My Moonshot

by Tom Shafer

July 18, 2019

So, I hope you are not exhausted by all of the media coverage of the fiftieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing – and if you are, well, you’ll be disappointed in this entry because I too must weigh in on the greatest engineering feat of all time.

I do have a connection to this event after all. My father worked Air Force intelligence for most of his thirty-year career and was in a room where heartbeats were detected in the Vostok 1 capsule on April 12, 1961, signaling that the Soviet Union had beaten the Americans into space. Yuri Gagarin’s single orbit of the earth shocked the world and initiated the so-called space race.

Of course, I will never know my father’s role in that race, if any, because most of his life’s work was classified. However, in his later years, he would reveal a few details that he felt were not, including the fact that he spent at least a year (as far as I can gather) investigating UFO reports for the top secret Project Blue Book program.

As for me, from the time I was about seven, I was preparing for my career as an astronaut. My room then was filled with models of the Gemini and Saturn rockets, the lunar module and lander, and my two favorite planes, the SR-71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft and the XB-70 Valkyrie bomber (two of the fastest ever). I frequently asked my parents about taking flying lessons, for which I received the standard parental edict, “when you’re old enough.” So, I would read what I could about fellow Ohioan John Glenn and other heroes from the astronaut corps and dream of the day when I could join them at Cape Canaveral and Johnson Space Center.

However, family genetics reared its ugly head just before I turned eight. A teacher at school noticed that I was having trouble reading the blackboard from my seat in the middle of the room and moved me forward, and told my parents about it at parent-teacher conferences. A visit to the family optometrist confirmed my near-sightedness, and my first set of glasses was ordered. I knew then that this was the death knell to my desired career. Back then, astronauts were required to have close to 20/20 vision, and my eye doctor predicted that my poor vision was only going to get worse (which proved quite true). At eight years old, I was devastated.

From then, I focused on sports, thinking that if I couldn’t become an astronaut, I would follow my other loved pursuits, baseball and basketball. Of course, my parents weren’t going to allow me to ignore my studies – but this wasn’t a problem because I loved school and learning in general.

Though disappointed (and worse, bespectacled), I was still following the Apollo program as it systematically prepared for landing men on the moon. After working through the disaster of Apollo 1 (where three astronauts were killed in a cabin fire during a static launch test), a successful launch of Apollo 7 proved that the first Saturn rocket was more than capable of getting us to the moon and back. Apollo 8, now utilizing the Saturn V, made ten lunar orbits just before Christmas in 1968, and I was glued to all coverage both in print and on television (in fact, I kept several newspapers from those years and just donated them to the Greene County Library a couple of years ago).

Apollo 9 followed in March of 1969 by unveiling the lunar module, then testing its propulsion, rendezvous, and docking systems. In May, Apollo 10 successfully completed its full dress rehearsal for the lunar landing by flying within ten miles (technically 8.4 nautical miles), setting the stage for the Apollo 11 launch in July.

I followed all of this diligently and even kept a journal about the Apollo missions starting with 7. In this, I listed all astronauts on a mission, including their position (commander, command module pilot, lunar module pilot), the total number of space flights, and their birth cities. I also recorded the scheduled performance tasks, the landing targets (for moon shots, with a scaled drawings!), and important operational times (launches, returns, landings, etc.). I even drew the mission patches designated for each flight. I was fully geeked up on all things Apollo!

And I was particularly excited about 11, and not just for the moon landing itself. I had a new hero, Neil Armstrong, who just happened to be from a town about an hour north of my Beavercreek home. And, it being July, I could fully enjoy launch to splashdown without interruption from school activities.

Now, as I have watched many if not all of the fiftieth commemoration programs, I have been transported back in time, where an eight-year-old boy sat cross-legged two feet from his family’s nineteen-inch black and white television, fully immersed in live images, simulations, commentary, and interviews. On a couple of evenings, I fell asleep in that position and was carried to my bedroom – where I awoke later and slipped back to the living room to continue my vigil.

I vividly remember the launch (actually all of the launches including the awesome nighttime lift-off of 17!), but of course the landing, just after 3 p.m., is what all of us were awaiting. Screenwriters couldn’t have scripted the event any better, as Armstrong navigated the lunar lander past craters and boulders sprawled across the moon’s surface. He finally brought the lander to rest, telling Mission Control, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.” We didn’t know then exactly what was meant when capsule communicator (CAPCOM) Charlie Duke responded, “Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again,” but Armstrong had overshot the LZ by four miles (due to a quicker descent than expected – but not bad for a team that had never landed on the moon!) and was literally flying on fumes – about twenty seconds worth!

Of course, my kid-brain was ready to open the hatch right away and start bounding across the gray-white landscape. But there were other tasks to perform, and preparations for the walk took an hour and a half longer than expected. But none of that mattered to me, and just before 11 p.m., we (six hundred million strong) watched Armstrong’s legs appear on the ladder outside the lander. At this very dramatic moment, and in keeping with the almost matter-of-fact nature of astronaut-speak, he commented that the surface was “very fine-grained . . . like a powder.” Then, he stepped upon the moon, paused for a moment, then famously stated, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” I’ll leave it to analysts to debate the determiner “a” and whether Armstrong said it or not (he claims he did), but for me, all of Hollywood’s best writers could not have penned a better line.

So much of the rest of that evening (and the next day) has blurred in my mind over time (the kangaroo hops, planting the American flag, taking pictures with video and still cameras, deploying the seismic experiment package, and taking a phone call from President Nixon). Fortunately, all of that has been preserved for posterity. For an eight-year-old boy who had himself dreamed of walking on the moon, it was almost too much. Even today, some of the images from then are crystal clear.

So, I didn’t complete my degree in systems engineering (3+ years), instead choosing and retiring from a career in education, but I have always followed space exploration with a passion, including the shuttle program, the space station(s), and recent exploits in the private sector. In 2003, the National Museum of United States Air Force hosted a celebration of the centennial of flight at the convention center in downtown Dayton, and there was no way I was going to miss it. My wife and I secured tickets to the dinner so that I (and she) could put eyes on all of the living astronauts, my childhood heroes. An old friend, Harrison Ford (and a story for another day), was hosting the event, and many other celebrities (also flight and space geeks) were in attendance. Words can’t adequately describe what it was like to be in same room with John Glenn, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell, and all of the other aviation and space royalty.

After the dinner – and through a slight subterfuge – the wife and I were able to attend an after party where we comingled with all of this royalty. In fact, I was standing in line behind actor Cliff Robertson (Best Actor Academy Award winner for the movie Charly, based on the book Flowers for Algernon) to get a beer when Jim Lovell stepped in behind me. I bought Jim a Heineken, then stood with him and Cliff (yes, we’re on a first-name basis) for about twenty minutes talking about the event itself and flying. I’m not sure I even breathed for those twenty minutes. At some point, Buzz Aldrin (!) joined us, then later we all watched as Buzz excused himself to go sit and talk with Neil Armstrong, a conversation I think all of us wanted to experience. Just word-processing these last three sentences is surreal to me.

I hope all of you, even you youngsters who weren’t alive to witness man’s greatest engineering feat, were able to enjoy some of the coverage – or at least some of the television programs – dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing. It WAS a big deal, and 600,000,000 people will never forget it, including that eight-year-old boy who was sure that he too would get his chance to step on the lunar surface. In so many ways, he – er, I – actually did.