ALAMEDA — Just two men stood on the dusty surface of the moon after the first lunar landing in July 1969.
But thousands and thousands of others — from scientists and technicians to clerks and doctors — worked long hours to make the voyage of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin possible.
Wallace Johnson, 93, of Alameda, played his part at a pivotal time when the future of America’s space program was in doubt.
On Jan. 27, 1967, a flash fire killed astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee as they trained, leaving NASA administrators shaken.
A few days later, Johnson got a call from his employer, North American Aviation, which had developed the command module in which the men died. The aerospace manufacturing company wanted Johnson, a pilot, to help figure out what went wrong.
Johnson was fitted with a flight suit and helmet, and sent inside another module at its plant in Downey, in Southern California.
“We did everything we thought that they should have done to get out, trying to find out exactly what kind of timeline, the sequence of events that occurred,” said Wallace, who was picked for the job because he was an electronics expert. “What really happened?”
The fire led to a congressional investigation and prompted the suspension of manned Apollo flights for 20 months. According to the findings, an electrical malfunction sparked the blaze which quickly spread because of the pure oxygen inside the cabin. And the door hatch couldn’t be opened because of the internal pressure of the cabin, which prevented a rescue of the three astronauts.
Johnson still boasts the wiry frame that allowed him to easily slip into one of the three seats in the module, where the tight quarters — it measured just about 13 feet in diameter and 11 feet long — made movement difficult for the astronauts.
And when he speaks in his soft Texas drawl, his voice is measured and his statements are and matter-of-fact, as he if was working his way through a flight checklist.
Johnson said he knew he was witnessing history during those days of NASA’s “Golden Age,” when families huddled around TV sets to watch rocket launches live and TV shows such as “Lost in Space” and “Star Trek” teased that someday journeys to the stars might be commonplace.
“It was such an exciting job,” said Johnson, who lives in a Shoreline Drive apartment facing Robert W. Crown Memorial State Beach. “I was very lucky. Everything just fell right into place for me.”
Johnson’s tasks inside the command module often involved figuring out where was the best place to locate switches and other components so that astronauts could easily reach them.
He also spent hours honing the capsule’s re-entry program — which had to be perfect, otherwise it could burn as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere — as well as what was needed for docking and rotating spacecraft, maneuvers that were necessary if a moon landing was to succeed.
The information was then funneled to the astronauts, who then practiced and tweaked the procedures.
“It was all simulation because we can’t put a guy on a shot that’s going to the moon and train them then,” Wallace said on a recent afternoon as he looked over photographs and other mementos of his work on the space program. “That’s not where you want to do the first training. You want to do it all in simulation as much as possible, as realistic as possible.”
Bob Fish, the author of the book, “Hornet Plus Three: The Story of the Apollo 11 Recovery,” said the contribution of Wallace and others who worked behind the scenes to help NASA must be viewed in the context of the Cold War and the race to beat the Russians to the moon.
“The Apollo program became part of our national self-esteem — a positive counterpart to the war, assassinations, political chaos of the 1960s,” Fish said. “The contractors became psychologically intertwined at a much deeper level than just ‘getting a paycheck’ at IBM or Rockwell. Wallace Johnson would be no exception to that.”
The son of a Cuban mother and an American who worked for an oil company, Johnson was born in Texas, but spent his earliest years in Havana, where his father had been posted.
Johnson’s father was killed in an industrial accident after the family moved back to Texas when Johnson was still a boy, and his mother struggled to make ends meet, he said.
“My mother was a single mother with three kids,” he said. “The Depression years were on us.”
Johnson enlisted in the U.S. Navy in September 1941, just months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, plunging the United States into World War II.
He spent the war aboard the USS Jamestown in the Pacific, including ferrying supplies to battle-weary troops at Guadalcanal and Tulagi.
After the war, he used the GI Bill to take flying lessons. As a pilot, he has racked up more than 10,000 hours in the air.
“The idea of flying intrigued me,” Johnson said, adding that memories of seeing biplanes in Havana as a child remain vivid. “I always wanted to fly.”
He settled in Alameda in 1978 after leaving North American Aviation and going to work for Litton Industries, including as a civilian engineer for the company at the former Alameda Naval Air Station.
Johnson’s wife, Doris, died in July 2000. The couple were married more than 47 years. A longtime partner, Joan Lindsey, died in November 2017.
On the day Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon — while their fellow astronaut Michael Collins orbited above its surface — Johnson had taken off work. He wanted to stay home and watch the historic moment live on television.
“It was just one of those things that I did not want to miss out on, from beginning to end,” Johnson said.
As someone who worked on spacecraft, Johnson knew how risky the mission was, despite the efforts by himself and others to minimize the dangers.
“The fact that it was a success was a real surprise because the possibilities of the thing really coming off were very slim when you got right down to it, although they tried to figure out all the angles, to figure out all the possible things that could go wrong,” Johnson said. “Luckily, everything went right.”