John E. ‘Jack’ Riley, 78; Was Part of NASA’s ‘Voice of Mission Control’

John E. “Jack” Riley, a NASA public affairs officer and spokesman who provided the commentary for the first moon walk in 1969, has died. He was 78.

Riley died of cancer April 17 in Houston.

Steve Nesbitt, public affairs officer at the Johnson Space Center there, said Friday that Riley was “one of a small group of people who over the years have been referred to as ‘the voice of Mission Control.’ ” Nesbitt worked for the spokesman for several years.

Unlike Shorty Powers, who coined the phrase “A-OK” at Mission Control, Riley was one of the anonymous voices that were the public’s link to the human space programs. Nesbitt said that during missions, Riley would sit within feet of the flight director and “help translate all the NASA talk into something people could understand.”

“That was what people think of as the glory days of the human space program,” Nesbitt said, “and Jack was in the middle of it.”

Among many other missions, Riley provided commentary when Apollo 13 came back to Earth in 1970 after aborting a lunar landing.

He listened in on the radio chatter as a helicopter rescued the crew from the ocean, then described the floor of the Mission Operations Control Room: “There are visible smiles on the faces of the flight controllers and astronauts in this room.”

Riley was born in 1925 in Trenton, Mo. After high school, he joined the Navy, serving during World War II in the Pacific theater.

After the war, he got his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Kansas and worked at several newspapers in that state and Missouri before taking a job at General Dynamics.

He joined NASA in 1959 and worked for 33 years in its public affairs office, where he eventually became chief.

Riley is survived by his wife, four children and 12 grandchildren.