We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
We choose to go to the moon.
We went to the moon 50 year ago.
When I say “we” that doesn’t mean you or I ever set foot on its dusty soil.
We as a species harnessed the powers of our minds and our might and spurned gravity’s ever-oppressive grip to leave Earth … to leave footprints on the second-brightest object in our sky.
We did this thing not because it was easy, but because it was hard.
Just 35 years before JFK set us on a course for the moon, aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh entitled his autobiographical account of his solo flight across the Atlantic “We.” The title was meant to surprise readers. It had been a solo flight.
Yet, Lindbergh understood the hands and minds of the many people who financed, designed and built it for that purpose.
We is a word you’ll hear often as the world looks back on Apollo 11 this week.
The quest to land a man on the moon started with an ambition beyond the reach of the possible technology at the time. We took the impossible and made it possible. It was an accomplishment that required more than 400,000 Americans -- men and women, black and white, immigrants and refugees. It required the sweat and imagination of a nation to reach that far goal.
My dad-John Hunt-was one of that army of peace and exploration -- that great mobilization of human resources challenged to design and build a machine that could take mankind to the moon and return them safely to Earth. I grew up with the echo of that accomplishment ringing in my ears, optimistic at what people can do when they come together focused on a single goal.
My father first met Wernher von Braun while tending bar at the officers club in Huntsville, Alabama where the Army Missile Command and the Marshall Space Flight Center are located.
Hunt -- a whiz kid from South Jersey just out of college -- had already been working for the army in Huntsville testing the Sergeant Missile system when he got drafted under the looming threat of war with the Soviet Union.
“The Cuban Missile Crisis ended occupational deferments,” Hunt said. “I had a draft notice in my mailbox by the end of the week.”
Yet, after basic training, Hunt found himself called right back down to Huntsville to finish the project he’d been working on. This time in an army uniform and getting paid “a lot less.”
So he picked up a side job tending bar at the officers club, where he recalls Von Braun, charming the Congressmen and VIPs sent down to investigate his building program.
“It was cigar smoking and hard drinking,” Hunt recalls. “He had them eating out of his hand.”
It was partly Von Braun’s charm and ambition and his cadre German rocket scientists and engineers that helped turn Huntsville into the of the major centers of the space race. When Navy Vanguard rockets repeatedly failed on the test stand. Von Braun said he could put a man in space with the Army’s Atlas rocket, Hunt explained. When Atlas succeeded, Von Braun proposed a bigger rocket - the Saturn 1B.
“The test stand he built for it was massive,” Hunt remembers, “you couldn’t even see the 1B in it and we’d wondered why he built it so big. He was thinking ahead. He’d built it for the Saturn V.” The rocket that would eventually take men to the moon.
“You know when Kennedy said that we were going to the moon, nobody had a clue as to how we were going to do it,” Hunt says. “The guys at NASA were dumbstruck.”
Hunt was just about to get out of the army when Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963.
“I knew it wasn’t the end -- NASA was already ramping up,” Hunt said. “It was a beehive of activity and they were grabbing anybody with any talent or knowledge they could use.”
Hunt found himself as one of hundreds of thousands of contractors working for NASA based on his work at Marshall. This time Hunt was tasked with figuring out safe and effective equipment designs for the Astronauts to use when they had to work outside the spacecraft -- Extra Vehicular Activity. Working in space is difficult and Hunt helped develop the designs for boots and gloves and other equipment, including the lunar module as well as designs for the Apollo Telescope Mount and Skylab that would fly later.
Hunt spent a lot of time monitoring the Astronauts in the giant swimming pools used to simulate weightlessness -- testing critical equipment like boots and gloves, handholds and tools that needed to work in reduced gravity environments. They would also take astronauts up in a KC-135 plane on rollercoaster-like parabolic flights that provided a handfull of seconds of weightlessness at the top and bottom of the arc.
“We were kind of figuring things out was we went along because no one had ever attempted, what we were trying to do,” Hunt said. “It was the greatest job in the world.”
Still in his 20s, Hunt remembers working side by side with Astronauts Michael Collins, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, Jim Lovell as well as Skylab pioneer Owen Garriott. Hunt also became friends with future shuttle commander Joe Engle.
“The thing to remember,” Hunt said. “We were working with these guys -- the astronauts, traveling together, eating with them, we weren’t awestruct -- they were regular people. They were fun loving but very serious. It was life or death and the attitude was, we’ve got to get it right.”
It is hard looking back to remember how much pressure there was to get it right -- that this was a life or death situation for those Astronauts. It is even harder to recall that half a million contractors from every part of the country had a hand in putting those footprints on the moon with the primitive technology of the day. Seamstresses skilled at sewing girdles and bras were stitching space suits. The computers -- which became overloaded in the last seconds before landing on the moon -- were hard wired -- their connections woven by hand.
“We were working with nixie tubes, we weren’t even solid state,” Hunt added. “Your phone has thousands of times more computing power than they had on the flight. It was an amazing feat and nobody … everyone was holding their breath because we knew there were a million things that could have gone wrong. People today, I don’t think they realize what we accomplished.”
The effort to put a man on the moon wasn’t without controversy, there were protests at the Kennedy Space Center the day before the launch. There were other demands for the money being spent on this one ambitious goal. Reaching for the moon drove innovation and created a wealth of knowledge far beyond what on the surface appeared to be a narrow competition between Cold War nations.
Yet, the race to the moon ended up providing dividends in knowledge and technology still paying off 50 years later.
“It was the chance of a lifetime, a dream job,” Hunt said. “But once they landed on the moon, you could feel that the public and political support was going to die. I hope we go back, we’ve started to talk about that again,” he added. “We are starting to say hey, we did that.”
The lesson of Apollo is that we are bound only by our flagging ambitions and petty squabbles. “We can’t” is heard more often today, than “we can.”
Yet Apollo gave the lie to illusion that our reach extends no further than the end of our arms. We can accomplish great things.
Should you forget, look up tonight and know, on the surface of the moon there is a plaque that says, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
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