the MOCR, or Mission Operations Control Room, but the rest of the world knew it simply as “Houston,” a room born of the space age. The nerve center of America’s manned spaceflight program was impressive enough, but was actually quite a bit smaller than it appeared on television. Unless there was a simulation of a spaceflight or an actual mission in progress, Mission Control usually sat empty, with lights dimmed, chairs pushed in under the rows of control consoles, and monitors turned off. Only the whisper of air blowing out of the air-conditioning vents disturbed the silence.
But on this sweltering, humid Sunday afternoon in July 1969, the room was abuzz with pensive excitement. An unmistakable sense of anxiousness, the anticipation of what was about to happen, hung in the air. Mission Control was teeming with flight controllers, mostly young engineers who only three or four years before were studying mathematics and science in college. Now their full attention was on a constant stream of data in the form of numbers and letters that flickered before them on their black-and-white monitors. To the untrained eye, the figures looked like a cryptic alphabet from an obscure, long-lost mathematical language. But to the controllers, the data meant more—much more. And on this occasion, the telemetry had traveled nearly a quarter of a million miles to reach Houston. It was data that was coming from the moon.
From behind a glass wall separating the VIP viewing area from the floor of the MOCR, Tom Paine focused his attention on a greenish-yellow icon on the large projection screen at the front of the room. It slowly made its way across the screen. Shaped somewhat like the odd-looking Apollo lunar module (LM), it showed the position of the faraway spacecraft as it finally began its long-awaited powered descent to the surface of the moon. The final landing sequence would take only twelve minutes, but NASA had been waiting to make that engine burn for eight years.
Voice transmissions coming over the speakers told him what was happening. The voice signals were surprisingly clear, interrupted only on occasion by some garble and static that one would expect, whether listening to a live broadcast of a baseball game from just down the street or, in this case, two men narrating their own landing onto the surface of the moon. Earlier, Flight Director Gene Kranz, the tough, former Saber Jet pilot who was now directing Mission Control’s “White Team,” had ordered the doors of the MOCR locked. A final status check around the room followed. Each flight controller declared an emphatic “GO!” into his headset.
Two hundred thirty-eight thousand miles away, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin closed a sequence of circuit breakers that fired lunar module Eagle’s descent stage engine to initiate the powered descent sequence. The engine burn slowed them down just enough, gradually taking them out of lunar orbit and onto a predetermined path. At first, only the instruments told them that they were actually descending. But before long, the craters, boulders, and finally the rocks of the moon became very clear. The spacecraft pitched over and the dramatic lunar panorama filled their windows as they approached the landing area. If everything went well, they would be on the surface in the next few minutes.
Four days earlier, Paine was there at the Kennedy Space Center as Apollo 11 left Earth in mankind’s first attempt to land on the surface of the moon. The flight was the high point of Project Apollo, America’s historic quest to land a man on the moon and bring him safely back to Earth by the end of 1969.
He was in Houston now with the largest contingent of US space officials ever gathered in one place.1 Only four months earlier, President Richard Nixon had appointed the forty-eight-year-old engineer from California to be the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. On his watch, human beings began to journey away from the confines of planet Earth for the first time on missions to explore another celestial body.
Nearly fifty years later, those historic flights still hold their place as the zenith of America’s space program and the accomplishment for which it is most recognized around the globe. From those epochal voyages came paragons of the space age, pioneering and creative geniuses who saw what was possible and made it all happen. Circumstances had now put Paine among those on the brink of making history.
As the descent stage engine continued to burn, the spacecraft slowed, dropping closer and closer to the surface. The icon on the screen showed that the lunar module was on the correct approach trajectory. He was confident that Armstrong and Aldrin would soon be safely on the surface.
For Tom Paine, human beings’ exploration of the moon was the first step in pioneering the vast frontier of outer space. In the span of just a few short decades after the turn of the twentieth century, the rapid progress of technology had revolutionized the way people lived. All facets of human society were being advanced to one degree or another. Most tantalizing was that space travel had become a reality.
The years during and after the Second World War had been transformational. Rapid advances in science and engineering made people think that the right use of technology could overcome even the most daunting of society’s ills. It was in this dynamic setting that Paine’s career began. Computers were still in their infancy; “high-tech” had not yet been invented. He and other engineers of the day creatively devised new ways to apply discoveries in the fields of material science, electronics, and aerospace to everyday life. They used slide rules and vacuum tubes instead of keyboard and mouse. Their ingenuity revolutionized transportation, manufacturing, and weaponry. An ardent futurist, Paine believed that technology held the key to a good future for humanity, not only here on Earth but, one day perhaps, in the borderless expanse of outer space.
Twentieth-century technology of all kinds intrigued him. Ships especially piqued his interest. Neil Armstrong still remembered, just a year before his own passing, that Tom Paine was as fascinated with how airships—those impressively titanic, lighter-than-air, passenger-ferrying marvels of aeronautical engineering that were largely abandoned after the fiery Hindenburg disaster—were able to cross the Atlantic as he was with how a fragile spaceship like the Apollo lunar module could fly two men down to soft-land on the surface of the moon.2
Second only to space exploration was Paine’s lifelong passion for submarines. He made considerable contributions to the field as an engineer. As a historian also, he worked in many ways to preserve the artifacts, histories, and memories of the boats that fought in World War II. The breadth of his work has been recognized in recent years by the US Naval Academy for its unique scholarly and historical significance.
The latter half of the twentieth century saw great leaps and unexpected accomplishments in the field of aeronautics and astronautics. Those achievements became the new barometer by which the prowess of a nation was measured on the world stage. It began in earnest in the years leading up to World War II. Airplanes moved from the realm of mere curiosity to being useful machines for transportation and war.
The pace picked up dramatically after 1945. It reached a crescendo in the 1960s as the competition to be the torchbearer pitted the Soviet Union against the United States. The launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 had made sure of this. President John F. Kennedy wasted no time in responding to an unsure and stunned nation. He challenged America to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s.
Sputnik was America’s “Pearl Harbor of Space,” a wake-up call for a distracted nation. Overnight, the Space Race was born. Disbelief and anger at the Soviet launch consumed America’s psyche, from the young who barely understood the meaning of the nebulous images they were seeing on their television screens to the highest leaders at the national level who demanded to know how this could have happened. It was a jarring blow that woke the nation out of complacency and into a technological awakening. It would culminate twelve years later with the flight of Apollo 11.
“A strong demonstration of American technical and military capability is the best assurance we have for maintaining the peace,” Paine said after the successful landing.
I think the space program has had a darn strong
