Tenth Man

Peter had the privilege of hearing Charlie Duke speak at a chaplains conference recently. He was the youngest man (then 36 years of age) to set foot on the Moon, and he was the tenth to do so. He talked about President Kenedy's bold vision in 1962 of sending humans to the moon before the decade was through. In 1969 it became a reality with Neal Armstrong being the first man to walk on ground other than Earth.

Charlie shared some unusual perspectives worth mentioning (He became an air-force pilot and was selected to train as an astronaut for the Apollo missions). He was a member of the 1972 Apollo 16 mission. It involved bringing with them a 'moon buggy'. "Why was the buggy's range restricted to 6 miles from the moon capsule? It was just in case there was a buggy break down." They only had oxygen for a 6 mile walk back. What about the moon dust. It was finely ground rock and it was everywhere. "You could kick it and it all fell back to the moon surface as fast as a heavy stone would. Why? No air."

Charlie showed footage of the landing, walking, jumping and buggy riding (even moon push-ups) and Peter noted how fast the kicked dust fell back. That was definitely something that helped dissolve the story that each Apollo mission was a hoax.

News has recently come to us that Neil Armstrong has died at 82 from failing heart complications. Forty-three years earlier he spoke to billions of people around the world from the Moon's surface: "one small step.." It remains one small step. We have lost one of the twelve who went there and we will do well to pause to consider how great the loss is. Only twelve out of seven billion people on Earth have done this. The missions came at great cost to the USA. Now there is another cost to bear.