The 60s by The New Yorker Magazine

Author:The New Yorker Magazine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2016-10-25T04:00:00+00:00

Henry S. F. Cooper, Jr.

JULY 26, 1969 (FROM “LETTER FROM THE SPACE CENTER”)

JULY 21

AFTER THE LAUNCH of Apollo 11 at Cape Kennedy last week, several thousand people who had been at the Cape checked into hotels in the vicinity of the Manned Spaceflight Center, in Houston. One of the arrivals was Dr. Harold C. Urey, the elder statesman among selenologists, who had gone from here to the Cape early last week. The launch, he said, had more than lived up to his expectations. “The V.I.P. bleachers were so far away that we didn’t hear the noise until the base of the rocket had reached the top of the tower,” he said on his return. “Then there was this enormous light, and the rocket goes up and up, and then it goes through the first skiff of clouds, and then through the second skiff of clouds, and then you see a puff of smoke—the first burn-out—and then the rocket disappears. The precision! The accuracy! If only a fraction of this precision and accuracy spins off into industry, it will pay for the whole space program.” David Reed, the Flight Dynamics Officer, who for months had been practicing the flight in simulations, and who was sitting in the front row of the Mission Control Room in Houston after liftoff, said that the reason he knew the launch was the real thing and not another simulation was that everything was going so well….

· · ·

On Sunday afternoon, after the lunar module had touched down on the moon, the only way a visitor could tell that anything out of the ordinary was going on at the Space Center was that suddenly, at a little after three o’clock, many people started pinning buttons on their lapels that read “Lunar Contact.” Outside the Public Affairs Building, a number of demonstrators sat around a full-size mockup of the LM displaying signs that read “Texas—Big on Hunger” and “Good Luck from the Hungry Children of Houston.” The demonstrators refused to leave at five o’clock, when the Space Center closes to visitors, and they lingered on during a thunderstorm, from which a few of them took refuge beneath the LM. On the roof of a nearby building, a radio dish was aimed at the moon, which was behind a thundercloud, and as the evening progressed the dish tilted farther and farther to the west.

A little after eight, I joined Dr. Urey and his wife, a gray-haired lady in a blue dress, who had already turned on their television set and were waiting for Neil Armstrong to come out of the LM. Mrs. Urey set a bowl of green grapes on the table in front of the television set, and explained quickly that they came from Arizona, not California. Dr. Urey, who has had a number of ideas about what the moon is like, was obviously settling back to enjoy the evening; he said that he wasn’t particularly anxious about any of his theories, because he had good reasons for them even if they should prove wrong.

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