NASA’s extended family
Wives, children of Apollo astronauts look back on ‘amazing’ time
As Gene Cernan finished his 1972 Apollo 17 moonwalk, he dropped to one knee and wrote “TDC” — the initials of his then-9-year-old-daughter, Tracy Dawn Cernan — in the moondust and set his reputation as the coolest dad in the universe.
Now Tracy Cernan Woolie and 56 years old, the Houston woman has plenty of stories of growing up in the shadow of NASA, the only child of the last man to walk on the moon. But the one about the moondust inspired music, “Tracy’s Song” by No More Kings, and earned a still-talked-about mention in a 2012 episode of the ABC sitcom, “Modern Family.”
She was having dinner with her parents and her phone blew up. “My phone rang and it was, ‘They just said your name and your dad’s name on ‘Modern Family.’ It was the rebirth of the initials-on-themoon story,” she said. “It’s one of the big things I still get calls about.”
In the “Modern Family” episode, Phil (played by Ty Burrell) said that he wants to be as cool as Gene Cernan, because in writing his daughter’s initials on the moon, Cernan gave her the gift that no other dad ever has.
Woolie and her lifelong friend, Amy Bean — daughter of the late astronaut Alan Bean — now recognize they grew up in a special time and place, but when they were kids, it didn’t feel unusual. Their dads were astronauts, but many of their neighbors were, too, and most others were engineers or in some way connected to the space program.
“When I was a child, it was all I knew. My friends’ fathers were astronauts — they flew T38s to work and rode rockets into space. It was their job,” said Amy Bean, 56, who lives in Boerne.
Gene Cernan and Alan Bean were both naval aviators who were chosen for NASA’s third astronaut class in 1963. Both
had lengthy careers there, with Bean going into space on Apollo 12 and Skylab III and Cernan manning Gemini 9, Apollo 10 — the dress rehearsal for the Apollo 11 lunar landing — and Apollo 17, the last trip to the moon.
Moving to new area
When the astronauts brought their young families to Houston, Johnson Space Center hadn’t yet opened, and homes were just starting to be built in Nassau Bay, where many of that third group ultimately lived. Alan Bean’s wife, Sue, now 84 and a Houston resident, remembers driving to Kemah for groceries because there wasn’t a grocery store there, and it would be some time before anyone opened a restaurant there.
But in the middle of the Cold War, the space race was heating up. The Soviets sent cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin into space first in 1961, and President John F. Kennedy gave his famous space race speech at Rice University the next year.
Bean, Cernan and everyone else at NASA worked nonstop designing space modules, testing equipment and figuring out how to get crews to the moon and back. They’d leave their homes on Sunday night or Monday morning and return late Friday, traveling all over the country, helping design space modules and other equipment.
Once they were assigned to a mission, training was more intense. They’d visit Cape Canaveral in Florida or learn survival skills somewhere in the desert or in the jungles of South or Central America.
The Beans and Cernans have remained close friends since they met in the early 1960s and still reminisce on those times and how the wives worked to keep things together at home.
“The wives were close because the guys were gone so much and so often,” said Sue Bean. “It was not that the guys didn’t want to be home. They wanted to be with their families, but … there just wasn’t that much time.”
So the wives got their kids to school and summer camp, helped out when one husband or another was on a mission, and consoled each other when accidents inevitably happened.
“People ask me, ‘Were you scared?’ You were scared, but you never talked about it,” Bean said. “You think, ‘Let’s hope no one comes to my door.’ ”
Keeping in touch
The wives met monthly in what they called “The Astronauts’ Wives Club,” which later became the title of a bestselling novel about the Mercury 7 wives and a short-lived TV show that some of the wives said was sensationalized.
Early astronauts’ wives still get together each year, though they tend to call it the “Keep In Touch” trip or the “Astronauts First Wives Club,” since most of the marriages didn’t survive the men’s long absences or their newfound celebrity. The Beans divorced in 1976, the Cernans in 1981. Both women said they simply wanted their husbands to have “regular” jobs that allowed them to come home at night, but the men wouldn’t comply.
The wives learned to handle the media, since Life magazine photographers stayed inside their homes during space missions and other reporters camped out curbside for daily news conferences.
After moon missions, the astronauts and their wives traveled the world, delivering other nations’ flags they’d taken with them into space to kings, queens and other leaders. They went on safari trips and rode camels — or at least posed next to them in pictures. They met Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and rode on Air Force II.
“I had an amazing childhood,” Amy Bean said. “I remember Dad saying that when we got to NASA, they said we’d go to the moon but we had no idea how to get there. We had all these great minds come together and figure it out.
“The Apollo kids witnessed commitment and courage. We witnessed our parents overcome tragedy, loss, and learn from it. I’ve thought that all my life, and my father reinforced it, ‘If you work hard enough, there is nothing you cannot do.’ Now that shapes you.”
“The Apollo kids witnessed commitment and courage. We witnessed our parents overcome tragedy, loss, and learn from it.”
Amy Bean, daughter of Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean