In honor of NASA’s announcement yesterday of the crew which will return to the moon, here’s a photo of Neil Armstrong training for the original moon landing in Sherman, TX not far from Austin College. Neil was in Grayson County for parachute training on May 27, 1968.
Three weeks earlier, a lunar module testing malfunction forced Armstrong to parachute to safety before his vehicle exploded after a failure of the “automatic stabilization and control system.” According to NASA, Armstrong’s parachute would not have deployed had he ejected one second later.
You can see a scene of that incident in the excellent movie “First Man.” I dunno, I’m kinda sorta guessing that the Sherman parachute training weeks later was unnecessary. See the comments.
Armstrong’s moon landing was inspiring, a success of his piloting skills. The landing scene from the HBO series “From the Earth to the Moon” captures the moment well. See the comments.
But Armstrong needed the help of every aerospace engineer dedicated to lunar module operation at NASA’s Mission Control. One of those engineers, Emery E. Smith, had been hired by NASA to work in a division responsible for “developing the automatic stabilization and control systems for the Apollo vehicles.” Smith was later interviewed by the Johnson Space Center (JSC) History Project about the successful 1969 landing and the moment Armstrong made “one giant leap for mankind.”
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Interviewer: Let’s go back to Apollo 11. Where were you when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon?
SMITH: I was in the Mission Evaluation Room in Building 45 working at the time, so I was there when they landed.
Interviewer: What was the environment like at JSC during your first five years, six years there towards the culmination of the Apollo program?
SMITH: The first five years that I was there were really an excellent environment and I guess I would be in trouble for talking age these days, but we had a team of folks that average age was about twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, and everybody had a lot of energy and was willing to learn and try and do new things. The first five years that we were there, we just went at it, there wasn’t anything we couldn’t do, and we just tried to do the best we could with what we had. We had some excellent leadership from some of the older people that were at NASA at the time. It was just a lot of high-energy things and it culminated with the landing on the moon, which sent everybody into a major high.
Interviewer: What were your thoughts at that time?
SMITH: Oh, it was just elation at a successful event, and everybody was crazy, waving flags and doing things that people do when they’re excited.
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Emery E. Smith is the father of my good friend Whitney Smith Braun, a member of Delta Phi Nu……and an Austin College Kangaroo.
Whitney, would love to see some NASA photos if you got ‘em.
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