Earth’s Moon has special meaning for Morrison resident Ralph Pedigo, and it doesn’t have anything to do with romance, astronomy, or the tides.
It has to do with one of the most ambitious projects humanity has ever undertaken, the effort to put a man on the surface of our moon.
Pedigo knows all about that effort, because he was fortunate enough to be sitting in the control room at the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex on July 16, 1969 when that historic mission left the launch pad at 8:32 a.m. with Mission Commander Neil Armstrong, Command Module pilot Michael Collins, and Lunar Module pilot Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. on board.
Oddly enough, many years later, Pedigo discovered a photograph online which showed the control room and its occupants, and he was able to distinguish himself at his panel, something which brought back vivid memories of an amazing time in his life and the history of the space program.
At the time of the Apollo 11 launch, Pedigo was an engineer with Boeing Company, which was responsible for the first stage booster for the Saturn V rocket. Though he was certainly aware of the importance of the mission, he was so busy doing his job he didn’t give much thought to making history, in part because he had been working on Saturn rocket launches and the Apollo program for some time, and had even been in the control room before on the Apollo 9 launch, so it was becoming almost routine for him and those he worked with at the space center.
“This was something we’d all done more than once,” Pedigo said. “I had actually been in the control room on the Apollo 9 launch and I was the last engineer to leave the pad on Apollo 10.”
Pedigo worked on the environmental control system which kept the first stage engine within the temperature range necessary for takeoff.
“It was challenging,” Pedigo said, noting any one of the engineers manning the panels in the control room could have stopped the launch at any time if they determined there was a malfunction. But he says there was one point where he did give the historic nature of this particular mission contemplation.
“I did one time,” Pedigo said. “About 30 minutes, I guess, before launch. Now I’d already gone through the stress of getting dealing with some issues. There had been some problems with S1 (stage one rocket) forward and S1 aft. When they loaded on the liquid oxygen you’d lose control if you weren’t really careful. I’d already gone through that because it had already been loaded. As I said, it was about 30 minutes before launch and I looked around the room and I thought ‘We’ve got guys out there and we’re sending them to the moon. We’re actually going to walk on the moon, and I am a part of this.’”
And so were a number of dignitaries, governmental officials and members of the scientific community, along with several astronauts.
“I looked back and Wernher von Braun was back there, and if I remember correctly Spiro Agnew, who was vice president at that time, was sitting in the observation room,” Pedigo said. “Now, they weren’t in the control room, they were in a glassed-in observation area. They could see us and we could see them. So I thought, ‘This is historic.’ And actually I did think about this. I grew up in little New Union, Tennessee, and I wonder what they would think of me if they knew I was here.
“After that, I didn’t think about it much longer, and that was all I related to Tennessee at the time, because, boy, at that point you need to be watching your gauges. If something happened, you need to be on it. You can’t be looking around and thinking about all sorts of things and something happen on your gauges and you don’t know it. You’ve got time to straighten it up most of the time if you see it, but you need to get on it right then.”
Since the control room was above the launch pad, those inside couldn’t see it, but Pedigo says once it launched you could see it go by the window on its way to the stars. He thinks that was what was happening in the photo he found online.
Though he had seen other launches before and many others since, this one was particularly majestic, considering its importance to human history.
“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Neil Armstrong said as he took his first step on the moon.
Once the Saturn V rocket was in the air, control of the mission switched to Houston, Texas, and Pedigo’s job was over. And as he knew prior to the launch, the Apollo 11 was to be his swan song with the space program. Though he could have stayed and watched the rest of the mission on TV, he and his co-workers chose not to do so.
“When Apollo 11 lifted off, we all went back to the office as we normally did,” Pedigo said. “At that time I had already scheduled a vacation and I turned in my two weeks notice, and I left to go to Mobile to get married.”
Armstrong stepped on the moon on July 21 and Pedigo married the former Ray Nell Foster on July 26. Ray Nell recalled how she felt about her new husband.
“I was quite excited,” Ray Nell said. “It was kind of like he was a celebrity. I always thought that was really special, a part of history we would always have and always remember.”
Once married, he and Ray Nell moved to the St. Petersburg, Fla., area and he went to work for an architectural firm. He eventually moved back to Tennessee and went to work at AEDC in Tullahoma where he worked for 21 years before his retirement in 1999.
Pedigo has two children, son Tim, a teacher at Blackman High School, and daughter Heather, a drug development coordinator at Sarah Cannon Research Institute. Tim and his wife Lise have three children, Nicholas, Lucy and Michael, who think it’s pretty neat their grandfather was involved in the moon mission.
“They’ve always known,” said Ray Nell. “We went to Florida a lot of times for vacation and we saw launches. That was always special to us. If we were anywhere near we’d always try to watch.”
These days Pedigo has put together photos and information about his experience and visits schools and other events on occasion to talk about his days at Kennedy Space Center and in the space program. Though Apollo 11 was the first, several other missions put a man on the moon, 12 men altogether, and these accomplishments are something Pedigo says he is proud to have been a part of in his life.
“To be able to do what we did, nobody ever did that before us, and nobody has done it since,” Pedigo said. “And we did that over 40 years ago. That was a feat. It really was.”