Race to the Moon – Friday Night
Posted by Brent Bernasconi in Events on September 8, 2009
This blog post is re-posted from thebernasconis.com, the personal blog of San Diego Space Board Member and San Diego Air & Space Museum Education Coordinator, Brent Bernasconi.
Working at a museum will most likely never land me on The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. However, I do get to attend cool events and meet extraordinary people. This past weekend was one of those times.
After the San Diego Air & Space Museum’s Apollo 8 event back in December 2008, the USS Midway Museum wanted (begged us) to host one celebrating all of the early United States space exploration. Months of preparation resulted in The Race to the Moon weekend.
With eight astronauts and two NASA directors (one flight and one the actual director), the Museum needed escorts and so they asked me. I was assigned Al Worden (Apollo 15) and his wife Jill. Before the V.I.P.s even showed up we needed to prepare for the events with two walk-throughs. The first took place at the USS Midway. On Friday, we drove down to the USS Midway for Saturday night’s walk-through. The briefing only lasted a half-hour and we had some time to wander around. Rossco, a former Navy helicopter pilot and now coworker, took us on a short helicopter tour making sure to show us the first helicopter (not actually his helicopter) he regularly piloted. (more…)
Back by popular demand, the Orange County Space Society member John Sisson will be giving an updated version of his program which focuses on how Walt Disney helped to ignite the flame of imagination and to show how the idea of going into space, to the Moon, and even to Mars, were not things of a far off future, but something that could be accomplished in our lifetimes. It is visionaries such as Disney that we could use again today to do what he did 50 and 60 years ago. John will have video and lots of display materials that should be very entertaining and enlightening. It should be a great program to bring everyone in the family to.
Join us for the September general meeting of the San Diego Space Society. Dr. David Schrunk of the San Diego Moon Society will give a lecture on the Planet Moon Project, which portrays a vision to transform the Moon into an inhabited sister planet of the Earth in the 21st century.
Join the San Diego Air & Space Museum and the USS Midway for a special, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet and honor our country’s space legends — the astronauts of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. There is no other, or finer team of men who represented our nation during a time of national challenge… the Cold War. Their accomplishment was in direct response to President John F. Kennedy’s May 25, 1961 challenge to reach the moon within the decade. They succeeded against all odds and in 2009 alone we celebrate the anniversary of Apollo 9, 10, 11 and 12. But it was the entire body of work, those three primary space programs, which accomplished so much and that we honor.
