Langley played huge role in putting man on the moon

HAMPTON -- Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, famously called the feat a "giant leap for mankind."

That leap 40 years ago today was made possible by scientific advances at the NASA Langley Research Center here.

Langley researchers figured out how to get to the moon, and they created simulators to test equipment and train America's first astronauts.

"This is where the whole space program started, right here at Langley," said David E. Bowles, a Richmond native who is Langley's director of exploration and space operations.

Langley was established in 1917 to advance the science of flight.

Today, the roughly 800-acre center looks like a futuristic college campus, featuring white, spherical buildings -- they help form wind tunnels -- hangars, labs and rooms housing everything from sophisticated computers to sad-looking crash-test dummies.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the nation's first manned space program, Project Mercury, was based at Langley. Several early astronauts trained there.

Langley scientists envisioned space flight in the early 1950s, but the program really took off after the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in October 1957. The feat hurt America's pride and aroused a fear that our Cold War enemy had surpassed us scientifically.

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The space race was on. And we had a lot to learn.

"Nobody knew anything about how people were going to operate in space or if they could survive in space," said Jim Wise, 80.

Now retired in Smithfield, Wise was hired as a Langley radio mechanic nine months before the Sputnik embarrassment. He became an engineering technician in the space program.

On May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard, one of the Langley trainees, rode a Mercury capsule for 15 minutes, 28 seconds -- essentially up and down -- to become the first American in space.

Four weeks later, President John F. Kennedy made a pledge and a challenge -- that the U.S. would put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of the decade.

No one really knew how to do it.

One camp called for building a massive, battleship-sized spaceship -- the classic craft of science fiction -- that would blast off from Earth, land on the moon and return.

There were other proposals, too, but Langley scientists devised the winning plan. It called for launching a modular spacecraft atop a powerful Saturn V rocket. The mother ship, or command module, would orbit the moon while a small lunar lander would go to the moon, return and link with the mother ship before the trip home.

The plan was attractive because, among other reasons, the small lander wouldn't need a lot of fuel. That meant less weight to lift into space.

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But what scared many scientists -- and kept the lunar-orbit method on the back burner for months -- was the difficulty of the in-space rendezvous.

Wise and others helped solve that problem by devising a simulator, in which the astronauts practiced the rendezvous by guiding mockups of the two crafts, suspended from cables in a Langley hangar.

NASA test pilots initially operated the simulator, to figure out how to make the contraption -- and the real deal in space -- work the way they wanted, according to Wise.

"Eventually this was training [for astronauts], but in the beginning it was everyone learning how to do it," he said.

NASA scientists created another simulator for testing the lunar lander. This outdoor lab included a massive A-frame, steel gantry, longer than a football field and nearly as high.

There, Armstrong and fellow astronaut Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin practiced in a suspended mockup of the lander. The Lunar Landing Research Facility, as the site is called, was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1985, and it's still used today.

One day last week, NASA test engineer Robin Hardy was supervising a controlled crash of a half-size mockup of Orion, a capsule being designed for a return to the moon. The crash testing could lead to ways to make the capsule more shock-resistant.

Hardy gets a thrill doing her job just a few feet from where the Apollo moon-mission astronauts trained. "I'm working in the shadows of giants," she said.

The current effort to reach the moon -- a possible precursor to a trip to Mars -- stems from a vision President George W. Bush announced in 2004.

Langley didn't do a lot of space work in the 1980s and 1990s, said Bowles, the space-operations director. Now, an Apollo-like excitement is brewing.

"In some ways," Bowles said, "for Langley's role in space exploration, it's a little like back to the future."

Contact Rex Springston at (804) 649-6453 or .