Apollo Pride

There are still a few of us left who worked on the Apollo Project. If that’s you, hoist a glass of whatever it is you drink at our age. And think back…

With slide-rule accuracy and paper blueprints, with computers less powerful than a 10-year-old wristwatch, and only a precious few years after the Van Allen Radiation Belts were discovered, we went to the moon.

Six times out of the seven attempts.
Twelve human beings.
Walked.
On the moon.
Played golf.
Drove a Goleta-built moon buggy.
21 humans launched.
21 humans returned safely.

Most of us who are left from working on the Apollo Project were young whippersnappers at the time, working for adult leaders. My first job after high school was creating Van Allen Radiation Belts in a bottle in a laboratory in Huntington Beach. I was later fortunate to be a test technician on the Command Module at North American Aviation at 22124 Lakewood Boulevard in Downey, working in a cavernous clean room. My first job after graduating from UCSB as a young physicist in 1969 was researching the Moon Rocks at Rockwell Science Center in Thousand Oaks.

Excuse me for flights of nostalgia in my seventies.

WE DID IT. WE’RE PROUD.

I hope we do it again.