I am from "Rocket City USA" aka Huntsville, Alabama. We were proud of our NASA connections and all the work done there on rockets, astronaut training, and the Shuttle program. Little did I know I would grow up to teach what was considered the very water we drank back then and there as a unit in astronomy.
Each year, around this time, I do a deep dive with my astronomy class into the 1960's race to the moon by watching several of these episodes:
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_We_Left_Earth:_The_NASA_Missions)
Every year, I tear up at times and am deeply moved by what the astronauts went through and what was being accomplished by our country that might have been, in retrospect, the greatest accomplish ever made by a single country. The hardest hitting, of course is the Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom (likely to have been the first man on the Moon until then), Ed White (first American to do an EVA), and Roger Chaffee. Although my pathway through the Huntsville Public Schools did not include these, I had friends that went to all of these schools:
12 year old Kenny: "Who were those guys? They died in a training fire? Oh okay."
50 year old Mr. Rideout tearing up at the back of the classroom: "Oh, I feel like I knew those guys."
Funny, how time changes your perspective, isn't it?
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