‘AN AMAZING DAY’ FOR HOUSTON, NASA
Pride in the past, excitement for the future on 50th anniversary
People from across the world clamored to South Florida in July 1969 to watch Apollo 11 rocket to the moon, sleeping in their cars, on beaches or not at all so they could witness history.
Robert Blaske wasn’t part of the commotion. When it came time for the launch at 9:32 a.m. Eastern on July 16, the boy simply climbed a ladder to the roof of his childhood home and watched the rocket roar to life.
“We were close enough to see the rocket stages separate in the air,” Blaske, now 53, said Saturday at Space Center Houston, the visitor’s center for NASA’s Johnson
Space Center. His family watched TV as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon — and took their first steps — four days later, on July 20, 1969.
Fifty years later, Blaske and his 13-year-old son, Ben, were among thousands across the globe who celebrated the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, considered one of humankind’s greatest achievements. It was a particularly special day in Houston — home to the nation’s human spaceflight program, where astronauts have lived, worked and trained, since 1961.
“What an amazing day,” Johnson Space Center Director Mark Geyer said during the opening ceremony Saturday. “It changed
the world, and it changed my life.”
Capital celebration
Jeff Dowswell was born on July 20, 1969 — the day humans set foot on the moon.
Naturally, he has been fascinated by the Apollo program his whole life. The Nashville, Tenn., native celebrated his milestone birthday Saturday by joining thousands on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., for a dayslong celebration of the first lunar landing anniversary.
The highlight for Dowswell was the light show — a 363-foot Saturn V rocket projected on the face of the Washington Monument. A 17-minute film re-creating the launch of the Apollo 11 played out on the monument and panels on either side, a massive clock ticking down, then the ghostly white monument awash in rocket’s red glare. The production ran multiple times on Friday and Saturday nights.
“It was just absolutely amazing,” he said. “The technology for that light show was probably 10 times the technology for the actual moon landing.”
Volunteers were told to expect some 50,000 people for the festival, crowds that came despite a massive heatwave.
The Lone Star State natives in their midst didn’t mind the heat.
“It feels like Texas now,” Elgin native Rex Lundgren, 32, said. Lundgren, who now lives in Washington, studied astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. He’s been fascinated with space — shooting off model rockets and collecting telescopes as a kid.
Rishabh Gadi, 23, a Baytown native, who left Texas to study aerospace engineering in Florida came to the nation’s capital just for the 50th anniversary celebration.
“I grew up in Houston, so I enjoy all the space stuff,” Gadi, who sported an Astros T-shirt, said. “I couldn’t miss it.”
Meanwhile, massive lines stretched a full block on either side of the National Air and Space Museum. NASA shirts and hats dotted the crowded sidewalks, which were lined with ice cream trucks.
Cherished memories
Rod Brennan and his wife, Peggy, were among the locals who trekked to Space Center Houston on Saturday. The Conroe couple was amazed by the number of people who had traveled from other countries for the event.
Rod Brennan was 10 when the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957 — the start of the Space Race between the two super powers that came to an end when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.
“I was old enough to feel the fear,” Brennan, now 72, said. “I wasn’t cognizant of all the possibilities of the Cold War, but with Sputnik blinking up above us, I was aware of the fear of what the Soviet Union would do next.”
And about a decade later, he was sitting in a college course at the University of North Dakota when Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon.
“I was amazed by what we had accomplished,” Brennan said.
Many of the attendees Saturday had personal connections to NASA and the space center. Larry Roberts, 73, watched the moon landing from Johnson Space Center when he worked as a contractor doing mission reliability predictions for NASA.
He retired in 2010 after 42 years, but he still has strong feelings about the space program.
“I didn’t like it when we canceled Constellation, to put it mildly,” he said, “but I’m glad to see we’re going to go back.”
Dennis Stone, a 32-year employee with NASA who works on commercial partnerships, was enjoying the festivities with his daughter and grandson. Stone works with companies like Elon Musk’s Space X and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to help them access NASA know-how and technology.
“The exciting thing is the companies we work with at NASA are also going to the moon. So now NASA’s not the only game in town,” he said. “There are all these other players that together it’s so much more exciting and robust.”
The future of space
The moon missions ended in December 1972 with Apollo 17 — a program cut short by three missions because funding dried up and the American public lost interest.
It’s a shame, Peggy Brennan said. “We should have kept going.”
But NASA moved on to other human spaceflight programs. First there was Skylab, America’s first space station, then the 30year space shuttle program, and then the International Space Station, where astronauts have lived on continuously for almost 20 years.
On Saturday morning, American astronaut Drew Morgan became the most recent American to launch to the space station, rocketed into space aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft from Kazakhstan. He was joined by European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov.
“What a great way to celebrate this day,” Geyer said of the Soyuz launch. “Today, we’ve had Americans in space continuously for 19 years.”
Brian Duffy, a veteran of four space shuttle flights who was on the last flight to the orbiting laboratory before astronauts started permanently living there, spoke to visitor’s of the space center on Saturday.
He considers himself a part of “the moon generation,” and remembers watching the landing on a black and white TV at home. He constantly flickered his eyes between the television and the window, looking at the moon and wondering how it was possible that men were up there.
He encouraged the children in the room to dare to explore, reminding them that they were part of the “Mars generation.”
“In your lifetime, you’ll see humans on Mars,” he said. “And we’re working on that right now.”
Blaske said, “I can’t wait to see what’s next.”
Mars is one of the goals of the current administration.
Since taking office in 2017, President Donald Trump has pushed for a return to the moon as a steppingstone for Mars. He upped the ante in March, when Vice President Mike Pence directed the space agency to put humans on the moon four years early, in 2024 instead of 2028, where astronauts could begin preparing for an eventual mission to the red planet.
“Similar to the 1960s, we too have an opportunity to take a giant leap forward for all of humanity,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said Saturday during a celebratory event at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. “President Trump and Vice President Pence have given us a bold direction to return to the moon by 2024 and then go forward to Mars. Their direction is not empty rhetoric.”
The program has been dubbed Artemis and though many in the space agency consider this urgency good for the program, officials have yet to submit a budget plan for the project. Additionally, its behemoth Space Launch System rocket is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
Pence also was at Kennedy on Saturday, where he talked about about the future of the space program — as well as the legacy Apollo left. He also announced that Northrop Grumman — contractor for the Orion spacecraft being built to take humans to the moon for the first time since 1972 — had completed the spacecraft.
This spacecraft will be used for the Artemis-1 mission, which will launch the capsule without humans around the moon. NASA officials now anticipate this mission will not occur until 2021 because of problems with SLS.
Pence said Artemis would get the money needed to succeed, adding that “Apollo 11 is the only event from the 20th century that stands a chance of being remembered in the 30th century.”