NASA celebrates 40th anniversary of Apollo

Posted on , by Danielle Cox

            “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” An entire nation celebrated the realization of the charge issued by President John F. Kennedy with those few words from Neil Armstrong in 1961.  In July, NASA celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission.

From the launch on July 16, 1969, to the lunar landing in the Sea of Tranquility; and from the first steps on the moon on July 20, 1969, to the splashdown of the command module in the Pacific Ocean on July 24, 1969, Americans across the country commemorated the historic space flight. Forty years later, America continues to dream of exploring uncharted territory, this time back to the moon, and eventually on to Mars.

                Celebrations of the historic event took place globally. Former and current NASA employees, as well as the general public, came together to observe the anniversary of the “Splashdown” of the Apollo module in Houston, Texas at Johnson Space Center. At the event, astronaut Neil Armstrong reminisced about his time working in the Apollo program. Armstrong indicated that the success of the Apollo 11 mission was due to the hard work of the thousands of NASA employees working on the Apollo program. Armstrong stressed the importance of teamwork in achieving the goal of man on the moon.

 “There often were diverse views and frequent disagreements, and then someone would ask, ‘Now just what is our goal?’ and someone would say ‘Man to the moon by the end of the decade.’ And that often ended whatever controversy the controversy of the day was. They began to believe that they might just pull this thing off,” Armstrong said in his speech. “I often heard them say in one way or another, ‘That’s the best work I’ve ever done and that’s the best people I ever worked with.’ That’s the way it was and that’s the way it is.”

                Lynchburg College President Dr. Kenneth Garren was one of nearly 400,000 people who worked for NASA during the height of the space race. Garren went to work at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va. as an Aerospace Technologist in the Guidance and Control Branch of NASA’s Space Mechanics division after he graduated from Roanoke College in 1962.

                “Now this is not mechanics like mechanics in a car, but the physics of space travel,” Garren said.

                Garren said that when he went to work for NASA he was given a choice of where he wanted to work and he chose the lunar landing program.

“I was involved in something called the Launch Escape System for the Apollo; this would have been escape from death, if you will, immediately after launch,” Garren said.

Garren, along with the rest of his team, conducted a study on how to ensure the safe return of astronauts in the case of an emergency abort of the mission after launch. Garren and colleagues compiled the Manual Control of High-Altitude Apollo Launch Abort which includes detailed diagrams of how the command module can be safely returned to Earth in various stages after launch.

Garren left NASA in 1967 to teach at Roanoke College, where he was when Apollo 11 landed on the moon July 20, 1969.

“It was kind of like it was hard to believe it was actually happening. It just seemed so phenomenal. And the funny thing about it was when the picture first came on TV it was upside down, the whole picture was upside down and they quickly got that fixed,” Garren said. “The interesting thing about the Apollo 11 landing, basically everything had been predicted as to how it would be from the fiction writers except for there was never a prediction that there would be something like a television set that would record the actual landing on the lunar surface.”