HUNTSVILLE — The successful landing of Apollo 11 on the Moon 50 years ago to the day is famously known as a “giant leap for mankind.” However, to one Alabamian, it meant the world.
Speaking at the Apollo 11 50th anniversary dinner at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center on Tuesday, the anniversary of the launch which was powered by an Alabama-built Saturn V rocket, Teledyne Brown Engineering President Jan Hess shared the emotional story of how much the historic mission’s culmination meant to her and her family.
Hess, a 2018 Yellowhammer Woman of Impact, now leads the very Huntsville firm that was the first high-tech company established in the city in the 1950’s to help Dr. Wernher von Braun build the Redstone Rocket, the first large American ballistic missile.
Noting the company’s early work with von Braun, Hess said, “They too believed the impossible was possible.”
She and her eight siblings grew up in the Rocket City, and Hess remembers the Space Race vividly, saying she “grew up hearing amazing things happening at [Redstone] Arsenal.”
“My dad’s excitement about man landing on the Moon was contagious,” she told the crowd on Tuesday. “So much so, that I wrote a series of books — five pages [each], very large print — about an astronaut named ‘Jerry,’ who first visited the Moon and then every planet. I was seven years old. But you see how a seed can be planted. And then another. And then another.”
One of the questions that all speakers were encouraged to answer was where they were when man landed on the Moon on July 20, 1969 at 2:17 p.m. CST.
Hess explained why she would never forget the answer to this question for two intertwined reasons.
“I believe my recall is close to perfect,” she emphasized.
“I was ten-years old, and I was watching the landing on TV with my father and my mother and some of my siblings,” Hess recounted. “It was perfectly quiet in the room, except for my mother’s voice, recounting to my father what was being shown and said on TV. Her voice was steady but conveyed the significance of what was occurring. You see, we were in my father’s hospital room. So, although we didn’t know it, he was within hours of the end of his battle with cancer. And he met one of his missions — and that was living to see man land on the Moon.”
“So, I want to salute and thank the men and women who worked tirelessly over 50 years ago, [who made that moment possible and inspired future generations and space exploration],” Hess concluded.
You can relive the golden anniversary of Apollo 11 in real-time here.
Sean Ross is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
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