Acknowledging Huntsville Alabama’s Role in Building the Saturn V Rocket –

The Apollo 11 Saturn V space vehicle lifted off with Astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. at 9:32 a.m. EDT July 16, 1969, from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A: NASA

By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. – It’s not hard to remember exactly where I was 50 years ago when the Apollo 11 space craft launched for the moon on July 16, 1969 with Saturn V rocket motors built in Huntsville, Alabama. Or where I was on July 20, when Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed in the Sea of Tranquility, then six hours later, when Neil Armstrong took those giant steps for human kind on July 21.

My father, a telephone company engineer, was something of a man of science. He recorded the entire live coverage of the event from CBS News off a new RCA color television set in our suburban den in Jefferson County, Alabama, just east of Birmingham, with a home movie camera. It was the new thing in the 1960s.

I remember seeing and feeling his excitement to watch it, and it made me feel interested and excited too in my eleventh summer. I’ve long held an interest in science. Some of it surely flows from this event, although I was never a rocket scientists. Just a social scientist studying public opinion about such things.

As CBS is reporting Tuesday on the 50th anniversary: “Fifty years ago, millions of people worldwide were glued to their television sets as America launched Apollo 11, the first mission to land on the moon. The three astronauts — Neil Armstrong, Edwin Buzz’ Aldrin and Michael Collins became national heroes as they boarded their spacecraft the morning of July 16, 1969, and set off into the unknown. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin would walk on the moon, making ‘one giant leap for mankind’ as Collins orbited in the module that would return them safely home.”

CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite led the network’s live coverage of the mission with unabashed enthusiasm and amazement. Tuesday night, CBS News celebrates the 50th anniversary with a prime-time special, “Man on the Moon,” hosted by “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell.

Newspapers around the country and the world and news websites are also celebrating this monumental accomplishment in human history, and politicians are talking about it too.

U.S. Senator Doug Jones of Alabama took to the Senate floor to honor the anniversary and the state’s vital role in the historic mission.

“It was a remarkable feat made possible by the sheer determination and grit of the American space program and all of those who participated in it,” Senator Jones said of the 1969 lunar landing. “It was a unifying time. It was a unifying force at a time when America needed it.”

Alabama played a crucial role in the effort to land on the Moon, Senator Jones reminded us, with the effort to build Saturn V, the rocket that launched the Apollo 11 mission, a program led by Werhner von Braun out of Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville. The success of Apollo 11 gave Huntsville national attention for its role in the Moon landing – earning the city the nickname the “Rocket City.” Today, a replica of the Saturn V rocket stands outside the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville.

“We’re still building on this legacy in space in Huntsville, Alabama,” Senator Jones continued. “And we’re going to inspire a new generation and more generations to come of Alabamians and Americans — people all across this country — to reach even loftier heights.”

Senator Jones secured millions of dollars in funding for space projects based in Alabama in the Fiscal Year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act that passed the Senate in June and he has also been an advocate for the U.S. Department of Defense to choose Huntsville as headquarters for the new Space Command mission.

Of course NASA, the civilian agency set up to accomplish the task, is going all out to promote the anniversary in light of the new plan to go back to the moon and on to Mars.

We Should Have a Lively Public Debate About This Moon-to-Mars Mission

Go here for more information about NASA’s Apollo 11 mission and a list of other events taking place across the country.

The New York Times, with some of the first science writers in the country and the world, also played a key role in covering the original mission, and now has a special section on it’s web site with a growing number of stories.

It would be great if the world could be unified around such an anniversary and event, along with the new mission. But it would be inaccurate to say the people of the United States were totally unified by this event. There was still civil strife over civil rights, the war in Vietnam and the environment.

It would, however, be accurate to say that the coverage of the event in the new era of television galvanized the attention of world for a few days. If only we could accomplish that again and keep it going, rather than being divided by party and race in this country.

Unfortunately this administration seems hell bent on dividing us and emphasizing the military side of the new mission and largely ignoring the science, the exact opposite of what another Republican President did in the 1950s, a real war hero himself, President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He signed the act creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 1958 as a civil or civilian agency, not part of the military.

For my part, I was literally born in the month that the Russians launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, the event that led to the “space race” and the need for NASA and Apollo 11.