Artemis II splashdown, Kansas City barbecue, and the amazing Kansas man who connects the dots 

As the world awaits the return Friday night of four astronauts who’ve just set the record for humans farthest from earth, it’s a great time to tell the story of a little-known Apollo engineer whose 65-year-old design still makes human space exploration possible.

Harold Finch was born in Kansas City, Kansas, during the Great Depression. Despite humble beginnings and an abusively critical father – and with the unwavering support of his mother and later his wife – he would one day solve one of NASA’s most critical problems for the Apollo program: how to prevent the craft and crew from boiling or freezing in the unrelenting conditions of space.

His inspiration for the design solution? Kansas City’s famous barbecue. Like a pig on a rotisserie, the spacecraft simply needed to turn slowly as it traveled.

While the concept was simple, the math and computing to pull it off were incredibly complex.

Ordinary miracles

Finch’s childhood dream to somehow be involved in the Space Age might have been squashed by his father, but a series of people and events in his life, which on their own might be considered ordinary, led him to achieve what can only be described as miraculous:

• Worked his way through college to earn an engineering degree with honors at the University of Kansas while enrolled in an Air Force ROTC program;
• Assigned to a secretive Air Force program to study enemy aerospace engineering while earning a Master’s, specializing in thermodynamics;
• Secured a first-of-its-kind NASA contract for a Kansas City-based firm, which led him to secure a second, and become project director of the Apollo Heat Program;
• Abruptly left his burgeoning science career to help start a junior college, where he eventually earned a doctorate in education and became an interim president;
• Departed education to start a business-training company with a friend with the express purpose of selling it so he could focus on Christian ministry;
• Successfully sold his business and started an international missions organization through which tens of thousands of people around the world came to Christ.

“Dad lived five lifetimes,” Harold’s son, Greg, told The Lion in an interview. “In one life, he had five completely separate careers, and he wasn’t qualified for any of them. …

“At the end of his career, when he physically just couldn’t function anymore, the missionaries had tallied the people who had made professions of faith, and there were about 80,000. Dad, just he was that guy. And again, he never missed a wedding, never missed graduation, nothing. You tell me how he did that.”

In fact, we know how the elder Finch did it thanks to the autobiographical account written by his son in the book, Space Age Renaissance Man (2025), with the fitting subtitle: How a Brilliant NASA Visionary Overcame Great Obstacles to Invent a Critical System for the Apollo Moon Missions… Then Kept Reinventing Himself.

“The Holy Spirit had definitely used my humble efforts to bring greater glory to Christ on this earth,” says Harold in the book. “He did all the work, and He alone deserves all the glory. Amazingly, the things I have shared in these past few pages are just the tip of the iceberg.”

That is amazing since the book is more than 500 pages of fascinating, true but unlikely stories!

“He and I worked on this book together,” said Greg, an award-winning teacher, explaining how he partnered with his father to write the story. “I put it in the form that made sense, but getting to sit down and talk to dad was the highlight of my life, because I knew a lot of things, but I didn’t know anything, and then I began to connect the dots. So dad was an amazing man.”

Though the book wasn’t published until last year, Greg was able to read the draft as the family gathered for Christmas in 2022, just a couple of weeks before Harold’s death.

“He heard it read,” Greg recalled, “and everyone knew that that part of his legacy was going to move forward.”

A legacy of missions

While many who learn the name Harold Finch will associate it with the moon missions of the Apollo program, it’s clear from the book his greatest joy and passion was a different kind of missions.

“Mom and Dad together, they founded two companies that three times earned the Inc. 500 fastest growing companies in America award,” Greg told The Lion. “And they spent most of their life after financial independence systematically giving it away. And mom and dad both had a philosophy that the only things you can keep are the things that you give away, and the things that are eternal are most important.”

The risk of leaving his stable science career to launch a business paid off, and in less than 10 years, Harold became financially independent and able to support an international short-term mission-sending ministry. Not only were the short-term mission trips effective in-and-of-themselves, but out of more than a thousand volunteers, at least eight became full-time missionaries.

Harold would later travel throughout Latin America to give talks on success – drawing on his many successful careers – with the deeper goal of sharing Christ, and with great results, as Greg noted earlier.

“At the end of his life, he looked back and he said, God gave me that path,” Greg says of his father. “Dad’s life verse was Proverbs 3:5-6: ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart; lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your path straight.'”

Artemis II, still using the barbecue roll

After slingshotting around the moon on a record-setting mission this week – no doubt turning like a rotisserie through space – Artemis II is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on Friday around 8 p.m. Eastern.

Although Harold passed away in early 2023, he was well aware of the Artemis program, which was announced by NASA in 2019.

“Why call it Artemis?” Harold asks in the book, in order to answer: “In Greek mythology, Artemis was the sister of Apollo (a nice tip of the cap to those of us who enabled the first manned spaceflights to the moon to happen).”

Indeed, the current American-led moon mission is the perfect opportunity to tip our hats not only to those Apollo pioneers, but especially to Harold Finch, whose life of Christian faith and character are worth emulating, too.

As one of Harold’s children told him near the end of his life:

“You know, Dad, no matter how long the human race continues into the future, there’ll never be another first mission to another world. You were there at the beginning of the Space Age to figure out some of the most complicated things people will continue to use forever.

“Most people don’t know your name, but the ideas behind the math and science you computed will never again have to be discovered. You were the first in the whole history of the world to do it, and there’ll never be another.”

Photo Credit: Space Age Renaissance Man Official Site (Facebook)