From the late 1950s to 1976 the U.S. manned spaceflight program
advanced as it did largely due to the extraordinary efforts of
Austrian immigrant George M. Low. Described as the "ultimate
engineer" during his career at NASA, Low was a visionary architect
and leader from the agency's inception in 1958 to his retirement in
1976. As chief of manned spaceflight at NASA, Low was instrumental
in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Low's pioneering work
paved the way for President Kennedy's decision to make a lunar
landing NASA's primary goal in the 1960s. After the tragic 1967
Apollo 1 fire that took the lives of three astronauts and almost
crippled the program, Low took charge of the redesign of the Apollo
spacecraft, and he helped lead the program from disaster and toward
the moon. In 1968 Low made the bold decision to go for lunar orbit
on Apollo 8 before the lunar module was ready for flight and after
only one Earth orbit test flight of the command and service
modules. Under Low there were five manned missions, including
Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing. Low's clandestine
negotiations with the Soviet Union resulted in a historic joint
mission in 1975 that was the precursor to the Shuttle-Mir and
International Space Station programs. At the end of his NASA
career, Low was one of the leading figures in the development of
the space shuttle in the early 1970s, and he was instrumental in
NASA's transition into a post-Apollo world. Afterward, he
embarked on a distinguished career in higher education as a
transformational president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, his
alma mater. Chronicling Low's escape from Nazi-occupied Austria to
his helping land a man on the moon, The Ultimate Engineer sheds new
light on one of the most fascinating and complex personalities of
the golden age of U.S. manned space travel.