The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Space industry looks back to Apollo 11, and forward
Late on the night of July 20, 1969, Fred Annunziata, barely 22, had more than a passing interest as he watched the moon landing of Apollo 11 with his wife, Gerry, at home in East Haven.
Annunziata, still in college, had developed and molded a seal compound thatwas, at that moment, on the surface of the moon. “It felt great. I couldn’t fall asleep at all,” Annunziata recalled this past week. “I said, ‘Go America! We beat the Russians!’”
A fewmiles up the Connecticut coast, 11yearold Bill Lee huddled with his family and neighbors in Guilford, watching the same scratchy video that enraptured theworld. Like Annunziata, he had a special connection: 21 years earlier, his father, Leighton Lee II, had founded a company in Westbrook that
made miniature nozzles and other hydraulic flowcontrol devices.
Now The Lee Companywas on the moon.
Less than an hour past Westbrook up Interstate 95, 7yearold Dan Burbank, whose family lived in Tolland, stayed up towatch the moon landing at the home of family friends in Rhode Island— with binoculars in hand. As he tells the story now, young Dan ran outside and trained his sights on the moon.
“Iwas convinced Iwas seeing Neil and Buzz,” he said, referring, of course, to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin as the astronauts exited the Eagle— Armstrong first, then Aldrin 19 minutes later — becoming the first men to walk on the moon.
Annunziata, Lee and Burbank would never be the same after that night. Fifty years later, all three are still deeply in the space program in Connecticut— which had then, and still has, an outsized role in developing key hardware for space missions.
The space industry in Connecticut— along with the whole world — looks back a halfcentury this week to the moon landing, which happened 26 days before the Woodstock festival changed history in another way. People in the business speak of that beacon of their lives in reverent tones.
“From that point on I think I was always interested in the space program,” said Burbank, who spent 22 years as an astronaut. “Thiswas another breed of people.”
But, tellingly, all three said they mostly look ahead, not back, when they think about space exploration. NASA announced in April that the next moonwalk— this time with awoman— is scheduled for 2024, with the goal of preparing for a human Mars mission a decade later.
“I can’t wait for us to go there again,” Annunziata said.
At 72, Annunziate heads a team of chemists as technical director at Jonal Laboratories in Meriden. That’s not the company he worked for in 1969— which he declined to name— but Jonal is deep in the rocket and satellite business, with a bladder in the space suit and seals in various components of the vehicles and the International Space Station.
Lee is now president of the familyowned business, which has ten locations in Westbrook and Essex, employing 1,100 people. “We’re thinking about the future. We’re involved in all of the programs,” he said. “We make parts today thatwe certainly didn’t dream of in 1969.”
Burbank didn’t see Aldrin and Armstrong through those binoculars but he grewup to know both menwell, and towear that space suit on three missions— including a 5month stint as commander at the space station in 2012, the year Armstrong died. “Hewas a pilot’s pilot, hewas an engineer’s engineer,” Burbank said.
Today Burbank is senior technical fellowat Collins Aerospace, the sprawling unit of United Technologies Corp. that includes the old Hamilton Standard plant in Windsor Locks, where the space suit was, and still is, developed. About 1,000 peoplework on spacerelated programs at the Collins complex across the road from Bradley International Airport, out of more than 3,000who work there.
Burbank said Collins often reaches out to retired engineers, many still in Connecticut, not to reminisce but to actually help solve technical problems— people like Earl Bahl, a key Hamilton employee, whose son, Theodore, now works for Collins on the portable lifesupport system.
“They didn’t have machine learning, they didn’t have additive machining, they didn’t have all the technologies thatwe have right now so theywere able to pull off something spectacular with a much smaller toolbox,” Burbank said.
‘I grewup fast’
Annunziata has seen the whole sweep. Born and raised in New Haven, his familymoved to East Haven when hewas a teenager and he landed a job as a chemist at age 20, in 1967. From the start, he worked on a fluorocarbon compound, whichwas vulcanized onto a 1 1/2inch stainless steel insert to form a seal for a valve that separated hydrogen and oxygen.
Those sealed valves gave Annunziata a direct hand in the moonshot, literally. He didn’t just design the compound. “I actually molded those parts too, not all of them but a good portion of them,” he said, including curing them and making sure theywere accurate to one 1,000th of an inch.
I asked howhe could have done such meaningful work, so young, andwhether that could happen today.
“As long as you had the common sense and the smarts and the passion to do it,” he said. “Iwas the kid. I grewup fast, though.”
These days, he said, “I’m interviewing masters and PhD’s to do similar work,” and he added that some are “too book savvy without enough common sense.
Not the ones he brings in, of course. He’s mentoring a young man in his ‘20s, a chemical engineer. “I seemyself in him, he’s a young kid with a passion.”
Youth is big part of the space industry at every company. “They’ve got a whole lot of new fresh ideas, they’re great programmers, they’re great coders and they’re much more conversant in new technologies like artificial intelligence,” Burbank said, naming one student intern from Connecticut, Ashley-Himmelmann, who’s already listed on two patents.
Memories of Apollo 13
Dozens of companies in Connecticut worked on the Apollo program, with UTC— then United Aircraft Co.— by far the dominant one, not only with space systems at Hamilton (now Collins) but also with Otis elevators at the Saturn rocket launch pad, Sikorsky helicopters (now part of Lockheed) doing recovery work and Pratt & Whitney developing fuel cell technology. UTC later sold its fuel cell business, which is now owned by Doosan, a South Korean company, in South Windsor.
Burbank is most proud of the company’s, and the industry’s, work in the illfated Apollo 13 mission of 1970, which aborted its moon landing after an oxygen tank exploded. As portrayed in the Tom Hanks movie, engineers on Earth figured out howto rejigger the Windsor Locks made environmental control system to bring the three astronauts home safely.
In those harrowing hours, NASA told Annunziata’s company to prepare for an immediate inspection, lest its products were the culprit. “Itwas quite scary,” he said, but added, “We had all the documentation they needed,” and the cause was unrelated to the Connecticut seals.
If anyone at The Lee Co. needed a reminder of quality control, Leighton Lee II had posted a typed memo in the main Westbrook plant in 1966, anticipating the moon landing.
“The LEM, lunar excursion module, will contain a number of Lee Jets, Lee Visco Jets, and Lee Plugs. We all share in the responsibility of having these parts as nearly perfect aswe can make them,” the elder Lee wrote.
That included fuel flow controls “to blast the men off the surface of the moon,” the memo said.
He asked for diligence and concluded, “We are all sharing a great responsibility.”
That invocation and the Apollo 11 landing, Bill Lee said, is “indelibly marked in the company’s memory.”
Today, space applications— including every significant program, from NASA to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to the tourism bid by Virgin Galactic— account for about 8 percent of The Lee Co.’s output. “It’s exciting work,” Bill Lee said. “It definitely gives you a sense of pride.”
Connecticut space suppliers don’t see much public glory from the business and that’s the nature of their craft. “Most of the stuff we do nobody ever knows about, it’s buried deep inside of somebody’s engine. Butwe know,” Lee said.
They know their parts are now flying beyond the solar system, on the Voyager.
And all of these industry veterans knowthe history of space ambition.
“As a kid growing up I thought that by now we’d have 1,000 people living in space,” Burbank said. “We haven’t gotten to that point now but the technology is advancing in leaps and bounds...We’re going to build a scientific outpost on the moon.”
And then, a person to Mars, not to die there but to return. The challenge keeps Annunziata on the job as he trains the next generation.
Burbank, who graduated from the Coast Guard Academy and made the astronaut corps in 1996 as a career Coast Guard pilot and engineer, said he doesn’t feel he missed out by not setting foot on the moon.
“Iwould happily go up again,” he said. “Nothing beats climbing in that suit and going on a space walk.”
He’s aware that critics say space exploration isn’t worth the cost, and that nationalized space races are dangerous. He— like the rest of the industry— argues the case, having flown on Russian rockets, with Russian scientists and pilots.
“It builds teamwork, it builds international cooperation,” Burbank said. “It give us the tools to solve the problems that often times we create here on Earth.”
“They didn’t have machine learning, they didn’t have additive machining, they didn’t have all the technologies thatwe have right now so theywere able to pull off something spectacular with amuch smaller toolbox.”
Dan Burbank, senior technical fellow at Collins Aerospace and retired astronaut