Apollo 11 press conference was awkward

As has been said, in those days it was always about the mission first. Who knows how much of the portayal of Ken Mattingly in Apollo 13 is fact or fiction, but he seemed to epitomize what the early astronauts were all about. He was understandably upset at getting bumped. But he put those feelings aside and worked his ass off to help the mission ultimately become a successful failure.

I find it honorable that none of these Mercury/Gemini/Apollo guys has tried to cash in (to my knowledge). They all seem to realize that while they were driving the bus, they were all a small part of a large team and that thousands of other people helped get them there.

 

Well, the Apollo 15 guys somewhat famously got in trouble for bringing along stamps that they intended to sell for big bucks.

 

There's a book just out on the Apollo landing called Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon
By Craig Nelson

 

I wasn't aware of the Apollo 15 stamps. I guess it was a long time ago, and I disremembered.

Some of them wrote books, did some commercials, ran for office and undoubtedly used their name to advance their campaigns, etc. I'm sure there's an exception or two but I can't remember any of those guys hawking autrographs and stuff like Pete Rose or some other huckster.

I still think, for the overwhelming majority of the time, the mission came first.

 

Competition among those guys for just a seat on a mission was so fierce, you didn't really think about being the guy "stuck" in the command module. You got a seat, and you were damn happy to get it.

Also, as has been stated earlier, CM pilot was No. 2 position on the crew (with LM "pilot" a distant third --- even the name is a misnomer, since the LM pilot does not fly the LM; the mission commander does). LM pilot basically just looks at gauges and reads the numbers to the commander.

Pete Conrad did a nice thing for LM pilot Alan Bean. After they had lifted off from the moon's surface and were en route to a rendezvous with the command module, Conrad let Bean "fly" the LM while they were on the dark side of the moon (away from Houston's prying ears). That gesture really meant a lot to Bean.

Actually, that was the second nice thing Conrad did for Bean. The guy who was assigned to be Conrad's LM pilot --- C.C. Williams --- was killed in an airplane crash. And Conrad suggested Bean as the replacement to be his LM pilot. Bean never would have gotten a sniff of that assignment without Conrad's help.

Remember, the country lost interest pretty quickly. I don't think many people know who Edgar Mitchell is, or that he is the 6th person to walk on the moon.

 

Seems to go hand-in-hand with that whole generation. A lot of those guys were pilots in WWII or Korea, weren't they?

 

Reading up a bit on the different missions last night, and they had a couple of other tributes to Williams. The mission patch had four stars -- three for the crew members and one for Williams. They also left Williams' pilot wings on the moon.

 

Yeah, and there was also the semi-scandal with Gus Grissom on Liberty Bell 7: when the hatch blew (regardless of whose fault it was) and he had to tread water in the Atlantic, his suit was supposedly weighed down with rolls of coins and other trinkets he was planning to sell (or give away) as souvenirs afterward, and he almost ended up going under as a result.

The astronauts were never very well-paid, although that was offset to some extent that they were basically comped on everything from Corvettes to new houses. I think when Armstrong flew on Apollo 11, he was making something like $25-$30,000 -- a nice salary for 1969, but nothing more than that.

 

I just finished reading "The Right Stuff." Really good read.

 

And they absolutely could not get life insurance.

 

Oh, I agree.

On the salary point, the Mercury 7 guys did get money out of exclusively selling their stories to Life magazine. (Again, not disputing the larger point that they were mission-first types.)

 

I love SportsJournalists.com. Only here can pioneering, mankind-changing space travel be equated with "blue balls".

And not only that, but until the third post or so, the metaphor rolls off me like normal.