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STACY GITTLEMAN 
CONTRIBUTING WRITER

N

ot many recent college graduates get to launch 
astronauts to the moon for their first job. But 
that’
s just what Michael Liebowitz did in the 
summer of 1969. 
On the 50th anniversary of the famed Apollo 11 
mission, Liebowitz, who enjoyed a career afterward in 
the automotive industry and is a dedicated member of 
Congregation B’
nai Moshe in West Bloomfield, looks 
back at this time of his life with nostalgia and pride. 
When Liebowitz graduated from New York Institute 
of Technology in 1964 with a degree in 
mechanical engineering, he landed a contract 
job with Boeing and spent the next four years 
working at NASA on its Apollo missions. 
Working alongside men with mostly military 
backgrounds, he said he was the youngest 
person in the famed Firing Room 1 at the 
Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where engi-
neers like him oversaw launches of the Apollo 
missions all the way through the first space 
shuttle mission in 1981. 
Sometimes he worked the midnight to noon 
shift; his work included testing the switches 
that moved the five 42,000-pound pneumatic 
arms that held the 363-foot, 6.2 million-pound 
Saturn V in place on the launch pad and then 
released them at just the right second as it lift-
ed off into space to send Neil Armstrong, Buzz 
Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon. The 
arms had to withstand the upward thrust of 
9.5 million units of horsepower. Compare that 
with a typical racecar, which has 500 horsepower. 
Apollo 11 was a mission first proposed by President 
John F. Kennedy in 1961. On July 20, 1969, humans first 
set foot on the moon. The astronauts explored the Sea of 
Tranquility site for more than two hours. They collected 
soil and rock samples, set up experiments, planted an 
American flag and left behind medallions honoring the 

fallen Apollo 1 crew and a plaque saying, “We came in 
peace for all mankind.
”
Though engineers were not in the limelight, he had 
some encounters with well-known icons of the age, 
including taking an elevator ride with TV newsman 
Walter Cronkite. He also spied Alan Shepard — the first 
man to orbit Earth in 1961 and who, in 1971, went on 
the Apollo 14 mission where he hit a golf ball on the 
moon — high atop the launch pad in a red Corvette 
with a blond woman. 
“Shepard had sweet-talked the guard into letting him 
take the Corvette and that woman up on the launch pad 
to take some pictures,
” Liebowitz recalls. “
And we all 
knew damn well that was not his wife!”
Liebowitz said space engineering contracts dried up 
during the Nixon administration, so he took nearly a 
year off sailing and scuba diving around the Bahamas 
with a friend. 
“I would have done it a lot longer, too, if my father 
hadn’
t called me and reminded me to get a job and a 
haircut,
” Liebowitz says. 
He spent the rest of his career in the automotive 
industry, retiring from Ford in 2005. It’
s his time at 
NASA that Liebowitz reminisces about the most, giv-
ing talks about his experience with schoolchildren as 
well as congregants at B’
nai Moshe. You can find him 
there at morning minyan where he davens and has 
prepared breakfast for the last 14 years. He also volun-
teers as a docent for the Holocaust Memorial Center in 
Farmington Hills. 
Liebowitz says while history focuses on the crew of 
the space missions, it is also important to remember the 
thousands of engineers on the ground, like him, who 
contributed to designing and engineering the mission. 
“The astronauts got all the media attention,
” he says, 
“but if it weren’
t for the work of the thousands of engi-
neers, Saturn V would have never gotten off the 
ground.
” ■

Blast Off!

At the 50th anniversary 
of Apollo 11, 
a local 
engineer recalls his 
contribution. 

TOP LEFT: Michael Liebowitz in Firing Room 1 at 

the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in 1969. TOP 

RIGHT: Saturn V on the launch pad secured in place 

by scaffolding and the hydraulic arms designed by 

Boeing. ABOVE: Liebowitz gave a recent talk about 

his NASA experiences at B’
nai Moshe.

PHOTOS COURTESY MICHAEL LIEBOWITZ

