(Sunday, July 25, 1999)
HOUSTON, WE'VE GOT SOME RECOLLECTIONS
By Paul Harral
It's been an interesting week for an old aerospace reporter.
One of the high points of my career was assignment to cover the Apollo series by my then-employer, United Press International.
There are two such people in Fort Worth, interestingly. The other one is Glen Johnson, now a big-shot attorney at Kelly, Hart and Hallman.
Glen was working at UPI in Houston (HS in UPI code) when he was assigned to space coverage. We called the bureau at the Manned Spacecraft Center LX for Lunar Exploration and the bureau at Cape Canaveral BW for Bird Watch.
Glen took the LSAT one morning after we had been up all night nurse-maiding one of the Apollos. He was a talented reporter and I thought he was crazy to be throwing away a promising career in journalism. He went on to law school and I stayed in journalism and in retrospect, well, that's a different column . . .
I'm thinking about all this, of course, because last week was the 30th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing on the moon.
Even my wife got into the act. She and the wife of another UPI staff member served as editorial assistants in the bureau. They'd run errands, pick up air-to-ground transcripts at the press center, and the like. For free, of course, since UPI was nothing if not cheap.
Harriet and I have been working in our basement and in one of the scrapbooks we found a letter from a top UPI official thanking us for our work and pointing out that it was one of the most significant stories of all time. It certainly was that.
(Technically, Harriet served as a "copy girl" for UPI. Her mother told all her friends that Harriet was a "call girl" for UPI. I don't think so.)
We also found other Apollo artifacts while we were cleaning up: Press badges for all of the Apollo missions as well as mission patches. The patches are no different than those you can buy at the spacecenter shop if you visit there. Their only significance is that each one of these was purchased during an actual mission.
There's also a little lapel stick pin in a kind of turquoise color with the words "Lunar Contact" on it. Its significance is that it duplicates a light on the instrument panel in the moon lander. The light came on when a probe that extended past the footpad on one of the landing struts first touched the surface of the moon.
When that happened on July 20, 1969, representatives of the contractor that built the lander handed the buttons out in the pressroom at the space center.
There's no way to describe the excitement of the moment when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon. I've written about this before, and it is still with a sense of wonder that I recall a room filled with reporters from all over the world leaping to their feet and cheering.
And there was another event last week that stirs, frankly, unusual emotions in me.
It was the raising of the Mercury capsule Liberty Bell 7 that sank in the ocean during the nation's second sub-orbital flight. Gus Grissom was the pilot, and he nearly drowned when the explosive bolts that held the hatch on the spacecraft blew early and the spacecraft flooded with water.
Grissom flew for 15 minutes 38 years ago. And he gave his life in the cause of space exploration when he and two other astronauts died in a disastrous fire during a test of the Apollo capsule on a launch pad in Florida in 1967.
Liberty Bell 7 was the only American spacecraft lost after it returned from a successful flight.
In later years Grissom was forced to defend himself against speculation that he was at fault - that he panicked and blew the hatch too soon, that he did not have the right stuff.
The Mercury capsules were small - a "one-seater" veteran astronaut Wally Schirra once called them - only 7 1/2 feet long. Liberty Bell 7 had lain in water 3 miles deep 300 miles southeast of Cape Canaveral since July 21, 1961. It was located last May.
It will be taken to the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center in Hutchinson, Kan., where it will eventually be put on display.
Locating and then recovering the capsule is a tremendous feat. But Betty Grissom, the astronaut's widow, said in May that she was disappointed that the capsule had been found: "It brings back memories and there's nothing good."
I sort of wish that the capsule had never been found or recovered. It seems more appropriate that it remain an unseen but fitting monument to one of the men who gave his life trying to reach the Moon.
But maybe that's just emotion speaking.
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Harral is vice president and editorial director for the Star-Telegram. His e-mail address is harralstar-telegram.com. You may telephone him at (817) 390-7836 or write him at P.O. Box 1870, Fort Worth, TX 76101.
(Copyright Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Posted by permission.)