USS Hornet (CV-12) 27 March 1967. She reached Japan exactly a month later and departed the Sasebo base on 19 May for the war zone. She operated in Vietnamese waters throughout the first half of 1967. "Hornet" recovered the astronauts from the first moon landing mission, Apollo 11, on 24 July 1969. President Nixon was on board to welcome the returning astronauts back to Earth, where they lived in quarantine aboard "Hornet" prior to transfer to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory at Houston. The first steps on Earth of returning moonwalkers Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, with Command Module Pilot Michael Collins, are marked
John Hirasaki very minimal." After removing the recovered lunar rocks to the MQF, Hirasaki opened the containment pouch in which they were stored so that he, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and William Carpentier could look at them, making him one of the first five known human beings in history to view lunar rocks inside the atmosphere of Earth. In his autobiography, Michael Collins described Hirasaki as "quiet, flexible, unobtrusive" and said that both he and William Carpentier were "good choices" to join the astronauts in the MQF. Hirasaki's grandfather was the farmer and businessman Kichimatsu Kishi. His uncle, Taro Kishi,