This story was originally published in the July 18, 2014 edition of the Charleston Daily Mail.

It was almost midnight in West Virginia when Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon on July 20, 1969.

The next day’s Daily Mail proudly proclaimed “Astronauts’ Moon Blastoff Perfect.” A smaller headline boasted “U.S. feat awes mankind from Lapland to Poland.”

West Virginia natives Homer Hickam and Jon McBride certainly were in awe.

Hickam had become fascinated with rockets and spaceflight while growing up in McDowell County, experiences he recorded in his bestselling memoir “Rocket Boys.” He would later become a NASA engineer, of course, but that was a long way off.

Hickam, now 71, was 26 years old in the summer of 1969. He stationed in Fort Lewis, Wash., on his first duty assignment after a tour in Vietnam. He led a field exercise during the day on July 20, 1969, so he didn’t get to see the Apollo 11 land on the moon. But once his workday was over, he borrowed a Jeep and drove to the nearest officers’ barracks to watch Armstrong’s on walk.

“It turned out it was a barracks for junior officers heading for Vietnam so it was kind of a surreal setting. I was giving advice on Vietnam in between explaining how the moon lander was designed,” he said.

Hickam and the junior officers watched as Armstrong climbed down Apollo 11’s ladder onto the surface of the moon, delivering the words that would immediately become part of world history: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Jon McBride, now 70, heard those words at the Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia.

Although he would later become the first West Virginian in space, McBride was 25 years old and training to become a fighter pilot in Vietnam when he watched Armstrong step on the moon. He watched the moonwalk at his commanding officer’s home, surrounded by fellow pilots.

“We were all piled around his black-and-white TV set watching it unfold.”

Although Hickam and McBride were watching the broadcast thousands of miles apart, they both had the same thing on their minds. Both men desperately wanted to work for NASA but did not see a way to make that dream come true.

“They were already laying engineers off in the space program,” Hickam said.

McBride had wanted to be an astronaut since he was a child growing up in Sprague, W.Va., but the dream seemed as distant as the moon itself.

“The reality was so far away,” he said.

But McBride began working his way through numerous Navy assignments, getting promotion after promotion and proving himself as a really good pilot.

“God gave me this blessing with hand-eye coordination. I could really fly,” McBride said. “As I progressed through my navy career I realized, hey, I’ve got a good chance at this,” he said.

He applied to NASA in 1978 and, after surviving the agency’s intense weeding-out process, was made an astronaut in 1979. McBride went to space in 1984, piloting an eight-day mission aboard the Challenger spacecraft.

He now works at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, organizing events and speaking with visitors about the history of the space program. He said he thinks of the moon landing nearly every day.

“I’ll be 71 next month. I think in my life it was the most outstanding achievement mankind has done in my lifetime. I can’t think of anything more stupendous,” he said.

The moon landing left a lasting impression on Hickam, too.

In 1971, he became an engineer for the United States Army Aviation and Missile Command before moving to Germany as an engineer for the 7th Army Training Command. He finally began working for NASA in 1981, getting a job as an aerospace engineer at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. Throughout his
career at the agency he worked on several major missions, including projects with the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station.

He retired in 1998 to focus on his writing. His most work is a trilogy of young adult novels set 120 years in the future . . . on the moon.

Bob Anderson, 59, is the chief telescope engineer at the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Pocahontas County. The telescope searches deep space for new stars and planets. When something breaks on the telescope, Anderson is the guy to fix it. He has worked at Green Bank for 12 years, after spending 24 years working in the electric utility business.

He says the job is the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

“It’s kind of brought my passion for amateur astronomy all back together again.”

Anderson, who grew up in Chatanooga, Tenn., became interested in astronomy as a young boy. He joined his junior high school’s astronomyclub, and once spent the night in the bottom of a drained swimming pool looking for the rocket burn as Apollo 8 circled the moon.

He was 14 years old when Apollo 11 made the first moon landing. He remembers watching as Walter Cronkite delivered updates about the moon landing on live television, then spilling into the yard to talk about what was happening. Then, later that night, the family gathered around the television again to watch Armstrong’s moonwalk.

He said while we have high-quality footage of the moon landing now, the live broadcast left much to be desired.

“It was a very shadowy image. (Cronkite) had to explain, because he was hearing it from the people in Houston, he just had to give a verbal description of what we were seeing.”

That didn’t squelch Anderson’s enthusiasm, however.

“Everybody felt like that was just awesome. Here we are, we’re able see this from hundreds of thousands of miles away and be a participant in that.

“Television allowed us, as a world, to be participants in that.”