Don Canney

A recent story about the death of the last surviving Apollo Astronaut, Walter Cunningham, got the gears in my old head cranking back to the time when the space program was just getting started in 1962 as President John F. Kennedy stated that an American will walk on the moon by the end of the decade. From that point forward, the nation was focused on a call to action. Mr. Cunningham may not have been the most famous of the American astronauts but nonetheless a key cog in the program that staked an American flag on the moon.

I discovered today that the month of April has the distinction of being the month when America’s first astronauts were announced by NASA on April 9, 1959.

We in the Granite State tend to focus on our native contributors to the space program, Alan Shepard, and Christa McCauliffe for obvious reasons, as Shepard was the first American in space and McCauliffe the first teacher.

I think I can speak for most when I say there is little that can match the thrill, excitement, fear, anticipation, and pride that we each felt every time we’d plunk ourselves down in front of that old black and white tube, waiting for the countdown to get to zero, then ignition, then lift-off and seeing the plume of smoke, gasses and heat billow from the bottom of what was essentially an upright tubular bomb. Sometimes, at about the count of one, we’d see a pause on the screen and wonder what went wrong. Why is there no take-off? Maybe, the count would start again, or it would be delayed for hours, if not days, until the problem was deciphered. It was a time when none of us knew if any of this was going to work at each launch. We all felt not only for the astronauts themselves, but for their families, whose stomachs had to be tied in knots.

The network news would show videos of the astronauts prepping for launch, tell us what they ate for breakfast, provide a biography of each and their families and show them walking towards the launch pad, getting into the elevator that would hoist them up to the small capsules that would push them into the unknown. The very grainy, albeit live, images of them sitting in capsules, so tiny they seemed scrunched together like sardines in a can, still play in our minds.

I can remember the great Walter Cronkite handing the duties over to a correspondent by the name of Jules Bergman, who was a reporter and science editor for ABC News back then. He always tried to explain, in layman’s terms, what was happening or what was about to happen.

A July 22, 1969, edition of the then Nashua Telegraph showed a headline stating, “Shining hours found millions watching moon walk – while on earth, Hippies swam, and Soldiers fought.” To prove how new and unsure all this space travel really was, another headline stated, “If moon bugs come back, they might be friendly.”

We obviously had no moon bug infestation, but I can remember seeing stories on the quarantines, debriefings and updates each astronaut incurred after every landing.

And speaking of landings, they were as tense, scary and action packed as the launches. I recall the grainy images from cameras aboard Navy ships that were in the middle of the Atlantic watching for that bell shaped capsule attached to a parachute, to splash down in the ocean. Sometimes we were treated to seeing it gently falling from the sky, sometimes not.

There are doubters that say the moon landing was a hoax or Hollywood staging.

I think most of us who watched it unfold live would agree it was a culmination of a tremendous national focus that brought many of us together for a unified cause. Families and friends would get together for launch parties and splash downs.

And NASA’s technical accomplishments accelerated the computer age, as many products and discoveries resulted from the need to make things work in a much smaller footprint than any of us could imagine.

Don Canney is a freelance writer and professional voice artist. He was born and raised in downtown Nashua with great interest in Nashua history circa 1950-1970. He now resides in Litchfield.

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