This just in from today's AP -- notice the references to slide rules!



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NASA Marks Apollo 11's 35th Anniversary
54 minutes ago


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By PAM EASTON, Associated Press Writer

HOUSTON - Johnson Space Center staff and retirees Tuesday marked the
35th anniversary of the first manned lunar landing with MoonPies, a
vintage car parade and proud reflections of a deed that dazzled the
world.

The celebration was a far cry from the 1969 bash that some remembered
as a "drunken orgy" to mark the safe return of the Apollo 11 crew of
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.

"The cigars came out," retiree Norman Chaffee, 67, said Tuesday. "The
flags came out. Boy, you put away your slide rule. For about 24 hours,
there were people stumbling out there on the road. That was just a
tremendous party."

It was also a time of less technology � and less bureaucracy, veterans
recalled.

"I stared up at the moon and couldn't believe what we had just done,"
JSC's chief engineer, Jay Greene, said as celebrants browsed mock-ups
of the moon's surface, a personal hygiene kit that traveled with the
astronauts, newspaper articles from 1969 and pictures of the crew that
flew the famed mission.

"We went to the moon with slide rules," noted Chaffee, who worked on
the spacecraft propulsion system. "I didn't even have my first
full-function calculator until 1972. There was much less bureaucratic
oversight at that time. People generally felt like if it made sense, go
ahead and do it.

"We were much less risk averse. Now with the Challenger accident and
the Columbia accident and some of the other things, we have become so
risk averse that we don't dare do things," he said, adding: "The key is
to take responsible risks."

Randy Stone, deputy director of the Johnson Space Center, said many
things made the Apollo era easier than today for space projects. "We
were in the Cold War," he said. "We were in a technological race that
most people believed we could not afford to lose.

"The naysayers didn't have as much influence," Stone said. "It was
still hard to get money, but it wasn't near as hard as it is today."

Stone said accomplishing something great, however, is difficult
regardless of the era: "Technical things and things where you are
putting people's lives at risk are tough at any time."

The challenges of the Apollo 11 mission were so all-consuming that
Cecil Gibson, who also worked on the rocket's propulsion system, said
he didn't even know his first child had been born until three days
later.

"By the time it kind of settled down and I got a chance to go home, I
had a 3-day-old daughter," Gibson recalled Tuesday. "We called her the
moon baby."

Milt Heflin, chief of JSC's Flight Director Office, said taking a man
to the moon was the "gutsiest thing that we have ever, ever done.

"At that time, you could feel it. Man, we were on a roll," he said.




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