Mark Hinson| Guest columnist
On Christmas Eve 1968, American astronaut Bill Anders quickly snapped a photo of the Earth as he and his Apollo 8 crew members became the first human beings to orbit the moon.
The photo, titled “Earthrise,” became a truly iconic, famous image. No one had ever seen the planet Earth orb rising over the lunar surface. Anders described how Earth looked so “fragile” like a “Christmas tree ornament” from way up there.
“It made me realize that the earth was small, delicate and not the center of the universe,” Anders told one reporter.
The vastness of space is good at making humans feel humble, I have always said.
Anders died in a plane crash earlier this month when the vintage Beech A45 he was piloting solo apparently caught fire and plunged into the sea in Washington state. He was 90. A sad but, somehow, fitting way for an astronaut to go.
Back home in North Florida, the NASA flight program of the ‘60s also inspired my older brothers. Only not in a poetic way like Ander’s image of our world. Excuse me while I travel from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Preparation for history
When NASA began strapping living chimps and launching them into space from Cape Canaveral down the state, my brother, Robert, decided to get in on the action.
Robert grew up on our family’s pecan and cattle farm south of Marianna. We had chickens running around in the backyard pen at the time. Little did one of the cluckers know that it was about to be conscripted for the first North Florida NASA mission into space. (If you are president of PETA or a preachy vegan, you should probably stop reading now.)
My oldest brother, Richard, around 13 at the time, helped by collecting Maxwell House coffee tin cans and carpet tubing to make the fuselage of the mini-Saturn V. He also helped with the rocket fuel, aka gunpowder, by cutting into the centers of M-80 and cherry bomb fireworks.
Robert’s pal Bo had a mother who was a chemistry teacher at a local high school. In those lax pre-Homeland Security days, they helped themselves to plenty of explosive materials to fabricate a concoction to give the rocket an extra boost to break Earth’s bonds. My brother called the mix The Devil’s Lunch Box.
The chicken astronaut got the necessary essentials for space flight. Corn kernels were poured into the floor of the capsule can in case the chicken-naut got hungry on its voyage. One paper ramekin of water was added for thirst. An old pillowcase with some strings attached served as a parachute for re-entry. Nothing but the best for the Cornish hen-sized Commander Cluck.
“We looked up at the moon and thought, ‘What’s the big deal?’” said Robert, who was around 10 when my brothers decided to send poultry into space. “It didn’t look that far away to us.”
Blastoff – emphasis on blast
A few kids from the Elsi-de-Mond Heights neighborhood rode their bicycles down the highway to watch the top-secret spaceshot. My brothers set up the launch site surreptitiously atop the brick backyard grill one summer morning. Mom was inside the house tending to me because I was still too young for such shenanigans. She did not know about the rogue NASA mission. She had four boys. She was busy.
If there had been a press conference, Commander Cluck would’ve said, “Bok, bok, bok. Bok, bok.” Which translates as: “For God’s sake, help me.”
The tiny chicken was placed inside the top coffee can/capsule. The not-very-long fuse got lit.
“It was basically tying a can on a stick of dynamite,” Robert told me many years later. “We had just a few seconds to light it and get around the corner of the house.“
My brothers and the other kids ran for cover to watch the liftoff. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five ….
Ka-BLAM!
Instead of taking off for the moon, the makeshift rocket sputtered into the mid-air, paused its brief ascent and exploded into tiny bits loudly not far above the launch pad. It sounded like a Howitzer artillery weapon had gone off. Tin can shrapnel went every which way. The windows of the house rattled. Some small ones cracked.
“There was a big magnolia tree in the backyard, and you could hear the pellets of corn hitting the leaves when they came raining back down,” Robert said.
Feathers slowly floated down from the sky. Commander Cluck didn’t make it.
“We were underfunded by the government,” Robert recalled.
The short-lived North Florida NASA program blew into pieces that day, too. My mother ran out the backdoor and yelled, “What in the pluperfect hell is going on?”
The world is enough
Back in space in ‘68, Anders snapped his famous photo after the capsule had been going backwards around the dark side of the moon. When the ship finally rolled around, bam, there was Earth rising 230,000 miles away. Click, click.
The image adorned postage stamps, served as the backdrop for CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite and sparked the Earth Day observations. Apollo 8 had gone all the way to the moon only to discover the most interesting thing was the blue marble where we lived.
Afterall, everyone had come from the blue ball dangling in space.
Socrates. Alexander the Great. Howlin’ Wolf. Julia Child. Harriet Tubman. The Beatles. The first cave painter. Marilyn Monroe. Teddy Roosevelt. Werner Herzog. Sophocles. The person who invented walkabouts. Isaac Newton. Isaac Hayes. Lady Di. Mozart. Jonas Salk. The first person who dared to eat an oyster. Genghis Khan. Jane Austen. Martin Luther King Jr. Tom Waits. Rasputin. Napoleon. Charlie Parker. Galileo. George Herriman. The inventor of ice cream. Gen. Patton. Ghandi. Georges Melies. Muhammed Ali. Diane Arbus. Eric the Red. Buster Keaton. Nelson Mandela. Catherine the Great. Michelangelo. The Wright Brothers.
Even little boys in North Florida trying to reach the moon.
Mark Hinson is a former senior writer at The Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at mark.hinson59@gmail.com
