Moonwalker Charlie Duke touches down at event in Wolcott
Astronauts share stories from space travel at Vail Symposium event
Toni Axelrod/Vail Symposium
For the Vail Symposium, the Eagle has landed in the form of an action-packed program that took place at 4 Eagle Ranch on Monday featuring Charlie Duke.
Duke, in 1972, became the youngest man to walk on the moon.
“And still I am,” he told the crowd in Wolcott with a laugh.
Duke was joined by NASA Joint Test Panel Chair Doug Wheelock, who is in charge of building an astronaut training program out of the U.S. Army National Guard’s High-Altitude Aviation Training Site in Gypsum.
Duke and Wheelock were interviewed by Greg Dobbs, an Emmy-award-winning journalist who covered the U.S. Space Shuttle program for six years.
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A pair of F-16s out of the Buckley Space Force Base in Aurora flew side by side over the event before breaking apart, one heading north toward Wyoming, one headed south toward New Mexico, above the crowd.
Several members of HAATS arrived by Black Hawk helicopter, landing on the lawn in front of 4 Eagle Ranch.
Alan Shepard’s daughter Laura Shepard Churchley was among the hundreds in attendance; Alan Shepard was the first American in space and the fifth person to walk the moon. Laura Shepard Churchley, in 2021, traveled into space aboard the “New Shepard,” a passenger mission from private spaceflight company Blue Origin which was named after Shepard.
The important connections that helped the event come together were made by longtime Vail Symposium supporter Neal Groff, who said he was amazed by how well the event turned out.
“No matter what event we’ve had in the history of Vail, and I’ve been here since ’64, there’s not been one better than this,” Groff said.
Tang, twang and tranquility
All-you-can-drink Tang was the featured refreshment for the many children in attendance on Monday.
Those children quickly realized it was going to be an evening of great storytelling when the subject of Tang came up before the interviews began. Dobbs had not even started his line of questions, but Duke was ready with a hilarious story about discovering a single droplet of the orange liquid floating around in his helmet during a tense moment in space.
Making a sharp, inhaling sound, “I didn’t have strong enough lungs, and my tongue wasn’t long enough to get it back in,” he said.
Before Duke became known as the youngest person to walk the moon, he was recognizable for his voice and sense of humor as it was he who was communicating with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin back at mission control when Apollo 11 landed on the site of the moon known as the Tranquility Base. During that transmission, Armstrong made the instantly famous proclamation: “The eagle has landed.”
“I was so excited, I couldn’t even pronounce tranquility, it came out ‘twang,'” Duke said. “Then I corrected myself and said ‘Tranquility we copy you on the ground, you got a bunch a guys about to turn blue, they’re breathing again.'”
One of Dobbs’ themes in his questions was “why?”
Duke said he’s often asked that question, namely about the expense of the space program, and why the United States spent so much money on the moon.
“We didn’t spend a dime on the moon,” Duke said in response. “We spent it all in the United States of America. We had 400,000 people working towards a goal which is a national treasure today, and those 400,000 people got paid, and they supported the grocery stores and the filling stations and everybody else. The money spread out across the U.S.”
Wheelock, turning to Duke, said he also motivated future astronauts.
“Charlie you, in turn, inspired future generations, including me, so thank you for that,” Wheelock said.
Stories from space
Wheelock, a former commander of the international space station who has spent months at a time in space, said it took him nine years of training before he made his first space flight.
“I was thinking, ‘Man it’s taken so long to get to this,'” he said. “And then once I got strapped into that rocket it was like, ‘I hope I’m ready for this.'”
Wheelock shared some of his most intense moments in space, including an unexpected incident in which he was asked to engage in some high-consequence sewing.
“We were moving one of the solar arrays,” Wheelock said. “Then we heard the abort call, that the solar array had snagged when it was deploying, and it had started tearing the solar array in half.”
In the ensuing days, an out-of-the-box solution was developed.
“We decided that we were going to build sutures and go outside and sew up this solar array,” he said. “But it was a live-charged array beside a power strip that was carrying 210 amps into the mass canister.”
A plan was developed and executed to perfection, Wheelock said, but not without some second-guessing.
“We were going to go out and climb on this solar array and sew it up with metal tools and metal suits, and I’m thinking, ‘Is this OK?'” Wheelock said. “We ended up doing the spacewalk, and I’m thinking this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen … but we built five sutures and we sewed up this solar array and it worked.”
That was 2007, and when Wheelock returned in 2010, “the first thing I did was run to the window and look out, and there were those sutures, stretched out all nice and firm on the solar array.”
Duke said one of his best stories from his astronaut days involved a lost item in space. Ken Mattingly, who joined Duke on the Apollo 16 mission, had taken off his wedding ring in the spaceship and it became lost for days.
“Then on the way back we had a spacewalk,” Duke said. “(Mattingly) floated out and started working on an experiment, and I’m looking at this through the hatch … and I look over and there’s his wedding ring, floating out the door.”
Duke said it took about a minute for the ring to exit the craft, but when it did, “it hit him on the back of the head, and it took a 180-degree bounce and came right back towards the hatch, and a minute or two later it floated right in front of me and I grabbed it.”
‘A relationship with the creator’
Amid all the well-researched questions from the veteran interviewer Dobbs, it was a 12-year-old boy who elicited the most personal story from Duke with a simple question.
“What do you say about God when you’re in space?” asked Steil Thompson, who is a member of the Eagle County Composite Squadron cadets of the Civil Air Patrol and is going into seventh grade.
Duke’s response: “I came back from the moon, and I was one of 12 men who had done that. After the flight, I went to work on space shuttles, and I was at the top of my career at 36 years old, and I was empty — what am I going to do now, how are you going to top a flight to the moon?
“I struggled with that for about four years before I decided to leave NASA, and I took my eyes off the moon and put them on money. But our marriage, it’s 61 years now, but it was on the rocks in 1972-73.
“She was suicidal, and was going to end it all, and some people came to our church and told us about faith in God, and how it could change your life, and she did, and I watched her change from sadness to joy.
“Shortly after that, I made the decision that what I really needed in life was not more money, not more prestige, not fame, but a relationship with the creator of the universe. And that changed my life.”
