I remember it well – pretty well, anyway. I was in 4th grade. As I arrived at Spring Valley Elementary School that morning (Dallas, TX, but in the Richardson School District), May 5, 1961, I joined the throng of students on the covered walkway just outside the school, huddled around a small black-and-white TV, watching a rocket lift off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Alan Shepard would make a quick suborbital flight – it took about 15 minutes from launch to splashdown – into the heavens, becoming the first American in space. Now 70 years old, my memory is a little murky but, as best I can recall, we were allowed to stay out there and watch the coverage of the entire flight before going to class.
It had been a race between the USSR and the USA, ever since the Soviets had fired the first shot with the launch of the Sputnik satellite in October 1957. I remember going out one evening, with my parents and my sister, to the side of our house, looking up and watching Sputnik pass overhead. I had started 1st grade only a month earlier.
Now Russia had beaten us to the punch again, launching cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin as the first human in space only weeks before Shepard’s journey. Besides that, Gagarin had actually orbited the Earth, something the US wouldn’t accomplish until John Glenn’s three-orbit flight on February 20 of the following year. Glenn’s mission took close to 5 hours – an orbit, as I recall, took roughly an hour-and-a-half. For that one, the TV was set up on the stage in the school cafeteria, and the entire school was assembled in there – as best I can recall – to watch the coverage of the whole mission, from launch to orbit (to orbit to orbit) to splashdown. Don’t ask me how we saw anything on the (relatively) tiny black-and-white TV sets of the day, especially set way up on the stage – I have no idea!
It wasn’t just geeks back then who followed the “Space Race.” After all, the US was also engaged in a “Cold War” with the USSR, so the Space Race meant more than just bragging rights in space. It was also symbolic of the advantage of one nation or the other in the Cold War; besides that, there were scientific accomplishments connected with the Space Race that could provide tangible advantages for either country in the Cold War. It was an exciting time to be growing up; everyone watched every launch, from the Mercury program, through the Gemini flights, on through the Apollo program that would accomplish President Kennedy’s ambitious goal – which he announced to Congress and the nation only 20 days after Shepard’s flight – of landing a man on the Moon, and returning him safely to Earth, before the end of the 1960s.
Kennedy himself linked the Space Race to the Cold War, declaring in that momentous address on May 25, 1961:
. . . if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to all of us, as did Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere. . . . Now it is time to take longer strides—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth. . . . Space is open to us now; and our eagerness to share its meaning is not governed by the efforts of others. We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share. . . . Accordingly, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No single space project . . . will be more exciting, or more impressive to mankind, or more important . . . and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” (Apollo to the Moon, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, https://airandspace.si.edu/)
JFK, of course, did not live to see the realization of that goal, but the U.S., led by the relentless pioneers of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, kept pushing toward the goal, and – despite some setbacks along the way, including the tragic deaths of three astronauts in a fire on the launch pad in January 1967 – ultimately launched Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins (who passed away a week ago today, on April 28) toward the Moon on July 16, 1969. Four days later, Armstrong and Aldrin set the Lunar Excursion Module down in the Sea of Tranquility, and a few hours later became the first humans to set foot on the Moon.
I had graduated from high school the first week of June. So the Space Race, from the USSR’s launch of Sputnik to the USA’s landing of the first men on the Moon in the Apollo 11 mission, had encompassed my entire school career (pre-college), from just a month after I entered 1st grade to just over a month after I graduated from high school.
For my high school graduation in June 1969, my parents had given me a Craig reel-to-reel tape recorder (5-inch reels), which I still have – and still works – today. So when it came time for the Apollo 11 mission in July, I put my new tape recorder to work. I taped the audio of every significant event of the mission off the TV, from the astronauts’ press conference two nights before launch, to the landing and the entire Moon walk, to the liftoff from the Moon, to splashdown and the astronauts’ subsequent conversation, in quarantine, with President Nixon. Then I edited it into about 15 hours, inserting my personal introduction to each “episode” of the mission.
A few years ago, I digitized it and have uploaded much of it to YouTube. (I’ll continue to upload the remainder, as I have time, until all of it is available on YouTube.)
Click here to access my Apollo 11 YouTube channel.