11 children of Apollo astronauts and flight directors talk about what it was like when their dads...

[Michie]

...went on business trips to the moon

(CNN)They are the names written in history books: Armstrong, Aldrin, Lovell, Chaffee, Bean, Cernan, Anders, Griffin, Carr. Their stories of NASA's Apollo program in the 1960s and '70s are the stuff of legend and lore.

The telling has mostly come from the astronauts themselves, or members of Mission Control, and occasionally from the astronauts' spouses.
But there was another group who had a front-row seat to history. This is the story of Apollo from some of its most wide-eyed observers: the children of those brave Americans who first went into space and those who helped get them there.
This is the first of a two-part story on the history of the space race as seen by 11 children of Apollo astronauts and flight directors. The second part includes their accounts of the first men on the moon, the near disaster of Apollo 13 and the lasting impact of their witnessing history so personally.

Business trips ... to space

Continued below.
Generation Apollo: Coming of age inside America's space race - CNN

 

[BrAndreyu]

There was a point in time when I was a kid where I wanted to be an astronaut, and thus did well in school. Then, my eyes went bad and the teacher told me "you will never be an astronaut" so from that point on, I pretty much shut down and didn't bother to participate or do any of the work. I think it was about the fifth grade that this happened, and the teacher already hated me for not being a Jehova's Witness like the majority of the other students.

So school was a series of pitched battles with teachers and administration to try and get me to jump through hoops, which I refused to do because my dreams had been smashed.