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CONTACT US FOLLOW US Jonathan Williams editor@coastweekend.com facebook.com/ DailyAstorian 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