George Low

George Low was an Austrian-born American engineer and NASA manager who served as Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager during the critical period following the January 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. Low led the subsequent redesign of the Apollo Command Module's safety systems and, in 1968, made the high-risk decision to send Apollo 8 all the way to lunar orbit rather than only testing it in Earth orbit as originally planned, a call credited with keeping the Apollo program on schedule to meet President Kennedy's end-of-decade Moon landing goal. During the Apollo 13 emergency in 1970 he played a central role coordinating the mission control response that brought the crew home safely, work for which he was sometimes called the 'fifth member' of that crew. He later served as NASA's Deputy Administrator from 1969 to 1976 and helped negotiate the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project with the Soviet Union, before becoming president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.