Long Island's legacy and its contribution to Artemis II

Late last year, a team of engineers from the Northrop Grumman Corp. spent a week scouring thousands of archival documents at the Cradle of Aviation Museum on Museum Row in Uniondale.

Museum curator and historian Joshua Stoff said these included not only blueprints Long Island-based Grumman engineers used in the 1960s to build the Lunar Excursion Module that first carried astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, but a mission-related letter to scientists and engineers — a document Stoff described as “Lessons Learned.”

“It was,” he said, “almost a letter to the future.”

While the author remains unknown, Stoff said: “It was written in 1972 and appears to be the thoughts and assessments of Grumman engineers at the time. That if anyone wants to build another lunar lander, if we ever go back to the moon, here’s what worked — and here’s what didn’t. And, here’s why.”

As soon as March 6, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration — NASA — will launch Artemis II, the first crewed mission of its Artemis Project. The launch date depends on preflight testing, including a dress rehearsal today, Thursday, at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA said Artemis II will “verify today’s capabilities for humans to explore deep space and pave the way for long-term exploration and science on the lunar surface.”

The crew of Artemis II won’t land on the moon.

Like Apollo 8 in 1968, the crew will orbit it — but at about 4,600 miles away from the moon, compared to Apollo 8’s 10 orbits at about 60 miles away.

Still, for the first time since Apollo 17 departed the lunar surface in December 1972, humans will return to the proximity of the moon.

Subsequent Artemis flights hope to land on the moon by the end of this decade. Eventually, NASA plans to launch a crewed mission to Mars.

Builders tied to the Artemis program include SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Although the technological advances are light years ahead of the abilities that backed those old Apollo missions, the science that could help again attain that goal remains the same.

Which is why, Stoff said, the archived documents matter — a reminder of Long Island’s role in reaching the moon, and perhaps returning there.

LONG ISLAND’S CONTRIBUTIONS

More than 30,000 workers on Long Island were employed by Grumman in the 1960s. At least 9,000 of them worked on the Lunar Excursion Module.

Grumman wasn’t alone. Kollsman Instrument Company in Syosset and Elmhurst, Queens; ARMA, American Bosch, in Garden City; Fairchild Camera and Instrument in Syosset and Huntington; Republic Aviation in Farmingdale; and EDO Corporation in College Point also supplied critical components.

Brooklyn native, Richard Dunne, 88, a graduate of the Academy of Aeronautics, now Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology, was chief spokesman for the Grumman Lunar Module program that landed a total of 12 Americans on the moon as part of the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17 missions between July 1969 and December 1972.

“Unless you’re of a certain age, I don’t think you have any idea of the connection between Long Island and man going to the moon,” Dunne, of West Islip, said in a phone interview this week from his winter home in Punta Gorda, Florida.

“No other place in the world can say they were the place where they designed — and, built — a machine that landed men on the moon, then brought them home again,” Dunne noted.

PRESIDENT’S VISION

It was Sept. 12, 1962, in a speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas, that then-President John F. Kennedy made his famed pledge about the moon.

The space race — a heated Cold War battle between the United States and the then-Soviet Union — was in full bore. And America was trailing. Badly.

Starting with the launch of the first intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957, the Russians racked up a series of historic firsts: the first satellite, the first mammal in orbit, the first unmanned spacecraft to reach the moon and the first human in space.

Noting the United States had ridden the first waves of industrial revolution, of modern invention, of nuclear power, Kennedy pledged to the crowd gathered that day: “ . . . this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it — we mean to lead it.”

And moments later he uttered those iconic words: “We choose to go to the moon,” he said. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . . ”

‘EARTHRISE’

Days before Christmas 1968, NASA launched Apollo 8, the first crewed space flight to orbit the moon.

The astronauts in the command module atop that Saturn V rocket, a three-stage rocket longer than a football field, would not land on the lunar surface.

But Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders would not only be the first to see the far side of our lunar neighbor. They would chronicle another first — in a photo by Anders capturing Earth, solitary against the vast blackness of space, rising over the moon.

Taken on Christmas Eve, Anders later said of that “Earthwise” picture: “We set out to explore the moon — and, instead, discovered the Earth.”

Armstrong and Aldrin would be the first men to reach the surface aboard the Grumman-built Lunar Excursion Module flown by Apollo 11. The last moon mission, Apollo 17, would land on Dec. 11, 1972, and depart the lunar surface three days later.

Three subsequent Apollo missions were canceled because of budget cuts and declining public interest.

The Artemis II crew — commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen — includes the first person of color (Glover), the first woman (Koch) and the first non-American (Hansen, a member of the Canadian Space Agency) to leave low-Earth orbit.

They’ll journey the more than 230,000 miles to the moon, circle it, then return to Earth, landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California.

The mission will take 10 days.

“We made it to the moon in 1969 with technology frozen in 1962,” Stoff said. “When you look at the Lunar Module, it’s like looking at the cockpit of a World War II aircraft — not a spacecraft. There’s no digital instruments.”

As Dunne said: “You have more technology on your cellphone than we had back then going to the moon . . . But the how of how they’re doing it? That’s pretty much the same.”

INTERNATIONAL RIVALRY

As a young radio reporter, Rubenstein Communications managing director Gary Lewi broadcast two Apollo missions from a Grumman studio in Bethpage.

“What I could never have imagined then is that it would be 50 plus years before we would return to even lunar orbit,” Lewi wrote in a recent email.

Stoff, Dunne and others said while this time it isn’t the Soviet Union pushing America into space, growing interest from other nations, particularly China, has sparked renewed enthusiasm in the moon and beyond.

As NASA explained on its official Artemis website page: “The moon is a 4.5-billion-year-old time capsule . . . We’re going back to the moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits and inspiration for a new generation of explorers.”

Interestingly, the official Artemis mission patches recreate the Earthrise scene as their logo.

Will Americans follow the missions flown by Artemis? Will the world? Some, like Dunne, think maybe for the earliest missions — though, he fears the “been-there, done that idea” means interest will soon wane, as it did with the later Apollo missions.

For now, NASA is doing all it can to create interest, including an online promotion for a “Boarding Pass” to send your name “around the moon.”

As of Wednesday, more than 5 million boarding passes had been claimed by the public, NASA said. (Visit nasa.gov/send-your-name-with-artemis to register).

Closer to home, a real Lunar Excursion Module — one scheduled for a canceled Apollo mission — remains on display at the Cradle of Aviation.

“It’s hard for some to grasp, that there once was this ‘Space Race’ — and, that Long Island was part of it,” Stoff said. “Long Island was integral to getting us to the moon. And because of that history, in some way, it now will be again."