Meet Murphy Wardman. When I watched the final space shuttle launch 12 days ago, I kept hearing stories about what happens when it lands. Local residents were speculating that possibly the most memorable part of the shuttle era would be the window-rattling sonic booms heard as they fly home to land. I realised I had never in my life heard the boom of a super-sonic aircraft and with the shuttle program ending (and the Concorde already long gone), when would I get another chance?
So I came back to Titusville with my fingers crossed that the weather will hold out so they won't have to turn around and land in California. The forecast is good so far, but even if it doesn't work out, meeting Murphy Wardman today made the trip worthwhile.
Murphy volunteers at the "Spacewalk Hall of Fame" museum in downtown Titusville. Although it doesn't look like much from the outside, the dusty little ex-shopfront that houses the modest museum delivers a far more genuine space experience than its overpriced "official" cousin across the river.
But how does a donations-based community museum trump a multi-million dollar visitor's complex? Well, its only in the former that you can flip the switches of an actual Atlas rocket launch control, closely examine a real retro-rocket, reach out and touch a space-suit that was worn by a human on the moon and of course, meet and talk to people like Murphy Wardman.
Murphy started working as an engineer on the Atlas rocket program shortly after Russia launched its Sputnik satellite. He was in the launch control room flipping switches and trouble shooting problems as John Glenn blasted off to be the first american in orbit. He saw the Apollo program come and go, and now he has seen the same with the Shuttle. Murphy told me stories of how they ironed out kinks in the Atlas rocket design (a lot of the time it was by trial and error), of seeing people thrown across the control room when rockets blew up (because in the times before fibre optic cable, the control room was located only 500m from the launch pad) and of how some of his colleagues had been killed on the job (remarkably there have only been 47 deaths in entire history of the US space program). He talked with passion about the hands-on nature of his work and the exciting moments he lived through and was an active part of. Gadgets, technology and complex science was only a small part of it, creativity and working with others to overcome challenges was the bulk. Hearing him speak, I finally realised that a space program is not the impossible and exclusive domain of the world super powers, but rather an accessible and intensely human endeavour: one must simply have the vision to guide the way and the drive to overcome the associated challenges.
But of all Murphy's incredible stories, the one he told me at the very last was my favourite. When I asked him how he got the job in the first place, his eyes lit up and a smile brushed the corner of his lips. "Well," he said, "I came down this way looking for a job because I liked the weather. I had already gone down the west coast of Florida with no luck. I was coming back up the east-coast and down to my last $2 when I decided to see what was going on at the Cape. As I got close I recognised an old school friend walking by the side of the road and stopped to see if he needed a lift. He jumped in the car and the first thing he said to me was 'Are you looking for a job?'. When I nodded 'yes' he told me to turn the car around. We went back to where he was working and they signed me up that afternoon."
As they say, the rest (the Atlas rocket, John Glenn, Apollo, the Shuttle etc) is history.
