Portal:Space exploration/Biography/Week 51 2007

John Dennis Hodge (born 1929) is a British-born aerospace engineer. He worked for the Avro Arrow project in Canada; when it was canceled in 1959, he became a member of NASA's Space Task Group. During his NASA career, he worked as a flight director and as a manager on the canceled Space Station Freedom project. He also served as an administrator at the United States Department of Transportation.

During John Glenn's historic mission, the first orbital flight by an American, Hodge was serving as the flight director at NASA's tracking station in Bermuda.

The final flight in the Mercury program, MA-9, was scheduled to last long enough that a second flight director was needed in Mission Control. Thus, in 1963, Hodge became a flight director, choosing blue as his team color. The missions that he worked included Gemini 8, where he was on-shift when a stuck Gemini thruster brought a rapid end to the mission. He was also on-duty during the launch test that resulted in the Apollo 1 fire.

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