Introduction

A number of sources concur in considering Howard W. 'Bill' Tindall Jr., one of the greatest unsung heroes of Apollo and of US manned space exploration programs. His contribution was so greatly respected, he was nominated (a very rare appointment) honorary Flight Director.

In this article we would like to collect what his co-workers said of him. Please report new contributions to the address listed in the Contacts section of this site.

Michael Collins, in "Carrying the Fire"

In his book, one of the best space autobiographies, Collins provides sketches of many people included in the program, Bill Tindall included. 

"The best coordinator of diverse technical opinions I have ever met, Tindall must be listened to; he knows what he is talking about, and we must do something about his criticism."

James Hansen, in "First Man"

This appears in an end-of-page note in the authoritative biography of Neil Armstrong.

"... Howard W. 'Bill' Tindall Jr., the chief of Apollo Data Priority Coordination and one of the unsung geniuses at the MSC in Houston ... "

David Scott, in "How Apollo Flew to the Moon" by W. David Woods

"Tindall would control debates in terms of giving people the opportunity to talk, and then mix and match to make the trades. Then he would make a decision and say, 'I am gonna recommend this to management. Anybody have any really strong objections?' And the guy who lost the debate may say, 'Yeah, it won't work!' And Tindall would say, 'OK, fine. We'll go this way and if it won't work, we'll come back and re-address it, but we'll make a decision today.'

There were good debates and anybody could stand up and debate the issue. But he kept it moving. He didn't get bogged down because he himself was a brilliant engineer. I think Tindall was a real key to the success of Apollo because of how he brought people together and had them communicate on very complex issues. He was very good at it. He'd have them explain it, and in front of all their peers."

Chris Kraft, in "Flight"

In his autobiography, Kraft provides unique insight into Tindall's original work on Mercury and Gemini, and its critical role in getting the development of Apollo on-board software on track.

"My rendezvous expert was Bill Tindall. His full name was Howard Wilson Tindall Jr, but nobody ever tried to use it. I'd known him slightly in the old Langley days, and with the coming of space flight, he was one of the leaders in developing software that used radar data to do launch and orbit calculations for Mercury. He came to Houston as one of John Mayer's top people in Mission Planning and Analysis, and after Bill organized a rendezvous group, I got to know him a lot better.

...

Nobody has ever done it. Tindall asked around and found a number of smart people who shared his curiosity. A few were astronauts who'd have to do it. Some worked for contractors. Most of them were in my Flight Operations Directorate.

...

Finally in late 1964, they had a series of procedures and calculations that might work. Tindall briefed me regularly and wrote insightful and sometimes summaries of the group's work. His 'Tindallgrams' became the founding papers of space rendezvous and were required reading for contractors and NASA people alike who were involved in Gemini and Apollo mission plans."

In the wake of the Apollo 1 fire "I sent Bill Tindall to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory - now called the Draper Laboratory - which was writing our software, to find out what was wrong. The legendary electronics expert Stark Draper himself was running the place and welcomed Bill with open arms. Software was different then. It was encoded onto electronics strips called ropes, and it was being overloaded with instruction sets. Tindall came home with some thoughts, then took me to lunch in our cafeteria. We sat down at a table with astronauts Dave Scott, Rusty Schweickart, and Dick Gordon, and the conversation naturally turned to business. It was an eye-opener. They needed this. They wanted that. The software should do this and must do that, and we can't do without this other function either.

We wlaked back from lunch convinced that better is the evil of the good. We were trying to get Draper to write software ropes that were all things to all people. It couldn't be done. So I set up my own Configuration Control Board for software.

'They've got one month', I told TIndall, 'After that there will be no software changes unless I personally sign off on it.' Tindall's grin as he went off to call Stark Draper told me all I needed to know. Within that month, Draper had an operating program that we declared our benchmark.

...

In a single month, everything changed on the software front."

Gene Kranz, in "Before this decade is out" ed. by Glen Swanson

Kranz was a good friend of Bill Tindall and provides a clear opinion of the effort of Tindall and his team in his interview with Glen Swanson.

"Now, there's one other honorary flight director, that was Bill Tindall. Tindall was pretty much the architect of all the techniques that we used to go down to the surface of the Moon. I think Tindall was probably the single individual who had - if there should have been a lunar plaque left on the Moon from somebody in Mission Control or Flight Control - it should have been for Bill Tindall. Tindall was the guy who put all the pieces together, and all we did is execute them.

I respected Bill so much that when the time came for the lunar landing, the day of the lunar landing, I saw him up in the viewing room, and I told him to come on down and sit in the console with me for the landing. He didn't want to come down, but basically I cleared everybody away and we had Bill Tindall there for landing, and I think that was probably the happiest day of his life. A spectacular guy.

... Bill Tindall was Gray Flight because we always assigned colors to the flight directors. ..."

Gene Kranz in "Failure is not an option"

Tindall has a much greater role inside Gene Kranz' autobiography, with details about the beginning of the Apollo Data Priority Coordination task and his being invited to join Kranz at the MOCR console during the A11 Moon landing (in the book there are even more short references to Tindall during the whole descent phase).

"Tindall ... with the easy manner of a farm boy, was tall, blond, and youthful in spirit and manner. He was gregarious, short-tempered but quick to recover from an outburst. "

"In the restructuring after the fire, Low gave Tindall the task of uniting the entire Apollo team, civil servants and contractors, into a working group to determine how to use the hardware and software most effectively to achieve each mission's objectives. Tindall's genius was his ability to focus on issues and coax diverse people to work together. He combined the friendliness of a puppy with a comic wit. His operational intelligence was brilliant. We formed a particular strong bond, and our families spent a lot of time together at his beach house. Although our technical backgrounds were very different, we were both emotional about our work, perpetually optimistic, and gave our people unconditional support.

Bill Tindall swung into the Apollo 8 mission with zest, resolving issues from the simplest to the difficult. While we were slugging it out with Schirra on Apollo 7, Tindall was holding daily meetings to work out how we would navigate to the Moon, and to get into and out of lunar orbit. Allegiance to Tindall did not come easy for the Trench. For a while, Bostik's team believed that Tindall was really doing their job. Bostik's deputy, Phil Shaffer, and Llewellyin complained about their turf issues, while Tindall tried patiently and persistently to gain their support. By the time of Apollo 8, however, the Trench had become Tindall's most zealous group of converts, actively supporting, debating, and testing his plans, carrying into the training his decisions and mission rules.

We were, in a sense, in a race against ourselves, every event and decision converging on the launch date. Tindall was unsinkable. Only a month away from the Apollo 8 launch, he was still arguing with Frank Borman on the best way to navigate the return journey from the moon."

"The Trench did such a good job for Apollo 8 that Bill Tindall dispatched a letter to the head of the Recovery Division: 'Jerry, I've done a lot of joking about the spacecraft hitting the carrier, but the more I think about it the less I feel it is a joke. The visual reports of the landing indicated that the spacecraft flew right over the carrier and landed only 4572 meters (2.8 miles) away. This really strikes me as too close. The consequences of hitting the carrier would be catastrophic. I seriously recommend that you relocate the recovery forces at least 8 to 16 kilometers (approximately 5-10 miles) from the target point.'"

"Bill Tindall had started weekly meetings on the descent phase in April and had released a barrage of 'Tindallgrams' and assorted notes. 'Tindallgrams' was the name given to Bill's comic and highly treasured memos of the techniques meetings he conducted from 1966 to 1970 to document key engineering and operational decisions. In May 1996 the memos were bound in a single volume and distributed to 'Bill's many friends'. TIndallgrams were converted into new procedures, flight plan entries, and the jargon used by the controllers in their Go NoGo.

One of the Tindallgrams really grabbed our attention and also gave us a few laughs. It began, 'There is another thing about powered descent crew procedures that has really bugged me. Maybe I'm and 'Aunt Emma' - certainly some smart people may laugh at my concern, but I just feel that crew should not be diddling with the computer keyboard during powered descent unless it is absolutely necessary. They will never hit the wrong button, of course, but if they do, the results can be rather lousy. The next day we started a review of every crew computer keystroke and its effect throughout the descent phase.

Another 'Aunt Emma' note challanged the terms used by my flight controllers after landing, 'Once we get to the Moon does Go mean 'stay' on the surface, and does NoGo mean abort from the surface? I thing the Go NoGo decision should be changed to Stay NoStay or something like that. Just call me 'Aunt Emma''. We changed the procedure for the entire after-landing process into a series of Stay NoStay decisions. Tindallgrams, spiced with humor, idioyncratic grammar, and personal 'revelations', got the job done. After Apollo 11, at a post-mission beer party, Flight Control made Tindall an honorary flight director, with the team color Gray. His color is retired, like that of many flight directors, and now hangs in the third floor of the Mission Control Center."

"I asked him to sit next to me at the console for the lunar landing. Tindall, ever modest, declined, but I persisted in my request and he finally agreed. He was one of the great pioneers of manned spaceflight."

15/12/2008 - Edited after proofreading by librarian.