Satellite Dreams
As every school kid knows, on July 20, 1969, Commander Neil Armstrong and pilot Buzz Aldrin clambered down the ladder of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle and made history as the first humans to set foot on the surface of the moon. This feat was the culmination of a Cold War space race between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and the fulfillment of the goal proposed in 1961 by president John F. Kennedy of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” before the end of the decade.
In 2019, to celebrate the landing’s fiftieth anniversary, PBS broadcast Robert Stone’s Chasing the Moon, a beautifully written and edited documentary that captures the events leading up to that historic accomplishment. You can still catch the documentary on PBS, as I did this summer in anticipation of NASA’s next big moon mission—Artemis III, scheduled for 2026—which will be the first crewed lunar landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.
Using previously unknown archival footage and audio, Chasing the Moon puts the drama and excitement of the 1960s space race into context against a backdrop of social and political turbulence in a way I’ve not seen before.
And I was there.
I was just entering the 4th grade when my family moved to Cocoa Beach, Florida, in 1966, a few years after the start of the Apollo Space Program. My dad was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force and because of his work with the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, he was reassigned to Patrick Air Force Base to continue his work in the heart of Florida’s Space Coast. Dad worked with NASA and knew astronauts—one even came to a party at our house, although I was never able to get a straight answer from my parents who it was. (I’ve maintained all these years that it was Neil Armstrong himself, and no one has ever denied it.)
Outer space was the thing back then, and like many kids my age I dreamed of going there. Astronauts were flawed, wild, human, and heroes to my innocent eyes, “willing to sit up on top of an enormous Roman candle,” as Tom Wolfe put it, “and wait for someone to light the fuse.” Despite the risks, I desperately wanted to be one. Or, you know, maybe a surfer. Who knew that one day I'd go in a completely different direction and become a professional actor, then a graphic designer, illustrator, and writer? Probably everyone but me.
Who knew that one day I'd go in a completely different direction and become a professional actor, then a graphic designer, illustrator, and writer? Probably everyone but me.
Watching rocket launches from the beach was a common occurrence, and so family from all over would often come to see for themselves the dark, pre-dawn sky light up like daylight with the miracle of spaceflight. And whenever they visited there was only one place for them to stay as far as we were concerned: the Satellite Motel in Cocoa Beach. Despite the fact that the motel was only a few miles up SR A1A from our house on the base, my family usually got rooms, too, since we spent all our time there anyway.
I don’t remember why we chose the Satellite, since Cocoa Beach boomed with space-themed motels at the time: the Polaris, Sea Missile, Astrocraft, Starlite. Maybe it was the Satellite’s large pool and diving board, its proximity to the ocean for watching launches, or the Pillow Talk Lounge, which featured live entertainment and was the culprit in many a drunken evening, to hear my parents tell the tale.
My last encounter with the Satellite Motel was in the early 1980s, when I and a group of friends stayed there during a nostalgic road trip to the Florida east coast. We went for the kitsch and it didn't disappoint. We swam in the ocean, played putt-putt on the beach, drank at the Pillow Talk.
Alas, the Satellite Motel no longer exists, nor does its iconic revolving globe sign. I read somewhere that the globe came down in a storm, was stored somewhere on the property and eventually fell apart. A shame.
Unlike the sign, my memories of those days haven’t yet eroded. And thanks, PBS, for bringing it all back with the excellent Chasing the Moon. In the 60s, the space program seemed to unite our country in a way we could sorely use today. Sure, we have pressing problems to solve here on Earth, but perhaps NASA’s plan to return us to the moon by 2026 could have the same effect. The naive, star-gazing kid in me hopes so. As long as we keep politics out of it, we might just have a shot.
