WARREN, Ohio – Katie Hartt says she has been interested in astronomy since her mother used to wrap her in her sleeping bag at age 4 and take her outside during the summer to say good night to the moon and stars.

“I attend Lordstown High School and we do have a planetarium,” she said. “I loved that class and enjoyed myself.”

Hartt and her mother, Ginger Killing, were among the 100 people who attended a noontime program at the First Flight Lunar Module memorial site to remember Neil Armstrong, the American astronaut who made history July 20, 1969, by being the first person to set foot on the moon. 

“It was a great experience,” Killing, who watched Armstrong’s historic step on television, recalled. “I was about her age when that happened and I think it’s important to pass it down.”

Armstrong, who died Saturday from complications resulting from cardiovascular procedures, took his first airplane flight from a Parkman Road airfield where the replica module – at nearly 13 feet tall and 12 feet wide half the scale of the Apollo 11 lander – was erected to commemorate the event. Armstrong took that flight at age 6, in July 1936, when he lived in Warren and when spaceflight was the stuff of science fiction.

“He later said it was that day he knew that he wanted to go into outer space,” said Olivia Simpson of Warren. She is the granddaughter of Pete Perich, who founded the lunar module site project, and the daughter of Linda Perich Carpenter, who first envisioned it.

The vision came while she was praying in a Washington, D.C. church after visiting the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, Carpenter recalled. Her father, Pete, had memorialized Armstrong’s first flight in a painting he commissioned in 1970.

The idea behind the memorial was to help children understand space exploration, as well as to inspire people to aim for high goals such as finding a cure for cancer or exploring new technologies, said Eddie L. Colbert, 7^th Ward councilman, who along with Mayor Doug Franklin delivered remarks. “We always think that these things happen on a larger scale in a larger city somewhere else,” he remarked. “This embodies the message that these great things can happen right here in the city of Warren.” 

The lander memorial, dedicated in 2003, was built at the Trumbull Career and Technical Center by retired steelworkers who used donated materials.

“The whole thing was grassroots,” said Lisa Goetsch, director of workforce development and continuing studies at the Kent State University Trumbull Campus. “Nobody turned us down. Everybody was interested when we explained what we were doing and the significance of it.”

The project provided an opportunity on multiple fronts for RTI International Metals, the project’s biggest contributor. “Neil Armstrong at the time was on our board of directors. He’s an American hero and was a pioneer in our space program -- aerospace and defense being our largest customers at that time,” said Curtis Koch, an ERP – or enterprise resource planning – analyst for RTI, which has a titanium mill in Niles.

Koch recalled Armstrong as a “real humble” guy who deflected credit when people thanked him or said anything about going to the moon. “He always felt everybody on that team was equal to him,” he said.

When the model replica was being built, Koch, who was maintenance superintendent for RTI at the time, said his role included securing the titanium used for the module and training the volunteers how to weld the titanium.  RTI’s CEO at the time, Tim Rupert, told Koch to “get what you need” for the project, he recalled.

“It was a pretty good project,” remarked Don Wiggins, a then-WCI Steel retiree from Howland who served as crew chief on the project and helped build the module.

“It was a pretty good project. Neil Armstrong is a true American hero and anything that would honor his name and honor his accomplishments I think was a very good project to be on, and that’s why we did it,” Wiggins remarked.

Hartt, who picked up as a memento a spent shell casing from the ammunition fired by American Legion members at the program’s conclusion, plans to pursue a career in science, though not necessarily astronomy.

Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.