All of the talk about the upcoming launch of Artemis 2 has jogged a few of my space memories.
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. I was 9-years old and fascinated. I knew space travel was possible because I had seen Flash Gordon, Dale Arden and Dr. Zarkov travel the galaxy in their ship the Sky Flash. But now space flight was being initiated right here on earth!
The space race was on. The US had experienced mostly failures trying to launch a satellite with the Vanguard rocket and the Russian success really put the pressure on. On April 2, 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower wrote a special note to Congress calling for the creation of a civilian National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA).
The Mercury program started and 7 astronauts were soon named and preparing for manned space flights. To be an astronaut you had to be younger than 40, possess a bachelor’s degree or equivalent, and be no taller than 5 feet 11 inches. The height limit was because anyone taller than that would not fit into the Mercury capsule. I would soon be too tall for the job, but years later Kathy showed she could have been one.
I was disappointed, as were many Americans I suspect, when the Soviet Union put the first human in space on April 12, 1961, by launching Yuri Gagarin to make an orbit around earth.
Less than a month later, however, on May 5, 1961, Freedom 7 took Alan Shepard on a suborbital flight that carried him to an altitude of 116 statute miles and to a landing point 302 miles downrange in the Atlantic. All of the students in our small rural school went to the gym and watched the launch on a small black-and-white TV. There were 6 manned flights of Mercury 7 astronauts from 1961 – 1963.
Although we had only launched one manned suborbital flight at the time, on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the United States would land a man on the Moon and bring him safely back to Earth by the end of the decade. That seemed like an impossible goal! But, some of you may remember that in the mid-50s Ralph Cramden, in The Honeymooners, was already telling his wife “To the moon, Alice!“
In addition to manned space flight, it was also exciting when Telstar 1, a communications satellite, was launched on July 10, 1962. It relayed the first television pictures and telephone calls through space, even without an iPhone! From the perspective of a 14-year-old kid, however, the best part was I could sit out in the field at night and watch the small twinkling light fly by overhead. The newspaper even printed the times when it could be seen.
This satellite was so popular that a band named the Tornados released an instrumental named “Telstar.” It reached number 1 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in December 1962.
After the Mercury program, space flight continued with 10 Gemini flights in 1965 – 1966, each carrying two astronauts. This was considered the bridge between the Mercury program and the upcoming Apollo program, the one we hoped would take us to the moon.
The Apollo program got off to a very tragic start. On January 27, 1967, a fire erupted in the command module during a test on the launch pad. The fire destroyed the module and killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee. That mission had originally been named Apollo Saturn-204. It was changed to Apollo 1 as a tribute to the crew. I had just started college and wondered how things would continue.
There were no Apollo 2 or Apollo 3 missions and Apollos 4, 5 and 6 were unmanned flights to test the Saturn V rocket. Apollo 7, was the first crewed mission of the program. It took place on October 11 – 22, 1968, and was manned by Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham.
Apollo 11 was the one I was waiting for. I was studying to be an analytical chemist at the time and working with a professor who was a Principal Investigator for NASA. He would be receiving samples from Apollo 11 and I was working with the graduate student who was developing the analytical procedure. I watched the landing on a small TV in a bartender’s house on Washington Island. When I returned to Madison and got to work, it was a very interesting and exciting time and I was glad that I was trusted to do half of the work. Eventually we also received samples from Apollo 12. For a lot more details on that work, please see My small Apollo footnote.
Some of you may remember that Apollo 13 was the one where astronaut Jack Swigert radioed back to say “Houston, we’ve had a problem.” If you haven’t seen the movie Apollo 13 by Ron Howard, I think it’s worth the time.
There have been, of course, many other space programs since Apollo, like Voyagers 1 and 2 that have now left the solar system, the Apollo-Soyuz venture that took place during a brief period of US-Soviet detente, America’s first space station Skylab, the International Space Station, the Mars Rover and, of course, the successes and tragedies of the Space Shuttle. However, the return to the moon seemed to have been abandoned.
I haven’t been able to keep up with everything in the past 50 years, but I’ve visited the Kennedy Space Center to see Apollo’s Saturn V rockets, an Apollo capsule, and a moon rock. There was even a copy of the Wisconsin State Journal announcing the landing. Space Shuttles, of course, were also there. I watched the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-131), which was the final night-time shuttle launch. I visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC to see the lunar lander and other Apollo exhibits. With the return to the moon, Artemis will be a program for me to follow with interest.
It seems like the primary reason for our early ventures into space was to compete with the Soviet Union. Science was only secondary. The Artemis program will be interesting to follow, but I wonder if the primary reason for this program is to compete with China’s quest for the moon. Science will probably still be secondary. But I’ve been watching for almost 70 years so I’ll still keep watching.