NASA News
National Aeronautics and
Space Administration
John C. Stennis Space Center
(228) 688-3341 July 12, 2004
Stennis Space Center, MS 39529-6000
STS-04-046
Paul Foerman FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
NASA News Chief
(228) 688-3341
APOLLO PROGRAM CHANGED THE WORLD;
NASA STENNIS SPACE CENTER PLAYED CRUCIAL ROLE
HANCOCK COUNTY, Miss. – “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The national effort that enabled Astronaut Neil Armstrong to speak those words as he stepped onto the lunar surface July 20, 1969, fulfilled a dream as old as humanity.
No nation had ever demonstrated its aspirations and abilities as dramatically as the U.S. did in accomplishing the feat of landing humans on the Moon, and no other event had been done more publicly. More people on Earth watched that first small step than had witnessed any prior event. Most Americans who saw the event can easily recall what they were doing the moment it happened, and most can recite the names of the crew without hesitation.
NASA’s scientists and engineers put forth unprecedented effort to accomplish nine manned flights to the Moon, six of which involved landing on the crater-filled lunar surface. A total of 12 Americans walked on the lunar surface from 1969 to 1972. The scientific results of the Apollo program were staggering, and the human achievement came at a critical time in America’s history, when the nation needed to prove beyond doubt its technological superiority.
People who lived on the Mississippi coast and in Southeast Louisiana during the Apollo era witnessed firsthand the groundwork laid to achieve these historic milestones. The beginning of NASA Stennis Space Center (SSC) came just five months after President John F. Kennedy’s May 1961 challenge to send Americans to the Moon before the end of the decade. SSC’s creation
provided the nation the testing site for the rocket components that took Americans to the Moon and changed the world; it also forever changed the communities surrounding the center.
People living in the area at the time recall the impact that the completion of the NASA test facility had on their hometowns. One resident says things were never the same. Subdivisions sprang up to house engineers and their families moving in from Alabama, California and other points across the nation.
“The main thing I remember was the huge scale of construction,” recalled longtime employee Jeanne Kellar of Picayune, Miss., InDyne Inc.’s documentation coordinator for NASA’s central engineering files. “It was just everywhere you looked – in town, around the site, the interstate. And the people came from everywhere: New York, Colorado, Florida, Alabama, you name it. To a smalltown girl like me, it really was something to meet all those people.”
The center’s construction in Hancock County, begun in 1963, was the largest building project in Mississippi and second largest in the U.S. at that time. In 1966, the facility built to test launch vehicles for the Apollo program was completed, opening as the Mississippi Test Facility (MTF). The project’s total estimated cost in 1962 was $250 million.
“The Saturn V effort at MTF was remarkable,” said retiree Boyce Mix of Slidell, La., who directed the Propulsion Test Directorate for eight years. “The construction, activation and testing was completed successfully over a period of a few years.”
“I can remember when we had one phone line out here,” said Pat Mooney, also of Slidell, who will mark his 39th year at SSC this summer. “The phrase ‘Never was so much done by so few’ really applies to that time.”
Both rocket boosters for the Apollo vehicles – the first-stage S-IC and the second-stage S-II – were too big to travel from their assembly station at Michoud Defense Plant in New Orleans any way other than by barge up the Pearl River. Because the Mississippi and Louisiana highway departments’ engineers had no idea how big the rockets of the future would be, the Interstate 10 bridge under construction at that time was built 92 feet above the East Pearl River. NASA contributed $4.5 million to the road fund to help build it.
On a highly ambitious schedule, workers dredged 15 miles of the East Pearl River to the Intracoastal Waterway, dug 7.5 miles of canals inside the site and built a Panama Canal-sized lock system to connect the river and the interior canals.
Despite a 1963 salt marsh mosquito plague and a long, soggy 1964 spring that threatened to slow work on the Saturn V test site, the test facility was completed in only three years.
“I only had two Saturdays off in 1967,” Kellar said. “Everybody was working six days a week, and no one complained. We knew we had a deadline to meet. We were going to make it work, and we were glad to do it. We were just one big team. We were and are very proud to have been a small part of our going to the Moon.”
The center conducted the first static test firing of the Apollo/Saturn V second-stage prototype engine in April 1966, and less than a year later began testing the first and second stages of the rocket.
The effects of the first tests for the huge stages of the Saturn V were felt far and wide. Residents recall that the reverberations from testing the cluster of the five huge Saturn engines broke windows as far away as Mobile, Ala.
Dianne Bulen of Abita Springs, La., now administrative officer in SSC’s Propulsion Test Directorate, came to work at the center in 1965 for Gordon Artley, who oversaw the task of getting the facility up and running. “When the first test was conducted,” she said, “I thought the world was going to explode. The ground shuddered, windows rattled all the way to Slidell. And when we watched those astronauts walk on the Moon, you can’t imagine the feeling of pride, to know you had a part in getting them there.”
That testing led to one of humankind’s most phenomenal achievements when Apollo 11 Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the Moon.
It also spawned the motto, “If you want to go to the Moon, first you’ve got to go through Hancock County, Mississippi.”
When Apollo 11 lifted off in July 1969, then-Test Site Manager Jackson Balch is quoted as saying, “The dramatic flight is especially significant to all of us because two of the major elements of the Saturn V vehicle… were checked out and proven flightworthy at the MTF.”
“I hope we can somehow recapture that excitement,” said Mooney, now NASA’s project manager for the Space Shuttle Main Engine program at SSC. “Everybody ought to have that
sense of accomplishment. I don’t think space exploration has even cracked the shell of its potential.”
Today, SSC’s state-of-the-art facility remains America’s largest rocket test complex. Its 125,000-acre buffer zone is considered a national asset. Because the A-, B- and E-Complexes are designed for propulsion testing that ranges from component to engine to stage-level testing, the center is poised to rise to a new challenge.
On Jan. 14, 2004, President George W. Bush called on NASA to “gain a new foothold on the Moon and to prepare for new journeys to the worlds beyond our own.” This Vision for Space Exploration seeks to return humans to the Moon by 2020, then use it as a steppingstone to Mars and beyond.
“I was glad to hear President Bush say he wants America to go back to the Moon,” Kellar said. “I think we should. I was planning to retire, but now I’m going to stay and help NASA go back.”
“I think it’s absolutely wonderful,” Bulen said. “The younger generation will feel that same excitement like we felt. I hope I’m here to see it.”
-END-
News releases provided by NASA’s Stennis Space Center are available at https://www.nasa.gov/centers/ssc/news/newsreleases/2004. For more information, call the NASA Public Affairs Office at Stennis at 1-800-237-1821 in Mississippi and Louisiana only, or (228) 688-3341. SSC’S ROLE IN APOLLO 11 LANDING Page 3 of 4 -MORE-
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2004 News Releases