What's Past is Prologue - Historian Frank Nickell on Apollo 11 anniversary

"What's Past is Prologue" series, an homage to William Shakespeare's "The Tempest", looks at events of the past that seem to reoccur later with remarkable similarities. Frank Nickell of the Kellerman Foundation for Historic Preservation, previously a longtime faculty member at Southeast Missouri State University, is primary historian for these articles, which are carried intermittently in the Southeast Missourian.

There are certain imprinting moments seared into the historical consciousness of Americans of a certain age.

The first moon landing is one such example.

Fifty-four years ago, on July 16, 1969, a powerful three-stage Saturn V rocket boosted Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins into space for a historic journey that four days later would see Armstrong and Aldrin step onto the lunar surface.

"You can't believe, unless you lived through it, how big of a deal that was," said Frank Nickell of Cape Girardeau's Kellerman Foundation, who spent 43 years on the SEMO history faculty. "Man walking on the moon captivated the world and it was a magnificent accomplishment. Earlier that same month, I accepted a job for a one-year teaching appointment at Southeast, but my wife and I were in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when the lunar module touched down. We were having a picnic behind our house, and the moon was so bright and clear that night. We looked at the moon all evening through my binoculars, and we were mesmerized."

Linda Godwin

Linda Godwin

Linda Godwin, 1970 Jackson High School graduate and NASA astronaut, flew on four space shuttle missions from 1991 to 2001. Her last flight aboard shuttle Endeavour was piloted by now-U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona.

Godwin, 71, told the Southeast Missourian in 2019 she vividly recalls Apollo 11.

"I had just turned 17 (and) definitely was watching at home with my family, in our house between Jackson and Oak Ridge, on what was a hot July day," Godwin recalled.

"I was really excited to watch it. I followed all of the early space programs," she added, specifically noting the coverage of late CBS news presenter Walter Cronkite.

Space race

In the 2020 television drama series, "The Right Stuff", a group of astronaut candidates was told the following by a NASA administrator after Soviet satellite Sputnik 1 was launched into space in October 1957: "The Russians are sprinting around the track and we (Americans) are still in the starting blocks tying our shoelaces."

On April 12, 1961, the Soviets further burnished their first-in-space credentials when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to leave the Earth's atmosphere before the U.S. could launch its first Project Mercury astronaut

Nickell said he has an impactful recollection of President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961, announcement to Congress that the U.S. would send an American to the moon and return him safely to Earth before the end of the 1960s.

"Apollo 11 was a demonstration of our desire to get ahead of the Russians," Nickell said, lamenting that the nation's 35th president did not live to see his promise fulfilled due to an assassin's bullet. "We Americans were afraid of the Russians because of Sputnik. They looked up and saw that little red light off the satellite in the late 1950s. People were thinking the U.S. had to do something to get ahead of them."

Of note

Nickell said he will not soon forget the rapid succession of events transpiring in his life in late July 1969.

"Within a two-week period at age 34, we had seen man step on the moon, we'd adopted two kids, we bought a house in Cape Girardeau, and I had taken a job at SEMO as a professor and had relinquished my position teaching high school in New Mexico. It was an amazing and rapid period of change in the lives of our family," he said.