COLLEGE PARK, Fla. – I don’t think enough people care that we’re going back to the moon.
Before sunset on Saturday, Jan. 24, I took this photo of it from College Park, where I grew up and still live:
The moon can make any decent camera look like a toy, but the joke’s on her. Like with all celestial objects, there’s no easier way to really appreciate how far away the moon is than by trying to take a good picture of it and ending up with a speck.
Look closely and you’ll see another speck toward the bottom right of my picture.
That’s Delta flight 867 from Los Angeles to Orlando, an Airbus A321neo that left before lunch and landed on time ahead of a winter storm that canceled thousands of journeys across the U.S. the very next day.
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The flight was no more than 4 miles away from me when I took that picture, but the moon stays an average of 238,855 away from us at all times, or about 30 Earths, according to NASA. Even though it’s more than 25% the size of Earth and has a surface area comparable to Asia’s, the moon’s sheer distance makes it look no larger to us than the Delta jet does.
My point is, four humans are about to put themselves in a pressurized metal container in which they will travel that absurd distance, and hopefully return, during Artemis II.
Those four — NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, along with the Canadian Space Agency’s Jeremy Hansen — will be the first people to see the moon up-close in 53 years.
It’s a crazy thing to do and would make any explorer blush, which is perhaps why I don’t think enough people care that we’re going back to the moon.
For that matter, I also don’t think we’ve named enough things after John Young, the late NASA legend who grew up here in Orlando — and yes, I do understand the irony of typing that from a newsroom on John Young Parkway.
Young was the only astronaut to fly in the Gemini, Apollo and Space Shuttle missions. He was commander of the first Space Shuttle mission, the first astronaut to orbit the moon alone — doing so in 1969 as commander of Apollo 16 — and the ninth to ever walk on the moon, stepping out for three days of exploring during Apollo 16, which he also commanded, in 1972.
I say there aren’t enough things named after Young, that’s my hill, but I concede there are nice tributes to him, here and there.
You may have noticed his portrait at the red light on Princeton Street between Orange and Mills avenues, painted by artist Briana Vega. If so, you may wonder why the artist also took the time to paint a sandwich.
Young’s spaceflights began with Gemini 3 in March 1965, joining Gus Grissom — the second American to ever visit space — in becoming the first American astronauts to get out there as a pair.
The purpose of the Gemini missions was to put astronauts in orbit for periods longer than during the Mercury flights and to test them in microgravity, all in preparation for Project Apollo, but it was Young’s antics during Gemini 3 that added to our reasons to remember him.
As it’s recounted in a 2018 piece for the National Air and Space Museum, Young told Life Magazine that with Grissom bored of NASA’s space food — menu items that Young said came in plastic bags and required a water gun to “squirt liquid inside to reconstitute them” — bringing a corned-beef sandwich with them “seemed like a fun idea at the time.”
According to Young, his contraband corned-beef sandwich was thanks to astronaut Wally Schirra, who had it prepared at a restaurant in Cocoa Beach before Gemini 3 launched. Schirra was well known as a practical joker.
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In the transcripts of the Gemini 3 mission, Young tells Grissom, “Let’s see how it tastes. Smells, doesn’t it?” When Grissom took a bite, “crumbs of rye bread started floating all around the cabin,” he told Life.
Grissom put the sandwich in his pocket for the duration of the flight, Young remarking “It was a thought anyway… Not a very good one.”
It’s possible for tiny crumbs like that to pose a big threat during spaceflight—they can fly off and get wedged in any of the many pieces of equipment that keep a spacecraft running. (That’s why they use tortillas instead of bread aboard the International Space Station.)
Hillary Brady: "How an Astronaut Smuggled a Sandwich Into Space" (Nov. 2, 2018)
It should be noted here that Deke Slayton — who was NASA’s director of Flight Crew Operations at the time — wrote in his autobiography that he had actually given Young permission to stow the sandwich and only formally reprimanded him to satisfy agency complaints in post.
Less than two years after that happy memory, Grissom, along with NASA astronauts Ed White and Roger Chaffee, died when a fire swept through their command module during an Apollo launch rehearsal test on Jan. 27, 1967. It was retroactively named “Apollo 1″ in their honor.
The tragedy, the first deaths that NASA said were directly related to the U.S. space program, further led to a lengthy redesign of the spacecraft. The space agency didn’t resume human flights until October of the following year.
[MORE: Apollo Project overcomes tragedy to land man on moon]
Young’s portrait with his and Grissom’s sandwich overlooks Loch Haven Park and gives his likeness a good view of the Orlando Science Center, which we’re told was named after Young several different times before moving to its current building in 1997.
“In 1973, the institution went through a series of name changes honoring famous Orlando native son, astronaut Captain John Young,” Jeff Stanford, vice president of Marketing at Orlando Science Center, said in a statement to News 6. “These included ‘The John Young Museum and Planetarium,’ changed to ‘The John Young Science Center’ and subsequently to ‘John Young Science Center.’”
You’ll recognize the science center’s old building as what’s now the John & Rita Lowndes Shakespeare Center, where I got as far as playing King Lear in their summer camps years ago.
“OSC has a rich history of adapting to the changing needs of our community and serving as an invaluable resource for cultural experiences and engaging learning opportunities,” Stanford continued. “In 1955, a group of visionaries chartered a small nonprofit called the Central Florida Museum to stimulate active learning for visitors, interpret Florida’s natural environment, and adapt to changing times. The first wing of the museum built was the planetarium, which opened in 1960 and was one of the first constructed in Florida. In response to booming population growth and an increasing need for STEM education in area schools, the Board voted to become a ’hands-on’ science center, which led to technology upgrades and an expansion of the planetarium. Astronaut and Orlando native Captain John Young attended the grand opening of the new planetarium in 1971.”
John Young and his family had moved to College Park during the latter half of the 1930s. You can find a historical marker outside of his childhood home on Princeton Street, less than a mile and a half west of the sandwich portrait.
He may have had to move away for college after graduating from Orlando High School in 1948, but he was remembered here ever since.
Sheryn Minton, my grandmother, taught at Edgewater High School for 35 years. Her mother also taught, doing so at elementary schools in and around College Park.
Like any good teachers, they both found themselves able to brag about some of their former students. Maybe some of you reading this were my grandmother’s students way back when, but it was her mother who she says would talk about teaching John Young and Joe Kittinger at Princeton Elementary School, recalling them as rambunctious boys who understandably grew up to be daring pilots.
Young died about eight years ago last month, at 87 years old.
So it was, that on Jan. 5, 2018, in Houston, life ended for the only person who ever knew what it was like to grow up in College Park and to walk on the moon.
To my knowledge, it was also he and Grissom alone who knew the thrill of sneaking a sandwich into low-Earth orbit. That is, unless any of the Artemis II astronauts have anything to say, or smuggle, about that.