Thirty-five years ago, Jerry Elliottt was nearly finished with his shift at NASA when he heard the astronauts of the Apollo 13 report a major malfunction en route to the moon.

Elliott, a 1965 OU alumnus, played a key part as one of the ground crew who helped bring the astronauts aboard the Apollo 13 home safely.

"Those kinds of things happen only one time in your life, something that major, where the entire world was watching when it was going on," Elliott said.

Soon after its launch in April of 1970, the Apollo 13's oxygen tank overheated and exploded, damaging a quarter of the service module of the ship.

Elliott's job as a retrofire officer was to compute the return trajectory of the spacecraft to ensure it could re-enter the earth's atmosphere safely.

Elliott, an Oklahoma City native, said flight director Gene Kranz issued directions to abort the mission and return to Earthimmediately. Elliott said he and his teammates convinced Kranz the best plan was to instead continue with the mission and send the module around the moon, using its orbital pull instead of the ship's engines to get on a return trajectory to Earth.

The return trajectory was not the only problem. Elliott said the crew didn't know the four-inch thick heat shield had been damaged in the explosion.

"So, even though the (astronaut) crew was coming back, we still didn't know if they would survive re-entry," Elliott said.

He said he didn't know immediately if the astronauts had made it back alive because of a one-minute blackout period in communication, due to the speed of re-entry.

"It was the greatest suspense in the world. It seemed like forever," Elliott said. "It went in one split-second from fear and hope to instantaneous joy," Elliott said.

Monday marked Elliott's 39-year job anniversary with NASA.

Elliott received the Presidential Medal of Freedom with the rest of the ground crew from President Richard Nixon for his role in the mission.

His efforts, along with the other NASA employees', were recognized in 1995 with the release of Ron Howard's movie, "Apollo 13." Elliott said the movie was mostly accurate, with only minor details changed.

During his senior year at OU, Elliott said he struggled through his physics course in trajectories, receiving a "C" as his final grade. He said while at a party with the astronaut crew of the Apollo 13, he asked them how comfortable they would have felt if they had known that the guy working to save their lives made a "C" in his college trajectory course.

"You should have seen the look on the crew's face," Elliott said. "They thought OU should change the grade from a 'C' to an 'A'."

Elliott said a collection of items such as his original notes, log book, papers and books that he used at his console to bring the Apollo 13 back are on display at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City.

Elliott, a member of the Cherokee and Osage tribes, said he was the first American Indian to earn a physics degree from OU.

He estimated there were fewer than 15 American Indian students attending OU in the early 1960s, compared to the more than 1,600 attending today.

Elliott was one of the founders of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, a national non-profit organization that offers scholarships, as well as internship and job networking for American Indian students majoring in math and engineering.

Elliott said he wrote a letter asking for a national Native American Awareness week in the 1970s. He said he received the first-ever proclamation from a state governor for Native American Awareness Week from then-governor OU President David L. Boren. Elliott said he has admired Boren ever since.

"I appreciate him coming to the forefront and stepping up to the plate to recognize the American Indian population," Elliott said.

Jerry Bread, an OU American Indian studies professor and coordinator for the American Indian Outreach program, said he met Elliott in the late 1970s when he began setting up an American Indian Science and Engineering Society at the OU campus.

"I think Jerry (Elliott) really broke down the stereotyped imagery people had about American Indians' capacity to excel in the area of mathematics and engineering," Bread said.

He said Elliott is a role model by encouraging organizations and universities to work with American Indian tribes.
hello there & you too