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When I was a kid WW2 was in full swing. The news papers and newsreels were full of stories about the heroic fighter and bomber pilots who carried the war to the Japanese, German and Italian heartland. Guys like Colin Kelly, John Cunningham, Jimmy Doolittle and a host of other brave men fought the Battle of Britain, bombed Tokyo and became the fabled greatest generation. Until the Germans deployed the jet powered Messerschmitt ME-262 near the end of the war the fastest planes barely topped 400 mph. A bunch of forward thinking German scientists created the V weapons and wreaked havoc on Britain until the Allied armies pushed them out of Holland and put London out of range of the launch sites. I followed all the news on the radio, in magazines and newspapers. I was hooked on flying and more particularly rockets. I had model airplanes and when a British company started selling solid fuel rocket engines under the name Jetex I saved my allowance and bought two of them. When I was in 8th grade there was a space club at the school. There were three of us who wanted to learn about rockets, everybody else wanted to read Sci-Fi stories with Bug-Eyed monsters menacing scantily clad space girls. I built a flying saucer from plans in one of the model magazines and almost got kicked out of school and the space club banned when we flew it on the ball field. Seems it was designed for the smallest Jetex motor and I scaled it up and put the big one on it. Go figure. I actually saw the math for going to the moon, everybody knew what it was going to take, it was the technology that was hard. The metals didn’t exist, the electronics didn’t exist. Most of the stuff that took the Apollo guys to the moon was some engineers dream. People don’t realize that you can go down to the Verizon store or Best Buy and get a phone or a computer with orders of magnitude more computing power than what Apollo had. We moved to California in 1953, the rocket motors and the model airplane engines went in a box in the garage and I got interested in California girls and hot rod cars and drag racing. I had followed Chuck Yeager and Scott Crossfield and the duel between the Bell X-1 and the beautiful Douglas D-558-2 Skyrocket but all that pretty much went in the box in the garage till the space program came along. You can see the whole story in the movies “The Right Stuff” and “Apollo 13” The run up to the moon missions was a wonderful time. Even the newscasters were chosen because they knew what was going on, not because of their “Q” factor. Some of them actually had degrees in hard sciences. We got up early or stayed up late and watched the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launches. Cried when *Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were killed in the Apollo One cabin fire and sweated bullets when one of those flying bombs climbed out on that column of flame and smoke.
Fast forward to July 20th 1969. Marilyn and I took the kids to the Italian Gardeners Picnic at Micke Grove near Lodi Ca. We went every year, Marilyn’s family all came, everybody cooked and it was a real party. We lived about ten minutes from the park so I went early in the morning with Marilyn’s uncle Ralph and got a prime table just across from entrance to the dance floor and stage. I took my portable radio so I could listen to the progress of the Apollo 11 landing. Lots of people remember Neil Armstrong’s famous words “That’s on small step …. etc” I remember “Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed”. Because anyone will tell you takeoffs and landings are when stuff can really go wrong in a hurry. We went home to our modest first house that evening to watch the first moonwalk. One of our guests was an elderly Italian lady who was Marilyn’s surrogate grandmother. Octavia was a great friend and poker partner who treated our kids like her own. She was wonderful. We were explaining what was happening on TV and she pointed up and said “You mean that moon? Marilyn, you think this is real?”
The kids grew up and moved out. We watched as many of the shuttle launches and landings as we could, When Challenger blew up shortly after launch and the crew was lost our plant engineer came to find me and tell me so I wouldn’t hear it on the radio. People knew I was a space junkie. There came a time when the launches became so common that the networks quit carrying them. The reporters that knew what was going on retired and were replaced by talking heads with high “Q” factors The space program was normal if going into earth orbit can be considered normal. I followed the Mars Lander program, watched press conferences on the NASA Channel with reporters trying to “gotcha” scientists and engineers who were maybe twice as smart as the reporters.
That gets me to today. The shuttle fleet has been retired, they’ll be put in museums. Discovery is going to the Smithsonian Annex near Dulles Airport in Washington. She was delivered today. I happened to be at the gym warming up on a stationary bike in front of the big screen TV’s that carry CNN and Fox. Both had the arrival of Discovery at Dulles. I can’t report what the Fox folks were saying but CNN has an on-screen text service. As the 747 which carries the shuttle piggyback was approaching Dulles it was obvious that they were going to do a flyby. They were at about 1500 feet, wheels up, straight and level right over the airport. Panic ensued in the CNN booth, “They don’t have the landing gear down.” “Flying awfully low to not have the gear down” etc. About halfway down the main runway, still at 1500 feet or so Wonderchin and Blondie figured out what was going on. Then they made all sorts of cover remarks but when the 747 tooled off toward the center of Washington they got all excited again. I was laughing so hard I had to stop pedaling.
I think the journey from P-40’s and P-51’s and 400mph to 18,000mph space shuttles and orbiting space stations and all the technology that came from the space program is probably the reverse of the journey from ABC’s Jules Bergman and NBC’s Frank Reynolds to the pretty boys and girls whose only skill is to make palms sweat and read a teleprompter. It all happened in my lifetime and I got to see a whole bunch of it.. Just might be another allegory of America.
*Marilyn’s favorite Astronaut.
