1. John W Aaron was born on 1943 and is a former NASA engineer and was a flight controller during the Apollo program.
15 Facts About John Aaron
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John Aaron is widely credited with saving the Apollo 12 mission when it was struck by lightning soon after launch, and played an important role during the Apollo 13 crisis.
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John Aaron was born in Wellington, Texas, and grew up in rural Western Oklahoma near Vinson, one of the youngest of a family of seven children.
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John Aaron's mother was a minister, and his father was a cattle rancher.
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When he arrived at NASA, Aaron was trained as an EECOM, a flight controller with specific responsibility for the electrical, environmental and communications systems on board the spacecraft.
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John Aaron pivoted his work as Chief EECOM Officer of the Command and Service Module to the Apollo program in 1967 where he continued through 1969.
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On November 14,1969, John Aaron was on shift for the launch of Apollo 12.
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However, John Aaron realized that he had previously seen this odd pattern of telemetry.
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John Aaron surmised that this setting would return the Apollo 12 telemetry to normal.
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John Aaron was off duty when the Apollo 13 explosion occurred, but was quickly called to Mission Control to assist in the rescue and recovery effort.
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John Aaron was allowed to veto the ideas of other engineers, particularly when they affected the power usage of the modules.
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John Aaron was in charge of rationing the spacecraft's power during the return flight and, with help from grounded Apollo 13 crew member Ken Mattingly, devised an innovative power up sequence that allowed the Command Module to re-enter safely while operating on limited battery power.
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John Aaron was portrayed by actor Loren Dean in the 1995 movie Apollo 13.
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John Aaron was interviewed in the PBS documentary Apollo 13: To the Edge and Back, and in two History Channel documentaries about Mission Control, Failure Is Not an Option and Beyond the Moon: Failure Is Not an Option 2.
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In 2017, John Aaron appeared in David Fairhead's documentary Mission Control: The Unsung Heroes of Apollo.