I recently wrote about sharing American stories and the people behind our greatest achievements. I had just heard Walter Isaacson speak at the launch of the Center for the American Experience at The New School in New York, and one example stayed with me: Grumman, the Long Island company whose workers built the lunar modules that took Americans to the moon.
This was more than an interesting historical example. When I was a teenager, I spent several years doing work with NASA in Texas. Over the years, I’ve seen the Saturn V; visited places such as Langley, Virginia, and Huntsville, Alabama; and encountered all sorts of rockets, machinery, and mock-ups. But what stayed with me most was the good fortune of being part of a team working toward something much bigger than any one person.
It is a wonderful feeling. You have your responsibilities, but your work matters to others, just as theirs matters to you. Everyone understands the goal, even if everyone brings different skills. I don’t have that kind of experience much anymore. But I know what it feels like, and I have never forgotten it. It’s a big part of why I admire what the people at Grumman accomplished.
After writing about them, I realized there was a place I had somehow never visited: the Cradle of Aviation Museum in Garden City, New York, not far from Grumman’s old facilities. My son had a day off from school, so we went.
I knew the museum had a fully built lunar module, LM-13, intended for one of the later Apollo missions that NASA canceled. For all the space hardware I’d seen, I had never stood before one of these completed lunar excursion modules. I wasn’t prepared for how much I would enjoy the rest of the museum, either.
I’ve visited plenty of museums, including some famous ones, and the Cradle of Aviation is spectacular. It is also surprisingly old-fashioned, which I mean as a compliment.
There are interactive exhibits, but for the most part, the museum lets you look at actual innovations and hardware: airplanes, engines, cockpits, instruments, spacesuits, and parts of rockets. Some planes and rockets hang overhead from the ceiling, while others sit in modest displays or recreated settings.
Fortunately, there isn’t a screen demanding your attention at every turn, and you can look carefully and deeply. My son sat in an old airliner cockpit and a Gemini space capsule for quite a while, surrounded by dials and switches, and had a wonderful time taking everything in.
Many museums try to go high-tech, believing that guests need immersive experiences in a world already full of stimuli and digital distractions. Sometimes technology really does help, especially when an artifact or an idea can’t otherwise be visualized. The new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in Medora, North Dakota, is a good example of this approach, and it works beautifully in bringing Roosevelt and his time alive. But the Cradle of Aviation has real things right in front of you with incredible stories, and there is little need to do much else. The objects and artifacts do not need the competition to be appreciated.
The galleries take you from the beginnings of flight through the extraordinary aviation industry that grew up on Long Island and on to the space program. Through old photographs, historical accounts, and the aircraft themselves, you get a wonderful sense of just how important Long Island was to the development of American aviation.
That local history becomes especially vivid in the Apollo exhibits. Grumman built the lunar modules nearby, and the museum doesn’t let you forget the people who did the building. Before you get to LM-13, there’s a recreation of the clean room, with figures in white protective suits working around a lunar module test article amid scaffolding and equipment. I loved it. Somebody had to assemble the parts, check the connections, figure out what wasn’t working, and try again. There was no repair shop waiting on the moon.
And when you finally see the completed lunar module, I have to say, I smiled. The whole setup was far more imposing than I thought it would be. It was frankly awe-inspiring. LM-13 stands on a simulated lunar surface, with an astronaut beside it and Earth visible in the distance. The gold and silver insulation looks like something you might tear by accident, and its legs are spindly. The whole piece of hardware seems almost too awkward and fragile to be real, but this was a machine built to land on the moon. As with so much of the hardware built for NASA, I wondered how anyone ever trusted one of these contraptions to land on the moon and take off again. But they did — six times.
My son looked at it for a long time, and so did I. I have seen the three remaining Saturn V rockets and plenty of other NASA hardware over the years, but never a fully built lunar module. And here, in a museum on Long Island, was a machine built to fly, still near the place where it was made. It was humbling to see it.
As I marveled at what this module was built to do, I found myself thinking about the people who had built it. They went to work every morning in ordinary Long Island communities, raised families, attended church or synagogue, and came home at night for dinner. There were many brilliant engineers who helped design and think through all of the logistics of the module, but there were so many others involved too: machinists, electricians, welders, and technicians who had to turn drawings into a machine that worked in a place no one could reach to fix it.
Thousands of ordinary people were creating machines for one of the most extraordinary undertakings in human history, and they did it together. That scale of cooperation is almost as astonishing to me as the moon landings themselves.
My own NASA experience was well after the Apollo missions and involved research about planetary environments. But I worked in Texas as part of a team, and I learned just how deeply satisfying that teamwork can be. You don’t forget the trust that comes from working alongside other people who depend on you, or the pride you all share in trying to create something new and make something work. I certainly haven’t, even decades later, and being at the museum and seeing these artifacts brought that feeling back.
The guides were another pleasure. They knew the machines and had stories to tell, and when my son asked questions, they had answers. We lingered and talked, and I learned from them. I think they may have even learned from me. That sort of exchange makes a museum visit memorable in a way that another video rarely does.
As America continues to mark its 250th anniversary, there has been plenty of debate over what history we teach and how we teach it. Those are important conversations, and they need to continue. But we also need to show children and younger generations generally what people in this country actually accomplished and how they did it. We need to teach them about the great men and women who are the subjects and protagonists in Isaacson’s books, but also the many who are not front and center in those narratives and who made the achievements possible.
My son doesn’t need to become an engineer or even be interested in space and exploration to get something out of standing in front of LM-13. I think he loved it, however, and I want him to understand that these achievements were made by people, not magic or one singular visionary. The people who built these machines were once young themselves, and they could hardly have imagined what they would eventually accomplish. I want my son to understand that the future is something he and his generation will have a hand in making, and that some of the most remarkable things they accomplish will require working together.
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Perhaps that is why this visit meant so much to me. I know what it feels like to be part of an effort that is larger than yourself, and I would love for my son to know that feeling too. We live in a social media- and therapy-saturated world where so much of our attention is directed inward, toward ourselves, our needs, and our personal fulfillment. There is value in looking inward, of course, but we cannot overlook the enormous satisfaction that comes from being part of a community, working with others, and accomplishing something that none of us could do alone.
So, if you’re anywhere near New York, make the trip. Talk to the guides, go see that lunar module, and appreciate what Americans can do when they work together.