A correction to an earlier version of this article has been appended to the end of the article.
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MOUNTAIN VIEW — On the morning of July 20, 1969, Michael Green jumped out of a plane.
The culmination of a skydiving class, it was the first jump of what would prove to be a short-lived hobby for the young NASA engineer whose day job was at that very moment rocketing towards a climax hundreds of thousands of miles above him.
As Green plunged through California sunshine, almost exactly 50 years ago, three men were readying themselves for a very different kind of landing.
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A few hours later, at 1:17 p.m. Pacific time, the Eagle, Apollo 11’s lunar module, touched down on the surface of the moon.
“When you see the earthrise, it’s so meaningful — it’s a profound perspective for human beings,” said Green, who remembers watching the touchdown with drink in hand at the Interstate 80 Nut Tree rest stop in Vacaville, on his way back from his own dramatic descent.
On this golden anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic “one small step for man,” the now-retired researchers at Mountain View’s NASA Ames who played a part in the Apollo 11 mission are celebrating the research center’s role in sending the first humans to the moon.
For many of them, their work played a role after the landing was done. As a computer programmer, Green worked to support aerospace engineers testing the thermal protection system to allow the astronauts to safely return to earth.
“Most people in the propulsion area were worried about getting off the launch pad,” Green said. “We were worried about coming back through the atmosphere.”
NASA researchers at Ames had analyzed and tested a heat shield that insulated the Apollo module against extreme temperatures as the craft re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. Known as an ablative heat shield, the material was designed to burn away during re-entry, keeping heat away from the metal spacecraft.
Unlike the lunar lander, the heat shield had been tested on previous Apollo missions, so it wasn’t an unknown. But on July 24, as the three astronauts aboard hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere, shedding flaming pieces of the heat shield behind them before splashing down safely into the Pacific Ocean, the team knew for sure that they had done their job.
“Ames was supporting the other centers; they were all supporting the industry,” said Green, 74, who retired in 2007 and now lives in San Jose. “Everyone did the part that they were supposed to. The part that we contributed — it was part of the success of the whole mission.”
At its peak, the Apollo program employed about 400,000 people. At Ames, researchers like Green designed the basic shape of the capsule that carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the moon.
Ames scientists also analyzed the hundreds of pounds of rocks that astronauts brought back from the moon’s surface. Samples arrived first at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where researchers worked to make sure the rocks did not contain hazardous materials. Months later, they were shipped to the Lunar Biology Lab at Ames, where biologists, careful not to contaminate the samples with organic particles, ran hundreds of tests in search of life.
“While at the Johnson Space Center, we were trying to protect the personnel from the rocks,” said Caye Johnson, a retired Ames biologist and longtime Los Altos resident who now lives in the Stoneridge Creek senior living facility in Pleasanton that is home to five Apollo alumni. “At Ames, we were trying to protect the rocks from the personnel.”
Johnson and her husband, Richard, were the only Ames researchers to go to Texas, she said: “We jumped at the chance.”
There, they were able to catch a glimpse of the astronauts the night they returned to Houston, although the three men were quickly whisked away to quarantine facilities.
Quarantine and other “formidable” safety procedures — for fear that researchers would be exposed to potentially dangerous lunar samples — were a big part of the Johnsons’ experience at the Space Center in Houston, she said. To get to their lab, they had to strip down and go through an air shower before suiting up again in NASA-issued garments. Exposure scares, which would occasionally last until two or three in the morning, could have resulted in researchers ending up in the quarantine facilities with the astronauts.
Technologically, it was also a different time. Without laptops or cellphones, the only way to get data in or out of the secure lab was via a Xerox machine, Caye remembers.
“Half of it was inside of the biological barrier, and half was on the other side,” she said. “We would put data on the copy side of the machine, and then we had to run around through the shower to press the go button on the other side.”
Back at Ames, Green said, it was much of the same. For the most part, computations were done by hand using mechanical calculators and tables from World War II, and only a few people — himself included — knew how to use computers: “We’re talking Stone Age compared to what we have right now.”
“When you started work, they gave you a three-foot slide rule,” he said. “Nowadays, they give a young engineer an iPhone and he has the whole universe in his pocket.”
Socially, it was a different environment, as well: Bonnie Berdahl O’Hara, the Johnsons’ colleague at the Ames Lunar Biology Lab, remembers being one of only a few women in the lab when she began her work. By 1970, the department was just a quarter female, according to NASA.
Over the course of her 28-year career at Ames, women made progress, O’Hara said, but she said they were still treated differently, although she didn’t want to specify the things she said they let slide by: “Maybe that’ll change in 50 years, when the older generation dies out.”
O’Hara, Green and the Johnsons are in their 70s, now. All four of them have decades-long careers at NASA to look back on.
“I took what I thought was a summer job in 1965, and I never left,” Green said. “I worked in an area I loved for 42 years.”
His career can be divided neatly into two equal pieces, he says: he spent 20 years as a researcher, including on the Galileo probe to Jupiter, before becoming a project manager. O’Hara and the Johnsons went on to work on the Viking mission to Mars in the 1970s. Caye Johnson would later work on reclaiming water in space and designing the life sciences laboratory on the International Space Station, too.
“As scientists, we treated it as something we had to do,” Richard said. “It was our job to give them the answer. We all went on to do other things, but it doesn’t have the power that people now say, ‘What an important thing — where were you 50 years ago?’”
Correction: July 18, 2019: An earlier version of this article included incorrect information from NASA that researchers at Ames developed the heat shield for the Apollo mission. The researchers there analyzed and tested the heat shield but it was built by the aerospace industry.
