A small role in history: York County man was among those who helped man land on the moon

In April 1967, Tony Shanko was just out of school, having earned a two-year-degree in aerospace engineering from the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology, and was looking for work. 

He had three offers right off the bat – one from Boeing in Seattle, another from Westinghouse in Philadelphia and a third from Grumman Aircraft Engineering on Long Island.  

He took the job with Grumman because, he said, it paid more. It was that simple.  

He didn’t know at the time that he would play a small role in one of the greatest achievements of humankind. He was one of the thousands of engineers who helped put a man on the moon, a member of the original geek squad, the guys you see in old photos wearing white shirts and skinny dark ties and working a slide rule. He doesn’t make a big deal about it. 

“I’m an engineer,” Shanko, a slim, soft-spoken man, said recently in the living room of his York Township home. “I was just one of those guys. There were a lot of us.” 

He was one of the 'geeky people behind a desk'

Shanko grew up in a Navy family. He’s originally from Trenton, N.J., but the family moved quite a bit, his father serving in a variety of capacities from Rhode Island to Key West, stationed mostly on aircraft carriers.  

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Shanko developed an affinity for aircraft at a young age. He would go to air shows with his family. He dreamed of growing up to be a Naval aviator, considered the pinnacle of the aviation pyramid. “That didn’t work out,” he said of that dream. 

Instead, he studied aerospace engineering, hoping to work on the aircraft that he had once dreamed of flying. He had that chance at Grumman, working, eventually, with teams that designed systems for the F-14 fighter, the EA-6B all-weather bomber and the Gulfstream jet, among others. 

But those projects were on the back burner. When he joined the company, the space program was in full swing and Grumman played a large role in it, one of 10 aerospace contractors responsible for designing and building the most powerful machine ever built by humans, the Saturn V rocket.  

The company, renamed Grumman Aerospace, was responsible for crafting the LEM, the lunar module, the squat, spindly-legged craft that would deliver astronauts to the surface of the moon.  

And Shanko was a member of one of the teams of engineers that worked on the LEM. He did something called “data reduction,” he said, working on the craft’s systems. Every system on the LEM had backups, and those backups had to work as well as the primary systems should something go wrong.  

“What I was doing was proving the integrity of the LEM,” he said. “I was one of the geeky people behind a desk.” 

Among the other engineers, he has a vivid memory of an older engineer who worked on another team assigned to the LEM, the team that came up with the urine collection and disposal system, that particular engineer being tasked with designing what was known as “the pee bag.”

A significant amount of engineering went into designing the system that allowed the astronauts to expel fluid waste in zero gravity. (It’s an important system, considering that it would be impossible to hold it that long. There were no gas stations to stop at on the way, and having a work environment in which urine floated through the compartment would be incompatible to performing the tasks necessary to land on the moon.) 

Much of Shanko's work was done with paper and a pencil, doing calculations with a slide rule. (“I still have my slide rule,” he said.) Some of the heavy number crunching was handled by an IBM 360 computer, a huge mainframe system that, in its day, was among the most powerful computers on earth. (Today, the phone you carry in your pocket is exponentially more powerful than the IBM 360.) 

He never got to see the LEM in person, he said. It was built in what’s known as “a cleanroom,” a strictly controlled environment ventilated by a system that filters out dust and microbes. Access to the cleanroom was strictly limited, he said. You just couldn’t pop in and take a look at the results of the number crunching. 

In December 1968, he did get a glimpse of the control room for Apollo 8, the first flight to orbit the moon. He and another engineer just walked into the room to watch. “They found out we were there and told us to leave,” he recalled. 

While working at Grumman, he rented a room in a nearby boarding house, and that was where he saw the fruits of his labor culminate with man walking on the moon, July 20, 1969. He was there with his landlady and another resident, a man who worked as a custodian at Grumman.  

“We just sat in front of the TV, just spellbound,” he said. “We were elated that is succeeded. But I don’t think anybody had any doubts.” 

It wasn’t just hubris that led to the lack of doubt. It was knowing that every system, every rivet, every detail was painstakingly tested over and over again. There was, Shanko said, no margin of error. 

Some time after the moon landing, two of the three Apollo 11 astronauts visited Grumman for a ceremony. (Shanko said if memory serves, Neil Armstrong did not visit, leaving the duty to his crew mates Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin.) “It was incredible,” Shanko said. “It was as exciting, if not more exciting, than landing on the moon.” 

Tough times for aerospace industry

After working on the LEM, Shanko moved onto other projects not affiliated with the space program. In September 1970, he was laid off. It was a tough time for the aerospace industry. NASA laid off 50,000 people that year, he said, and other contractors, including Grumman, followed suit. He had been working on his bachelor’s degree and completed it after being laid off. 

He looked for work in the industry,  but it was tough. “You had people with PhDs and master’s degrees out there looking for jobs,” he said. 

He found work in the air conditioning and refrigeration industry, eventually landing at Borg-Warner in York, the predecessor of York International and Johnson Controls in 1976. 

Now retired, at 74, he marvels at the achievement in which he played a small role.  

“It was something that was never done before, an engineering first to send somebody to the moon and back,” he said. “It’s just incredible.” 

Soon, his son and his soon-to-be-6-year-old grandson are going to visit. His grandson, also named Tony, is enamored with the Apollo missions, having watched a documentary about the moon landing like other kids watch “Toy Story” or “Spiderman.”  

And the legacy of working on the space program may continue. His grandson, he said, wants to be an astronaut.