By Frank D. Roylance , frank.roylance@baltsun.com|July 19, 2009
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped down from their Apollo 11 moon lander 40 years ago tomorrow, they seemed to move in their bulky spacesuits with an unlikely ease.
Only a handful of the millions watching them on TV that night knew that many of the spacewalking skills and tools developed during the missions leading up to the historic landing had their origins in a 75-foot swimming pool at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills.
Three years earlier, at a time when U.S. astronauts were failing miserably in their first attempts to move and work effectively outside their spacecraft, it was a pair of Randallstown researchers -- Sam Mattingly and Harry Loats -- who persuaded NASA that underwater training was the best way to simulate the challenges of getting the job done in outer space.
Among the astronauts who worked and trained at McDonogh's pool between 1964 and 1966 were Aldrin (the second man to walk on the moon on July 20, 1969), Scott Carpenter, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan (the last man to walk on the moon, during Apollo 17, in December 1972).
"We felt we shared in their accomplishments," said, Mattingly, 82, who is retired and living in Ocean Pines with his wife. "It was a great period to live through, and to be closely associated with such great people."
Mattingly was always full of stories about working with the astronauts, and his own rigorous training -- diving in a pressure suit, parachute and survival training, dealing with explosive decompression or floating weightless in a looping airplane - to work out the problems of simulated weightlessness.
"Every time I tell a story of these memories to my son, Randy, he tells me that I really should write a book," he said. Instead, he penned a 58-page memoir about the days that took him to McDonogh.
Alternating pool time with the school's students, he wrote, the two men and their team of 10 or 12 solved many of the problems of working in space. They figured out the need for tethers, handholds, foot restraints and more space-glove-friendly tools. The value of long hours of underwater rehearsals and strict safety procedures first became apparent from their experiments, and laid the foundation for today's astronaut training.
"There is a continuing heritage from the work done at McDonogh" to all of NASA's modern "neutral buoyancy" laboratories, said John B. Charles, a NASA program scientist and an unofficial collector of the space agency's more obscure history.
