Covering Space– Life at the Cape by Ron Steinman Covering Space — Life at the Cape by Ron Steinman In coming days over the next several weeks you will read and see stories about the wonders of the past space program and America’s many trips to the moon. Having covered space there are many things I could tell you about the space program though I can tell you almost nothing about space flight itself. The mechanics of rocketry have always eluded me. NBC News had three terrific reporters covering space at that time. Frank McGee was the anchor of our coverage: calm, collected and very knowledgeable. Roy Neal and Jay Barbree were the two principal reporters who did admirable work. I and the other writers and producers left it to them to explain what was going on. If not at the Cape for a launch, McGee worked out of huge mockup of a space capsule that took up a whole wing of a major studio in the NBC Building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Jim Kitchell was our executive producer and he knew space as well as anyone alive. In the early 1960s I spent time with the NBC News space unit in New York. My first assignment was to write introductions to almost 200 prepared pieces that we would use during preparations for a flight, during lulls in coverage, when we went to a commercial and returned to the live broadcast. It may have been the dullest assignment I ever had. But I did what I had to do and wrote thirty and forty-five second intros to all those pieces, then filed them away until we needed them. In time, I covered Gemini flights, Challenger, the space shuttle Columbia. And had a lot of fun doing it despite the primitiveness of the conditions we had to endure. In Florida we worked out of barely serviceable aluminum trailers that had white asbestos siding and no air conditioning. We kept the small windows closed to keep out the bugs, sand flies and sand in general. Our working conditions were terrible but it hardly mattered considering the story we were covering. We used manual and electric typewriters. Computers and smart phones did not exist. We wrote our notes with ballpoint pens and Number 2 pencils and kept those notes on legal size lined yellow pads or in stenographer notebooks. When we typed our stories, we hoped the ribbons would not tear or snap because replacements were near impossible to find. There were no hardware stores near the space center to buy needed supplies. The mostly men and the few women who ran things for NASA lived and worked under similar conditions as we did, in the same motels, eating the same food in the few restaurants on the Cape. At work, they sat at rows of plain desks with TV screens and the basic computers they needed to calculate the flight, manned or not, they would direct on the day of a launch. Men wore either short sleeve white shirts or long sleeve shirts with dark ties pulled as tight as possible against their close shaven necks. Their upper left hand pocket usually had a plastic pen and pencil holder filled with more pens and pencils than one could count. Remember in this time before smart phones and our ubiquitous pocket computers, they did their calculations by a slide rule in its own leather case attached to the belt on the engineer’s waist. A plastic holder with their nametag hung around their neck. The low level buzz at mission control sounded as if it was coming from a moderately active hive. It was as if the Stepford husbands were in charge. Their genius was that these engineers conducted their work under the most trying of conditions and succeeded marvelously. We had dial phones that were off the scrap heap. Every ring sounded the same. We did not have the option of choosing our own ring tone. Our tape editing equipment flown in from New York surprised us when it did not crash because of the heat and sand, our common enemy. Using razor blades, a magnifying glass, and store bought Scotch tape and sometimes prayer, we edited pieces slowly, carefully and hoped the tape we joined the edits with would stick when we fed material into a network program for broadcast. Wastebaskets overflowed with discarded newspapers (remember them) empty paper coffee cups, and various iterations of scripts that never made it on the air. People shared battered desks and chairs in seriously overcrowded conditions but it did not matter. The story mattered more. But what also mattered were the good times that went with what we did for a living. Part of being at the Cape or any other venue as a journalist was what happened after we finished working for the day. Most rocket launches took place in the very early morning, usually in the dark before sunup. As a Today Show producer, I was there along with other early morning staff. Bleary eyed from lack of sleep because we played hard the night before — too many drinks, too little decent food — we always arrived on time for the launch. We prepared for our broadcast, sipped bad, mostly tasteless coffee, chewed on a roll or an uninteresting Danish and allowed the caffeine in the coffee to cascade through our systems. Set and ready to go, we waited patiently, because that was all we could do, for the launch to take place. Dawn rose slowly. The bright orange sun dominated the sky. The astronauts made their way to the capsule that would carry them into outer space. With little fanfare, they entered their home away from home, and settled into their cramped quarters. The countdown began. Then, usually on a tight, computerized and targeted schedule the rocket launched with a thunderous sound and bright yellow-orange light. The earth beneath our feet shook and rumbled, as if an earthquake had struck the sands at Cape Canaveral, as the space ship made its way into the sky above. The big crowds, many of whom had slept overnight in campers, in the backs of their cars or in sleeping bags on the ground, and who numbered in the thousands outside the perimeter of the launch site cheered, applauded and yelled encouragement. Soon the rocket was out of sight. An announcement told us the flight had been successful and Cape Canaveral control then moved onto mission control in Houston. Our work done for the day, it was time to head home. Our bags packed and loaded into our cars, we made our way from the NASA launch site and into heavy traffic crowded with the people who had just witnessed the launch. Many of us were on the same road leading to the highway and to the Orlando airport across the state. There we would make our flight home, me to New York, others to the city where they lived. For all the excitement I had covering the many launches I witnessed at Cape Canaveral and, later, after it was renamed Cape Kennedy, one of biggest thrills was more mundane. There were days when life was boring on the Cape when we had little to do but wait for the perfect weather a launch required. Then we played touch football. Usually it was Nightly News versus the Today Show. The sand at the Cape was rocky, not soft and almost silky like the sand I grew up with in Brighton Beach and Coney Island. Walking on the ground was not easy and often the rocks and shale cut into the bottoms of our sneakers. But we played touch football with fury. Usually the Today Show lost because we had more women on the team who were not good at the game, especially roughhouse touch football. We had played a few hours in the hot sun in our usual desultory fashion drinking water — no beer permitted — until we on the Today side of things had one series of plays remaining. I lined up in the backfield and sprinted for all I had into what was our end zone. I turned and saw the football floating to me and I thought it beyond where I could catch it. I looked over my shoulder again, and to my eternal surprise there was the ball. I reached out, grabbed the ball going away into the end zone for the winning touchdown. I bent over, breathing hard, sweating and panting. At first, only silence followed the catch. But, no. Soon came cheering. And through the cheers, a voice rang out above all the other voices: “I didn’t know he had it in him.” That was the perfect end to my day. For one brief moment in time, life did not get better than that.