This homage to the 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon is posted at the approximate time Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the lunar surface. Did you know, however, that before Armstrong made that famous footprint, he—and almost every National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) astronaut—walked the grounds of UNC-Chapel Hill?
From 1959 through 1975, Morehead Planetarium hosted an astronaut training program designed to teach stellar constellation recognition and stellar navigation. Neither Neil Armstrong nor Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr.—the first two men to walk on the moon—appear in this photograph, but both attended the training program on subsequent dates within the next few weeks. In total, Aldrin attended five training missions and Armstrong completed eleven at Morehead between 1964 and 1969, and the two trained together in the program twice, once in 1968 and once 1969.
In the photograph above by Wolf Witz from the UNC Photographic Laboratory Collection (negative 28733), twenty-one astronauts, about a month after their induction into the NASA space program, line a staircase at Morehead Planetarium on 10 June 1966, encircling an exhibit panel labeled “In Our Lifetime . . . .” The negative and photographic prints in the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives have no identifications, but we know from the Web page “Astronauts Who Trained at Morehead Planetarium and the Missions They Flew” that the following astronauts are in the photograph:
- Vance D. Brand
- John S. Bull
- Gerald P. Carr
- Charles Conrad Jr.
- Charles M. Duke Jr.
- Ronald E. Evans
- Edward G. Givens Jr.
- Fred W. Haise Jr.
- James B. Irwin
- Joseph B. Kerwin
- Don L. Lind
- Jack R. Lousma
- Thomas K. Mattingly Jr.
- Bruce McCandless II
- F. Curtis Michel
- Edgar D. Mitchell
- William R. Pogue
- Stuart A. Roosa
- John L. Swigert Jr.
- Paul J. Weitz
- Alfred M. Worden
How many of these men made it to the moon?
(The moon as projected inside Morehead Planetarium, 6 July 1962. The man in the lower left corner is probably planetarium director A. F. Jenzano. Photographer Richard McKee, UNC Photography Laboratory Collection, negative 23170.)