Bill Text: CA ACR106 | 2019-2020 | Regular Session | Enrolled

NOTE: There are more recent revisions of this legislation. Read Latest Draft

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Bill Title: 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

Spectrum: Partisan Bill (Democrat 1-0)

Status: (Passed) 2019-08-27 - Chaptered by Secretary of State - Res. Chapter 134, Statutes of 2019. [ACR106 Detail]

Download: California-2019-ACR106-Enrolled.html

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Enrolled  August 23, 2019

Passed  IN  Senate  August 22, 2019

Passed  IN  Assembly  July 11, 2019

CALIFORNIA LEGISLATURE— 2019–2020 REGULAR SESSION

Assembly Concurrent Resolution

No. 106

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Introduced by Assembly Member Cristina Garcia

June 18, 2019

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Relative to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST

ACR 106, Cristina Garcia. 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

This measure would commemorate July 20, 2019, as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

Digest Key

Fiscal Committee: NO  

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Bill Text

WHEREAS, Commander Neil Armstrong, lunar module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and command module pilot Michael Collins, all American, landed the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC; and

WHEREAS, Apollo 11 was launched by a Saturn V rocket from Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida, on July 16 at 13:32 UTC, and was the fifth crewed mission of NASA’s Apollo program; and

WHEREAS, Armstrong’s first step onto the lunar surface was broadcast on live television to a worldwide audience. He described the event as “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind”; and

WHEREAS, Apollo 11 effectively ended the Space Race and fulfilled a national goal proposed in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy: “before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth”; and

WHEREAS, Kennedy Space Center may be in Florida, but the Apollo mission got its start in California; and

WHEREAS, Vultee Aircraft was the City of Downey’s largest employer during World War II, producing 15 percent of all of America’s military aircraft by 1941; and

WHEREAS, The company was a pioneer in the use of women in manufacturing positions and was the first aircraft company to build airplanes on a powered assembly line. Vultee became a part of North American Aviation (later North American Rockwell, then Rockwell International, which was then bought by the Boeing Company), whose facilities were the birthplace of the systems for the Apollo Space Program as well as the Space Shuttle; and

WHEREAS, For over 70 years, the City of Downey’s Rockwell NASA plant produced and tested many of the 20th century’s greatest aviation, missile, and space endeavors; and

WHEREAS, In November 1961, North American Aviation’s Space and Information Systems Division in Downey, California, won the contract for the design and construction of the Apollo spacecraft; and

WHEREAS, By the mid-1960s, at the height of the Apollo program, the Downey site ballooned to nearly 30,000 employees working around the clock to complete the historic project; and

WHEREAS, The Apollo 11 capsule returned to the Downey facility for evaluation in the months after the historic flight to moon, and thousands of southern Californians witnessed the spaceship at its birthplace; and

WHEREAS, In October of 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins visited the City of Downey. When addressing a crowd in the city, Astronaut Collins said, “the trip to the moon really started here.”; and

WHEREAS, The 70-year history of airplane and space vehicle manufacturing in the City of Downey came to an end when the Rockwell plant closed in 1999; and

WHEREAS, Project Apollo in general, and the flight of Apollo 11 in particular, should be viewed as a watershed in the nation’s history; and

WHEREAS, It was an endeavor that demonstrated both the technological and economic virtuosity of the United States and established national preeminence over rival nations—the primary goal of the program when first envisioned by the Kennedy administration in 1961; and

WHEREAS, It had been an enormous undertaking, costing $25.4 billion (over $200 billion in today’s dollars), with only the building of the Panama Canal rivaling the Apollo program’s size as the largest nonmilitary technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States and only the Manhattan Project being comparable in a wartime setting; and

WHEREAS, Project Apollo forced the people of the world to view the planet Earth in a new way. Images from all the Apollo missions were critical to this sea of change, for on its outward voyage, the crew focused a portable television camera on Earth, and for the first time, humanity saw its home from afar, a tiny, lovely, fragile “blue marble” hanging in the blackness of space; now, therefore, be it

Resolved by the Assembly of the State of California, the Senate thereof concurring, That the Legislature commemorates July 20, 2019, as the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing; and be it further

Resolved, That the Chief Clerk of the Assembly transmit copies of this resolution to the author for appropriate distribution.