Background
Hodge was born in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex in 1929, and attended Minchenden Grammar School in Southgate, London.
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John Hodge
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He studied at the Northampton Engineering College at the University of London, graduating in 1949 with a first-class degree in engineering.
Career
He worked for the CF-105 Avro Arrow jet interceptor project in Canada. During his, he worked as a flight director and planner. When he returned to National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the 1980s, he worked as a manager on the Space Station Freedom project, which later became the International Space Station.
He also served as an administrator at the United States Department of Transportation.
From 1950 through 1952 he worked as an engineer at Vickers-Armstrong in Weybridge. Upon graduation, Hodge worked as an engineer for the Aerodynamics Department of Vickers-Armstrongs.
In 1952 Hodge took a job at the Avro Arrow project in Canada, where he was head of the air loads section. When the Avro Arrow project was cancelled in 1959, 32 Avro engineers including Hodge followed the lead of Jim Chamberlin and migrated to join National Aeronautics and Space Administration"s Space Task Group.
The group, based at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was responsible for America"s manned space program, Project Mercury.
At Langley, Hodge became the assistant to Chris Kraft, who was the head of the Space Task Group"s operations division and National Aeronautics and Space Administration"s first flight director During John Glenn"s historic mission, the first orbital flight by an American, Hodge was serving as the flight director at National Aeronautics and Space Administration"s tracking station in Bermuda. The final flight in the Mercury program, Master of Arts-9, was scheduled to last long enough that a second flight director was needed in Mission Control.
Thus, in 1963, Hodge became a flight director, choosing blue as his team color.
The missions that he worked included Gemini 8, where he was the first person other than Kraft to be lead flight director for a mission. Hodge was on-shift when a stuck Gemini thruster brought a rapid end to the mission.
He was also on-duty during the launch test that resulted in the Apollo 1 fire. Hodge retired as a flight director in 1968, and became head of Johnson Space Center"s advanced program office where he worked on preparing for the last three Apollo lunar landings and programs to follow Apollo.
He left National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1970 but returned in 1982 to run a large space station design study.
After leaving National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1970, Hodge worked for the Transport Systems Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Urban Transportation Development Corporation in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, before serving five years as an administrator at the United States Department of Transportation. After leaving National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1987, Hodge then formed his own firm, J. Doctorate. Hodge and Company, which was an international management and aerospace consultanting company.
Membership
When it was cancelled in 1959, he became a member of National Aeronautics and Space Administration"s Space Task Group, which later became the Johnson Space Center.
