchors to spend time discussing one aspect or another of the space program.

My perspective was sitting in the trailer, under Cronkite, with those reference manuals from CBS research. And I began to see a pattern: When there was a countdown hold, I would look through the manuals to see exactly what the engineers and flight controllers were doing at the moment the countdown stopped. And it was not entirely surprising to see that whatever they were checking or doing at that moment had gone slightly wrong, so the countdown stopped.

One time, when Gemini launch control announced a hold, I saw that technicians at that moment were scheduled to run a test of one of the crew systems – if memory serves, the ECS, or environmental control system. So I knocked out six lines of copy that Cronkite could use (if he wanted), not to say that was the cause of the hold, but to give background. A few minutes later, launch control announced that, indeed, the ECS was the cause of the hold, but the problem was solved and the countdown resumed. It was all one huge organism; very little was random.

Then there was the launch. It is difficult to describe a vehicle the size of an office building start to lift off. You can feel it, almost like an earthquake. For Apollo’s launch vehicle, the Saturn 5, the air pressure was so great that it dislodged the glass window behind Cronkite (for Apollo he had moved down into the trailer). It seems so unlikely, as the rocket slowly, slowly, starts to move upward. The press site is sufficiently distant that we could not see the rocket engines swiveling to keep the vehicle vertical; first time astronauts said it was almost eerie, feeling this huge thing under them shifting back and forth to keep from toppling over.

After the launch, I flew back to New York and resumed my work in the election unit. But I guess I had passed the audition, because CBS asked me once again to go to Florida for the next manned space flight, Gemini 11, right after Labor Day. It was always interesting and exciting, because we all knew where it was heading. Look up: the moon.

The last Gemini flight, Gemini 12, was in November, and it was scheduled to be right after the 1966 election. For CBS, that meant Cronkite would anchor election night and then fly the next morning to Florida for Gemini launch coverage. For me, CBS asked me to choose: Work on election night in New York or return to Florida for Gemini 12. I picked Florida.

But Gemini 12 was during the school year, in November, so I needed permission from the professors teaching all of my courses to take time off. When I told them what I was doing – Cronkite’s name meant a great deal - all of them quickly agreed to let me go. And I promised to bring back souvenirs for them from Gemini 12.

Arriving at the CBS Flight Deck, I was surprised: The director for CBS launch coverage was in New York working on election night, and he and Cronkite would be arriving later. So the director assigned to prepare coverage was an assistant director from one of the CBS daytime dramas (soap operas). He walked up to me.

“Powell?” I said yes; we introduced ourselves to each other, and then he asked, “What do you want?”

What did I want? What did he mean? Was he taking lunch orders?

Then he showed me his clipboard, with a list of all of the CBS staff and when they would arrive. All of the regular production staff were in New York working on election night.

“You are the senior editorial person here,” he said. I looked again at his clipboard. And so I was, at age 20, listed as “producer.”

Well, since he asked. . . The live shot I had always wanted since I first visited the launch site was to show that manned space flight began not from a single gantry but from one in a row of steel towers at the Kennedy Space Center. Viewers would see people leaving the earth from the American spaceport, a row of rockets, the others all unmanned.

Disclosure: My inspiration was the 1950s TV series “Rocky Jones, Space Ranger.” Each week Rocky and his crew would take off, vertically, from a spaceport on earth, aboard the Orbit Jet XV-2, heading off to foil dastardly villains of outer space. That’s the shot I wanted. But how to get that shot, live from Florida?

The AD suggested getting a crane and stationing it a few miles away, lining up with the row of launch complexes. The best location seemed to be a nature preserve south of the test range. The nearest crane he could find was being used by CBS Sports in New Orleans, and sports wouldn’t release it.

Plan B was to use a helicopter, flying at the edge of the air base. But to fly a helicopter anywhere near the launch complex required the permission of the air force. So we went to see the officer in charge, a burly, fit guy who had a terrific business card that listed among his regular duties and achievements wrestling alligators and a great deal of drinking (and no, that wasn’t his official USAF card). I memory serves, his nickname was Buck.

“You want to fly where?” he asked incredulously. “Do you know what happens to your little copter if anything goes wrong out there?” He gestured out of his window toward the launch complex.

“Sir,” I replied, “if anything goes wrong out there, our little helicopter is the least of your problems.”

He squinted.

“Well if you’re damn fool enough to fly a copter there, then I’m damn fool enough to let you.”

Now we had to find a helicopter, a pilot willing to fly near the launch, and a cameraman. We even rehearsed it, and it looked beautiful. But how to get the live shot from the copter onto the CBS television network? That was a real problem. And before the invention of Steadicam stabilizers, the video was shaky and wobbly.

The bigger problem was that Cronkite hated it. He made it clear he always wanted a tight closeup from a NASA pool camera, ideally focused on the letters U S A on the side of the launch vehicle moving upward as the rocket ascended. Got it.

So I stayed through launch and then flew back to MIT. That was the end of the Gemini program and the last manned space mission of 1966. But CBS wasn’t finished with me yet: They called and asked me to go to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston to attend the two-day “Apollo Press Symposium” December 15-16 to preview the mission to the moon. Mission Director Joseph Shea was in charge, and one by one, he brought onto the auditorium stage the directors of each of the major subsystems, for show and tell – and Q & A.

The biggest hit may have been he director of crew systems, who walked onto the stage and announced, “My name really is… José Jiménez.” The audience roared with laughter. José Jiménez was also the name of a fictional character created by comedian Bill Dana. He would come on television shows, look into the camera, and say, “My name… José Jiménez.” And then he would talk to the show’s star, Steve Allen on NBC and then Ed Sullivan on CBS. Dana also played the role for three years on a sitcom with Danny Thomas.

Once he appeared on the Ed Sullivan show dressed as an astronaut, carrying a helmet. Sullivan asked, “So is that your crash helmet?” Dana looked at his helmet for a few seconds, looked up and said, “I hope not.”

But the true highlight of the two days may have been Joe Shea’s films, never before seen in public, of the failures of the Apollo spacecraft during tests. In one, the spacecraft was dropped into water to simulate landing in the ocean. The walls buckled, and the spacecraft sank. Shea said they had to reinforce the structure and try again. This time the spacecraft floated, but it was upside down – the hatch was under water. The solution: Install balloons on the top of the spacecraft and inflate them after landing in the water. Result: The spacecraft rights itself, and the hatch is above water. It wasn’t the most elegant solution, but it worked.

Cronkite did not attend the briefings, nor did most of the CBS News journalists who covered the space program. The CBS crew consisted of two people: correspondent George Herman, who anchored space coverage for CBS Radio, and me. George had been White House correspondent, had anchored “Face the Nation” and more. He is credited with inventing the filmed standup when he covered the Korean war, using a camera his father had given him. He called me “hard-working Adam.” He and I became friends, and I visited him in New England after he retired from CBS.

On one such visit, he had invited another couple for dinner, neighbors from Vermont. Late in the evening, the husband said he was a lifelong Vermonter, and his wife said she almost was. He turned and glared at her. She said she was born in a hospital in Massachusetts but then came to Vermont as an infant. Her husband looked at her for a few seconds and said, slowly, “Just because your cat has kittens in the oven doesn’t mean they’re biscuits.”

But I digress. George and I always sat together those two days, and on the other side next to me was Jules Bergman, ABC News science editor and anchor for manned space flights. We were surprised by some of what was described: Apollo used water glycol as a coolant. I leaned over to George: “Isn’t that stuff highly flammable? I think some caught fire in a chem lab. Bad stuff.” George wasn’t certain, but Jules nodded that it could be a problem, but they obviously must have thought of that. Another: gallium connectors? Gallium melts at a very low temperature.

And the three of us went back to New York. But CBS still wasn’t finished with me that winter: On January 27, I was in New York during a break between semesters at MIT. If memory serves, CBS was broadcasting a New York Philharmonic concert, and broke in with a bulletin that a flash fire in the Apollo spacecraft had killed three astronauts during ground tests. I jumped up, ran to the 135^th Street subway station, heading down to the Broadcast Center. Don Hewitt was running live coverage, and I volunteered to do whatever was needed. One problem: No one could find Cronkite. This was before mobile phones. Mike Wallace was there and anchored brief cut-ins and later a half-hour special report at 11:00, after the CBS Friday Night Movie.

PS CBS News consultant George Alexander, the Kennedy Space Center editor for Aviation Week magazine, was one of the few and perhaps the first journalist allowed to look inside the spacecraft. He told me later he thought it was empty: everything had been incinerated, and the astronauts’ bodies had largely “flash evaporated.” And the official investigation blamed “excessive combustible material” for the disaster.

That led to continuing assignments to cover the Apollo program, including and especially the first moon landing, Apollo 11, which launched the day before my 23^rd birthday.

But before continuing my career at CBS, I was recruited by Av Westin, my boss in the summers of 1964 and 1966, In 1964, Av was a producer, in charge of the CBS Morning News. In1966, he had been promoted to executive producer in charge of special reports. At the end of that summer, he called me into his office and asked what we should do if we had two hours every Sunday night. Wow, gutsy move, I thought: CBS was going to give the news division 9-11 pm, after the Ed Sullivan Show? So I went to a typewriter, created a lineup for a Sunday night series, and took it back to Av. I still remember his reaction, because I had never heard a word he used as a verb:

“That’s the way I like to see a lineup parsed.”

But Av wasn’t planning a new Sunday night series for CBS News: Instead, he asked me to join him as he was planning to leave CBS to start a new national network called Public Television (later PBS), beginning with a weekly live broadcast every Sunday night. It would be the first time noncommercial television stations across the U.S. were connected from coast to coast. For one season, 1967-68, I worked with Av and others he brought from CBS News and recruited from other newsrooms, producing reports and even anchoring one, before returning to CBS.

But back to my 20^th birthday and my first visit to Cape Kennedy: Looking back, I now see that every ten years after then, my career was jolted:

Ten years later, just after my 30^th birthday, Bill Small, Senior VP of CBS News, called me out of the blue. I assumed he was going to offer me a producer job, which I would have gladly accepted; instead he asked me to become Manager of News Operations for CBS radio network news.

Ten years after that, just after my 40^th birthday, Doug Bennet, President of National Public Radio, called me. I assumed he wanted a consultant, an offer I would have gladly accepted; instead, he asked me to become NPR’s first Vice President of News programming, replacing a senior VP of programming, Joe Gwathmey.

Ten years after that, almost exactly on my 50^th birthday, Charles Overby, President of the global billion-dollar Freedom Forum foundation, asked me to meet him in his suite at the Park Lane hotel. I had no idea what he had in mind. He asked me to come join him at foundation headquarters as a vice president, to design and run a global technology education program.

Ten years after that, just after my 60^th birthday, Max Nikias, the new dean of the University of Southern California’s school of engineering, asked me to come to his office, inviting (or telling) me to become the Director of the school’s National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center. My reaction: “Max, you’re a busy guy. I’m your 2:30.” But no, he was serious.

Ten years after that, on my 70^th birthday, at the urging of my friend Vint Cerf, who invented the Internet in the 1960s, I started a small cybersecurity project in USC’s Washington office. By the next Presidential election, that had grown into a multi-million-dollar national operation with election cybersecurity programs in each of the 50 states (in 2020, the federal government only did 48 states).

There’s more, especially the craziest job I ever had, executive producer for Quincy Jones Entertainment. And that was just my professional career!

So now I am turning 80. A few nights ago, trying to make sense of it all, an odd memory suddenly filled my mind: It was “The Rabbit of Seville,” a 1950 Warner Bros cartoon by the brilliant Chuck Jones, seven minutes of increasingly outrageous animated mayhem, each scene topping the previous one, and if you had any time to think while your sides were splitting with laughter, you wondered, how can he possibly end this cartoon? His ending: Bugs Bunny turns to the camera and says to the audience, “Next?”

Bugs had it right:

Next?

P.S. I worked with Richard Salant for more than twenty years, at CBS News and later at National Public Radio, when I was in charge of news and he was on the board. In all of those years, I could never summon the courage to ask Salant a question I have often mulled about that newsroom encounter in 1966: What make him think I could write?