WAPAKONETA — Two special guests at this year’s Summer Moon Festival in Wapakoneta have special ties to local hero Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon.
However, both Don Thomas and Mike Mallory have have carved their own niche into the history books as well.
Thomas, an astronaut who is now retired, was on four space shuttle missions aboard Columbia, flying his first mission in 1994. Mallory was a Navy frogman who was one of four people who aided Neil Armstrong and the other astronauts out of the Apollo 11 capsule and onto the U.S.S. Hornet.
Thomas said he remembered Armstrong as one of his heroes as a youngster. He was 14 when Armstrong went to the moon.
“I wanted to be an astronaut since I was 6 years old,” Thomas said. “I was 6 years old and watched the first man in space from school. I followed John Glenn, and then I was well hooked by the time of Neil Armstrong’s trip.”
Thomas said he was inspired by the Apollo 11 crew, and he finally became an astronaut at the age of 35. It was only four years later when he took his first shuttle trip. Throughout his career, Thomas spent 44 days in space and made a total of 692 trips around the earth. He said a trip into space is like no other feeling.
“The whole trip to space takes eight and a half minutes,” Thomas said. “There is no ride at an amusement park that can compete with it. I had seen plenty of pictures, but there is nothing that competes with going to a window and looking at the earth a quarter of a million miles away.”
Thomas said Armstrong became more of a hero to him prior to his first mission. NASA allows astronauts to invite some VIPs to watch the launch, so Thomas wrote a letter to Armstrong, inviting him. Armstrong not only attended the launch but also met with Thomas for an hour the day before the launch. Armstrong also took the time to meet with Thomas’ mother, wife and son.
“That’s the kind of person he was,” Thomas said.
As the strongest swimmer in his unit, Mallory had the distinction of carrying an equipment bag off of the U.S.S. Hornet while swimming to the capsule. Their mission was to simply get the astronauts off of the capsule and onto the ship. Due to Armstrong and the other astronauts being in suits, Mallory never got a chance to speak to Armstrong. However, he does have an interesting picture album from the event. The album includes a piece of gold foil he scraped off of the capsule. The gold foil protects the capsule as it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere.
“Our mission was to make sure we got the moon rocks first, the astronauts second, and we were last on the list,” Mallory said.
The two are scheduled to appear several times at the festival throughout the weekend. They will help start the Run to the Moon 5K and 10K run at 7:30 a.m. today. They will be available for a question and answer session and book signing at the Armstrong Air & Space Museum from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Thomas will give a public presentation at 7:15 p.m. at the museum.
On Sunday, the two will give a presentation at noon and be available for another book signing and autograph session at 1 p.m.
Several other events will take place over the weekend with a schedule of events that can be found at http://www.wapakoneta.com/summer-moon-festival/.
.neFileBlock {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
font-size: 85%;
}
