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Neil Armstrong spent many hours practicing in simulators worked on by the late William Paulsen of Dallas, an engineer for Link Aviation, the Binghamton, N.Y., firm that built the simulators.
Photo courtesy of NASA
As he watched the lunar landing as a boy 40 years ago, Chris Paulsen noticed his father beaming over a bit of dialogue between mission control and the astronauts descending to the surface of the moon.
During the television broadcast on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil A. Armstrong relayed the status of the Eagle lunar module to NASA in Houston.
“Delta-H is looking good now,” said Armstrong, according to a NASA transcript.
“Roger, Delta-H is looking good to us. Right on time,” replied a voice from Earth.
“Throttle down better than in the simulator,” Armstrong noted.
The elder Paulsen’s ears perked up.
Rather than take it as a slight, Paulsen, a Dallas resident who died in 2002, took it as a compliment for himself and the other engineers at Link Aviation in Binghamton, N.Y., who built the simulators for the Apollo astronauts. After all, they helped prepare Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin for space travel.
“Neil Armstrong trained extensively in the simulators before they did the mission,” Chris Paulsen said.
In a way, his mother, Winnie, too played a part. She was on the secretarial staff of founder Ed Link and worked at the company with her husband.
Their son also joined Link after graduating from Penn State with a degree in mechanical engineering. He worked on a simulator for the space shuttle that is still being used. The 52-year-old Binghamton man has since taken over WEPCO Inc. in Pittston, the business his father started after leaving Link.
At the material-handling company he continues to put projects through their paces on a computer before sending them out into the real world.
“We simulate the system design before we build to prove it will work,” he said.
The hours and hours of pre-flight training paid off and allowed Tom Cupillari to release a relieving exhale as he saw the black-and-white images from the moon flicker on his television screen.
“The drama of the whole thing, to make the landing, it was very nerve-wracking for those of us watching on TV,” said Cupillari, professor emeritus and director of the observatory at Keystone College.
The lunar module could have crashed or Armstrong and Aldrin could have been stranded on the moon while Collins orbited above in the Columbia, and Cupillari, a 30-year-old professor at Keystone at the time, watched anxiously.
“Once they touched down there was even a relief, letting go of your breath,” he said.
Armstrong signaled success when he said, “Houston, Tranquility base here. The Eagle has landed.”
The drama heightened afterward when word of Armstrong’s piloting the spacecraft came out. The Eagle only had a “few seconds more for the retro engines” to fire because Armstrong “was looking for a smooth spot to land,” said Cupillari.
Mission control heard the confident and collected Armstrong explain what happened.
“Houston, that may have seemed like a very long final phase. The auto targeting was taking us right into a football field, a football field-sized crater, with a large number of big boulders and rocks for about one or two crater diameters around us, and it required a (garbled) on the 366 and flying manually over the rock field to find a reasonably good area,” Armstrong said, according to the mission transcript.
“Roger, we copy. It was beautiful from here, Tranquility, over,” came the reply.
Later as Armstrong’s boot left its mark on the lunar surface, he captured the magnitude of the feat with the enduring words, “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind.”
What Armstrong and the others saw that night won’t be seen as clearly tonight through the telescope at the observatory, since renamed for Cupillari, near Fleetville. In fact the moon will barely be visible as it wanes in its last quarter phase, he said.
When the Earth’s natural satellite is visible it stirs the memory of the landing for Bishop Emeritus the Most Reverend James C. Timlin. “Every time I see the moon I think of it,” he said.
The night of the moonwalk he was living in the cathedral rectory in Scranton. “The event itself was spectacular,” he said.
An active pilot at 81, Timlin said he prefers his prop plane to the Saturn V rockets that hurled the astronauts into space. He recently flew to San Antonio for a meeting of bishops.