Space enthusiast wants to share knowledge

Gerald Pleau could go to Cape Canaveral and feel the ground shake, but he'd rather be sitting on Cocoa Beach and watch the ball of fire ascend into the heavens.

For almost 50 years, the Avon Park resident has been passionate about the space program. He moved to Florida over 20 years ago from Massachusetts and has seen a number of shuttle launches.

Pleau has not watched one of them from Kennedy Space Center.

"You have to get there at like 3 o' clock in the morning to get close because there's so many cars jammed up," he said. "It's just not worth it."

Instead, he'd head roughly 10 miles down the road to nearby Cocoa Beach and watch the shuttle lift off from sandy seats.

"When (the rocket) passed us and went straight up, it was nothing but a ball of fire," Pleau said. "The thing about Cape Canaveral is you're out there, you'll actually feel the ground shake. I didn't care about that. To see that ball of fire was, like, wow."

In the mid 1980s, Pleau was watching a shuttle launch when he suddenly saw what could only be described as a "poof."

"One of the guys said, 'They just disengaged and they went into the second lift,' Pleau said. "I said, 'No, they've got to be out of the earth's atmosphere. They've got to be up there. That can't happen.'"

Pleau and the other spectators went inside and saw news reports explaining the rocket had blown up. The date was Jan. 28, 1986 and the shuttle in question was the Challenger.

A new history lesson?

From the triumph of the Apollo 11 moon landing to the tragedy of the Challenger explosion, Pleau has kept up with the happenings of the U.S. space program.

When he found a plaque at a Daytona Beach thrift store that had the dates and insignia from the first 28 space missions between 1961 and 1972, Pleau became inspired to take his passion one step further.

"I started to ask people, all students, what do they know about the space program," he said. "The response was overwhelmingly zip."

Pleau has spent the last three years researching and compiling information from those missions to make-up a 170-page book called "Space Odysseys."

Each chapter describes an individual mission and includes the objectives, names and biographies of the crew members, conversations between the astronauts and ground control and 10 review questions.

Pleau wanted to make sure and cover his tracks when it came to reproducing those NASA conversations. He checked with attorneys to make sure there were no issues regarding copyright infringement.

"One lawyer said to me, 'No, there's no copyright infringement,'" Pleau said. "I said, 'How can that be?' He said, 'Because we, the taxpayers, fund NASA.'"

His labor of love is complete and Pleau is now trying to get the book published. He is also talking with educators all across Florida about his ultimate goal, which is getting the text into the classroom.

Pleau said he is "devastated" that the space program is not taught to students.

"This should be in the school system," he said.

The author is particularly proud of the 19 pages devoted solely to the Apollo 11 mission and the hair-standing-on-the-back-of your neck conversations between the astronauts and ground control as the shuttle landed on the surface of the moon.

One excerpt came from the Houston ground crew, who told astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Michael Collins to, "Be advised, there's lots of smiling faces in this room, and all over the world."

"It's exciting," Pleau said.