MOMENTS IN SPACE HISTORY
labs and workshops during the Apollo missions. “We
worked seven days a week,” he says. “It was a national
effort. We were fired up.”
He recalls running up flights of stairs trying to see
launches and once running out of energy before he
could top them.
Offices and labs were moved out of the building at the
start of the space shuttle program for safety. But the
building’s low bay, four high bays, transfer aisle and
several heavy-lift cranes remain as essential parts.
In 2011 when the shuttle program ended, Tribe was
among the 5,000 current and former workers who
signed their names on a specially designated wall in
the VAB.
Titusville resident and former NASA operations
engineer Albert Koller, 80, shares Tribe’s sense of
wonder that the building encompasses. He was a
Titusville High School senior and avid model rocket
builder in 1959 when Army Ballistic Missile Agency
recruiters hired him at his school’s science fair as a
summer intern.
“The town was an accepting people who put up with a
tremendous amount of change,” Koller says of Titusville
in a telephone interview.
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ALBERT KOLLER
A Jupiter missile model is awarded to Albert Koller, center, for his science fair project at
Titusville High School. In 1959, Bob Gorman, right, recruited him to intern at the Army
Ballistic Missile Agency. H >> e worked at Kennedy Space Center for more than 30 years.
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