Exhibit explores Hornet’s link to Apollo 11
It would seem counterintuitive, given that we are slowly emerging from a pandemic, but there’s good reason to get out of the house and into the open air to check out a museum exhibit about a quarantine.
The USS Hornet Sea, Air & Space Museum, docked in Alameda, is currently showing an exhibit about one of the aircraft carrier’s biggest missions, when it functioned as a sort of spaceage Uber ride.
More than a halfcentury ago, on July 24, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, returning from history’s first manned moon mission. As shown in the new short documentary “Apollo 11: Quarantine,” the Hornet picked them up, with President Richard Nixon aboard to greet them.
However, as it was unknown what kind of microbes and potential disease that Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins might have brought back from the lunar
surface, the astronauts had to enter a cramped, trailerlike facility to begin a threeweek quarantine. The first five days were spent aboard the Hornet as it chugged toward Hawaii.
“Many people don’t realize there is a local tiein to the lunar landing right here in the Bay Area,” said retired Navy Capt. Mark Epperson, the Hornet’s executive director. “The museum’s Apollo 11 exhibit creates a ‘time warp’ as visitors step into history.”
Bob Fish, the Hornet’s chief historian who helped curate the exhibit and wrote the book “Hornet Plus Three: The Story of the Apollo 11 Recovery,” was in high school in Orlando during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo launches. He recalled that for the latter, “we’d be in high school watching the countdown on TV and, when it got to the all ignition start sequence, the fire alarm would ring and we’d go outside to the baseball field and watch these rockets take off.
“Just to be a tiny, tiny part of that history for me was really special.”
While most of the physical objects from the Apollo 11 mission are in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Hornet’s exhibit features an Apollo command module and Mobile Quarantine Facility from other missions. The quarantine facility, identical to the Apollo 11 unit, was from the Apollo 14 mission.
Other exhibits include vintage aircraft on both the hangar and flight decks, and a nisei veterans exhibit honoring the 442 combat unit and other famed contributions by Japanese Americans, including as translators and code breakers.
“We have a story to tell,” Bob Adachi, a docent of the Hornet representing the Friends and Family of Nisei Veterans, said of the exhibit that has been on the Hornet since 2006. “The reason we feel this is important is that half these men and women came out of Japanese internment camps. ... It’s a history that’s not wellknown.”
Amid the surge of antiAsian hate crimes in the Bay Area and across the country, Adachi be
lieves it’s crucial to have such an exhibit on display at the floating museum.
“Apollo 11: Quarantine,” a 23minute film that acts as a supplement to Todd Douglas Miller’s 2019 documentary “Apollo 11,” was released on major digital and ondemand streaming services in February and aired on CNN in early March. Fish believes Miller was inspired to make the quarantine film after a screening of “Apollo 11” aboard the Hornet in May 2019.
The timing for the new film couldn’t be better for this National Historic Landmark, which has been docked in Alameda since 1998. The museum is open for business, but the Hornet, which survived World War II battles, has been struggling to stay afloat.
The USS Hornet, which is an affiliate of the Smithsonian and privately funded, was closed from midMarch 2020 to Aug. 1, 2020, then closed again from early December to early February. As a result, Epperson said the museum lost 96% of its revenue and has been relying on grants, online programs and sales from the museum store, private events and donations.
But now that Alameda has moved into the orange “moderate” tier in California’s colorcoded reopening plan as of Tuesday, March 30, Epperson is hopeful the museum will see a turn in the tides.
The museum has been open on weekends, with capacity limited to 250 people per hour, and will soon allow small individual tours to some of the deeper locations that had previously been closed, such as the engine room.
Social distancing aboard an aircraft carrier — which, if stood on its end, would be about as tall as the Transamerica Pyramid — is not a problem, Epperson said.
With Alameda advancing to the less restrictive orange tier, the museum plans to expand to daily tours.
Epperson said the museum is also working on an exhibit that would honor the Tuskegee Airmen, the Black fighter pilots of World War II.
“This isn’t just a place to see an aircraft carrier and some airplanes,” Epperson said.