{"id":53352,"date":"2026-09-24T08:42:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T13:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/?p=53352"},"modified":"2026-09-17T11:10:55","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T16:10:55","slug":"who-really-chose-the-apollo-11-moon-flag-acc-student-follows-the-paper-trail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/2026\/09\/24\/who-really-chose-the-apollo-11-moon-flag-acc-student-follows-the-paper-trail\/","title":{"rendered":"Who Really Chose the Apollo 11 Moon Flag? ACC Student Follows the Paper Trail"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Decades-old NASA documents are helping ACC Honors Program student Gordon Ray piece together the unlikely story behind the first American flag planted on the Moon.<\/p>\n

The American flag planted on the Moon by Apollo 11 is one of the most recognizable symbols of human exploration. But exactly how that flag made its way from Earth to the lunar surface is more complicated than the iconic photograph might suggest.<\/p>\n

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ACC Government student Gordon spent months digging through NASA records, archival collections, engineering documents, and historical research to reconstruct that story. His research points to a surprising conclusion: the Apollo 11 flag was likely purchased from Sears & Roebuck in South Houston.<\/p>\n

That may be only the beginning of the story.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Following a paper trail<\/h3>\n

The breakthrough began with documents saved nearly six decades ago by his wife\u2019s grandmother\u2014 Minna Lo Squires. Squires worked as a NASA Procurement Operator at the time of the Apollo flight. Among the documents were purchase requests and other administrative records that Gordon believes help establish the provenance of the Apollo 11 flag.<\/p>\n

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The documents are significant in part because they were never supposed to become famous. They were ordinary administrative paperwork \u2014 the kind of records that could easily disappear with time. Instead, Squires kept them.<\/p>\n

One set has since been accessioned into the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum archives.<\/p>\n

Gordon\u2019s research connects those documents with NASA press materials, engineering records, and the work of Dr. Anne Platoff, whose research has examined the Apollo flags and the engineering and political decisions surrounding them.<\/p>\n

Together, the records create a more detailed timeline of how NASA approached the flag.<\/p>\n

\u201cShort of a revealing memo that says \u2018Let\u2019s take the Sears flag,\u2019 every bit of evidence suggests that the first flag came from Sears. The purchase request for that was the last submitted, the press kit being drafted the same day, the memos coming out the day after NASA had the flag in hand. It all lines up in too clear of a way for it to be mere coincidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The flag was never just a flag<\/h3>\n

Gordon’s research also reveals that NASA’s thinking about the flag was tied to a much larger political question. <\/p>\n

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George Low, one of NASA’s key leaders during the Apollo program, did not want the flag planting to become a purely performative act in missions after Apollo 11<\/em>. At the same time, Congress took action requiring a U.S. flag to be placed on the Moon. NASA subsequently relied on that requirement while internally wrestling with how it fit within the international cooperation surrounding the lunar program.<\/p>\n

According to Gordon, that tension matters even more today.<\/p>\n

The Artemis program is built on international partnerships, including the European Service Module developed through the European Space Agency, with France and Germany among its major contributors.<\/p>\n

As NASA prepares for future lunar landings, Ray’s research raises a question that existed during Apollo as well: What does it mean to plant a national flag during a program built through international cooperation?<\/p>\n

NASA almost made the Moon a little more international<\/h3>\n

The Apollo 11 flag itself was also part of a more ambitious idea. Gordon’s research suggests that the Houston team wanted the flag planting to remain secret from much of NASA. They viewed the act as a kind of gift. It was something they wanted to keep small and unexpected so that it would have the greatest possible impact.<\/p>\n

At one point, NASA explored ways to acknowledge the international and historical significance of the moment. The plans went beyond simply planting an American flag.<\/p>\n

NASA developed equipment that could have allowed flags representing other countries to be left on the lunar surface. The idea was ultimately dropped for political reasons. In the surviving records, Gordon found evidence of the plan, followed weeks later by documentation showing a much simpler approach: U.S. flag only.<\/p>\n

His research connects those records with Platoff’s scholarship, NASA press releases, engineering documentation, and photographic analysis, including the research published in Six Flags Over Luna.<\/p>\n

The flag that prepared astronauts for the Moon<\/h3>\n

Gordon’s research also takes the story beyond Apollo and into NASA’s current return to the Moon. <\/p>\n

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One of his most intriguing findings involves the size of the flags NASA purchased and how those dimensions changed as the Apollo program evolved. The evidence suggests that a particular flag carried by the Artemis II<\/em> crew was not likely intended to be planted on the Moon. Instead, Ray says the evidence suggests that it was a training article.<\/p>\n

After Apollo 12, <\/em>NASA changed the engineering requirements for lunar flags; smaller 2.5-by-4-foot flags became the standard for trips to the Lunar Surface. Apollo astronauts continued using 3-by-5-foot flags for Earth-based training. He sees a direct connection between that history and Artemis II<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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\u201cI think it\u2019s poetic: a flag that was meant to prepare Apollo astronauts for the Moon went with the Artemis II crew preparing us to go back.\u201d<\/p>\n

His research also suggests the third purchase request may have been a programmatic purchase intended to support the rest of the Apollo program, but the engineering reality changed their fates before the launch of Apollo 13<\/em>. That distinction could help explain the provenance of the surviving 3-by-5-foot training articles, like the flag recently flown by Artemis II and those currently housed within the Smithsonian and other institutions. His research ultimately suggests that the surviving documents saved by Minna Lo can be viewed as the birth certificates of a few of the most famous American Flags in modern History.<\/p>\n

From Apollo to Artemis<\/h3>\n

For Gordon, the most exciting part of the research is that the story isn’t confined to 1969. His work at NASA Headquarters gave him a closer look at the political and budgetary decisions surrounding Apollo 11<\/em> \u2014 and helped him see connections to NASA’s plans today.<\/p>\n

\u201cI walked away from NASA HQ with a deeper understanding of the political machinations of what was happening in the lead-up to Apollo 11\u2019s<\/em> launch. I was also able to get insight into the budgetary discussions to see what the thinking was on the future of the program, which allowed me to draw an exciting line to the present-day Artemis program in April when I saw the crew share the U.S. Flag that they took with them around the moon.\u201d<\/p>\n

With Artemis IV<\/em> currently slated to land astronauts on the Moon in 2028, Gordon says the core questions like \u201cwhat we do when we go back\u201d are becoming increasingly relevant. Gordon plans to continue pursuing them through his research, first preparing a paper that details why a U.S. flag went to the Moon and how it all unfolded\u2014both in public and behind closed doors\u2014for submission to the Sacknoff Prize in Space History through the only peer-reviewed academic journal devoted to the historical examination of spaceflight, Quest: The History of Spaceflight<\/em>.<\/p>\n

What began with a box of documents saved by his grandmother-in-law has become an investigation into NASA’s history, American symbolism, international cooperation, and humanity’s return to the Moon.<\/p>\n

What to see how it started? Read Part 1: ACC Student Gordon Ray Turns a Family Connection Into a Journey Through Space History<\/a><\/p>\n

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Decades-old NASA documents are helping ACC Honors Program student Gordon Ray piece together the unlikely story behind the first American flag planted on the Moon. The American flag planted on the Moon by Apollo 11 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3930,"featured_media":53364,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,12,15,1],"tags":[4448,158,176,326],"class_list":["post-53352","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-and-announcements","category-business-and-community","category-facstaff-news","category-updates","tag-gordon-ray","tag-government","tag-honors-program","tag-nasa"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53352","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3930"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53352"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53352\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53371,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53352\/revisions\/53371"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53352"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53352"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.austincc.edu\/newsroom\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53352"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}