Apollo Farewell: Highlights and Sidelights

Cape Kennedy—I found myself asking Tom Wolfe, whom I had just met, whether the radical-chic crowd has ever forgiven him for “Radical Chic.” He told me an amusing story about Leonard Bernstein, and offered me a peanut. It was a warm, almost too warm, night. We, and ten thousand others, stood in a tremendous roped-off area by the huge rectangular VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) at Cape Kennedy. Across the flats, three miles away, bathed in floodlight was a sight seen a dozen times on the television screen, but never, before tonight, really seen: the orange gantry, ten stories high, an Erector set to end them all, and beside it, but not of it, shiny, white, poised arrowlike, the Saturn V rocket that would minutes from now send Apollo XVII on the last of America’s manned missions to the moon.

We had piled out of our VIP buses two hours before and taken our places on the open stands. We had clapped politely while the names of the celebrities attending were read off, clapped more heartily when George Wallace was wheeled in. It was after all a night for brave men, not politics. We had listened as Apollo Launch Control gave the countdown, our eyes straying here and there but returning always to the focal point of light down the line: the gantry, the Saturn, the vapors that formed a cloud across the bottom third of it as the final checks were made. The count: T minus one minute, minus 33, 32, 31, 30—30 and holding. Thirty seconds to blastoff, and holding. How could the men in the spacecraft bear this delay?

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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Cape Kennedy—I found myself asking Tom Wolfe, whom I had just met, whether the radical-chic crowd has ever forgiven him for “Radical Chic.” He told me an amusing story about Leonard Bernstein, and offered me a peanut. It was a warm, almost too warm, night. We, and ten thousand others, stood in a tremendous roped-off area by the huge rectangular VAB (Vehicle Assembly Building) at Cape Kennedy. Across the flats, three miles away, bathed in floodlight was a sight seen a dozen times on the television screen, but never, before tonight, really seen: the orange gantry, ten stories high, an Erector set to end them all, and beside it, but not of it, shiny, white, poised arrowlike, the Saturn V rocket that would minutes from now send Apollo XVII on the last of America’s manned missions to the moon.

We had piled out of our VIP buses two hours before and taken our places on the open stands. We had clapped politely while the names of the celebrities attending were read off, clapped more heartily when George Wallace was wheeled in. It was after all a night for brave men, not politics. We had listened as Apollo Launch Control gave the countdown, our eyes straying here and there but returning always to the focal point of light down the line: the gantry, the Saturn, the vapors that formed a cloud across the bottom third of it as the final checks were made. The count: T minus one minute, minus 33, 32, 31, 30—30 and holding. Thirty seconds to blastoff, and holding. How could the men in the spacecraft bear this delay?