My extremely small part in the history of human spaceflight
First, a bit of backstory. I have been a fan of science fiction and space exploration all my life. I grew up on Long Island, a suburb of New York City; at the time it was the home of several major aircraft manufacturers. The best-known of these was Grumman Aircraft, now a part of Northrop-Grumman. My father worked for Grumman, and they had quite a list of benefits for their employees. One of these was a scholarship program for the children of employees. If the student was planning on majoring in a scientific or engineering discipline, they could enter a competition for a limited number of scholarships - the idea was that the student would come to work at Grumman after they got their degree. I was graduating from high school in 1964, planning on majoring in physics (I already had plans that I believed would get me into the space program... but that's another story). I had my father enter me in the scholarship competition. I was the first female who had ever entered.
I didn't win a scholarship, but everyone who made it to the final elimination got a sort of "consolation prize": the offer of a summer job at Grumman while they were going to college. The rationale was that the budding engineer or scientist would get some practical experience in how aircraft were built, so they wouldn't later design something that could (as the guys on the shop floor put it) "only be assembled by a triple-jointed midget with prehensile toes". But they didn't want to give me a regular factory job. I told them they could put me in the wire-harness assembly room; they already had women working there, and my father had taught me how to solder mil-spec when I was twelve (he had worked in the wire-harness room himself for a while). But they gave me clerical jobs. One was in the engineering building, in the blueprint library, helping to file, copy, and otherwise keep track of all the working drawings for all the different aircraft Grumman built.
Grumman built the Lunar Modules. During the scholarship competition, all of the student applicants got to sit in a sort of "practice version" of the LM cockpit. And, yes, I found myself folding and shelving and handling the LM blueprints, among others. As the date for the Apollo 11 mission (in the summer of 1969) - the first one where the astronauts were scheduled to actually land on the Moon - drew near, there was a lot of excitement at Grumman. One feature of the LM was a big green light on the control panel, bearing the words "LUNAR CONTACT". Pressure sensors in all the legs would detect when the LM was solidly on the surface, and the green light would light up. Every Grumman employee, including me, received a green button that resembled the light. On that Sunday afternoon, the 20th, I was watching TV and clutching that button so hard that the point of the pin drew blood. As the LM landed, piloted by Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin called out to him, "Contact light! Okay, engine stop." At that moment, with tears of joy streaming down my face, I knew that the big green light had come on as designed. Then Armstrong spoke the words we all know: "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." ("For the Eagle has landed; tell your children when!") I still have the button.
A couple of hours later, as Armstrong was getting ready to leave the LM, a friend of mine from another town - a fellow SF fan and space nut - phoned me; he wanted to watch the "moonwalk" with somebody, but the only person he knew who would understand was me, and the only way we could watch it "together" was on the phone. As we waited, I told him about the LUNAR CONTACT light/button. We were each at our TV sets (again, crying tears of joy) as Neil stepped down and delivered his other historic (albeit rather lame) line.
As I said, Grumman built all of the Lunar Modules, including all the leftover ones you might see in museums, and the ones that were left behind on the Moon. When the Apollo 13 mission went bad, it was Grumman engineers, working round-the-clock in the same building where I had filed blueprints, reconfiguring the LM and relaying instructions to the crew, and managing to bring the astronauts safely back to Earth.
And I had a very, very small, and very indirect, part in all of this...
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