The 50th anniversary of the historic Apollo 11 moon landing is Saturday and for one former astronaut, he knows a little something about space travel.

Paton native and retired Air Force Colonel Loren Shriver flew three space shuttle missions during his time with NASA. After graduating Paton High School in 1962, he joined the Air Force and went through the Air Force Academy, did his graduate work at Purdue University and was training to become an instructor pilot when Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969. Shriver points out a personal significance to that event.

“Our first daughter was born right in that time period. She was born on July 15th and so she was basically five days old during the first moon landing.”

When Shriver joined NASA, his first space mission was classified with the U.S. Department of Defense in 1985. The next mission was launching the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990. His final mission was to be an experiment to generate electricity from the Earth’s magnetic field. But due to a mechanical malfunction with an attached copper wire connector, the mission wasn’t completed.

Shriver says one of his most challenging moments was during the Hubble Telescope mission. One of the solar rays wasn’t extended out all the way and so two of the crew members were getting ready to do a space walk to hand-crank it out. The crew back at NASA were able to bypass the electrical system and get it working. When that happened, the two crew members were stuck inside the airlock chamber, and they were the two people trained to take pictures of the launching of the telescope.

“We missed all of the nice momentous, historical photos of releasing the Hubble Telescope into space for the first time. But luckily we had a big IMAX camera in the payload bay that was remotely operated from the ground and they did get pictures of it. So it was on film.”

While Shriver did not travel to the moon, he spent 386 hours in space for his three missions and retired from NASA in 2011 as the vice-president of engineering and integration and chief technology officer with United Space Alliance.