forty years and a day

I always end up responding a day late to events and anniversaries, since I’m half a day ahead of much of my blog-reading-list. I’ve been thinking about the anniversary of the first Moon landing all week, but wasn’t going to write much until I noticed how many of the nice memories I’ve been reading have comments that mention the conspiracy theorists who believe the whole thing was a fake.

They’re wrong. A lot of them are mean and suspiscious-minded, so wedded to despair (or to sowing it among others) that they can’t believe that we might have achieved something great. That’s pernicious – because it keeps us from believing in what we can achieve in the future. I welled up at Majkia’s words: “It’s a shame, really, that today we have no – zero – massive and seemingly impossible dreams we’re working toward. We’re so poor in that department that we think we can’t even manage to see that everyone gets health care.”

“If we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we….” should be a challenge, not a lament. Dammit.

But more than anything else the conspiracy theorists are flat wrong about this. I can’t speak about the Kennedy assassination or any of their other theories, but about this they are wrong.

I’ve never doubted anyway, just from the simple logic (our government? organized enough to create a secret that big and hide it for that long? I have never seen any evidence of such a capability.) Like everyone who cares enough to go to a museum, I’ve seen Moon rocks and Lunar modules, photographs so beautiful they show the artistry of God and ones so relentlessly technical they would only have been taken by a proud engineer. But I also have some more personal experience, working for the Johnson Space Center from 1989-1995. I drove home down Deke Slayton Blvd – I *sat* three seats down from him at an AIAA meeting where Vance Brandt was speaking of Apollo-Soyuz. I stood ten feet from Pete Conrad at the 25th anniversary celebration. Those guys weren’t bluffing. But the thing about Apollo is that it was never about them; they only stood at the center.

The real reason I have no doubt whatsoever is named Shirley Brandt. I don’t think I’m violating her privacy in typing out her name; she’s pretty easy to Google, along with “NASA” or “JSC” to make sure you have the right Shirley – there are pages and pages of references to her, generally in some capacity organizing the AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics, the aerospace engineering society) or giving lectures on the history of NASA or working behind the scenes somewhere at JSC. I sat next to Shirley for a couple of years in the mid-1990s, working on the Space Station simulator (our job was to simulate the Thermal Control System). Shirley was something I rarely encountered: an older woman engineer, a generation older than I. She’d worked at the JSC since the 1960s, worked on the Apollo program. She was there. And I didn’t work with Shirley for all that time without becoming aware of something else that everyone who knows her must see: she is a person of absolutely unimpeachable integrity. There is no way that Shirley worked on a hoax, and perpetuated it twenty-five years later.

The JSC is, or was then, full of people who count working on Apollo as the hghlight of their professional lives. Some of them probably are accomplished liars. Many of them are good ol’ boys and girls who might fib now and then but who are basically honest and uncomplicated, not the people you’d want to run a massive, complicated and sustained scam on the whole world. And some of them are like Shirley.

QED. The Eagle, it landed.