Aviation/rocketry engineer Thomas J. O’Malley died 6 November 2009 of pneumonia. Born 8 October 1915 in Montclair, New Jersey, he graduated from the Newark College of Engineering (now the New Jersey Institute of Technology), and then worked at the Wright Aeronautical Corporation.
In 1958, O’Malley joined General Dynamics, and four years later, he was the one who pushed the button to ignite the rocket that launched John Glenn into space. O’Malley worked for GD’s Convair division, which built the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (which was turned into the rocket that launched the Mercury capsules).
After the early Mercury missions, NASA moved on to the Gemini program, and then the Apollo program, which was to send men to the Moon. In January 1967, a launch pad fire killed Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chaffee, Jr. Following that fire, NASA urged North American Aviation, which had built the command module, to hire O’Malley away from GD to manage the command module launch operations. He worked on command module operations in Florida leading up to the October 1968 Apollo 7 launch.
In their obituary, The New York Times writes “Memorabilia from the early days of the space age surrounded O’Malley at his home in Cocoa Beach, not far from the launching pads. Mounted on a piece of varnished wood was the black starter button from the 1962 Glenn flight.”
O’Malley is survived by his wife of 65 years, Anne Arneth, a daughter, two sons, three sisters, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.