ROCKET BOYS
One small step for man, one giant leap for the crew of Apollo 11 1⁄2
There was a disturbing headline in the Orlando Sentinel on July 19, 1969. A space capsule carrying three brave Americans had encountered “Meteor Trouble.” Thankfully, Mission Control was able to address the problem.
“We’ve added one big German shepherd dog to our crew,” Richard Fall told the press, “and we don’t look for any more meteors.”
If you don’t recall a dog being aboard Apollo 11, don’t feel ignorant of NASA trivia. The canine actually rescued Apollo 11½.
It was a fake lunar landing, though not the kind
conspiracy theorists have been peddling for 50 years.
Jeff Martin, Lewis Seifert, Jim Parker and Fall openly admit their journey was make believe. The Orlando boys built an Apollo 11 replica and went for a 10-day ride that propelled lifetimes of
achievements.
As the city nervously looked on, the “Apollonauts” simulated the exact procedures taken by the NASA crew. Well, not every procedure.
A palmetto bug did not fly into a toaster as Buzz Aldrin prepared a Pop Tart on the real lunar module. And neighborhood kids didn’t grab oranges from a nearby grove and throw them at the spaceship.
“Those were our meteors,” Martin recalled.
Today he’s Dr. Martin, a physician in Raleigh, North Carolina. In the summer of ’69, he was a wannabe space man like countless other kids.
Astronauts were especially revered in Central Florida, where kids could watch Saturn V rockets light up the sky and feel the power under their feet.
“That thing shook the earth,” Seifert said.
He and the rest of the crew attended Union Park Junior High and got hyped about Apollo 11 long before it rumbled to the moon.
“Why don’t you guys think of something you can do together?” a teacher suggested.
What they did was spend the next three months turning Seifert’s house into Cape Kennedy.
“I had a side yard where we could build a shack that became a space capsule,” Seifert said.
The shack was about 10 feet wide and two stories high. It cost a good bit less than the $24 billion NASA spent on the Apollo program.
The bottom story, a.k.a. the Command Module Columbia, was six feet high. A ladder led to the four-foot high Lunar Module Eagle.
The boys built a short crawlway to a pup tent that would serve as the surface of the moon.
Stocking the tent with sand and “moon rocks” was a snap compared to constructing the instrument panel in the command module. A TV was built in and gauges were authentically labeled and wired to blink on and off.
Mission Control was the Seifert’s laundry room, where Fall would talk to the Columbia via a hardwired intercom system. Throw in a fan and a small attached outhouse, and you had Apollo 11½.
It launched July 17, a day after Apollo 11 blasted off. The delay was intentional since it allowed the boys to better mimic everything that happened.
They adhered to an Apollo 11 operations manual that was about 200 pages long. They also scheduled a one-day timeout on July 20 to watch the actual lunar landing. Was it a long 10 days?
“To me, it seemed like it went by in 10 minutes,” Martin said.
He was Neil Armstrong, though he can’t recall how the roles were divvied out. Martin does recall the thunderstorm that forced Mission Control to cut off the electricity one afternoon. And drinking a lot of Tang and eating a lot of Spaghetti-Os and Pop Tarts.
And hearing a snap, crackle, pop one day when the palmetto bug met the toaster. “That doesn’t sound like a Pop Tart,” Martin said.
The real astronauts had bigger things to worry about, though at least they didn’t have to deal with the Florida heat.
“It got a little toasty in there,” said Seifert, aka Michael Collins.
He was alone in Columbia for two days as Martin and Parker hunkered in the Eagle. Then Martin left the first tennis shoe print on the lunar surface.
It was one small step for man, one giant leap for four ambitious kids from Union Park Junior High.
A few hours later, they departed from their miniature Sea of Tranquility and docked with the Columbia. Then it was just a matter of avoiding any more meteor attacks and making it back to Earth.
“Boys Home After a 10-day ‘Moon Trip,’” the Sentinel reported on July 27.
Martin moved to South Florida a few months after the moon shot. Seifert went to UCF and became Chief Financial Officer for a division of Adventist Health System.
He said Parker became an Air Force pilot and Fall became a computer engineer. Apollo 11 certainly defined the lives of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins.
What did the Apollo 11½ experience do for its crew?
“If nothing else,” Seifert said, “it challenged us to go a little bit harder and go strongly for our goals.”
After overcoming a meteor shower on the way to the moon, the boys knew they could handle just about anything Earth threw at them.