Teams at NASA's Kennedy Space Center could conduct a simulated launch of the Artemis II as early as this weekend.
The rocket will be used to take the Orion spacecraft and its four astronauts on a trip around the moon.
And the story of the Apollo engineers who helped fulfill President Kennedy's promise to land a man on the moon is being told in Sarasota.
WUSF's Cathy Carter recently spoke with Deborah Brevoort, the writer of 'The Blue-Sky Boys,' a play making its Southeastern debut at Florida Studio Theatre.
Deborah, you say these engineers were kind of the outcasts of the scientific community at the time. Tell us a little bit more about the Blue-Sky Boys.
They were sort of lumped in the same category as folks who believed in UFOs at the time. They were considered to be kind of kooky, and they had a very untraditional way of doing their work.
They did creative visualizations long before the New Age movement came along. They consulted Buck Rogers comics. They were reading Greek mythology. One of the lead guys who designed the spider that landed on the moon couldn't do math. He flunked math. He was a visual engineer.
There were obviously mathematicians who were involved and all of that, but they were very unconventional, and they created a process for themselves that relied upon their imaginations, realizing that technology and science and all of those sort of traditional rules were not enough to get to the moon, they had to make huge imaginative leaps.
So, the play is based on real world events but dramatized with your imagination?
Well, everything in the play is true, but to your point, it's not documentary theater. You know, a play about NASA engineers sounds like pretty dry stuff, and this play is not that. This play is a comedy, and there were 13,000 engineers working on the moon mission, and I have three characters on stage, and I created composite characters.
So, there's nobody in the play who is readily identifiable with any one particular engineer, although, you know, everything that they did all came out of the historical record, but Buck Rogers was not literally running through the NASA lab, but he was running through their heads while they were in the NASA lab. And so, the lab that I've created on stage is really the lab of their mind.
What made you interested in telling this story?
Well, a couple of things. First, when I was a kid, my mother was related to John Glenn by marriage, and so when the whole space race started, it became a thing for our family. We camped out in front of the television set. This was a huge part of my childhood, and you know, it meant that if there was a launch, we got to stay home from school, or we got to stay up late, or we got TV dinners because mom wasn't cooking.
So, I've always been really interested in space, and also because of this personal connection that my mother had to John Glenn.
And you call this play, your accidental play?
At the time, I had an idea to write some play that was somehow related to Japanese Moon poetry, and I can't even remember today what that play was, but I did what I always do, which is I go to the library and I order mountains of books, and I begin to read.
So, I went to the library and I ordered all these books on Japanese poetry, and they called me and said, your books are in. I took my backpack to the library, loaded it up, came home, and in the batch was a book called Apollo: Race to the Moon, which I had not ordered. It was accidentally put into my pile. And of course, I didn't read any of the books on Japanese Moon poetry.
I started reading this. It's a rare book now, it’s very hard to get this book, but it was the oral histories of the engineers who chronicled the kind of crazy, loopy, highly imaginative process that was taking place behind the scenes. And of course, having watched this whole moon mission from the beginning as a kid, the story that we got were these guys in the lab suits with the slide rules and the, you know, the science and the technology.
But I immediately recognized when I was reading about the real process, that they employed the artistic process, because it's very similar to what I do when I'm writing a play. And I thought, oh, I know who these guys are. I know what this is. They're artists. They were given a job they didn't know how to do, and they jumped into the mess and were in the chaos.
And so, I immediately got the idea for the piece, and I was off to the races.
The Blue Sky Boys is playing at Florida Studio Theatre through March 8.
