Photo gallery: NASA 50th year celebration brings legendary Apollo astronauts to Dallas

Remember that Neil Armstrong fellow? You know, "one small step" and all that?

by John P. Meyer

On Fri. morning (Oct. 17), a select group of invitees crowded into the Hamilton Auditorium at the Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas (next to Love Field) for a spectacular special event.

To celebrate NASA's 50th year in business - and the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 7 launch (the first manned flight in the series) - the folks at Frontiers of Flight brought together some legendary figures from the U.S. space agency's storied past (and present!), including:

* NASA's current head honcho (i.e., "Administrator"), Mike Griffin

* John Healey, an engineer for North American Aviation, who worked on a redesign of the Apollo Command Module after the tragic Apollo 1 fire

* Gene Kranz, flight director on odd-numbered Apollo missions (which included all the notorious ones - though don't try to convince Alan Bean or Bill Anders of that!) and the only actual person to have been portrayed onscreen by both Ed Harris and Matt Frewer

* Alan Bean, Apollo 12 lunar module pilot and spacecraft commander of Skylab 3; now a successful painter who has been know to incorporate lunar dust into his canvasses

* Bill Anders, lunar module pilot on Apollo 8 and the guy who took the stunning "Earthrise" picture that forever changed the way we look at our planet

* Walt Cunningham, lunar module pilot on Apollo 7, retired Marine Colonel and a guy you still wouldn't want to piss off because it's my belief he might clock you one given the slightest provocation

* Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission and the first guy to walk on the moon. Who now - see if you don't agree - bears a passing resemblance to Herb Kelleher. (Put a shot of Wild Turkey in their hands, and I think I'd have trouble telling them apart.)

These guys sat behind a microphone-laden table at the front of the auditorium while WBAP's Mark Davis conducted a live-on-the-radio roundtable discussion. (Which I taped, and will attempt to extract quotable nuggets from for future posting.)

School kids from Hockaday, Highland Park High and the DISD School of Science and Technology - Astronomy Class were bused in to participate in the event.

There was supposed to be an audience Q/A opportunity, but the time ran so short (the fellows were due to be feted at a gala luncheon elsewhere on the premises) that only one query from the cheap seats was actually fielded - and that involved what we (as a society) missed out on as a result of the cancellation of the last three Apollo missions (numbers 18, 19 and 20).

While the expert assemblage agreed that the cost to proceed with the final Apollo missions would have been low (because the hardware and protocols were already available and established), it was pointed out that the money budgeted for them was gainfully applied to the Skylab missions, and to good result: Alan Bean (along with Owen Garriott and Jack Lousma) ended up spending 59 days in space, setting an endurance record.

Which led Mark Davis to ask Bean whether the story he'd heard was true, which was that - on the 40th day of the Skylab 3 mission, Capcom instructed the astronauts to go ahead and change their underwear. "Bean, you change with Lousma; Lousma, you change with Garriott..." According to Bean, all true - BUT it was an order with which the astronauts refused to comply.

There was a touching interlude during which Davis read the names of those Apollo astronauts who were no longer with us. To which Col. Cunningham added, "yeah, every time we have one of these meetings there'll be fewer and fewer attending until they're all gone. And I'm going to miss every one of 'em."