My grandpaw Julian worked on the shuttle program, and specifically on the guidance systems, as a Honeywell employee who was contracted out to NASA in central Florida.
He, alongside hundreds of others, is a part of the program’s history and one of the people who paved the way to the current Artemis II launch, and I’ve been thinking about him a lot as I’ve logged in throughout the week to watch this mission.
As I’m typing this, I have the livestream on in the background, the last few hours of the mission serving as a backdrop to a day of doing book research for a fellow author, and my own writing.
I wish I knew more about grandpaw’s specific role in the shuttle program. I have some of his old NASA patches and some photos of him in the office, but few paper records, thanks to a culling of his old papers from his house that happened before I was able to intervene. There’s a sense of loss, then, for not having a deeper knowledge of the work he did. But a sense of pride, too, and a renewed desire to try once again to learn more about his work.
What I do know is he worked on the guidance systems, and he worked with NASA for years, on many important missions (but which ones specifically?! Since I don’t have most of his records, or even all of his mission patches, I don’t have an answer to that). I also know he worked cared deeply for the work. My strongest memory of the Columbia disaster isn’t the shuttle breaking apart, it was talking on the phone with my grandpaw and hearing his voice crack as we talked: Probably one of maybe three times in my life I heard him cry. He was a complex character, and a highly inventive one (you should have seen his ham radio collection and cobbled together tools, some of which I still use), but our space memories are some of my most cherished.
I’ve loved watching the collective joy at this mission, which has been a needed balm when so much else about turning on the news or opening my phone is…not joyful.
And it brought to mind my family connection to the space program, and the reason that NASA always makes me think of food.
Decades after he retired, when grandpaw was in a nursing home, I was eager for ways to connect with him as much as possible with the little time he had left. But, I was also hours away in a PhD program, so I turned to one of my favorite solutions and started mailing care packages.
On a whim, I started packing up boxes of Moon Pies in there, in part a nod to his time spent helping with lunar missions. But the Moon Pies ended up being his favorite part of the care packages: To the point that I just sent him a new box every two weeks and stopped sending anything else, because nothing compared.
Grandpaw was hard of hearing, so phone calls were difficult, but he loved email, and so we primarily communicated that way, him sending messages in the stereotypical all caps. His Moon Pies became a daily ritual, and a daily email ritual for both of us: Each afternoon or evening, I’d get an email with one line: MOON PIE AND MILK TIME.
It was a marker of a ritual but also an invitation to conversation.
I’d reply and ask him how his day was, and from there we’d chat for either a few emails or many. I tried to ask as many questions as I could about his youth and about our family (though he wasn’t always terribly forthcoming), and the emails ended up becoming a record of his history that I probably wouldn’t have gotten if I had just rocked up with a recorder and started asking questions.
I ended up publishing an article in a student journal on his emails back in the sands of time, which you can read here.
There isn’t a larger point to this story besides that it’s been beautiful to see a lunar mission happen again. To remember some great times connecting with my grandpaw in part because of those missions. And to think how excited he would be if he were alive today, emailing me about Moon Pies and sending me frequent updates about the shuttle’s status.