Memories of space

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It was the summer of 1969. I was just 9 years-old. Like most young boys I had two plastic models I had assembled — one of the Saturn Rocket and a second of the Lunar module — just like the ones from Apollo 11 that took Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon.

That was a time of awe and wonder for everyone, not just a 9 year-old boy.

Many people remember sitting around the TV in their living room and watching the launch, the moon landing and the successful splashdown in the Pacific Ocean. For the moon landing, more than half a billion people were watching on television, when Armstrong climbed down the ladder and proclaimed: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

That first trip to the moon is easy to remember. But there were 14 Apollo missions with a total of six crewed U.S. landings on the moon between 1969 and 1972.

It was in 2018 that I read the book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. This incredible true story — also a movie — follows four African American women who participated in some of NASA’s greatest successes and helped make the landing on the moon possible.

The back cover of the book says, “Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.”

These ladies were originally math teachers in the South’s segregated public schools. Their accomplishments are amazing considering the time it happened. They didn’t let racism hold them back. They didn’t allow the opinions of others to stop them.

Reading this book will make you proud to be an American.

If you have seen the movie I suggest you read the book also. The book covers much more than a two-hour movie can.

One reviewer on Amazon described it this way, “It is a case of getting one slice of pie when you could get two slices. I suggest you eat WELL!”

For spring break in 2002, the Warden clan packed up our mini-van and headed to Florida. Our first stop was on the East Coast for a visit to the Kennedy Space Center.

There we spent a full day learning about space pioneers with our kids. Plus, I was able to see a full-size model of a Saturn Rocket and the Lunar module with my family.

During our visit, the Space Shuttle Atlantis was on the launch pad waiting for its 25th mission to outer space. At that time flights into space became so common that the launches were practically ignored by the national media.

The final flight for the Space Shuttle was on July 8, 2011, by the Atlantis — it’s 33rd. The Atlantis was considered the workhorse of the shuttle fleet.

There were a total of 135 Space Shuttle missions flown by six ships with two of them ending in tragedies that killed a total of 14 astronauts.

The final missions of the Challenger (April 4, 1983) and the Columbia (Jan. 16, 2003) are burnt into our minds. These are two events, everyone in my generation, or older, remembers.

All of these memories came back after Saturday’s historic launch of NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken to the International Space Station by a private company, SpaceX. The launch was from the same launch pad, 39A, used for the Apollo and space shuttle programs. The name of their ship was the Dragon.

It was beautiful and exciting to watch after a hiatus of almost nine years of manned flights from Cape Canaveral.

What was equally amazing was watching the successful vertical landing of the Falcon 9 booster rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This enables SpaceX to reuse the rocket for additional launches into space, saving money.

Even with the advent of commercial rockets, the Saturn V -— which launched the Apollo missions — remains the tallest and most powerful rocket ever, and the only one thus far to help carry humans beyond Earth’s orbit. It had to be. It also carried the Lunar module and the Command and Service module.

I wonder what happened to those models I had as a kid. Bet they’d be worth something if mom would only have saved them.