As the on-shift flight director of the Gemini 8 spaceflight crewed by Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott as it entered a spin, Hodge was credited with the safe landing of these astronauts.

The group, based at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was responsible for America's crewed 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 NASA's first flight director.

He was also on duty during the launch test that resulted in the Apollo 1 fire which killed Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee.

[6][3] Hodge was the on-shift flight director of the Gemini VIII spaceflight, crewed by Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott, as it suffered an in-flight failure causing it to roll out of control.

Hodge said the role of flight control was then to "tell them what we wanted to do, and feed all their retro information, when they should fire rockets, what angle they should be at, what time, all that kind of stuff", directing the falling spacecraft to be near the Navy destroyer USS Leonard F. Mason, "and he landed close, fairly close to the destroyer, and they picked him up"; Hodge later said "if anybody ever says what did I do in the space program, it was make sure that Neil Armstrong was around to fly on Apollo".