03_Berry Magazine - Spring 2010

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A number of Berry alumni were instrumental to the Apollo program at NASA, as well as to many missions that followed. Among them are seven Berry graduates interviewed by Elizabeth Cady (08C) for this story on the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Bobby Duncan

57C what he said,” said Wagnon, a 1954 Berry College graduate and chief engineer of the lunar rover program at NASA. “It was very rewarding to know that you’d been a part of the huge effort,” said Wagnon. “A lot of people were involved in it (the Apollo 11 mission), several thousand in fact, but it was rewarding because your fingerprint was on it.” NASA, and the United States, earned a place in history when it placed man on the moon July 20, 1969. And a significant number of the engineers, physicists and mathematicians who made the mission a reality were Berry College alumni. “Berry taught you the value of work, and it was just a great place to go to school,” said 1961 alumna Ann Fite Whitaker, who after one year left a fellowship at the University of Alabama when offered a job at NASA. One of the few women to work at NASA in the 1960s, Whitaker said she took the job because so many other physics majors were interested in the space program at that time and “it just seemed like the thing to do.” During the Apollo 11 mission, Whitaker was working in the materials and processes laboratory at the Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Ala. One of her projects was developing lubricants that would work in outer space. “I saw the landing on the moon at home, and it was pretty late in the evening,” she said, and recalling her feelings at the time, she added, “It was kind of like you were working in the best place in the world.” However, working at NASA was no piece of cake. Wagnon would often work 40 to 50 hours of overtime, going home for a shower and a quick meal before returning to the office. “But I told people many times that I would’ve paid people to work there,” he said. “To me, it was so exciting. I was like a dead pig in the sunshine.”

Jack Jones

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Malcolm McDonald

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Larry Mullins

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Marion Sanders

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Wayne Wagnon

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BERRY MAGAZINE • SPRING 2010

APOLLO 11 LAUNCH PHOTO COURTESY OF NASA

Ann Fite Whitaker

LAUNCHING HISTORY

Jack Jones, who graduated from Berry in 1957 and worked at NASA for 40 years, didn’t want to miss the Apollo 11 launch. He flew from Huntsville to Cape Canaveral, Fla., around 1 o’clock in the morning the day of the rocket launch,


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