The daily Astorian., July 20, 2019, Page B1, Image 9

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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JULY 20, 2019 • B1
TO THE MOON
Writer recounts father’s experience working on Apollo 11
By ED HUNT
For The Astorian
W
e went to the moon 50 years
ago.
When I say “we,” that
doesn’t mean you or I ever set foot
on its dusty soil. We as a species
harnessed the powers of our minds
and our might and spurned gravi-
ty’s ever-oppressive grip to
leave footprints on the sec-
ond-brightest object in our
sky.
We did this not because it
was easy, but because it was
hard.
Just 35 years before Pres-
ident John F. Kennedy set us on a
course for the moon, aviation pioneer
Charles Lindbergh titled his auto-
biographical account of his fl ight
across the Atlantic Ocean “We.” The
title was meant to surprise readers. It
had been a solo fl ight.
Lindbergh recognized the work
of the many people who fi nanced,
designed and built it for that
purpose.
Quest beyond
technology’s reach
NASA
At 9:32 a.m., the swing arms move away and a plume of fl ame signals
the liftoff of the Apollo 11 Saturn V space vehicle with astronauts Neil A.
Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr. from Kennedy Space
Center Launch Complex 39A on July 16, 1969.
Library of Congress
Astronaut Owen Garriott at the control panel for the Apollo Telescope
Mount. John Hunt worked on the design of the control panel as a contractor
for NASA in the 1960s.
The quest to land a man on the
moon started with an ambition
beyond the reach of the technology
at the time. We took the impossi-
ble and made it possible. It was an
accomplishment that required more
than 400,000 Americans — men
and women, black and white, immi-
grants and refugees — to design
and build a machine that could take
mankind to the moon and return
them safely to Earth. It required the
sweat and imagination of a nation to
reach that goal.
My father — John Hunt —
was part of that army of peace and
exploration.
I grew up with the echo of that
accomplishment ringing in my ears,
optimistic at what people can do
when they come together focused
on a single goal.
My father fi rst met Wernher von
Braun while tending bar at the offi -
cers club in Huntsville, Alabama,
where the Army Missile Command
and the Marshall Space Flight Cen-
ter are located.
Hunt, a whiz kid from south
New Jersey just out of college, had
already been working for the Army
testing the Sergeant missile system
when he got drafted under the loom-
ing threat of war with the Soviet
Union.
“The Cuban Missile Crisis ended
occupational deferments,” Hunt
said. “I had a draft notice in my
mailbox by the end of the week.”
Yet, after basic training, Hunt
found himself called right back
down to Huntsville to fi nish the
project he’d been working
on. This time in an Army
uniform and getting paid “a
lot less.”
So he picked up a side
job tending bar at the offi -
cer’s club, where he recalls
Von Braun charming the
congressmen and VIPs sent down
to investigate his program.
“It was cigar smoking and hard
drinking,” Hunt recalls. “He had
them eating out of his hand.”
It was partly Von Braun’s charm,
ambition and his cadre of German
rocket scientists that helped turn
Huntsville into the of the major cen-
ters of the space race.
When Navy Vanguard rockets
repeatedly failed on the test stand,
Von Braun said he could put a man
in space with the Army’s Atlas
rocket, Hunt explained. When Atlas
succeeded, Von Braun proposed a
bigger rocket: the Saturn 1B.
“The test stand he built for it was
massive,” Hunt remembers. “You
couldn’t even see the 1B in it and
we’d wondered why he built it so
big. He was thinking ahead. He’d
built it for the Saturn V.” This was
the rocket that would eventually
take men to the moon.
“You know when Kennedy said
that we were going to the moon,
nobody had a clue as to how we
were going to do it,” Hunt says. “The
guys at NASA were dumbstruck.”
Hunt was just about to get out of
the Army when Kennedy was assas-
sinated in November 1963.
“I knew it wasn’t the end, NASA
was already ramping up,” Hunt
said. “It was a beehive of activity
and they were grabbing anybody
with any talent or knowledge they
could use.”
Designing equipment
for astronauts
Hunt found himself as one of
hundreds of thousands of contractors
See Apollo 11, Page B2