The Moon Rock Window & Neil Armstrong

The National Cathedral dedicated a window titled the "Scientists and Technicians Window (Space)". These astronauts presented the National Cathedral with the moon rock on July 21, 1974, on the five year anniversary of the first lunar landing.

WASHINGTON, D.C. A true American hero is set to be honored in Washington Thursday. A public memorial service will be held for Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Armstrong died last month, at age 82. Services will be held at the national cathedral, but we spoke with the flight director of the mission that put Armstrong on the moon. By all accounts, Neil Armstrong would not have been comfortable with the tributes which have come since his death. He shunned the label of hero, though that's how he will be memorialized in Washington D.C. on Thursday. 

Washington National Cathedral's Space Window incorporates a moon rock from Apollo 11 at the center of the red circle in the stained glass.

At the Washington National Cathedral, embedded in one window is a rock brought back from the moon by Armstrong and the Apollo 11 astronauts, so it's fitting that one of the pioneers of space who brought that rock back would be given a public memorial there. Armstrong the man who made history so many years ago. He died August 25 after complications from cardiovascular surgery. He was 82. "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," former President John F. Kennedy said at the Rice University campus. 

It was 50 years ago Wednesday that President Kennedy set the U.S. on a course of space exploration. "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Armstrong said then. By 1969, the eagle had landed. Armstrong's boot marking on the moon the first human footstep. "We lost a tremendous human being. We lost a man who knew what he wanted to do," Apollo 11 flight director Christopher Kraft said. Armstrong was a private man but Kraft knew him as well as anyone. 

As NASA's first manned space flight director and director of flight operations during Apollo 11, it was Kraft who suggested Armstrong take that first step on the moon, not Buzz Aldrin. "We knew what he wanted to do, we knew how good he was at accomplishing whatever he set out to do and whatever we set out to do," Kraft said. It wasn't till 25 years later that the two talked privately about what they'd accomplished. Armstrong, Kraft notes, was unusually humble. That humility not found often among men who were daring to go where no one had gone before. "I didn't see that happen very often in astronauts," Kraft said. "He believed in the team, he believed in the people behind him." 

(L-R) Astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Annie Glenn, astronaut John Glenn and singer Diana Krall watch a bagpiper pass during a tribute to U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong during a service at the National Cathedral in Washington September 13, 2012.

An image of the Space Window on the memorial service program.

Window Cleaning - The Apollo 11 Connection

Those in our region privileged to have been a part of the Apollo 11 lunar project 40 years ago find the experience still inspires their imaginations. Harold Bauman (pictured), an attorney and Liberty village justice, worked as a project engineer responsible for testing many of the most critical components of the lunar module. During one part of the mission, Armstrong spotted a tiny doughnut-shaped object caught between one of the lunar module window's five thick plastic panes, a detail that had gotten past somebody's inspection. That somebody was Bauman, who was called up to Bethpage, Long Island to answer Armstrong's question.

"I saw my entire career flash before my eyes," Bauman said. Bauman was reminded of his father, who did back-breaking work as a window cleaner all his life so his son could go to college and be in that position talking to Armstrong on that day. "Neil, don't worry about a thing," Bauman told the astronaut, "that's just your window washer." A silence fell over the radio, followed by a chuckle, then laughter from Armstrong followed by laughter from the mission crew in Houston, who were listening in.

Barbara Tenke-Niles, who lives in Huguenot, also remembered a serious but good-natured team of engineers and astronauts who made the lunar mission possible. As secretary for the analog-digital department at Grumman, she was responsible for typing and retyping the specs for the lunar landing module, a model of which she played with on her desk from time to time, she said.
She remembered the astronauts as short. "I was taller than some of them," said Tenke-Niles who was five feet six inches. She also remembered workers punching holes in cards to be fed into a supercomputer that filled a warehouse-sized room. "This was the original start of the computer age. The printouts from these little keypunch cards could have lined the Long Island Expressway. I sit at my laptop and laugh at how easy it is now," she said.

Though the space program resulted in an explosion of technological and consumer innovations that make our lives more convenient and comfortable today, the promise of the program has lost its luster. Neil Armstrong gave this now famous observation about our planet while looking through the very window that was the subject of Bauman's "washer" joke.

"The Earth is nothing more than a spaceship carrying mankind and future generations through space, and because of that we must do every thing we possibly can to preserve this precious spacecraft," Armstrong said. The remark proved prophetic, considering our current problems with climate change, and depleting natural resources. Bauman believes it would take a national effort on par with the lunar space program to develop clean energy in time to save our planet. "That is the essence of the (Apollo 11 missions), that anything is possible, but that time is running out," Bauman said.