To a Distant Day: The Rocket Pioneers

Epilogue: July 16, 1969

In the roads, beaches, islands, and waters surrounding a space center in Florida named after John F. Kennedy, an estimated one million people had gathered to watch the sixth launch of Wernher von Braun’s greatest creation, the Saturn V rocket. Every launch of this 363-foot behemoth was an event due to the 7.5 million pounds of thrust it packed at liftoff. But this particular flight was even more special because astronauts were on board who would take the Apollo 11 spacecraft all the way to the surface of the moon for the first human landing on another world. Though this landmark flight began , in a sense, with humanity’s earliest urgings to travel beyond the earth, it had its more immediate origins in the flight of Yuri Gagarin. The Soviet cosmonaut’s successful 108-minute flight on April 12, 1961, was the opening event of an extraordinary six weeks in spaceflight history that led directly to Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepping on the moon eight years, three months, and eight days later. Gagarin ’s single orbit around the earth was followed on May 5 by Alan Shepard’s 15-minute suborbital flight aboard his Mercury-Redstone vehicle. President Kennedy, whose young administration was shaken by Gagarin’s flight and a botched invasion of Fidel Castro’s Cuba a few days later, decided to make a bold announcement to show American determination to be first in space. On May 25, the president set a national goal of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” by the end of the 1960s. Led by men like von Braun, Robert Gilruth, James Webb, and George Mueller, nasa successfully pulled off six manned Mercury and ten Gemini flights. After overcoming the setback of a 1967 launch pad fire that killed the first Apollo crew—astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee—nasa succeeded in flying four manned Apollo flights before ful- filling President Kennedy’s national goal. In July 1969 Armstrong and Aldrin reached the lunar surface and returned home safely with astronaut MiEpilogue : July 16, 1969 chael Collins. Five more Apollo crews journeyed to the lunar surface and another three crews flew to the vicinity of the moon before Apollo ended with Apollo 17 in December 1972. When Apollo 11 departed skyward from the Kennedy Space Center, many of the people who had made the flight possible were among the crowds nearby. Many of nasa’s top officials were in the firing room of Launch Complex 39, including von Braun. At a press briefing before the launch, he was asked how he rated the importance of Apollo 11. “I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land,” he said. At the time of Apollo 11, von Braun was drawing up ambitious plans for nasa to build a shuttle craft, a space station, a lunar base, and spacecraft to go to Mars in the 1980s. His plans were boosted when Vice President Spiro Agnew returned from watching the Apollo 11 launch to tell assembled media that America should go to Mars. President Richard Nixon, who began his term a few months earlier in 1969, rejected von Braun’s ambitious plans but eventually agreed to a shuttle. A frustrated von Braun left nasa for private industry as Apollo wound down in 1972 and died five years later, advocating space exploration to the end. Many of the rocketeers who came with von Braun to America from Peenem ünde were also there at the Apollo 11 launch site or standing by at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville. A number of them held highly responsible positions, such as Kurt Debus, who was director of the space center from which Apollo 11 was launched, and Eberhard Rees, who succeeded von Braun as director of Marshall a few months after the historic lunar flight. Arthur C. Clarke, the great British writer, theorist, and spaceflight advocate , also came to Florida and told media covering the launch: “This is the last day of the old world.” Willy Ley, who was one of the key publicizers of space travel in his native Germany and then his adopted United States, died eight weeks before the launch he had done so much to make a reality. Also among those at the space center was Hermann Oberth, the only one of the three fathers of space...