"Final Countdown: NASA and the End of the Space Shuttle Program" by NPR's "space expert" Pat Duggins

"Do you drink Tang?" National Public Radio's Madeleine Brand once asked me.

I get that question occasionally.

Anyone who grew up in the 1960s might remember Tang, which was
the orange-flavored powdered drink mix the astronauts supposedly took
with them to the moon as the United States battled the Soviet Union to
put the first man on the lunar surface. As NPR's resident "space expert,"
I contribute about an hour's worth of stories each time a shuttle blasts
off. That's in addition to whatever unmanned spacecraft NASA launches
from the Cape, or missions the Russians, Europeans, Japanese, and now
the Chinese undertake. That often leaves colleagues and listeners with the
impression that I eat my meals through a plastic tube, NASA style.
That's not precisely the case. But in the late 1960s, I admit, I was one of
those kids waiting for Tang to make its way onto store shelves. My folks
were under strict instructions to keep an eye out for the jar that had the
small plastic Apollo lunar rover, or moon buggy, shrink-wrapped onto it.
No buggy, no sale.

Project Apollo was the stuff of pop culture back then as well as a
driving force in grocery stores. Local moviegoers lined up to see 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and actress Barbara Eden incurred the ire of network television
censors by baring her belly button on I Dream of Jeannie. Her costar, Larry
Hagman, played an astronaut, and the show was set in Cocoa Beach near
the launchpads of the Kennedy Space Center. The city commemorated the
connection by renaming one of its roads I Dream of Jeannie Lane.

My father was an air force chief master sergeant, and my family was
stationed in Alaska when astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed
on the moon during the historic mission of Apollo 11 in 1969. The two men
opened the hatch on the lunar module called Eagle around 10 p.m. Eastern
Daylight Time. That meant most schoolkids had to stay up late to watch
the first man walk on the moon. At our home in Anchorage in the Alaskan
time zone it was four hours earlier, and we were just sitting down to dinner
when the phrase "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind"
was uttered for the first time.

In 1971 my father was transferred to Patrick Air Force Base, which sits
just south of Cape Canaveral in Florida. That meant the exciting notion of
being in the middle of the space program that put Tang on store shelves
and Barbara Eden's navel into the nation's consciousness. I remember
walking into my backyard to see Apollo 14 blast off with Mercury pioneer
Alan Shepard as a member of the crew. Unfortunately, Neil Armstrong had
already beaten the Russians to the moon two years previously, and budget
cuts were already chipping away at NASA. Instead of wading into a vibrant
space program, I was a witness as time was running out for Apollo.
There would be just three more lunar landings. After that, the U.S.
space program would surrender the moon. Astronauts who dreamed of
kicking up the gray lunar soil would be reduced to fighting for a seat on the
Skylab space station. The only alternative was one of the three crew positions
on the last Apollo capsule, which would dock with a Russian-built
Soyuz spaceship. Long after that came the troubled space shuttle. For me,
it was like discovering the Beatles just as the Abbey Road album was coming
out and Paul was thinking about Wings.

© 2007 Patrick Duggins
University Press of Florida