Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

Some are unhappy that the rest of the country has never truly comprehended the historic nature of our first journey to another world. Most people think of Apollo as just another episode in the tumultuous sixties, secondary to the Vietnam War and America’s social upheaval, not as something that will still figure large in the history books when Vietnam and John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson are consigned to footnotes. But the failure to understand goes beyond that, argues Rocco Petrone. “We’ve had a lot of reporting of how big the rocket is, how much noise it makes, pictures of guys on the moon. But what was the real meaning of Apollo? What did it symbolize? What were we after?” For a few short years, Apollo was almost like a Renaissance, Petrone thinks, but nobody wants to confront that kind of possibility now—to do so would make the nation recognize how much it abandoned so casually.

Trombka also teaches an occasional evening course on astrophysics for laymen at the Smithsonian Institution. One evening after class in the fall of 1983, he captivated two of his students with stories about Apollo—about what it was like to be in the Control Center, and especially about the strange and wonderful people who ran the place. Someone, he observed upon parting, really ought to write a book about them.

“It isn't that we don't trust you, Joe, but this time we've decided to go over your head.” This is the photograph that the crew of Apollo 1 gave to Joe Shea and that he kept near his front door for years after, not allowing himself to go for even a day without being reminded.