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Tomorrow afternoon, Gigi and I are traveling to Boston for this event.
2/ The Apollo 11 celebration is important to our family for personal reasons. My dad Theodore (Ted) Metzger was super proud to have worked on the Apollo program. He was a quality control inspector on the ground systems at @NASAKennedy... 
3/ He was in the US Army Air Corps in WW2 and was injured in Italy. He was honorably discharged but got a waiver for his injuries to join the newly formed US Air Force as a flight engineer. He retired when I was 2 years old to work in the space program in his hometown in Florida.
4/ In the Army he was in the 1st Aircraft Assembly Squadron in North Africa building aircraft to fly over Europe. Then he followed the front lines through Sicily and Italy before a shell broke his back. In the USAF he flew in the Berlin Airlift and flew dignitaries around Europe.
5/ Then he was an aircraft maintenance controller at McCoy Air Force Base (which became Orlando International, hence the airport code MCO) when he met my mom. She was from Connecticut & Maine & was in the US Navy as a Pentagon cryptography officer before returning to grad school.
6/ They met on a blind date and after marrying in the MCO chapel were transferred to Westover Air Force Base where my sister & I were born. My dad was a Technical Sergeant managing maintenance of bombers. When I was 2 he retired and got a job in the space program.
7/ Many early space workers came from the US military (also some captured German rocket scientists). Once NASA asked me to give the keynote speech at a convention for WW2 Army Air Corps veterans. It was my delight telling how their sacrifices also led to the US space program.🚀
8/ Key point: the reason my mom met my dad was because after grad school in Colorado she wanted to live east of the Mississippi, but the only place hiring teachers on the east coast was the Florida Space Coast...because the Apollo program was creating so many jobs.
9/ My sister and I were literally children of Apollo. We would never have existed unless President Kennedy made that famous speech calling for the US to put a human in the Moon before the decade was out. Here I am with my mom in our driveway in about 1968.
10/ Here is our family in May 1967, 2 years before Apollo 11. We were dressed up for the Titusville Centennial. This was 4 months after the tragic loss of the Apollo 1 crew in January 1967 and during preparations for the first (uncrewed) launch of the Apollo V in November 1967.
11/ My dad took us to every Open House day at @NASAKennedy and to every rocket launch. We grew up thoroughly embedded in the US Space Culture. I assumed I would one day grow up to work on rockets, too. Here is @ExploreSpaceKSC during the Apollo days. See the Lunar Module? Cool!
12/ I’m not 100% sure, but I think that is a picture of the Rocket Garden that still exists at @ExploreSpaceKSC today. More rockets have been added, but I think these original rockets are still there. The Lunar Module has been moved indoors and a lot more has been added.
13/ Here are my sister Sally and me — the two shorter children in the center of the rocket engines — in March 1970. This is the year after Apollo 11 and one month before the launch of Apollo 13.
14/ Here we are a few years after the Apollo program. This was 1974, two months after end of the last Skylab mission and a year before the Apollo Soyuz Test Project. Notice the open windows. After the NASA layoffs we were poor & had no air conditioner (in Florida!).
15/ So I was blessed to grow up immersed in Space. I got to watch every launch from the shore of the Indian River, just a 2-block walk from our house. The memories are deeply imprinted: the crowds, the voice of Walter Cronkite, the highly underexpanded rocket plume at staging...
16/ ...and as I said, my dad was very proud to have worked on Apollo 11, which put humans on another world and returned them safely to the Earth. Here is his certificate from his employer at @NASAKennedy.
17/ At the time I didn’t know how privileged I was to grow up in the midst of this. It was just normal life for us kids growing up around the space program. I know there must be 10,000s of kids whose parents also worked on the space program and who grew up feeling the same way.
18/ But it did have a very deep impact on my life. My dad made me stay awake and watch the first humans walking on the Moon. I grew up making paper models of satellites and playing with Major Matt Mason toys. syfy.com/syfywire/meet-…
I would love to have these again 😅
20/ And when I went to college my dad insisted I study engineering. He literally said, “I want you to study that because you WANT to study it. But if you don’t want to, then I’m TELLING you to study it.”😅 Today I’m super grateful. (Later I went to grad school for physics, too.)
21/ So this is partly why Gigi and I are going to the @JFKLibrary for the Space Forum and the celebration of Apollo 11. I believe if my dad were still with us then he would want us to get to this event at all costs. “...but if you don’t want to go then I’m TELLING you to go.”😅
22/ I’m very honored the library invited us to attend. I hope to network with other space workers, I expect we’ll be overwhelmed by the magnificence of a celebration of Apollo 11, and I plan to think about my dad‘s contribution & how to pay it forward.
