Astronauts lived in Houston, trained in Florida
Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins commuted to work in Florida in a supersonic jet from 900 miles away.
The two-seat Northrop T-38, which NASA also used regularly as a jet trainer for its stable of astronauts, enabled Collins to spend weekends with his wife Pat and the couple’s three children at their
home in suburban Houston and still arrive on time at the Kennedy Space Center for Monday morning Moon-flight meetings.
“Every astronaut could fly a T-38 whenever they needed to get from Houston to Florida or back,” said science journalist Nancy Atkinson, author of “Eight Years to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Missions” and contributing editor of “Universe Today,” a space and astronomy news website. “It was the quickest and easiest way to get them from place to place.”
Apollo 11’s moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin also piloted T-38s to work as the crew logged 14-hour training days, six days a week for six months, mostly in Florida and Texas.
Unlike the Mercury 7 astronauts, who were fixtures in their
Corvettes in the Cocoa area when the space program began and mission control was based at Cape Canaveral, the Apollo 11 crew was more closely tied to Houston and the Manned Spacecraft Center, which opened in 1964. Many of their neighbors in the Texas town of El Lago also were astronauts.
The crew moved into a home base at the NASA Florida complex only a few weeks before blasting off for the moon.
The astronauts’ families stayed in Texas and did not come to the Cape on a regular basis as their fathers were generally working long hours.
“Actually we never lived in Florida, during the ’60s or any other time,” said Rick Armstrong, who was 12 when his famous father walked on the moon.
But the family did visit the Space Coast.
“The main thing I remember is that we always looked forward to the beach there because the waves were bigger than they were at Galveston Beach in Texas,” he said.
A guitarist, the younger Armstrong and progressive rock band Edison’s Children will play a free concert Saturday at the Cocoa Riverfront Park as part of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation’s “Celebrating Apollo” events marking the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’s historic flight. The band, billed as a “science fictionoriented progressive rock trio,” will open for the Alan Parsons Project.
Neil Armstrong died in 2012 at age 82. Both Aldrin, 89, and Collins, 88, reside in Florida.
“More often than not, when the families came, it was because a [space] event was occurring — a launch or some kind of publicity event,” said University of Central Florida history professor Lori Walters, who has conducted numerous oral histories of individuals involved in the space program. “It’s not like they had accommodations and came all the time.”
“You have to remember their kids were in school and a launch meant long hours at work,” she said.
According to a NASA archivist, “During the Apollo Program, the primary and backup astronaut crews arrived at KSC roughly three months before the mission… For the first two months, the astronauts could stay where they wished. Beginning 21 days before launch, however, they were required to stay in the crew quarters, and their movements were limited to designated areas within the Flight Crew Training Building and the launch pad. This was to reduce the risk of the astronauts becoming sick prior to launch, which could potentially delay a mission.”
In “Carrying the Fire,” an autobiography of his space career, Collins described living quarters in the Operations & Checkout Building at the Cape as “monastic.”
“Generally we crew members enjoyed the bright lights and freedom of Cocoa Beach to the last possible moment. On Gemini 10, John [Young] and I had stayed on the beach until the last week, but this time it was different,” he wrote, referring to the fellow astronaut for whom Orlando named one of its central parkways. “We needed a month sealed off from the world, to live and relive the complex venture before us, and crew quarters was the only place to do that. Crew quarters abutted our offices in the huge assembly and test building on Merritt Island. With a special key, one gained access to a small living room and a windowless corridor with small windowless bedrooms on either side of it …”
NASA said the crews trained for the moon mission on simulators at the Flight Crew Training Building; the lounge areas provided the astronauts with a place to relax in the evenings and between training periods; a fully equipped gym allowed them to stay in top physical condition; the conference room and office areas gave them a place to study and discuss mission operations; and a kitchen and dining room provided them with meals.
The cook was Lew Hartzell, who had spent years preparing meals on a tugboat and on social yachts.
According to Collins’ book, “… when he was full of beer he recounted good stories of celebrities falling overboard and other excitement, but mostly he stayed in his kitchen and cooked…. It did no good to tell Lew that you were on a diet; he took no offense, he simply ignored this irrelevant information. The tugboat must plow ahead, even through heavy seas. Reaching the moon obviously necessitated heroic measures in the kitchen. More meat, more potatoes, more bread, more dessert!”
The crew’s sequestered quarters provided a quiet space to study and concentrate, Collins wrote.
“The crew quarters environment, instead of being strange and unfamiliar, was as comfortable as an old shoe,” he wrote. “I even had the same bedroom as before Gemini with the same photograph of an exquisite milk-skinned brunette in a dark-red one-piece bathing suit perched demurely on the stone steps of a crumbling building in what appeared to be an Italian hill village. She was my pin-up patron saint from before, and she reminded me that people did go from this room into the sky and return safely to earth.”