Last night, i received a text from one of my favorite people.

Katherine Jewell Hansen, with the same middle name as me, Rye — we both got if from her grandfather and my father — is an incredible woman. She is my brother’s daughter, a Vanderbilt alum like her husband, her father, and in a weird sort of way, me.

Kate is a professor of history at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts and has written two dynamite books.

Dollars for Dixie is a intriguing non-fiction about the industrialization in the South that draws upon the success of the Lebanon (Tennessee) Woolen Mills and is an in-depth analysis of how the South evolved in industrialization.

Live from the Underground is a wonderful exploration of the history of college radio and has become a beacon for a superb medium.

Well, her text was:

Navy question: why are they getting the space people out with helicopter rescue guys to take them to the carrier? Why not a boat? What range of landing zone would they be working with?

Kate was with friends of her watching the Artemis II splashdown. Since she knew i had been on ships in the Navy, i was pleased she reached out to me.

My response:

A helicopter would be much safer, faster, and easier than a boat recovery. The landing zone would have been a circle with about a 10-mile radius from the center. It was projected to be about 50-70 miles from the San Diego coast. Apparently, the USS John P. Murtha (LPD 26) was the lone recovery ship. i believe it would have been outside the projected splashdown area for safety reasons. That makes a helicopter recovery of the astronauts even more practical than a boat.

i don’t know if you know this, but in 1969, My ship, the USS Hawkins (DD 873) was the Atlantic recovery ship for Apollo 12. The USS Hornet (CVS 12) was the primary recovery ship in the Pacific.

Right after blastoff the spacecraft was hit by lightning causing loss of fuel cells and electrical instrumentation. The decision was to take one more orbit around earth. If no solution was found during the orbit, the spacecraft would make an emergency splashdown in the Atlantic. Hawkins would make the recovery.

We had our deck strengthened and a crane added to our fantail in the Portsmouth (VA) Naval Shipyard. We went to Bermuda where we practiced recoveries of a dummy capsule and then went to our station about midway between Bermuda and the Azores.

i was the recovery Officer of the Deck and would have had the conn (maneuvering control) to bring the ship alongside the capsule to raise it to our fantail. Fortunately, a flight controller in Houston, John Aaron, had the astronauts switch “auxiliary,” and the flight continued on a successful mission and returned to the Pacific and the Hornet.

Had it landed in the Atlantic, my life would have changed dramatically. As it was, we had a very nice week in Bermuda, one of my favorite places on earth.

i, in my usual fashion, began to think about that time. i, even though i didn’t know it, was in a wonderful spot, in something that turned out to be one of my true loves. It was a nice memory.

Thanks, Kate.