Stanley A. Lewandowski

The son of Polish immigrants, Stanley Lewandowski grew up in Braddock, near the Edgar Thomson steel mill where his father worked. He used his structural civil engineering degree from Carnegie Tech to get a job with Bechtel working on bridges and nuclear power plants. When Boeing contracted Bechtel for the Apollo Project, Lewandowski headed to Florida. This field notebook documents Lewandowski’s work on the Launch Umbilical Tower, LUT, which provided the support structure for the Saturn V rocket and the crawler-transporter, the massive steel platform that ferried the rocket from the Vehicle Assembly Building (where it had been constructed) to the launch pad at Kennedy Space Center. Lewandowski spent more than eight years working with NASA as part of the team that designed, built, and tested these structures. The tests checked for any defects or weaknesses that might compromise the effectiveness of these launch facilities.