Apollo. Shuttle. Station.

About

One Family. Three Programs. Five Decades.

This is an independent research project documenting a family whose members served at NASA across three of the agency's defining programs: the Apollo lunar missions, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station. Their combined careers span more than a hundred years of service to the American space program.

From guidance systems that helped land men on the moon, to the avionics that kept Space Shuttle crews safe across 135 missions, to the leadership of programs that built humanity's permanent home in orbit. This family was there for all of it.

The Book

The Story Nobody Told

Apollo. Shuttle. Station. is a work of narrative nonfiction built from firsthand accounts, government records, and decades of institutional memory. It follows members of a single family through the defining chapters of American spaceflight, told in the voices of the people who lived it.

The narrative follows three threads. An Apollo guidance engineer whose Landing Point Designator work fed directly into the Apollo Master Plan, and whose 1975 voting algorithm paper became reference material for Shuttle redundancy management. A Space Shuttle avionics manager who served as a Challenger investigator, then as Deputy Director of Space Station Freedom in Reston during the redesign, and ultimately as NASA Chief Engineer. And a young woman who staffed the Apollo Auxiliary Computer Room for Apollo 4 and Apollo 6, then returned to government service decades later in Senate testimony work and at the NASA Safety Center.

This is not a book about astronauts. It is the story of the engineers who solved the problems that made human spaceflight possible, the systems they built, and the knowledge they carried. Written in the tradition of narrative nonfiction that puts the reader in the room when it happened.

The book is currently in active research and writing. Publication details will be announced here.

The Research

Archival Investigation at Scale

The research corpus currently catalogs more than 14,600 archival sources and over 77,800 atomic facts, mapping a network of more than 660 colleagues, supervisors, co-authors, neighbors, and family members across four decades of agency history. Every claim in the book is tied back to a source identifier in that corpus.

Sources include NASA Technical Reports Server publications, JSC Space News Roundup issues from the agency's own newsroom, NASA Headquarters and Center org charts, the Linda Hall Library aerospace collection, Marshall Space Flight Center oral histories, Johnson Space Center telephone directories that track careers room by room and extension by extension, Congressional Record entries, contemporaneous newspaper coverage from the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Houston Post, and Houston Chronicle, an 8 box NASA Glenn archive of personal calendars and notebooks (Arrighi accessions 479 and 482), and records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and the National Archives and Records Administration.

The research also relies on personal records and firsthand recollections from family members who lived this history. Their accounts provide the connective tissue between the documents. The human context that transforms a paper trail into a story.

The Author

Tim Phelps

Contact

Get in Touch

If you have archival leads, photographs, NASA records, or information related to this research, I'd love to hear from you.