“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”
President John F. Kennedy, Sept. 12, 1962
Just a few years later, before the end of the decade, the commitment that the president delivered at Rice University was realized. Fifty years ago, July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon. Neil Armstrong was the first person to set foot on the lunar surface, and Buzz Aldrin, close behind him, became the second.
Among the thousands of people who joined in what Kennedy called “the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked” were Thomas Thayer, Coye Jones and Wayne Ottinger. The three men, who all live in Colorado now, participated in “Apollopalozza,” a 50th anniversary celebration at the Wings Over the Rockies Air and Space Museum.
Before the weeklong commemoration, the three talked about the work they did to help put people on the moon. Their areas of expertise span the gamut of the Apollo mission — from charting the craft’s path to the moon, to the moon-landing vehicle to safely recovering Aldrin, Armstrong and Michael Collins.
Thayer, an aeronautical engineer with TRW Systems, worked with a team of engineers and scientists from NASA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that mapped the paths to and from the moon. The trajectories were key to ensuring the crew’s safety, the sustainability of the craft on re-entry — or “entry,” as NASA called it — and determining where the capsule would splash down.
Ottinger, a mechanical engineer, was the technical director for the lunar landing training vehicle and base manager for Bell Aerosystems at Ellington Field Joint Reserve Base, near the Johnson Space Center in Houston and where the training vehicle was used. He was also the propulsion engineer for NASA on the X-15, a rocket-powered aircraft considered the bridge to space flight.
Jones, an aerospace engineer, spent his career with NASA, serving as project engineer for the landing and recovery division and working on the “boilerplates,” vehicles used to test water recoveries of the capsules. He was part of the launch-site recovery team for Apollo 11 and was on site when the astronauts were transported in an Airstream-like trailer to Johnson Space Center, where they were quarantined for 88 hours.
Looking back a half-century later, did Jones, Thayer and Ottinger realize the kind of history they were helping make?
“Yes, I suppose I did,” Thayer said. “And I had a sense of how many people were also involved. Teams were many and large.”
Jones said since Apollo 8 in December 1968, the first crew to orbit the moon, he had a sense of how groundbreaking their endeavors were.
“I don’t remember thinking consciously about making history, but I’m sure it was there in my subconscious mind of the enormity of what we were doing,” Jones said.
For Ottinger, Apollo 11 is as much about the future as the past. He founded the nonprofit Aerospace Legacy Engineering and Technology Recovery Organization to, as the website says, “help locate, preserve and present the technical information from America’s space race.”
“There are lots of fragile pockets of wisdom we’re trying to preserve,” Ottinger said.
In 2008, Ottinger helped organize a conference in Tempe, Ariz., to go over the experiences and lessons from the six Apollo lunar landings to aid new missions and operations. Armstrong, John Young of Apollo 16, and Gene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, both of Apollo 17, attended.
President Donald Trump has talked about sending people back to the moon, in part as a step to going to Mars. NASA’s project Artemis aims to send the first woman and the next man to the moon by 2024 to establish a base from which to eventually send people to Mars.
The program is named for the Greek goddess of the hunt, archery and the moon. Artemis was the twin sister of Apollo.
Asked if the moon should be the next, big destination, Ottinger was emphatic. “Moon first, by all means. It’s three days away instead of two years, if you take a round trip. There are lots of things to learn.”
Thayer is interested in tracking and checking out asteroids, in part to keep them from hitting Earth. NASA is involved with missions to asteroids to get more clues about how the solar system was formed.
Lockheed Martin’s OSIRIS-REx, built at the company’s Waterton Canyon campus in Littleton, reached the asteroid Bennu in December in the first U.S. attempt to collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back.
Jones sees establishing a presence on the moon as a good idea. “It’s a stepping stone.”
Whatever the next goals are, Jones added, the federal government should make a commitment and stick to it.
“Once we say we’re going to do something, don’t start and stop it,” Jones said. “We did pretty good with the space shuttle. They announced it in ’72 and finally flew it in ’81.”
However, plans and projects are often announced by one administration and then scuttled by the next, Jones said. With Apollo, President Lyndon B. Johnson carried on to make Kennedy’s vision a reality, he added.
The three talked about the people they worked with, the long hours, the dinners they shared with co-workers, including some of the astronauts. Thayer, who started his career at Douglas Aircraft, worked under the direction of Gene Kranz, the NASA flight chief who directed the landing portion of Apollo 11. He worked with astronaut Gus Grissom on defining the flight corridors.
When the Apollo program was reorganized and his company wanted him to relocate to Houston, Thayer, who was in California, didn’t want to move. He went on to design, develop, test and operate many satellite systems. He worked for Lockheed Martin in California and in Colorado.
Ottinger started his career at NASA two years before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the world’s first artificial satellite. He was the project engineer on the lunar landing research vehicle, used to simulate flying and landing on the moon. He later went to Bell Aerosystems, where he worked on the training version of the vehicle at Ellington Air Force Base.
At Bell, Thayer’s time overlapped a bit with Walter Dornberger, a former Nazi military officer who worked on Germany’s V-2 rocket and then worked for the U.S. Air Force after World War II. Thayer became Bell Aerosystems vice president and played a major role in developing the X-15 aircraft.
“When I arrived, Dornberger was working half-time,” Ottinger said. “I got to use his office when he wasn’t there.”
Decades later, Thayer, Jones and Ottinger still tap into the excitement of their days working toward the moon landing. Jones recalled his switch to a project called emergency access for launch-site recovery, in which teams worked through different scenarios in case something went wrong.
“For all the missions through (Apollo) 14, I was down at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch, which is great,” said Jones, with a big grin.
Before the launch of Apollo 8, Jones said he was driving on an access road when he had to stop and pull over for a van carrying the astronauts.
“I wondered if those guys realized what they were about to do, ride a Saturn V for the first time and go to the moon,” Jones said.
That story jogged Ottinger’s memory.
“One of (Armstrong’s) stories was when they would approach the elevators on the Saturn V, it became a psychological barrier,” Ottinger said.
A roof was put over the walkway to the launch pad to reduce the intimidation factor of looking up at the 363-foot-tall rocket, taller than the Statue of Liberty. The rocket weighed 6.2 million pounds when fully fueled, according to NASA.
As NASA pursued the ambitious quest of getting people to the moon, did Thayer, Jones or Ottinger ever question if it would really happen? The unanimous answer: “No.”
“I think almost everybody on the program was determined to make it happen,” Ottinger said.
“He’s right, it wasn’t a question,” Jones said.
“There was no question it was going to happen,” Thayer added. “When I was hired, I was told ‘If we give you an assignment and you have a problem doing it, either because of your knowledge or abilities, whatever reason you can’t do it, tell us and we’ll get you some help. We won’t hold it against you, but we can’t afford to do it twice.’”
Ottinger said, “They weren’t going to let any one person kill the whole program.”