Remembering the Early Space Program and Neil Armstrong

Mercury-Redstone Launch

The early days of the space program in the United States occupied the attention of the public in a way I doubt many younger people can imagine today – what I mean is – back then we didn’t normally glue ourselves to the TV the way many people do now.  But when a spacecraft with an astronaut or two was launched, it was all-day news, and that is probably the first time we ever did that (as a nation).  We stuck ourselves to the chair in front of the old black and white TV and we watched and watched and watched. 

This was back in the early days of television when programming was only 18 hours a day (if that) and “news” (including sports and weather) was limited to 30 minutes at 6 pm and 10 pm and maybe a third broadcast in the am for the early risers (along with the “farm report”).  Most folks back then would not have considered spending an entire day in front of the television a smart, reasonable or sane thing to do.  It's not a very good thing to do today, either.

Today, many sit zombie-like and entranced by interminable, unending media coverage (to no positive end) whenever CNN finds out that a Hollywood actor sneezed, including “expert” analysis by several medical “professionals,” plus commentary from his Grandmother and a psychologist or two so that we can completely understand (and appreciate) what the long term effects of the sneeze will be on the psyche of the unfortunate Hollywood star, his family and neighbors and friends and his dog…?   And of course, we most assuredly provide counseling for anyone remotely connected.

Back in the early 60s, no one did that; not until Kennedy got killed in Dallas.  But we did watch the astronauts fly. In 1961, space was an unknown – a mystery we could hardly imagine traveling in or through.  No one knew what would happen when (or if) we went there – what physical or mental problems might be caused by exposure to the lack of atmosphere, or by weightlessness.  Traveling to another world was almost unimaginable – so much so that many ignorant people don’t believe that we actually have done it.  We quarantined our spacemen when they got home – put them in isolated quarters in case they brought back some new bacteria or germ that might quickly kill us all if it got loose.

So when NASA launched our first astronaut, Alan B. Shepherd, into low space, we sat and watched, with feelings of hope, fear, and anticipation.  I can still remember the scene – Walter Cronkite sitting at a desk in the open air at Cape Canaveral, with a Mercury-Redstone rocket and its gantry in the near-distance behind him with a little tiny black Mercury “capsule” perched on top, while we waited for the count-down to get to zero and the engines would light.  Tendrils and jets of steam vented away from the rocket in the early morning sunshine as we waited on the edge of our seats for the ignition and launch. 

[A note about the photos:  Take a look at the nice little Redstone rocket in the photo above.  Then scroll down and take a look at the difference in power evident in the space shuttle launch photo down toward the end of this essay, or the Saturn V under the Apollo 8 command ship...  What a difference 30 years of development makes.]

I’m not sure many of us knew at the time just how many of those Redstone rockets had previously blown themselves to bits on launch or within the first few seconds of flight... I know I didn’t.  I’m not sure whether these early spacemen were courageous – or simply thick, stupid and uncomprehending of the realities (I’m joking…).  But if I had personally seen those many recent catastrophic failures (as the Mercury 7 had seen), I don't think love of country, Mom or mankind could possibly have induced me to sit atop one of those big bombs while it was being lit.

Gagarin

Spam in a can... On that first day when we catapulted astronaut Shepherd out over the Atlantic in a “what goes up must come down” trajectory, Yuri Gagarin had already been launched and orbited the earth.  He was first. The United States was a little more conservative, or cautious, about those first flights.  We launched first Shepherd, and then Gus Grissom, up and down, first and second, before we orbited John Glenn on the third Mercury flight; none of them had more than a little control over their spacecraft.  That would come later, with the Gemini program.


One of my best memories from the first orbital flights was the sense of wonder evoked by the radio communications from the astronauts as they circled the Earth -- and the weird sense of connection we had with them even when they were so isolated from us all. I remember when the citizens of Perth, Australia turned on every light in their city, as a hello and "welcome" to the orbiting American astronaut as he passed overhead. I still have warm feelings for Perth and Australians today as a result; I cannot think of Perth without thinking of what they did.  

My first memory of the space program was being led into the backyard one evening, probably in the late 1950s, to see a Russian satellite pass overhead.  My memory of it was as a ball of fire -- I don't know if what we saw was a re-entry burn-up or if my memory is flawed -- perhaps we just saw it as we see any satellite - like a little moving planet.  But I clearly remember seeing it -- it passed from south to north, basically.  I've seen many more since, of course -- seeing a satellite is possible almost any evening if you know how to look for them.  One of the best was seeing the International Space Station followed by a space shuttle as they passed overhead after un-docking from each other a few years ago.  The ISS led the shuttle by a few hundred miles -- but from this perspective, way down here in Phoenix, they appeared to still be close together.  They were both about as bright as Venus.

The USA had no catastrophic failures in the early days, but Russia lost Valentin Bondarenko in a training accident early on. I cannot help but feel that their losses are our losses too; you know, a brotherhood of spaceman kind of thing. At the time, the loss of Vladimir Komarov hit me particularly hard - he died when his Soyuz capsule's parachutes failed to slow his descent. In the USA, while glitches and problems were frequent, the day only came two programs and roughly 5 years later when we lost our first NASA astronaut crew– and that was on the ground. Test pilot Michael Adams had lost his life prior to Apollo 1 in an X-15 flight over California– but today no one much remembers his “space” flight – or his death. We knew, though, even from the start, that the day would come when men would give their lives for the sake of space exploration. At the time we didn't realize that women would be astronauts too and would also give everything; to date, four of them (17% of our total losses). In 1961, that possibility was unthinkable (except to women, of course).

Liberty Bell 7 just before she sank...

On one Mercury flight, astronaut “Gus” Grissom “lost” his capsule after splashdown – all our early spacecraft landed in the sea via parachutes.  The hatch on “Liberty 7” opened too soon and the craft filled with seawater and sank, while a Marine Corps helicopter hovered overhead, unable to lift its water-logged weight from the Atlantic.

Grissom was later blamed for popping the hatch prematurely – although he said he had not touched it.  He has been portrayed as panicked and cowardly by the media (in the film and book "The Right Stuff").  That’s nonsense. I have always thought he was due the benefit of the doubt – mechanical things do fail – and Grissom was known to be an unflappable and methodical test pilot – not the least bit incompetent or frightened, as he was portrayed. He was a “by the book” kind of a pilot, and a pilot’s pilot.  My thought has always been that he was criticized and denigrated by some who wouldn't have had the guts to stand in his shoes on even their best day.  And let's face it - they weren't there.  I don't believe for a minute that Gus Grissom didn't have "the right stuff."

Apollo 8 - Dec 1968

Everything we did on those early flights was aimed at one goal – to land us on the Moon, and to do that before the Russians could do it (and before New Year’s Day, 1970).  That was the goal President Kennedy set for us. In 1964 and 1965, we fired off two astronauts at a time in the slightly-larger Gemini capsules, on larger Titan II rockets.  We practiced docking maneuvers (using little unmanned spacecraft called “Agena” -- and space-walks. Astronauts like Neil Armstrong were finally flying their Gemini capsules like little space-sports cars – and sometimes they spun wildly out of control (before recovering and making NASA's first emergency landing).

Later, when the same pilot (Armstrong) had a need to suddenly find an alternative landing spot on the Sea of Tranquility, that experience in quick improvisation served him well. All of these exercises (and learned skills) were necessary for the Apollo flights and it turned out these were sound plans and preparations – Apollo unfolded just like we envisioned it -- and got us up there and walking around on the Moon’s surface before 1970, just like John Kennedy told us we would.  We had some problems along the way, like Apollo 13, but the Apollo program overall was a resounding success, and an awesome achievement by the standards of any era. The Russians never made it; after our success preempted them, they took their program another direction (which has also benefited space exploration and travel even today -- not just for them -- but for the rest of us as well).

Before we got Apollo 8 off to circle the Moon at Christmas, 1968, we had suffered the loss of our first crew on the pad in an oxygen-fueled flash fire – Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were the first astronauts to die in one of our spacecraft. So when Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders orbited the Moon and took photos of all of us back on planet Earth – many of us were thinking about the high cost we'd paid.  By then, in the Soviet Union, Cosmonauts Valentin Bondarenko, Vladimir Komarov and three others had also perished. 

Apollo 8, Earth and Moon

We were also thinking about the very real possibility that we might never see Apollo 8 again once it went around the Moon's back side… if they didn’t enter a lunar orbit precisely, the spacecraft could “glance” off and careen irrevocably into the far reaches of interplanetary space. Adding to the suspense, while they were behind the Moon we had no communication with them; we didn't immediately know at that critical point whether those men were coming home or not; what NASA and Apollo 8 were trying to do had never been done before. So we sat on the edge of our seats once again and we hoped and we waited.  But the NASA of the 1960s was a very competent organization and its people were brilliant.  Apollo 8 reappeared, in orbit, just as planned and the astronauts treated us to a moving scripture-reading for Christmas (a nice touch even for us non-Christians) and (later) one of the most famous photographs ever taken – Earthrise photographed from Moon orbit.

Apollo 8 Command Ship today (in Chicago)

My own family has a personal connection to those glory days of the American space program – my Dad was involved in the space program at two different times in his career as an engineer (or originally as a draftsman and design-checker).  In late 1965, he was hired as a draftsman by the Lockheed Corporation at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico (and later worked as a design-checker there). They were designing and building new tracking equipment – the existing gear (for Mercury and Gemini) wasn’t suitable for space flight that was leaving the confines of low Earth orbit – Apollo would be traveling nearly 240,000 miles out across the open sea of Space to get to the Moon, so we had to build new equipment that could track them way out there.  For those who think we didn’t really go to the Moon at all, my Dad thanks you (as do thousands of his similarly-employed peers) for letting him know that all his years of work in that program, including the design and the construction, as well as the later actual tracking of the Apollo space missions, were just a hoax and a fraud. Morons.

Later, when NASA was preparing for the Space Shuttle program, Dad, by then a mechanical and optical engineer, designed “steering” gear on the Solid Rocket Boosters used to help launch the Shuttles ("steering" does not regard direction of travel -- but a mechanism to control and equalize thrust through the use of rotating nozzles). 

I myself was also a "design engineer” in the early space program – helping further private rocket and spacecraft design with extremely sophisticated model rockets in my backyard… some of these reached dangerously high altitudes and although I am not certain any ever achieved orbit, a couple of them were still going up when they disappeared, so who knows… I was very famous in my neighborhood.

You could say that I was also personally inspired by the space program... In the summer of 1969, it didn’t seem real to us that our astronauts were going to the moon to land on it.  Some of us boys slept out in the yard during the Apollo 11 mission – and while Neil and Buzz and Richard flew, we looked at the Moon and we talked and dreamed about what it was like “up there.”  Later, very late at night, the heady atmosphere and the "euphoria of youth" got us into trouble – impersonating alien life-forms at two in the morning on the boulevards nearby, in complete alien costume, scaring bejeezus out of several drunk drivers, (we thought). That extra-curricular activity led to apprehension, detention, suspension... and “charges” of curfew violation. Our immediate travel arrangements were decidedly earthly; (police cruiser) transport to a nearby precinct-house... and my Mom didn’t speak to me for about two weeks… 

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon

But by the time Neil and Buzz Aldrin stepped down onto the surface of the Moon from Eagle, the “lunar landing module (or LEM),” we were all back in front of the TV; hundreds of millions of us. Even David Beaver, whose father had advised Phoenix PD to "let him sit down there [in jail] and rot" when he had been called at 0300...  We heard Neil Armstrong say “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind” on live television – all the way from Earth’s moon.  I did not hear the “a” he claims he spoke – but I believe him.  If he said it, he said it.  Period. Was it really a “giant leap” though?   

It was certainly a first step. Mankind must move beyond the Earth if we are to survive. While it likely won’t happen soon (more likely about 6 or 8 billion years from now), the Earth will eventually become completely uninhabitable, global-warming or not.  Eventually, the sun will grow old and as it runs out of fuel it will expand, and planet Earth will be engulfed and incinerated.  So before that day when we would become crispy critters, human emigrants must strike off in search of a habitable place to live.  Without a space program, how will we be able to do that?  And isn't the first step often the biggest?

Aside from that reality, we have gained hundreds of products and technologies through and from the space program.  Life simply would not exist as we know it today without us having launched men and women into space. The program jump-started the development of scratch-resistant lenses, Teflon, Velcro, memory foam, rechargeable batteries, miniaturization and microprocessors. Did you know that computers used to take up entire rooms and more?  Now, your little old laptop PC has many more times the computing power of all the equipment that sent the Apollo flight across space to the Moon! Many technologies used in the medical field, including that which is used to detect breast cancer, and digital technology, satellites, GPS, cell phones, satellite television, real-time and advance weather monitoring, microwave ovens, microwave communication equipment, solar energy, new pharmaceuticals, aircraft and aviation safety, and advances in firefighting technology, to name just a few – all of these things stemmed from space travel development and exploration. 

Both in the everyday, and in the big picture, the results of the space program have improved our lives – all our lives.  Many of us wouldn’t even have survived to adulthood without the benefit of the things we’ve learned while trying to get out there.

Neil Armstrong - NASA photo

This past week, our first man on the Moon passed away unexpectedly at barely past 80 years of age.  Neil Armstrong was by all accounts and appearances a modest unassuming guy -- but who did astonishing things.  He didn’t do them by himself of course – hundreds of men and women just like him helped him accomplish what he did. 

But I liked Armstrong because he clearly represented what I think are some of the best things about “us.”  He did his job well; he had a certain amount of courage.  He was positive, never negative. He was brilliant and competent.  He didn’t squawk much.  (Actually, he didn’t squawk at all, not publicly anyway.)  He was a great representative of all those just like him who accomplished so much in such a short time. 

I can’t but think that in the history of human endeavor – that which is past and that which is still to come – those early halcyon times in the space program will be among the times we think were most golden.  And Neil Armstrong was one guy who represented very well the magnificent people and program that started us down that road. 

We’ve lately lost sight of the place, even the direction, where they were leading us.  Perhaps someday we will regain that vision and focus.  Right now, I am remembering how exciting it was to be a witness to those early days – even if it was just being glued to the TV set, watching as brave men sat on top of white rockets at Cape Canaveral before being hurled skyward.  Thanks Neil, Buzz, Richard, and Alan, and John, Wally, Gordo, Sally, Yuri, and all the others who were “first.”  I won’t forget you. For the Mercury 7, the Gemini and Apollo astronauts, and particularly…

In Memory of

Valentin Bondarenko

Michael J. Adams

Virgil “Gus” Grissom

Edward White

Roger Chaffey

Vladimir Komarov

Yuri Gagarin

Georgi Dobrovolski

Victor Patsayev

Vladislav Volkov

F. Dick Scobee

Michael J. Smith

Greg Jarvis

Ellison Onizuka

Sharon Christa MacAuliff

Judith A. Resnik

Ronald McNair

Rick Husband

Kalpana Chawla

William McCool

Michael Anderson

David Brown

Laurel Clark

Ilan Ramon

"Non est ad astra mollis e terris via "

All photos courtesy of NASA except Apollo 8 Command Ship, by Bob Schaller