Time flies and memory fails, but I remember precisely where I was 50 years ago on July 20 at 10:56 p.m. – in the sweltering attic above the kitchen and dining hall at the “Pysany Kamin” (Painted Rock) Ukrainian Plast Scout camp sitting in front of a TV, along with more than 200 campers – all of us on edge, waiting for live images from the moon, not knowing from minute to minute, second to second, whether the landing would end in success, failure or tragedy. And then, Neil Armstrong stepped out from the Eagle to proclaim a small step for a man and a giant leap for mankind, his grainy image sent back to Earth for us at PK and for billions around the world.
As komandant (I was all of 21 years old), I got to choose the theme for our sub-camp of 7- to 10-year-old scouts. I chose “V Daleki Prostory” (Тоward Distant Expanses). Although our exploration was totally earthbound, focused on the woods, ponds, flora, insects and fauna at the beautiful site in rural Ohio, we had a campfire every evening to sing songs, tell stories and recite prayers. Before snuggling into our sleeping bags, we directed our attention to the moon, where we told campers we would soon see astronauts walking on its surface. And so we did. I’m now 71 years old. The boys I helped mentor are in their late 50s now. Oh my.
I was 10 years old myself when news came in October 1957 that the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik into orbit – the first time a man-made object had escaped the Earth’s gravity. I remember our family driving to a field miles outside of Cleveland where light pollution had not yet degraded the night-time to see a tiny dot move across the sky. A month later, the Soviets launched Sputnik II with a stray mongrel dog, Laika, on board. In April 1961, cosmonaut Yuriy Gagarin became the first man in space.
Sputnik I and II in 1957 came a year after Nikita Khrushchev delivered his infamous threat: “We will bury you.” Already then, both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were working on rocket science, focused as much on military as a scientific objective. Launching a satellite into outer space showed that the Soviets could attack the U.S. or any of its allies with an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) armed with a nuclear warhead.
In January 1958 – three months after Sputnik – the U.S. launched Explorer I, a satellite the size of a beachball. In July, President Dwight D. Eisenhower set up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It was science, but it was also war.
As a kid on the playground at my elementary school, I regularly heard air raid sirens testing for when the real alert might come. My classmates and I took perverse pride that a nuclear attack would target the steel mills less than a mile away to take out America’s industrial capacity. There were also monthly “security drills” – three rings, then a pause, then three rings more, another pause, and yet another alarm. We’d line up to walk in quick but orderly fashion to the basement, where teachers instructed us to crouch and cover our eyes and ears to protect from the nuclear blast. Good luck with that!
The space race captivated the American public. The only three television networks at the time – ABC, NBC and CBS – suspended normal programming to broadcast live black-and-white coverage of astronaut launchings while the nation stood still, including school kids in the classroom.
At the beginning of May 1961 astronaut Alan Shephard became the first American in space. It was a suborbital flight that lasted all of 15 minutes, but it became a national sensation. In February 1962, nearly a year after Gagarin’s flight, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. Half a year later, the first Ukrainian orbited the Earth, Soviet cosmonaut Pavlo Popovych. Others followed, including 44 years later, Ukrainian American astronaut and member of Plast Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper, who served aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, which for her included more than 12 hours of spacewalk. That was in 2006, long after the U.S. had won the race to the moon and the Soviet Union was no more.
But, in 1961, that was far from a sure thing. Three weeks after Shephard’s historic flight, newly inaugurated President John Kennedy, in an address to Congress, declared: “The U.S. should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
It was a call to arms. High schools across the country set up classes for higher math, intense history, literature and science classes to catch up with the Soviets. The campaign transformed a country. A generation of scientists and engineers, using slide rules, crafted a crash program that indeed put a man on the moon, with six successful landings in all and one aborted mission, Apollo 13, which demonstrated how dangerous the program was and how heroic the astronauts were (and continue to be), along with support staff on the ground who make it all happen. There were fatal accidents, as well – the Apollo I command module fire in 1967 and the destruction of shuttles, the Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. (There were also many rumors of Soviet cosmonauts dying in orbit; none ever confirmed.)
Ukraine played a huge role – Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro) became “Rocket City,” leading the USSR in aerospace technology, materials, design, manufacturing, etc. while also serving (not so coincidentally) as incubator of political careers for the likes of Leonid Brezhnev, Volodymyr Shcherbytsky, Leonid Kuchma, Yulia Tymoshenko and others. That story needs to be more fully told.
The space effort transformed the world. To get to the moon and stay in Earth orbit, the U.S. developed high-capacity computers, freeze-dried food, Velcro, scratch-resistant lenses, memory foam, communications technology, optics and a thousand other innovations. It also changed the way we see the Earth. Astronaut Frank Gorman’s Christmas Eve 1968 reading from the Book of Genesis and the image of our planet from 250,000 miles away is one of my most poignant moments. That and joining a couple of hundred fellow Ukrainians to watch men walking on the moon half a century ago.
Andrew Fedynsky’s e-mail address is [email protected].