Seymour Liebergot

Seymour "Sy" Abraham Liebergot (born February 15, 1936) is a retired NASA flight controller, serving during the Apollo program. Liebergot was an EECOM controller and was responsible for the electrical and environmental systems on board the Command Module. In 1970, he was part of the team that guided Apollo 13 back to Earth following the explosion that crippled the spacecraft.

He began his career in 1963 with North American Aviation after graduating from California State University, Los Angeles. In 1964, he came to NASA. Liebergot was an Assistant Flight Director on Apollo 4, then an EECOM flight controller on Apollo 8–15. On Apollo 17, he served as CSSB SPAN (SPacecraft ANalysis room) Support. He continued as a controller in the Skylab and ASTP missions.

Early life Seymour "Sy" Abraham Liebergot was born on February 15, 1936, in Camden, New Jersey, the second child of parents Ida née Soloff and Solomon "Sol" Liebergot. His paternal grandparents immigrated from Kyiv, Ukraine, and his maternal grandparents immigrated from Novosibkov, Russia to the U.S. Sy experienced an unstable and rough childhood. Though money was scarce, his father gambled, drank, and had many gangster friends and enemies. Ida spiraled into a nervous breakdown when Sol had an affair, attempting to kill Sy and his sister Phyllis in 1942. Ida was permanently institutionalized. Sol married the woman he had an affair with, and they later bore three more children. Sol constantly uprooted his family, moving from place to place in order to escape danger from his debts, and he neglected his family and often beat Sy.

Career Early work After graduating high school in 1953, Liebergot worked as a copy boy at the Philadelphia Inquirer. In 1954, after turning 18, he decided to join the Army to take some time to receive technical training and figure out his life plans. He was stationed in Fort Huachuca and the Yuma Test Station, where he fulfilled weather activity duties. Sy was honorably discharged in 1957. He simultaneously worked as a shoe salesman for five years to support himself and his family. Liebergot’s first daughter, Shelli Lyn was born in 1958 and his twin sons, Mark Daniel and Scot Alan, were born in 1960.

Engineering career While still in college, Liebergot accepted a part-time evening job at North American Aviation (NAA) in the Space & Information Systems Division (S&ID) College Engineering Unit. He became an assistant supervisor a year later. Their division later won a contract with NASA to build a part of the Saturn V lunar launch rocket.

Liebergot started as an Electrical, Environmental and COMmunication systems (EECOM) flight controller trainee on Apollo 8. From Apollo 9 through Apollo 15, he served as the CSM EECOM. Liebergot was assigned as the Lead EECOM in Apollo 14 because of his role in the Apollo 13 mission, for which he is well known for. In Apollo 16, Liebergot worked as the CSSB SPAN Systems position, supporting the new EECOM. There were two liquid oxygen and two liquid hydrogen tanks on the spacecraft. In space, they became more fog-like and separated into different layers. The stir involved turning on two fans in each storage tank to mix the contents.

Unbenownst to the mission team, the wiring insulation inside Oxygen Tank 2 had been damaged during a ground handling mishap; when Command Module Pilot Jack Swigert flipped the four switches, Tank 2 exploded, which also caused Tank 1 to start leaking. The shock closed the valves to fuel cells 1 and 3 as well, leaving only a third of the electrical power generation system working.

When data started appearing abnormally, the responsibility fell on Liebergot. He initially thought it was an instrumentation problem, but other flight controllers also started having abnormalities, indicating a bigger problem was at hand. Liebergot worked with his back room support to figure out the issue, giving the astronaut crew instructions, and they eventually realized that they had lost two fuel cells. It was not an instrumentation error. Time was limited with the remaining oxygen tank to the CSM leaking and only one fuel cell remaining. The mission turned into one to save the crew and deliver them back to Earth safely.

If the cryo tanks were stirred later in the mission and the tanks/fuel cells lost later, the crew may not have been able to be saved. Liebergot was part of the Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their efforts to successfully save the astronauts.

Personal life Liebergot and Deanna Cohen divorced in 1972. Six years later in 1978, he married Tania Andrasko. They divorced in 1984. Liebergot later met Elizabeth Craig Tharpe in 1988 at a monthly ski club meeting. They married in 1990.

In popular culture In the 1995 film Apollo 13, Liebergot was played by Clint Howard.