Chatham Man Who Recovered Apollo 7 Astronauts Commentates Artemis II Landing

CHATHAM – Four astronauts hurtled back to Earth last week, splashing down into the Pacific Ocean near Southern California where helicopters awaited to lift them up and away from their floating spacecraft.

On the opposite coast of the continental United States watched a man who could rightfully say he had experienced a day similar to those proceedings — of the return and recovery of Artemis II’s four astronauts.

Nearly six decades ago, Chatham resident Don Broderick, then a lieutenant junior grade in his 20s, co-piloted a helicopter during the Navy’s mission to retrieve the three crewmembers of Apollo 7, who splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean in October 1968. As a sequence akin to that autumn morning unfolded Friday, Broderick sat inside local watering hole TK’s Sports Bar, where a television screen displayed a livestream of the Artemis II landing.

“It's almost like an instant replay,” Broderick told The Chronicle.

As Broderick recalled, the weather was lousy the day he and Commander Edward Skube (along with other crewmen and NASA technicians) launched their aircraft — part of Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron Five, known as the “Nightdippers,” operating out of Naval Air Station Quonset Point in Rhode Island — off the USS Essex in pursuit of the landed capsule. 

Upon locating and reaching the spacecraft through the wind and rain, Navy SEAL divers descended and opened the hatch. The astronauts — Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham — were hoisted into the helicopter. They had traveled through space for close to 11 days. 

Back on the carrier, the Apollo 7 crew was brought right down to the sick bay for examination by flight surgeons. The only time Broderick ever met the astronauts was upon landing, when each came up to the cockpit to thank the Navy aviators for the ride.

“I still remember it like yesterday,” Broderick said.

With about 10 minutes to go until Artemis II’s anticipated landing at 8:07 p.m., TK’s Sports Bar co-owner Trish Kennedy introduced Broderick, donning a flight jacket, to the patrons inside the dining room. All of the restaurant’s many television screens flipped to the space landing broadcast. No Celtics versus the Pelicans. No Red Sox pre-game show. Just a cone-shaped capsule with four human beings inside tearing through the atmosphere faster than the speed of sound on the homestretch of a trip around the moon and back.

Kennedy asked Broderick about his experience recovering the Apollo 7 spacemen. He wasn’t scared, he said, but he was nervous; they had a lot to do that morning. Visibility was poor on account of the rain, yet there was nothing NASA could do to delay the return. 

The impromptu interview took the shape of a double act — like a pair of docents at the National Air and Space Museum delivering a lesson with a cadence resembling Abbott and Costello. “This guy is very brave, very brave to do that,” Kennedy said about Broderick’s mission partway through the dialogue.

“I’m brave to do this,” Broderick said.

Or: “Why doesn't it sink?” Kennedy asked about the capsule. 

“It’s designed not to,” Broderick deadpanned.

Broderick also relayed the anecdote that after picking the Apollo 7 crew up and bringing them to the carrier, he was invited to see the capsule. He peeked inside, caught a whiff of the module’s aroma and almost instantly recoiled backwards, hitting his head on the hatch.

Beyond the comedic twinge though, the back-and-forth was informative, Broderick being a most qualified perspective to provide commentary on a space trip splashdown. At one point during the livestream, flashes of light like flames appeared to emerge from the spacecraft as it plummeted. Those were thrusters, Broderick said, fired so as to adjust the attitude of the module. And the capsule’s three parachutes, he explained, were striped and colored for contrast to increase visibility.

A year before Apollo 7, the three astronauts of Apollo 1 — Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee — died when a fire broke through the command module during a pre-flight test. A year after Apollo 7, two of the astronauts of Apollo 11 — Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin — became the first humans to set foot on the moon (the crew’s third, Michael Collins, remained in the module during the lunar landing). The successful execution of the Apollo 7 mission then, from liftoff to splashdown to recovery, was critical in advancing in and eventually winning the space race.

Correspondingly, Artemis II — which was humanity’s first lunar trip since 1972 — served as a pivotal step in putting humans back on the moon. Artemis IV is expected to attempt to land a crew on the moon in 2028.

At 8:07 p.m. EDT, the Artemis II crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch of NASA and Jeremy Hansen, a Canadian — touched water. They had traveled further into space than any humans prior. After the landing, Broderick sat down at a table with family inside the sports bar. The splashdown livestream, where the four astronauts awaited their extraction by helicopter, continued to air on one screen. All the rest returned to the Celtics game. Back to Earth.