The first lunar fly-around mission in more than 50 years has given me the same feeling of excitement and hope I had when the Mercury program sent single-manned capsules into space for the first time ever. With all the imposed mayhem and hopelessness of the past few weeks, it’s a relief to see that science still trumps ignorance, and the United States space program still has what it takes to go beyond the new norms. As we stay tuned to the progress of Artemis II, let us focus on a more productive future.
It reminds me of those innocent days when I fantasized being inside Mission Control at Cape Canaveral, watching in real time as the new frontier was a universe of wonder. In celebration of the six intrepid astronauts flying in the void above right now, here’s an article I wrote two decades ago about the joy of collecting space travel ephemera.
From 1960 through 1963 I was president of The Astronaut Fan Club. I was also founder and its only member.
You might say it was a front for getting as much NASA swag as possible. Don’t get me wrong, the astronauts were my heroes. We lived in the era of heroes and it was for that reason I wanted (and still possess) every iota of paper ephemera I could absorb.
My strategy was simple. I typed letters everyday, seven days a week, to each and every NASA employee, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronaut and X-14 pilot asking them for autographed photos and whatever else they could spare. I was so persistent that Chuck Yeager, the famed test pilot and breaker of the sound barrier, asked me to stop writing him.
The Mercury astronauts were more generous (or at least less annoyed by my mail-stalking). They would send “personal” letters and mostly stock photos. But Gus Grissom one of the Project Mercury Seven and the first astronaut to die when a fire consumed his Apollo command module, sent me an actual signature.
To look at this low-impact design and illustration from the ’60s takes me back to when things were simple. I admire the NASA worm logo designed by Danne and Blackburn for symbolically bringing the space program into the space age, but this comic book or Flash Gordon graphic simplicity evoked an innocence that we’ll never see again.
Should NASA have returned to the “meatball” logo? No! There is no going back to the moment when Alan Shepard took Freedom Seven up into space for a 15-minute sub-orbital flight. It is also a shame that as a nation we are looking too much at our collective navels than into the far reaches of space for our moral compass.
This NASA swag is not a monument to design but it is a record of when heroics were valued and leaders were respected because they were heroes.
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