See steely-eyed missile man in All languages combined, or Wiktionary
Download JSON data for steely-eyed missile man meaning in English (9.5kB)
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"text": "The \"hold\" in the countdown of a rocket firing has a long and infamous history. It doubtless is as old as the \"countdown\" itself. We Brevardians have seen thousands upon thousands of pictures of countdowns in progress, of green lights flashing, green buttons being pushed, fuming LOX [liquid oxygen] boiling off, steely-eyed missile men battening hatches and astronauts climbing aboard.",
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"text": "At first glance, the stolid engineers and impassive pilots of the Apollo program weren't colorful movie characters. As [Ron] Howard [director of Apollo 13 (1995)] got to know the stoic astronauts and \"steely-eyed missile men\" of Mission Control, he saw their sense of humor, their wilder sides and the doubts they carry like everyone else.",
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"text": "NASA Entry Flight Director Tony Ceccacci said the motto in Mission Control is \"flight controllers don't cry.\" He tried to remain stoic – like a steely eyed missile man – after his team guided Atlantis and its crew through an era-ending atmospheric re-entry. \"This will be the last time this team will be together,\" Ceccacci said, struggling to maintain his composure.",
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"text": "D[avid] M[arshall]: […] Tell me about your steely-eyed missile man nickname. […] J[ohn] A[aron]: Well you know, I ran across the term, steely-eyed missile man a year before that. There was a group of thinkers even back in the—maybe it goes all the way back to military that they were kicking around this thing called steely-eyed missile man. […] I think it, particularly in the early days of NASA, […] it just had to do with the way people react when calamities happen. If they act calmly. It was not a term that was used much in Houston. In fact, it was not even a term that they coined, I don't think, having to do with anything I did in real time. It just kind of evolved. People kind of discovered that term. […] DM: Did anyone call you that at NASA? JA: No. Unh-uh. […] I probably didn't go through all the wickets to deserve that reputation. I mean, I probably do fit the mold. But I'm not the only guy there who was a steely-eyed missile man.",
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"ref": "1973 May 13, Emsley Armfield, “Picture this … a countdown stops”, in Brevard Sentinel: An Edition of the Orlando Sentinel Star, Orlando, Fla.: Sentinel Star Co., →OCLC, page 4, column 4",
"text": "The \"hold\" in the countdown of a rocket firing has a long and infamous history. It doubtless is as old as the \"countdown\" itself. We Brevardians have seen thousands upon thousands of pictures of countdowns in progress, of green lights flashing, green buttons being pushed, fuming LOX [liquid oxygen] boiling off, steely-eyed missile men battening hatches and astronauts climbing aboard.",
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"text": "Among the men in the Canaveral blockhouse and the Houston control room, there was no greater tribute a controller could be paid than to describe him, in the rough poetry of the rocketry community, as a \"steely-eyed missile man.\" There weren't many steely-eyed missile men in the nasa family. [Wernher] Von Braun was certainly one, [Christopher Columbus] Kraft was certainly one, [Gene] Kranz was probably one too. John Aaron, a twenty-seven-year-old wunderkind from Oklahoma, had recently become one as well.",
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"text": "At first glance, the stolid engineers and impassive pilots of the Apollo program weren't colorful movie characters. As [Ron] Howard [director of Apollo 13 (1995)] got to know the stoic astronauts and \"steely-eyed missile men\" of Mission Control, he saw their sense of humor, their wilder sides and the doubts they carry like everyone else.",
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"text": "NASA Entry Flight Director Tony Ceccacci said the motto in Mission Control is \"flight controllers don't cry.\" He tried to remain stoic – like a steely eyed missile man – after his team guided Atlantis and its crew through an era-ending atmospheric re-entry. \"This will be the last time this team will be together,\" Ceccacci said, struggling to maintain his composure.",
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"text": "D[avid] M[arshall]: […] Tell me about your steely-eyed missile man nickname. […] J[ohn] A[aron]: Well you know, I ran across the term, steely-eyed missile man a year before that. There was a group of thinkers even back in the—maybe it goes all the way back to military that they were kicking around this thing called steely-eyed missile man. […] I think it, particularly in the early days of NASA, […] it just had to do with the way people react when calamities happen. If they act calmly. It was not a term that was used much in Houston. In fact, it was not even a term that they coined, I don't think, having to do with anything I did in real time. It just kind of evolved. People kind of discovered that term. […] DM: Did anyone call you that at NASA? JA: No. Unh-uh. […] I probably didn't go through all the wickets to deserve that reputation. I mean, I probably do fit the mold. But I'm not the only guy there who was a steely-eyed missile man.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-01 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-04-21 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.
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