Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Names and faces
■ Charlie Duke is part of a tiny fraternity that’s getting even smaller: people who walked on the moon. Duke, 86, visited his Apollo 16 spaceship Wednesday at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala., to mark the 50th anniversary of his trip to the lunar surface. Only four of the 12 U.S. astronauts who walked on the moon are still alive, and Duke stays busy with speaking engagements. He said he still has vivid memories of the journey, which was the next-to-last U.S. mission to land on the moon. His face lit up while recalling his initial thoughts upon stepping off the lunar lander onto the dusty surface. “I mean, ‘I’m on the moon!’ I can’t believe it. Even today it’s an exciting thought,” said the North Carolina native. The late John Young was first out of the lander and walked on the moon with Duke, while Ken Mattingly orbited in the command module, nicknamed Casper. Duke said that after Apollo ended the United States focused on the space shuttle program, the space station and remote missions into deep space, and he doesn’t hold it against NASA for failing to return to the moon. But he’s looking forward to NASA’s forthcoming flight to the moon with its new Space Launch System rocket at the core of the Artemis program. The first of the huge rockets is supposed to blast off without a crew later this year, and Duke hopes he can attend the first blastoff with a crew within a few years. “The moon was really a beautiful environment. Desolate, but yet it had beauty about it,” he said. “The different contrasts, the mountains that we saw. The blackness of space on the surface of the moon and shades of gray. It just was very captivating.”
■ Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is among five people named Thursday as recipients of the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for acting to protect democracy. Zelenskyy was chosen because of the way he has “marshaled the spirit, patriotism and untiring sacrifice of the Ukrainian people in a life-or-death fight for their country,” the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation said. It said four U.S. officials were chosen for standing up for free and fair elections as the system is challenged: Republican U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Fulton County, Ga., elections worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss. Caroline Kennedy and her son, Jack Schlossberg, will present the awards May 22 at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston. The award was created by the family of the late president to honor public figures who risk their careers by embracing unpopular positions for the greater good and is named after Kennedy’s 1957 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Profiles in Courage.”