Meeting Fred Haise

Took my daughters down to Columbus, Georgia, to hear Apollo 13 astronaut Fred Haise give a talk about “Failure Is Not An Option” at Columbus State University and to visit the anniversary exhibits at the Coca-Cola Space Science Center.

While we were there I connected with Marc Tessier of S&T Geotronics, who provided the Open DSKY guidance computer replicas that will be installed in the Project’s command module. We were privileged to have a private meeting with Fred Haise, where we presented him with one of the Open DSKY replicas.

The Coca-Cola Space Science Center had a number of different Apollo and shuttle-era artifacts, interactive exhibits, and presentations. We attended a presentation on moon rocks returned by the Apollo missions. As luck would have it, the day before our trip I had received a piece of the lunar map carried aboard Apollo 13 that I won in the Lunar Legacies auction. During the moon rock presentation, I learned that 3 of the 6 samples the presenter had were from the Fra Mauro Highlands area returned by Apollo 14. Fra Mauro, of course, was the intended landing site of Apollo 13, so the map I had was of Fra Mauro. After the presentation, I took a photo of my Apollo 13 Fra Mauro map segment with the moon rocks from Fra Mauro. Needless to say, I was geeking out quite a bit!