On the ground or in space, Duke vital to Apollo success
The youngest to visit lunar surface, Duke left family photo behind
As a young child growing up in South Carolina, Charlie Duke didn’t even consider rocketing to the moon in a spaceship.
“Mom would have sent me to the psych hospital,” Duke, now 83, said during an event last year hosted by the St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Dallas.
But rocket to the moon he did.
Duke, who lives in New Braunfels, was part of the Apollo 16 mission to the moon in April 1972. The fifth mission to land on the lunar surface, Apollo 16 focused on conducting science experiments and using the lunar rover. He and his commander, John Young, spent 20 hours exploring the surface.
By the end of that year, the Apollo program was prematurely canned, nestling Duke in the history books for two significant reasons: He was one of only 12 men to walk on the moon, and he was the youngest to do so — by three months.
It didn’t bring the fame and fortune one might expect.
“No one has ever recognized me,” he joked at the Dallas event last year. “I don’t get on an airplane and they say, ‘Hey, you walked on the moon. I know you!’ It doesn’t happen.”
But that’s perfectly fine in Duke’s mind: He didn’t get into the space business for money or fame.
Duke grew up in a South Carolina town that was home to about 8,000 people. And his heroes were those who fought and died in World War II.
So, he decided to go to the Naval Academy, where he fell in love with airplanes.
After switching to the Air Force, he became a fighter pilot and served as a pilot trainer. He was tapped as an astronaut in 1966 — several years after many of the moonwalkers joined the fledgling space agency.
“I didn’t think I’d have much of a chance to fly,” Duke said.
But much to his surprise, Duke started bubbling up to the top of the ranks. Three years after joining NASA, Duke was on the Mission Control room floor for the Apollo 11 lunar landing — at the request of Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon — in charge of communicating with the astronauts from the ground
at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
When Armstrong and crew member Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon on July 20, 1969 — uttering the now famous phrase, “Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed” — Duke was there to answer the call.
And he was so excited, he fumbled the words for the whole world to hear.
“I was so excited, I couldn’t get out ‘Tranquility Base.’ It came out sort of like ‘Twangquility,’ ” Duke said in an interview with NASA in 1999. “It was, ‘Roger, Twangquility Base. We copy you down. We’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. But we’re breathing again.’ ”
After playing a vital role in that historic mission, Duke served as a backup crew member for the doomed Apollo 13 mission in 1970, where he famously — and accidentally — exposed crew member Ken Mattingly to German measles. Duke had been exposed to the disease by his young son. Both were pulled from the mission, which had to abort its moon landing after an oxygen tank exploded.
Duke finally got his chance at the moon in 1972, touching down on the surface as part of the second-to-last Apollo mission. He was 36.
During the mission, Duke and Young collected more than 200 pounds of rock and soil samples, according to NASA.
On his last day on the moon, Duke left a photo of his family — him, his wife, Dorothy, and their sons Thomas and Charles — on the dusty lunar surface.
“The moon was awesome, exciting and adventurous,” Duke said last year. “It was … the most beautiful desert.”
Duke retired from NASA in 1975, entering the private sector. He also served as chairman of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation based in Florida.
“The moon was awesome, exciting and adventurous. It was … the most beautiful desert.”
Charlie Duke, Apollo 16 astronaut