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The control center of the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, the most important and prestigious rocket base in the world, will be named after Rocco Petrone, the engineer of Italian origin who was the launch director of the Apollo 11 mission and then became the head of the entire program for the exploration of the Moon. This was announced by th...

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From Kennedy to von Braun, from Johnson to Debus, among the protagonists of the historical adventure that brought man to the Moon 42 years ago, there was one who had a decisive role, as director of the launch and later responsible for the entire Apollo program. His name was Rocco Petrone, and, as his very Italian name tells us, he was the son of a...

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Una buona notizia dalla Russia per il nostro cinema: il documentario Luna Italiana – Rocco Petrone e il viaggio dell’Apollo  di Marco Spagnoli, prodotto da Istituto Luce-Cinecittà in collaborazione con History Channel e con il patrocinio di Agenzia Spaziale Italiana e NASA, ha vinto il Premio ex – aequo come Miglior documentario al Tsiolkovsky Spac...

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A huge warehouse. Rival gangs. Bad blood. It all came together when a group of gangsters, dressed as outsiders, surprised their rivals and murdered them in cold blood on a cold February day. We all know the story: the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, Feb. 14, 1929. Actually, no. The gang rub-out described above refers to the Wah Mee Massacr...

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Ciao from Rome to all the friends of We the Italians! What a month! It has been full of wonderful opportunities to show and testify how great the relationship between Italy and the US is! On September 22nd I had the honor and the pleasure of giving the welcoming remarks at the National Italian American Bar Association, welcoming old and new friends...

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October 4 2019 Roma, Italy

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Rocco Petrone, the immigrant son of a couple from the town of Sasso Castalda, near Potenza, was the engineer monitoring the countdown on July 16, 1969 for the launch of the Apollo 11 spacecraft in Cape Canaveral that would take two men to the moon for the first time, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. A mechanic engineer, he was the director of launch...

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On September 12, 1962, in Houston, in Texas, the State where he would be killed just over a year later, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy made a historic speech, in which he announced the race to 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," JFK said.  When you...

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«Nessuno potrà mai dire abbastanza bene di Rocco Petrone. Non saremmo mai arrivati sulla Luna in tempo o, forse, non ci saremmo mai arrivati senza Rocco». Con queste poche parole Isom “Ike” Rigell, ingegnere capo del Kennedy Space Center e addetto alle operazioni di lancio, restituisce tutto il peso di una figura rimasta a lungo in ombra, ma che ha...

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Era figlio di emigrati italiani, Rocco Petrone, l’italiano della missione Apollo 11 di cui il prossimo 20 luglio ricorre il 50° anniversario. A ricordare questa singolare figura di scienziato, l’uomo chiave della missione, è il giornalista Renato Cantore nel libro “Dalla terra alla luna. Rocco Petrone, l’italiano dell’Apollo 11”, con prefazione di ...

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