Photos: The Command Module on display. Neil Armstrong, taken minutes after he took his otherworldly walk. Buzz Aldrin working by the Lunar Module (Eagle). Liftoff. (Photos from Wikipedia)
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I'm not all that big on anniversaries, especially when they remind me how old I am. OK, I'm in denial about a lot of things.
But it was 40 years ago this month when man left the Earth's friendly confines and set foot on another, unreachable hunk of real estate. Brought back rocks and soil samples and discovered that no, the cow did not jump over the Moon.
To me it's unreal that it's been 40 years. I could probably rattle off the blow-by-blow of what happened that day. If I think about it, I can still see the image of Neil Armstrong's left boot pressing down into the lunar surface for the first time. Most people can tell you exactly where they were when the World Trade Center was destroyed. Those who were alive can recall their lives when Kennedy was assassinated (I can), or when Pearl Harbor was attacked (I'm not that old).
Upstaging even the Angels
Although I'd been aware of some of the early two-man Gemini flights, I really started paying attention with the brand-spanking-new, three-man Apollo program. To be sure, I had an unusual view of the space program for a kid my age. At the time, my Dad worked as an engineer for North American Aviation (later known as Rockwell), one of the go-to suppliers for the space program.
I was 11 years old when I first saw the fuzzy black-and-white image of Neil Armstrong descending the ladder into history. In one bold stroke we fulfilled John F. Kennedy's challenge to put a man on the moon, and showed the Russkies what space flight was all about.
I was at a ballgame in Anaheim when the Eagle landed. This was during the first game of a doubleheader between my Angels and the Oakland A's (and Oakland started an unknown kid named Vida Blue for the first game). The landing was announced over the stadium PA system, people cheered, and my grandmother (who took my brother and me to the game), well, you can tell she was getting just a little misty. After that I was kind of hoping the doubleheader would be over quickly so we could highball back to Riverside, plunk down in front of the tube, and watch the astronauts. In my life then, that was one of the few things that could upstage the Angels.
Like everyone else, I watched the otherworldly pictures on TV. I listened to the communications between the moonwalkers and Collins, who piloted the mother ship alone in lunar orbit, and with Mission Control. I listened to President Richard Nixon cangratulate the astronauts in the mother of long-distance phone calls. And later, after the astronauts buttoned up the Lunar Module and got some rest, I stepped outside, contemplated the Moon hanging there in the sky, thinking that people were up there right now. Heady stuff.
For a youngster, I had an unusual perspective on what was happening in space. My Dad worked as an engineer for North American Rockwell, those folks that built several components (the command and service modules) of the spacecraft that would send these men to the Moon. Although Dad wasn't one to tell everything that happened in the office (and he couldn't, I found out later, because of security concerns), I knew I could get some technical aspects of the flight from the dinner table. Years later, when the Space Shuttle disintegrated during reentry, I picked his brain to find out what happened (the rigid heat tiles mounted on the flexible skin of the shuttle were the glitch in the system, he maintained).
Dad still has a medallion that was given to him at work. It contains some metal from the Apollo 11 spacecraft. "It's been on the Moon," he'd tell me. For years he kept it on a coffee table in the living room, signifying a high point for him.
Been there, done that
This was the pinnacle of NASA's efforts, and in effect the agency became a victim of its own success. We've sent other crews to the Moon, but with each one there was a bit more of a ho-hum, been-there-done-that aspect to it all. It really took a failure -- Apollo 13's aborted mission and high-wire space survival act -- that put the Moon back on the public's mind. The press paid little attention to that mission until an oxygen tank blew the side off the service module, leaving the ground crew scrambling for ways to bring the astronauts home alive. But even that mission was a stomping success, if for no other reason than to prove how vest-pocket solutions and duct tape can work in an emergency. Apollo 13 became the basis of a good book and an excellent movie, and to this day I have nothing but respect for those guys who ran things from the ground, in Mission Control.
(For the record, I continued to sit riveted to the television as each crew went to the Moon. The footage got immeasurably better, sharper, with each mission, and I really dug that little car the astronauts rode around in even if it wasn't particularly fast.)
After Apollo, the space program went into something of a standstill. There was Skylab, which I found interesting, and the Shuttle, which I didn't. Somehow spending 25 years messing around in low Earth orbit seemed pretty small potatoes after the Moon.
"Nobody ever told us we couldn't"
Even today, with the Space Shuttle (and proposed Orion project), there is not nearly the love affair we once had with space. The astronauts today -- well, if I think about it I can name maybe a couple of them.
Tom Jones, who flew on four Shuttle missions, advises Barack Obama in an open letter (recently published in Popular Mechanics) to retire the Shuttle as scheduled, push forward with Orion, and try to regenerate some excitement about space.
"Use your bully pulpit to explain why space exploration will continue to be an American trademark," Jones urges. "Tell the public that space is not just about science -- it's about exploring for resources and energy, creating new industries, and finding economic opportunity. You should drive home the message that investment in space technologty will keep our scientists keen and capable ... look our young people in the eye and tell them that we need explorers -- doers -- who are citizens of the most forward-looking nation on Earth."
On the surface, you'd think this would be the worst time to think about space given our wobbly economy. But that's not necessarily so. It's times like this when we need some brilliant minds running amok. Our space efforts gave birth to a whole raft of new technologies, from the simple (think Velcro) to the complex (like this computer I'm typing this blog on) to the downright fun (the Super Soaker, which revolutionized the water fight, was designed by NASA scientist Lonnie Johnson while he was working on something else). Rather than baffling us with BS, this is a real good time to dazzle us with brilliance.
Even if we put in the same level of effort and excitement into the space program that we did in the 1960s, it certainly won't be the same. I like how Sy Liebergot, who served as electrical, environmental and communications officer (EECOM) for one of the Mission Control teams for Apollo 11 put it recently in a retrospective piece in Popular Mechanics:
"We were young, and we were fearless and, after all, nobody had ever told us young engineers that we couldn't successfully land humans on another planet. So we did it."
When NASA started the Manned Space program (and the first astronauts were chosen 50 years ago), about the only thing anyone knew about our rockets was that they blew up a lot. Through the Apollo project the program itself consisted of swashbuckling test pilots and a bunch of hotshot engineers that had little choice but to make up their own rules as they went along. These guys made "thinking out of the box" a viable modus operandi, an art form long before anyone attached a catch phrase to it.
Although NASA was, as it is now, a govermnental agency, there was very little of the bureaucratic nonsense and turf protection that you saw creeping in later, during the days of the Shuttle. There wasn't room for it then.
Of course I'd read some of the great books of the period, Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" and Chuck Yeager's autobiography. These books probably did more to capture the mindset of those involved in the space effort, and I highly recommend both.
(Footnote: Yeager never received consideration for astronaut status -- didn't meet the educational requirements -- and the idea of riding in something controlled from the ground didn't excite him that much. Hey, chimps were the first passengers in Project Mercury, and he famously said he didn't feel like sweeping up monkey crap before sitting in the cockpit. He did tell how Armstrong -- then with the old NACA X-15 program -- got their plane hung up in a dry lake bed while trying a touch-and-go maneuver against Yeager's advice. "We touched, but we sure as hell didn't go," Yeager wrote of the incident. "The wheels sank in the muck and we sat there, engines screaming, wide open, the airplane shaking like a moth stuck to fly paper." Chuck Yeager is one of my heroes.)
I'm only half joking when I suggest staffing a new Manned Space Program by calling the old gang out of retirement. OK, they'll be getting on in years, and many of the pioneers (I'm thinking of two of my favorite old-school astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Shepard here) are no longer with us.
Dad's past 80 now, and he's enjoying his retirement so he's probably not interested in a comeback. Liebergot is probably taking it easy these days. Former Mission Control flight director Gene Kranz, who did more than anyone else to keep things together when Apollo 13 threatened to become a real aerial cluster, is likewise unavailable. Oh, well.
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