Orange County Gave a Big Push in Drive to Reach the Moon

In the early-morning darkness of a spring day in 1969, a convoy carrying a strange-looking cargo pulled out of a Rockwell International facility and snaked its way along Seal Beach Boulevard to the nearby Navy dock.

The trucks and trailers were transporting a large section of the huge Saturn V rocket that would take man to the moon--and back to Earth--for the first time ever.

The booster rocket, placed on its side aboard a specially built transporter, was so large that power lines had to be lifted and street lights twisted out of the way to allow the convoy to pass. It was then loaded onto a barge at the Navy dock for a long journey to the launch pad at Cape Kennedy (now Cape Canaveral), Fla.

On July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 spacecraft lifted off with astronauts Neil A. Armstrong, Edwin E. (Buzz) Aldrin Jr. and Michael Collins aboard, and on July 20, 1969, Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon.

“Having a role in something as important, as elegant and as challenging as putting a man on the moon was very satisfying,” said William Dean, 59, who supervised the engineers and technicians who worked around the clock to perfect Rockwell’s portion of the spacecraft. “We knew we were part of something that would be recorded in history as a milestone as important as almost anything that had happened in mankind.”

Dean was just one of thousands of Orange County workers who helped put the first men on the moon. At a time when “Midnight Cowboy” was playing on local movie screens and “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” was perched atop the TV ratings, county aerospace workers were designing and building some of the key hardware for Apollo 11’s half-million-mile journey to the moon. The Orange County operations of Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas and TRW Inc. performed major work on Apollo 11, and dozens of smaller local subcontractors made contributions too.

Three Stages

Because no single rocket was powerful enough to carry a spacecraft to the moon by itself, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration devised a plan for three rockets, or stages, that would be strapped together. Each stage would be discarded after it performed its task.

Rockwell plants in Seal Beach and Downey built Saturn V’s second-stage rocket, which would propel the craft to an altitude of 103 nautical miles, then be jettisoned so that the third stage could take over. (The first-stage rocket would launch Apollo 11, then quickly fall away.) Rockwell also built monitoring and control systems for the spacecraft.

The third-stage rocket was built by McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach. That rocket would bring the spacecraft into an orbit around the Earth, then fire its engines again to propel the craft toward the moon.

The TRW San Juan Capistrano plant developed the engines used to lower the landing module to the surface of the moon.

Exciting Time

The men and women who were part of the Apollo space program remember it as a time of hard work and extraordinary challenge, and they recalled the excitement of participating in what perhaps would be the most daring exploration ever undertaken.

“In those days, everyone was so busy and spirits were so high that it was really a wonderful place to work,” said George V. Butler, an executive in McDonnell Douglas’s space division in Huntington Beach during the Apollo program. “Those were some of the best years.”

President John F. Kennedy had issued the challenge to the nation in 1961: Land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Indeed, in a speech to Congress in May of that year, Kennedy said of the mission, “No single space project in this period will be more exciting or more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or so expensive to accomplish.”

The Apollo 11 mission marked the climax of an unprecedented nine-year effort to take man to the moon and back--and to do it before the Soviet Union did. Although the previous Apollo missions had tested many of the technologies used in Apollo 11, landing a spacecraft on the moon and bringing it back would be a venture into uncharted territory.

“No one knew what the surface of the moon was like,” said Butler, now executive director of the McDonnell Douglas space station division in Huntington Beach. “We didn’t know if Armstrong was going to sink to his knees or what.”

‘Feeling of Importance’

The TRW plant was charged with testing the engines used on the Eagle, the lunar module that would take Armstrong and Aldrin from the command module to the lunar surface. Those engines would play a critical role, performing as both brake and booster for the lunar module, and they had to allow Armstrong and Aldrin to change the direction of the module in case they needed to change landing sites at the last moment.

“There was always that feeling of importance,” said Benjamin Cruz, a 33-year-old supervisor on the TRW program in 1969. “We knew we could do it. We were pushing the technological edge forward. Our reputation was at stake. I don’t think there were doubts it could be done, but it was not an easy thing to do.”

As it turned out, TRW did its job well. Just as Armstrong and Aldrin were preparing to land on the moon, they saw that the intended landing site in the Sea of Tranquility was not the clear plain NASA planners had thought. Rather, it was a treacherous field covered with boulders the size of automobiles. The effort to land would provide some of the most tense moments of the mission.

The TRW engines performed flawlessly, enabling Armstrong to take manual control of the Eagle and steer the spindly looking module into a safer area four miles west of the intended site--and with less than 10 seconds’ worth of fuel left.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here,” Armstrong reported back to NASA mission control in Houston after the 47-minute descent. “The Eagle has landed.”

Cigars Passed Around

McDonnell Douglas’ Butler was watching at mission control in Houston as the Eagle set down on the powdery lunar surface.

“It was a very tense and exciting time,” said Butler, who recalled how he became anxious himself as the Eagle’s fuel ran low and as Armstrong and Aldrin “seemed to take forever” to put on the spacesuits they would wear for the moonwalk.

Those breathless moments turned into sighs of relief and shouts of jubilation as Armstrong placed his left boot on the moon’s surface, did not sink, and uttered the words, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

“Everyone got out cigars and puffed on them, including me,” Butler recalled. “I sort of turned green, not being a cigar smoker.”

Goose-Bump Time

David A. Forge, 55, a test engineer for McDonnell Douglas in Huntington Beach on the Apollo program, recalled watching the moonwalk at home with his wife, Delores.

“I remember sitting there with the biggest goose bumps I’ve ever had in my life and watching the tears running down my wife’s cheeks,” Forge said.

“It was an extremely hectic time, and we usually worked around the clock, six or seven days a week,” said Robert G. Minor, then an engineering manager for the Apollo program and now president of Rockwell’s space division in Downey. “But it was a very high-spirited time because this was a high-visibility program with lots of public support.”

The walk itself marked “a great day” for the nation, Minor said. “I look back at that as the pinnacle of when the United States was at the top of the technological tree. I don’t think anybody on Earth compared to us. Obviously, a lot has happened since then.”

Despite the attention generated by the mission, Cruz said he and his fellow workers were too busy doing their jobs to fully comprehend the significance of it all at the time.

Different Perspective

“You couldn’t stand back and look at it like the nation did,” Cruz said. “The realization comes after. Then we said, ‘My gosh, look what we did.’ ”

The lunar lander, after returning Armstrong and Aldrin to the orbiting command module piloted by Collins, was discarded, crashing into the moon’s surface, where it will remain forever.

Cruz cherishes the thought that he will be able to tell his 3-year-old granddaughter that a piece of his work will stay on the moon forever after.

Although the Apollo program provided exciting and challenging work, its demands sometimes took a toll on family life.

“All of us who worked on the Apollo program went through a lot of conscience problems associated with our responsibilities to our families and jobs,” said Dean, the former Rockwell manager who today is president of a Silicon Valley aerospace firm. “We knew that our jobs were going to make the difference between the crew surviving a trip to the moon and getting back safely.

“Maybe that was part of the reason why I hauled my children out to the TV to watch the moon landing,” Dean said. “I wanted them to understand, in some fashion, that my absence had counted for something.”