I Remember the Day America Touched the Moon

On July 20, 1969 I was in the tv room with my parents and my brother. John set up his telescope in the back yard. We alternated watching the live feed on tv and going outside to look through the telescope at the moon that in my memory was full. I recall seeing the visible crater called the Sea of Tranquility where the astronauts landed.

We were giddy. Lighthearted. Laughing. It was a time of wonder. 

Space travel was a given of my childhood. My dad loved flight. But I owed any  knowledge of the space program to my brother. When John Glenn orbited earth three times on February 20, 1962 brother John refused to go to school. He wouldn’t budge until his hero circled the Earth three times, plunged into the ocean and and was safely picked up and delivered to a U.S. Navy ship. I watched it happen on television but I’m sure I was more in mind of my birthday that week than the fate of John Glenn. 

Brother John built model Saturn and Apollo capsules. He was and is a voracious reader. On January 27, 1967, John was crushed when the Apollo 1 capsule burned on the Cape Canaveral launchpad, killing all three astronauts aboard. My brother closely followed each subsequent Apollo mission.

Late in 1968, the rocket scientist Werner Von Braun (pictured below) came to the University of South Dakota in the county my dad represented in the South Dakota State Legislature. My parents and John drove the 30 miles from Irene to Vermillion to hear Von Braun speak. Afterwards, Governor Frank Farrar, the University’s president, my dad, and John were photographed with the German scientist who built rockets for Hitler and for NASA.

As my parents told it, Von Braun and and my polymath brother shook hands and spoke with one another for some time. 

Von Braun complimented John for the quality of his questions. Then he said, “Would you like to see a launch?”

“Yes, sir,” John said, politely, earnestly, “I would.”

My parents looked at one another, thinking, how nice of the guy to say that, but it won’t happen.

About a month later, early February 1969, John received a heavy envelope embossed with the NASA insignia. It was indeed an invitation from Von Braun for John to come to see the upcoming launch of Apollo 9 from the VIP area at Cape Canaveral in Florida. My dad was Speaker Pro Tem of the House of Representatives and the legislature was in the crucial last weeks of the year’s session. He couldn’t accompanied John.

However, it didn’t take long for my parents to agree that Mom, John and I would go to Florida for the launch. Again it was February. I was reluctant: I’d miss being with my friends for my birthday. Clearly, space was John’s domain. Mine was the junior high social scene. It was embarrasing to do things that my friends didn’t seem interested in or worse, it would seem I was showing off being able to do such things. Ah, youth, clouded youth.

It was the trip of a lifetime for all three of us.* The mission of Apollo 9 was to practice the rendezvous and docking procedures that would allow Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to return successfully to mother ship from the moon.

On that night in July 1969 I remembered feeling earth tremble as the Apollo 9 rocket took off. I remembered seeing the enormous Apollo 11 rocket resting on a gigantic flatbed conveyance at Cape Canaveral. That very rocket and all the engineering and mathatical calculations and investment of tax dollars allowed the three men to leave Earth’s orbit and fly literally to the moon.

Finally, I, the self-absorbed eighth grader, was in awe of space travel, the possibilities. Would Aldrin and Armstrong make it back to the main capsule. Would the capsule get back in Earth’s orbit. Would there be trips to other planets in my lifetime? I was in awe of my brother and his vision and imagination. John delivered the moon to me.

*Sadly, I don’t have the pictures I took with my Instamatic camera. My science teacher asked me to write a report. I did, with pictures. I don’t have that either. But, the original pictures and video of the real thing are better anyway.