Thomas J. O’Malley, Who Helped Launch Glenn Into Orbit, Dies at 94
Thomas J. O’Malley, the aviation engineer who pushed the button that launched the rocket that carried John Glenn into orbit in 1962, and who five years later played a major role in reviving the Apollo moon program after a launching-pad fire killed three astronauts, died Friday in Cocoa Beach, Fla. He was 94 and lived in Cocoa Beach.
The cause was pneumonia, his daughter, Kathleen O’Malley, said.
At the height of the cold war, with the United States still reeling from the haunting beep-beep-beep of Sputnik — the first artificial satellite, launched into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 — Mr. O’Malley was sent to Cape Canaveral by his company, General Dynamics, as its leading test engineer.
The company’s Convair division had built the Atlas, an intercontinental ballistic missile, and then received a federal contract to convert it into a spacecraft capable of lifting astronauts into orbit. Too often, to the further frustration of America’s space dreams, the Atlas had blown up on the launching pad. The company feared it would lose the contract.
Mr. O’Malley was “Convair’s toughest test conductor,” the astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Deke Slayton wrote in their history of the space program, “Moon Shot” (Turner Publishing, 1994). He “took no lip from anyone” and created a team that was “anxious to work day and night and turn the Atlas into a fine piece of reliable machinery,” they wrote.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Mr. O’Malley said, “We had one goal: to get something up there as soon as possible.”
On the morning of Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. O’Malley pressed the button that fired the Atlas booster rockets and sent Mr. Glenn on his way to becoming the first American to orbit the Earth.
Tape recordings caught Mr. O’Malley’s words at that moment: “May the good Lord ride all the way.”
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The cause was pneumonia, his daughter, Kathleen O’Malley, said.
At the height of the cold war, with the United States still reeling from the haunting beep-beep-beep of Sputnik — the first artificial satellite, launched into space by the Soviet Union in 1957 — Mr. O’Malley was sent to Cape Canaveral by his company, General Dynamics, as its leading test engineer.
The company’s Convair division had built the Atlas, an intercontinental ballistic missile, and then received a federal contract to convert it into a spacecraft capable of lifting astronauts into orbit. Too often, to the further frustration of America’s space dreams, the Atlas had blown up on the launching pad. The company feared it would lose the contract.
Mr. O’Malley was “Convair’s toughest test conductor,” the astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Deke Slayton wrote in their history of the space program, “Moon Shot” (Turner Publishing, 1994). He “took no lip from anyone” and created a team that was “anxious to work day and night and turn the Atlas into a fine piece of reliable machinery,” they wrote.
In an interview with The New York Times in 2007, Mr. O’Malley said, “We had one goal: to get something up there as soon as possible.”
On the morning of Feb. 20, 1962, Mr. O’Malley pressed the button that fired the Atlas booster rockets and sent Mr. Glenn on his way to becoming the first American to orbit the Earth.
Tape recordings caught Mr. O’Malley’s words at that moment: “May the good Lord ride all the way.”