_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [63]
Cernan’s curse sent instant alarm through Mission Control, and Stafford punched the button to get rid of the descent stage. Eight long seconds later Stafford regained control, and Snoopy was still.
Stafford and Cernan took a few deep breaths, and ten minutes later, in darkness, the two astronauts triggered the ascent engine and began their journey back to John Young. They rose in a closing maneuver to dock with Charlie Brown, and Stafford reported, “Snoopy and Charlie Brown are hugging each other.”
Back on Earth, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin were in final training. The success of Apollo 10 meant all but one of the ifs had been blown away. Only landing remained. Millions began gathering on the beaches and roadways around America’s newly built moonport. A site with a clear view of the Apollo launch pad was a premium location. There wasn’t a room to be had in central Florida. It had come down to private families renting sofas, cots, and spare rooms to the hucksters, well-wishers, and complainers.
The NBC phones kept ringing and callers kept complaining. One was certain the launch would bring about the end of the world, while another was convinced his chickens would stop laying eggs and his cows would stop giving milk and wanted to know who would pay, and a third offered his sixteen-year-old virgin daughter to me if I could get him a seat on the rocket to the moon.
My good wife Jo took a breath and then took care of the situation. She snatched the phones out of the walls, and when I went to work, she went along. Her job was to deal with the cranks. She would be nice and syrupy and most of all understanding.
My friend Jack King wasn’t faring any better.
A President Kennedy look-alike, from Boston no less, Jack was the Associated Press reporter here at the Cape in the early days. But, within months, he proved to be a traitor. He jumped fence and went to work for the enemy. He was the first public-affairs officer at the Cape for the newly created NASA, and eleven years later, when Apollo 11 was on the pad, he was NASA’s news chief.
And to say he was in demand was the classic understatement. Every reporter wanted a piece of Jack.
And home offered no shelter. Jack’s young son Chip had plans for his dad, too. He wanted to make a couple of fast bucks. Chip would charge neighborhood kids a quarter each to hear his dad, the voice of Launch Control, do a countdown. Jack would try to catch a fast nap on the living-room sofa only to be awakened surrounded by nine-year-olds waiting for him to say, “We have a liftoff.”
On the morning of July 16, 1969, for Jack King, it was all about going to the moon. As the voice of Launch Control, he was putting out the word:
After a breakfast of orange juice, steaks, scrambled eggs, toast, and coffee, the astronauts boarded Apollo 11 at 6:54 A.M. Eastern time. Commander Neil Armstrong was the first aboard. He was followed by Mike Collins. Buzz Aldrin, the man who is sitting in the middle seat during liftoff, was the third to come aboard…
NASA’s voice of Launch Control Jack King, seated on the end left forefront, is busy telling the world the latest news on Apollo 11’s countdown. King is in Apollo Launch Control with some three hundred members of the launch team on July 16, 1969. (NASA).
The countdown was running on time as a million-plus people were pressing the gates and fences of the Kennedy Space Center, trying to see anything and everything.
Three hundred technicians and controllers were running the countdown in Launch Control. Hundreds more worked through the count at Mission Control in Houston. Thousands of other men and women were on duty at tracking stations around the world, aboard tracking ships at sea, and in tracking aircraft in the sky.
In our NBC house-trailer complex at Press Site 39 on the Cape, I had already been voicing reports for two solid days, sleeping on a cot in the studios that had long ago gotten too crowded with Hollywood stars,