University of Houston-Clear Lake | Remembering Apollo 11: perspectives from 5 former NASA workers

Luong Nguyen was 8 years old and living in Vietnam when Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong stepped onto a dusty moon on July 20, 1969. Nguyen, an assistant professor of engineering at University of Houston-Clear Lake, remembers peering through his neighbor’s window to view the moment on TV – his family didn’t own one. He was so inspired he went out and built his own crude telescope. He and four other former NASA workers share their reflections of Apollo 11 as well as their space agency experience and how it shaped their UHCL careers in a special feature titled NASA Connections.

Thomas Harman, UH-Clear Lake’s department chair of engineering and director of the Center for Robotics Software, recalls going to “splash-down” parties with NASA colleagues to celebrate the moon landing. Years later, he met Armstrong on a cruise.

James Helm, UHCL associate professor of software engineering, left NASA before Apollo 11, but not before he had composed the complicated equations that made it possible for Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to land safely on the lunar surface and later rendezvous with Mike Collins’s command capsule.

For nearly 45 years, the university has enjoyed close ties with the space agency, having been built to fill NASA’s need for highly trained engineers and other aerospace professionals. Ten astronauts have received UHCL degrees.

Nguyen, Harman and Helm found careers at the university after careers working for NASA or its contractors. So did James Dabney, program chair and professor of engineering who had worked on Space Shuttle avionics, and Evelyn Miralles, the virtual-reality pioneer who led Johnson Space Center's VR laboratory before joining UHCL as associate vice president for strategic information initiatives and technology.

Remembering Apollo 11: perspectives from 5 former NASA workers

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