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MIDDLETOWN — It took nerves of steel to keep up with the constant demands of the aviation and aerospace market in the 1960s and '70s, and in Middletown NASA found just such people.

It was a new program called Apollo, in which NASA's leaders had the crazy idea to rocket astronauts into space to explore the moon. They needed technology that would be capable of protecting the men inside the Apollo crew capsule from the cold, oxygen-free voids of space and prevent it from burning up as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere.

In enters Aeronca Inc., a development facility that had just completed developing and manufacturing the B-70 plane and were working on Saturn rocket, the nation's first dedicated space launcher, said Don Allen, 77, of Springboro, a retired Aeronca project engineer.

It was the type of company NASA was looking for to launch its plans for space travel, he said.

"It was very hectic but it was an exciting time for me. We were one the eve of something new, on the tale end of the Saturn project," he said.

Using the brazed honeycomb alloy Aeronca developed to reduce the sound of jet engines, the company applied it with a high-intensity stainless steel called ph14-8Mo, which was developed by Armco (now AK Steel Corp.), according to a Journal article published July 23, 1995.

The shields were extremely expensive — composed of 98 percent silver — but the 2-inch thickness was able to protect the capsule from the high temperatures of atmosphere re-entry while not cracking from the low temperatures on the dark side of the moon, Allen said.

Despite testings, Allen said he was on edge during the Apollo program's first launches, include Apollo 7 when the first manned spacecraft orbited the Earth and Apollo 11's crew landed on the moon.

"I stayed up all night watching the moon shows," he said.

Plans orbited around Middletown as Aeronca employees helped NASA officials devise a plan to get astronauts safely home during the Apollo 13 crisis.

"They called me into the office and I worked all night. I had phones on both ears talking to people across the United States," Allen said. "NASA wanted to know the details of each and every component on the module."

But it was a relief to know the technology Allen and others at Aeronca developed in Middletown helped safely bring each of the Apollo crews home, he said.

"It was a multi-team effort from the guy who swept the floors to the engineers," he said.

So Allen was a bit surprised when at the beginning of 2008 Aeronca and NASA officials wanted to meet with him to discuss the old shield designs for a new capsule project — the Orion.

"I offered what I could. It should work just as well this time," he said.

Contact this reporter at (513) 705-2843 or jheffner@coxohio.com.