25 www.foothillstimes.com What attracts him most to this story may be how it was done by people who were, by most accounts, not from America’s elite class. “They came from absolutely ordinary backgrounds,” says Houston. “Bob Carlton, who watched over Eagle’s fuel supply as Apollo 11 was landing dropped out of school in the 9th grade. Dropped out of school in the 9th grade!” Houston says with amazed emphasis. He later joined the Air Force, eventually went to Auburn University, became an engineer, and eventually landed people on the surface of the moon. Ed Fendell to this day has a 2-year associate degree in merchandising. Ed says that he went to the Air Force, took aptitude tests and found out he was smart. Many people like that in today’s age, would’ve been thrown out of the hiring pool by a computer program. That’s not all that has changed. On January 27th, 1967 – during a practice launch roughly 3 weeks before its targeted launch date – Apollo 1 caught fire on the launching pad, killing the three astronauts aboard, Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. Something like that happening in the 24/7 social media world might’ve meant the end of the Apollo program. “In today’s environment, Twitter would go wild, Facebook would go wild, the 24 hour news cycle would go wild, and everybody would have an opinion about how NASA killed those astronauts, Space X killed those astronauts, and it would kill that creativity,” says Houston. Fortunately, Apollo went on to great success by people not a lot different than most of us … just ones completely dedicated to doing something spectacular. “We didn’t know that it couldn’t be done,” says Houston of America at the time. “And they came together, and they made it happen.”
20327FT
To see the actual publication please follow the link above