mch

6 OUR ANCESTORS CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
to eat and sleep. Later, when my work became organized and I
put in only eight hours a day like the rest of my colleagues, I
would go home to San Diego every day.
When the Apollo project started, there was no communication
equipment powerful enough or sensitive enough to make voice
transmission possible from earth to moon, not to mention transmission
of television pictures over that distance. Such things had
to be invented, perfected, and built.
Relay stations had to be installed
all
around the globe in the Tropics with parabolic dish
antennas, some over 200 feet in diameter, in such a way that one
or two of them would always be in contact with any Apollo
spacecraft orbiting around the moon. All these stations had to be
in contact with each other and all of them had to report to the
Apollo Space Flight Center in Houston, Texas. All the new
equipment, built by some twenty difiFerent suppliers from all
parts of the United States, had to be co-ordinated and made
compatible.
How I was put in charge of all this within a few months after
I started my new job at North American I will never understand,
but that is of no importance now. The only thing that really
counts is that everything went well. Everything functioned much
better than we thought it would at the beginning, or even better
than we ever expected, and I think that it must have happened
because of some divine influence, not by human intelligence
alone. Since that time I firmly believe in benevolent divine intervention
in human affairs.
In April 1963 some technical publications announced the convocation
of an international sistronautical congress in September
in Paris, and specialists were invited to submit subjects for discussion
at the conference. I didn't want to pass up such an opportunity
and, besides, I badly needed a vacation. Without telling
anybody, I sent to Paris the text of a lecture about the
communications system of the Apollo spacecraft, by that time
very well known to me, and in a few weeks, to my surprise, there
was a letter from Paris confirming that my lecture had been accepted
and promising to let me know soon the exact day and
hour when I was to deliver my presentation at the congress.
That was the exact moment when my troubles began. First,
wasn't supposed to submit any lecture about Apollo on my own.
I