Oct 1, 2018 By Brad Hundt staff Writer bhundt@observer-Reporter.Com 5 min read

It’s long been known that President Richard Nixon had a somber speech at the ready in the event the astronauts making the first mission to the moon in July 1969 did not make it back to Earth alive.

If it hadn’t been for a felt-tip pen, Nixon might have had to deliver that address.

The pen was deployed by Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon. He found that a switch to the ascent engine’s circuit breaker in Apollo 11’s lunar module had somehow broken off, perhaps when he or fellow astronaut Neil Armstrong swung around in the module’s confined quarters. If they couldn’t switch on that engine, they would have been trapped more than 200,000 miles from home.

But Aldrin realized he had the pen in a shoulder pocket. He placed it where the switch had been.

It worked. The circuit breaker held.

“We were going to get off the moon after all,” Aldrin later wrote.

That humble pen is among the items included in the exhibit “Destination Moon: The Apollo 11 Mission,” which has splashed down at the Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. Developed by the National Air and Space Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, it contains more than 100 artifacts from the journey to our celestial neighbor when Armstrong made “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Despite it being among a handful of events in history that truly qualify as epochal, there are a number of other items in the exhibit aside from the felt-tip pen that bring it down to a human level. There’s a press kit that was handed out to reporters as the mission commenced; flight manuals that look like something you would pull out of a glove box; and a watch that Michael Collins, the third astronaut, wore during the mission.

But it also contains relics that are, by any measure, extraordinary: the command module Columbia, which Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were nestled in when the mission began and ended; the visor that Aldrin wore on the moon; and a rock from the moon’s surface. It is the first time the command module has left the National Air and Space Museum since it traveled to all 50 states in 1971.

The exhibit “celebrates the mission while providing context,” according to Michael Neufeld, senior curator at the National Air and Space Museum. The Heinz History Center is one of just four institutions in the United States that will be hosting “Destination Moon.” It has already been to Space Center Houston in Houston, Texas, and the St. Louis Science Center. After it leaves Pittsburgh, it will go on to the Museum of Flight in Seattle, where it will be when the 50th anniversary of the moon walk rolls around in July 2019.

The exhibit is in Pittsburgh at a providential time. Not only is the 50th anniversary looming, but so is the release of the film “First Man.” Based on the biography “First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong” by James R. Hansen, it stars Ryan Gosling as the taciturn, solitary Armstrong, and is directed by Damien Chazelle, who helmed the 2016 movie musical “La La Land.” It is due in theaters Oct. 12.

“Destination Moon” explains how the Apollo 11 mission, and the six missions that followed, grew out of Cold War imperatives. Though the idea of traveling to the moon had fascinated humankind at least as far back as the 1865 Jules Verne novel “From the Earth to the Moon,” the notion picked up steam in the 1950s, as the United States and the Soviet Union raced to attain scientific supremacy.

President John F. Kennedy made getting a man to the moon a national goal in an address to Congress in May 1961, and proclaimed in an address in Houston, Texas, in September 1962 that “we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win …”

The final Apollo mission was in December 1972, and no humans have returned to the moon since. Interest in pouring money into the program waned given the challenges the United States was facing at the time, such as urban poverty and the wind-down of the Vietnam War. Although President Trump has outlined the need for what he calls a “space force,” there are no concrete plans to send astronauts back to the moon or beyond.

The role of Pittsburgh-area companies and innovators who helped get the Apollo 11 mission off the ground is also explored in “Destination Moon,” with a list that includes Alcoa, Westinghouse, the American Bridge Co. and Allegheny Ludlum (now called ATI).

The exhibit will be at the Heinz History Center through Feb. 18. A number of special events are planned in conjunction with it, including a visit on Nov. 1 by the Armstrong biographer Hansen, and a talk by Neufeld on Dec. 9 at 1 p.m.

A separate ticket is not necessary to visit “Destination Moon” throughout its run. Brady Smith, the history center’s director of marketing and communications, said “Destination Moon” could be one of the most popular traveling exhibits to come to the museum.

Additional information on “Destination Moon” is available at www.heinzhistorycenter.org/moon.