- For 16 years, Chapel Hill was a secret space town.

Everybody thinks about Houston, Cape Canaveral, nobody thinks about Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Yet 62 astronauts came to Chapel Hill secretly to train on celestial navigation, stellar identification at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.

You had the first people to walk on the surface of the moon, the first people to go into outer space.

They came to Chapel Hill so that they would know how to safely return to the Earth.

For them to make it back home to their families, to their loved ones, and to more spacewalks, hopefully in their future, they had to come here, and there's no other way to do it.

Imagine how many people have come to Morehead Planetarium and sat in here and had great field trips, and they don't realize necessarily that they're sitting in the same space as a lot of moonwalkers from the 1960s and '70s.

- A lot of people are surprised when they hear about our role in the early space program.

For years, it was a matter of national security.

You have to remember the space race was a part of the Cold War, so in many ways we were the front lines of the Cold War.

I'm Todd Boyette.

I'm the director of Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.

Morehead Planetarium opened in 1949.

We were the first planetarium anywhere in the world on a university campus, the first planetarium in the South.

- John Motley Morehead was a man who really liked to have his name on things.

He really wanted to make sure that he was giving gifts back to the people of North Carolina.

My name is Michael Neece, and I have worked at Morehead Planetarium off and on since September of 1991.

It was an elegant, beautiful building with bronze railings and velvet rope and just every room with marble and wood paneling, just a gorgeous facility.

And he spared no expense when it came to the equipment in the dome.

- The spectacular production staged in the planetarium portray exact heavenly configurations from thousands of years past or hence.

It is visited annually by thousands of school children and adults alike.

- There's a kind of anecdotal story about a senator or congressperson from New Jersey saying the people of North Carolina were astronomically ignorant.

And Mr.

Morehead took that personally and figured that we're not going to be astronomically ignorant even if they meant that in jest and that we're going to focus on teaching people about the stars here.

- My name is Nick Eakes.

I'm an astronomy educator here at Morehead Planetarium and Science Center.

And I do all sorts of things, but mainly I work in our full dome theater, teaching people all about the nighttime sky.

I think it excites people that North Carolina and Chapel Hill in particular are kind of part of this hidden history.

It was a big secret at the time that the astronauts would come here and do their training and they'd be whisked away to Florida or Houston.

But our little town played a big part in it.

The space race was in full force already.

Sentiment in the United States was getting behind the fact that we wanted to send people into space and get humans on the moon.

- We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

- The early days of NASA, they had their operations in Langley, Virginia.

Well, Langley, Virginia is pretty far away from Houston and pretty far away from Kennedy Space Center.

And so for them to be flying anywhere, well, it didn't make sense for them to go anyplace other than, you know, flying on that flight path directly over Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

- Chapel Hill in the 60s, early 60s, was a somewhat sleepy university town.

So these astronauts who were rock stars in many ways, their privacy could be protected.

They could be focused.

They needed no distractions because what they were learning here was very, very important.

The idea of celestial navigation is going back to our ancient mariners who would navigate ships using the night sky.

So the idea is, can you do that in space?

And you probably need to do it in space, especially in the early space program because the navigation systems were so primitive.

- Onboard the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo spacecraft, if the onboard navigation failed, they had to reference the stars out the window to be able to figure out their coordinates and plot a safe return to Earth.

Practically, the astronauts were learning guide stars.

So we were able to project specific stars with markers on the planetarium dome.

And the astronauts sat inside of mockups of their actual space capsule.

- They actually took a barber's chair and mounted a seat on it that was a good replica of what the spacecraft would have.

And then they would move the barber's chair around, and then they would open up the night sky, show the night sky, and then the astronaut would have to determine where he was in space.

- They would say, "Okay, point out the things that you know."

They were all pilots.

They knew a lot of constellations.

They knew some bright stars.

So they were able to point out some things.

And then they would say, "Close your eyes."

They would spin the star machine so the stars would be in a whole different space.

And then they would say, "Open your eyes.

Now what do you see?

Now what can you spot?"

- You have to think about it.

It's one thing to do it when your feet are on the ground and you're looking up and you have, you're oriented.

You know where you are in space.

What if you're upside down?

What if you have no way to orient yourself?

There's no horizon.

You don't know exactly where you are.

- The original star machine was a Zeiss Model 2.

It was the most advanced piece of equipment anywhere in the world.

- It was definitely a big deal to have this machine here because at the time that Morehead first opened, it was only the eighth planetarium built in the United States.

I'm Richard McColeman.

I am the full-dome theater manager, which basically means I run the planetarium theater.

These Zeiss projectors were sort of the Rolls Royce of simulation technology back in the day.

But what we're looking at is, you can see there's a big sphere or big ball right there and then another one which is further up on top of it.

This is the, this larger sphere or ball is basically what we call the star ball.

So you can look at all of these lenses.

They look like a bunch of eyes on the projector.

Each one of those lenses would project several hundred stars and when you put them all together, you'd have a whole dome full of stars.

- So the beautiful thing about this was that we could take you to any place, any time on Earth.

So if you wanted to go back 2,000 years or 10,000 years, you want to go forward 200 days, I mean you pick it, you'd be able to do it with this.

- There were accurate star maps that have been made for thousands of years, but being able to actually manipulate it with the planetarium technology on the dome, let them practice better.

So this was a place that had a very accurate reference for what they were actually seeing in the stars.

- We live in such a digital age, it is hard to imagine in what it was like in the 60s.

Basically what we were doing was putting people in a tuna can, strapping dynamite on their backs and pointing them in the direction we wanted them to go.

It wasn't that bad, but it was, compared to what we know now, it is almost like that.

And I know we talk about how, how brave these men were.

I don't think we talk about how studious they were and how smart they were, because they had to know the night sky better than anybody.

Their missions depended on it.

- Apollo 12 was one of the situations where they had kind of a crisis on board.

- We had won.

We had landed on the surface of the moon with Apollo 11, but public sentiment was still there for NASA to keep going back.

So after the historic flight in July, November 1969 is when Apollo 12 was slated to go to the moon.

- This is Apollo 7 launch control, three hours, 12 minutes and counting.

The Apollo 12 crew now departing the crew quarters, boarding their transfer van, ready for the nine-mile trip to the launch pad.

- On the launch pad, it was a kind of stormy, cloudy day.

- They made the mistake of assuming that during a rainstorm they could go ahead and launch, not realizing that as the rocket and spacecraft ascended through the clouds, it would actually generate an electrical discharge, in this case, of course, in the form of lightning.

- Ignition sequence start.

Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.

All engines running.

Commit liftoff.

Pete Conrad reports the yaw program is in.

Tower clear.

- The rocket's exhaust kind of acted like a big wire hanging down from the end of the rocket down to the ground.

And so essentially it acted like a big lightning rod, except that they were on the lightning rod.

- Thirty-six seconds later, lightning struck the spacecraft.

- I don't know what happened here.

We had everything in the world drop out.

I'm not sure we could hit by lightning.

Fuel cell lights and AC bus lights, fuel cell disconnect, AC bus overload, one and two, main bus AC out.

- That knocked most of their spacecraft electrical systems offline, including their navigational system.

Now, fortunately, the rocket had its own onboard navigational system, and it was able to carry them up into orbit.

But once they got into orbit, they had no separate navigational reference inside the spacecraft.

- In space and on Earth, they checked out the systems.

- The astronauts actually had to completely align their navigational system from scratch, citing key guide stars.

The work that the Apollo 12 astronauts did was essentially due to the training that they had received at Morehead.

So not only was the mission successful, but of course it got the astronauts home safely.

- Without using the different measurements that they were taking in here and all of that training, they would never have returned safely to the Earth.

- The astronaut training program is an incredible part of our history.

We will always want to celebrate it and talk about it.

And at the same time, we continue to serve North Carolina and beyond through our programs and activities.

It's pretty cool to walk into our planetarium theater and take up the same space that Neil Armstrong took up.

To be in that same space, to look at the same dome, and to learn similar lessons that he learned and all his colleagues, other astronauts learned, is an incredible experience.

- So Morehead has the same mission it always has, science for all.

We want to serve people and help them connect with the world around them.

That's what science education is all about.

- Morehead Planetarium does not formally train astronauts anymore, but we informally train tons, because we have school kids who come through here.

We have the general public.

You know, your friends come from out of town.

You bring them here.

You can sit in these same seats.

So we may not formally train astronauts, but who knows what little kid's going to walk into this dome, look up at the stars, be really excited about it, and then pursue that next career and be the first person to walk on Mars.

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