The Apollo 11 launch, from the film First Man.

The ten-year-old me would get out of bed at 4 a.m. at our house on Huasna Road in my robe and pj’s to watch the Mercury astronauts lift off, so I kind of grew up with the space program. I fell asleep in class sometimes, too.

The third Mercury flight, John Glenn’s, was a nail-biter because there was a warning that the heat shield on the little space capsule had become dislodged. If it went, so did John Glenn. They didn’t dare jettison the retro-pack, the little rockets that slowed the capsule in its descent, because the metal straps that held the pack to the capsule might also last long enough, before their incineration, to hold the heat shield in place. What the nation held was its breath.

We exhaled, after several moments of radio silence, when the flickery television images finally showed “Friendship 7” swinging like a pendant from its parachute array.

President and Kennedy and John Glenn with Glenn’s Mercury capsule after the mission. Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth.


Today is the anniversary the first American spacewalk, assigned astronaut Ed White on the Gemini 4 mission–Gemini, with its two-man crews, represented the second stepping-stone toward putting an American on the Moon. White, 150 miles above the earth, tethered to his capsule by a nylon umbilical cord sheathed in a layer of heat-treated gold, performed a twenty-minute weightless ballet.


Two years after that mission, what didn’t happen to John Glenn did to Ed White. In 1967, he was consumed in the horrific fire that engulfed the Apollo 1 capsule during a test on the launch pad.

So, many years later, like the space nerd that I am, I watched the vivid but melancholy “First Man” once again yesterday, with Ryan Gosling as Neil Armstrong.

I had to turn off the sound in the scene that depicts the Apollo 1 fire, the one brought on by the sense of urgency that infected the space program. We had to beat the Russians. That intemperance cost the Apollo I crew their lives–including Ed White and the hard-luck Gus Grissom, whose Mercury mission ended when the bolts that secured the hatch blew prematurely and sent his capsule to the bottom of the Atlantic.

The doomed Apollo I crew: Roger Chafee, Ed White, Gus Grissom


But I turned the sound way up again a little later. The launch sequence for Apollo 11–the mission that would take Armstrong to the Moon–is an incredible piece of film-making. Especially the sound effects–you can hear steel groaning as the booster rocket climbs, shaking the crew violently. The film won two Academy Awards for sound.

You can find the sequence here, on YouTube. Turn the sound way up.

https://youtu.be/9LzDdfcNsXo



And, of course, years after the jubilation of Apollo 11, the two shuttle disasters brought shock, disbelief and heartbreak. They brought all of us back to earth.

But those images of Ed White in space made a powerful impact on me when I first saw them in Life magazine. So I just wanted to take a moment today to think about him. He was, his Wikipedia biography asserts, a devout Methodist. I am sure that what he experienced on this day in history made his faith even stronger. This is my prayer for him.