NASA Apollo Engineer, born 1942. Flight Controller for the EMU (Space Suit) through Apollo 13. Helped design, analyze, and test the suits. NASA medical requirements led to his doctorate and career as a Seattle OB-GYN 

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When Apollo 11 launched into the July sky 50 years ago, the public faces of the mission were, by design, the three men on top of the rocket: astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

But 400,000 people worked on that mission, from the Boeing employees who completed the first phase of the Saturn V rockets to Edith Gustan and Richard Olson, who researched spacecraft decontamination for Boeing.

And one Seattleite made a major contribution that wouldn’t be tested until Armstrong and Aldrin prepared to take their first steps onto the lunar surface. 

His name is Dr. James Joki. A self-described “Ballard guy” and a product of Ballard High School and the University of Washington, Joki, 76, served as an extravehicular mobility unit (EMU) flight controller for Apollo 11.

Now retired, he’s full of stories from his time at NASA, and lives in a sprawling house on Richmond Beach in Shoreline with a panoramic view of the Olympic Mountains and a huge pair of ceramic cowboy boots on the porch.

Inside are walls lined with space travel-related memorabilia, some from his time at NASA (including the sign from his Mission Control console), some collected in the decades since. A good Finn (Joki means “river” in Finnish), he keeps some of these artifacts in his home’s basement sauna.

As a flight controller assigned to Mission Control, Joki helped develop, test and modify the spacesuits, backpacks, visors, gloves and oxygen systems that Aldrin and Armstrong would rely on for life support during their walk on the moon. The mission unfolded in phases, and Joki’s part took place from the time Aldrin and Armstrong donned their suits and opened the door of the lunar module, to the moment they returned safely to the spacecraft and shut the door.

Joki’s interest in this line of work started early. He recalls formative developments in space travel during his boyhood and young adulthood — memories of Sputnik’s orbit, the Cold War and, finally, President John F. Kennedy’s statement in 1961 that the United States would mount a mission to the moon before the decade was over.

At a time when “we barely had a manned suborbital flight with John Glenn,” recalls Joki, “he was talking about having a booster 363 feet high, having three men to the moon and to land on the moon and come back.”

It was this high-stakes collision between geopolitical turmoil and the aerospace industry that Joki entered when he graduated from the University of Washington in 1965 with a degree in aeronautics and astronautics. He already knew he wanted to be involved in the space program — to have a hand in bearing out Kennedy’s promise — and that he wanted to work in operations, not direct engineering.

Through a combination of experience and luck, both hopes panned out, albeit in a circuitous fashion. Humble Oil had recruited Joki for a job, and paid his way to Houston for a company visit. There, Joki recalls asking his hosts: “‘While we’re here, is there any way that we could go over and take a look at that manned spacecraft center?’ It’s only been open for a year. And the guy said, ‘Well, our golf course is out there. Yeah, I could take you out there.’ ”

Joki called ahead to request a meeting with James E. Hannigan, a former Boeing engineer who was then the head of the Apollo program’s Lunar Excursion Module section in its flight-control division. The two men met and talked, and two days later, Joki had secured a contract to work at NASA — “where else but Mission Control?” As a thank you, he says, “I bought Humble Oil gas all the time — pay ’em back.”