A view of Earth from space brings unifying moment to year of turmoil

Britt Kennerly | Florida Today

In the grip of the upheaval and loss that defined 1968, from war in Vietnam to the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. to riots in U.S. streets, Americans were aching for moments of unity and triumph.

The race to the moon helped provide those moments and, ultimately, filled not only Americans but humans across the globe with a rare feeling of solidarity when, for the first time, man escaped the bonds of Earth.

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As those turbulent 12 months of 1968 drew down, it was from a sandy strip of land on Florida’s east coast that the country felt a jolt of hope and inspiration.

But while the year would end with a stunning view of Earth from Apollo 8 and a Christmas Eve reading from the book of Genesis by a trio of astronauts orbiting the moon, it began somberly.

In January 1968, only one year had passed since a devastating fire ripped through the Apollo spacecraft where three astronauts – Roger Chafee, Ed White II and Virgil “Gus” Grissom – were buckled in and training at Cape Kennedy Air Force Station Launch Complex 34.

Morale was still low in Brevard County, recalled John Tribe, former chief engineer for Boeing at Kennedy Space Center.

“We’d just lost three of our friends, which should never have happened,” said Tribe, whose career spanned from the Mercury years through the shuttle program.

“But we kept working.”

In some ways the tragedy of Apollo 1 galvanized NASA and the space community to fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Achieving that goal would not only give America a much-needed boost against the Soviets but also give more Americans an education in the benefits, here on Earth, of space flight.

The effort to meet Kennedy’s moon call became one of the largest, most complex and expensive engineering endeavors ever, involving 390,000 Americans and $25 billion.

The first tangible success came 20 months after the Apollo 1 fire when Apollo 7 launched on Oct. 11, 1968, from Cape Kennedy. That first crewed Apollo space mission, carrying NASA astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walt Cunningham, offered the first live TV broadcast of Americans from space, drawing a worldwide audience.

“Apollo 7 was a great success, and that flowed over to us,” Tribe said. “The program was moving again.”

And for those working it, the moon effort required almost full immersion.

1968: Setting the stage for the moon landing Successful testing done in 1968 gave the space program the confidence it needed to send men to the moon in 1969.

By anyone’s count, the work hours leading up to Apollo 8, a mission that launched Dec. 21, 1968, were grueling. Fifty-, 60-plus hour weeks were not unusual, said Charlie Mars, a NASA power and sequential systems engineer when hired in 1965.

“We really didn’t complain. Now, the wives did,” he said – and the county's divorce rate was high.

“The wives, the families took the brunt of it. … And there were times we just didn’t come home. Spend the night. Sleep on a desk. Bring a pillow; sleep somewhere where maybe you could find a couch in a boss’s office.”

Mars said he and others were so focused on the mission, they were “almost ignorant to what was going on in the rest of the world,” he said.

“In a nutshell, we had blinders on. Our blinders were what we did each day in the space program. … "Even the servers at the cafeteria were totally caught up in that. Rightfully so.”

John Tribe was 32 that year, married, with two children. Getting home in time to help a child with a bath or tuck them into bed was a rarity, he said.

The Vietnam War? The fight for gender and racial equality and equal pay for equal work? Unrest in the street?

“Those of us working on Apollo didn’t see a lot of it. … We were very focused, concentrating on our jobs,” said Tribe, whose first marriage crumbled during the pressure of the Apollo years.

“This was our life, married to the Apollo program. You’d catch the evening news and be like, ‘Oh my god. What started that?’ and you’d play catch up.”

It was the same for many young Brevard women who were following the progress of the growing and vocal women’s movement but happy to have a well-paying job in an exciting setting.

Just out of Merritt Island High School, not far from the space center, Hazel Banks took the civil service test for a clerk-stenographer job. She passed and went to work for NASA in December 1965 in a temporary position. Then came an opportunity to work with the manned spacecraft center that handled the Gemini simulation section, where the astronauts trained.

“We never said: ‘We quit at 5 o’clock; it’s time for me to go home,’” said Banks, now 70. “We stayed until we got the job done. And I didn’t have a car at the time and I relied on my co-workers to pick me up and take me back home. .”

By 1968, Kennedy Space Center’s workforce was at its peak, 26,500 `– more than double the total four years earlier – and activity on the Space Coast was a fixture on nightly news.

The presence of the space workers changed this sleepy beachside county into one of the fastest-growing in the nation with a population ballooning from 111,435 in 1960 to 230,006 a decade later.

Cocoa Beach’s population jumped from 3,475 to 9,952 in the ’60s, with those searching for homes looking for beach, launch views and astronaut sightings.The beach community attracted celebrities and those in the know flocked to spots like the Mouse Trap, Ramon’s and Bernard’s Surf – the latter was even mentioned on TV's “I Dream of Jeannie," set on the Space Coast.

Tourists came in droves. Crowds clogged highways for every launch and packed restaurants, bars and stores.

“Everybody was just pumped by the whole atmosphere … high-school classmates that ended up working at KSC, too,” Banks said. “We couldn’t believe it. We probably still can’t.”

Still, even with the excitement that grew stronger as NASA marched toward a moon landing, racial tension and concern over the plight of the poor were palpable – sometimes in the shadow of Kennedy Space Center.

The Rev. W.O. Wells was pastor of Greater St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church in Cocoa in the 1960s. Many of the church’s members worked at the Space Center but Wells still helped put plans in motion for a 1969 anti-poverty march to Gate 3 of the Space Center complex.

The Rev. Oliver Wells, a Cocoa native, was 12 when his father marched on the Space Center.

"The anti-poverty march was huge, because they were making the statement that if we could spend money to send man to the moon, we can spend money to eradicate poverty here in this county,” Wells said.

“He was very concerned about it. You can imagine … here you had a major employer in the area, with many members of St. Paul, where my father was senior pastor, working over there at the Space Center. But it was important for my father to be part of that particular march, instigated by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Because what they were saying was, ‘We’re going to the moon when people on Earth are hungry.’ You had that dichotomy of people struggling on Earth while we were invested in all that research that would get us to the moon.”

Retired United Launch Alliance employee Theodis Ray was born and raised just miles from Kennedy Space Center.

Ray, a black man, had signed on as a janitor at the Space Center in 1964 but left to join the U.S. Marines in 1965. He had hoped to be a state trooper after his service. But he was told his color would preclude that: This, don’t forget, was in an area where civil rights icons Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore had been slain in 1951 and the last segregated schools didn’t close until 1968.

So, back home in 1968, Ray headed back across the Indian River. The Space Center was a place where a person lucky enough to get hired, he said, could make a good living and be part of something bigger.

“That was one area that paid a decent salary, with benefits for retirement,” he said. “Most of the jobs were in janitorial or construction, but out there, if you had the qualifications; if you knew somebody or were military … you had a chance.”

Ray recalled showing up to look for a job in a spot where the launch pads were visible across the river. From a listing of jobs available for a veteran with his qualifications, he chose warehousing. At retirement in 2000, he was logistics lead for United Launch Alliance.

“I raised a family, had a home,” he said. “By it being a union job, I got the benefit of working and learning as I went, with everything going by seniority. If you got on out there, you had a chance … and I got that.”

Those who today consider themselves lucky enough to have been part of the moon challenge say it changed their lives – just as their work changed the way humans saw their planet and themselves.

That fall and winter of 1968, that message of hope and possibility reverberated around the globe.

The Apollo 8 mission, with astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and William Anders, was defining in that it proved that landing on the moon was within reach. The six-day, three-hour and 42-second mission saw astronauts orbit the moon 10 times. For the first time, astronauts viewed the dark side of the moon.

Just over six months later, Neil Armstrong stepped out of the Eagle and made his “one giant leap for mankind.”

Apollo 8, like the other Apollo missions and the Gemini and Mercury before that, helped get America there.

But Apollo 8 also gave all humans, not just Americans, a new view of Planet Earth – and perhaps, our shared humanity, in the waning days of a year torn by man-made tensions.

The iconic Earthrise photo, taken by astronaut Bill Anders, showed the "blue marble" in the distance, with the moon's surface in the foreground. Stark and stunning, it gave humanity a look at their fragile planet as seen from space.

It's still a significant photograph, said Banks, who stayed with NASA through Apollo 15.

“Earthrise … that was like going back to Michelangelo or something,” she said.

“Speechless, priceless, breathless … (like) we really are part of a universe that’s much different to us and maybe this will help us realize it, too.

Adding to that feeling was the decision by the Apollo 8 crew to read the first 10 verses of Genesis on Christmas Eve as they orbited the moon. In 2008, astronaut Frank Borman recalled: "We were told that on Christmas Eve we would have the largest audience that had ever listened to a human voice. And the only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate."

For those listening not only in the United States but around the globe, it was so much more, said Banks.

“When they started reading from Genesis it was like … it really was the best Christmas present ever,” she said.

Contact Kennerly at 321-242-3692 or bkennerly@floridatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter @bybrittkennerly or at Facebook.com/bybrittkennerly.



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