The Legacy of Ted Freeman

The boy who became an astronaut grew up right here in Lewes. Theodore Cordy Freeman graduated from Lewes High School in nineteen forty-eight, went on to the Naval Academy, and earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering. As an Air Force captain and test pilot, he was chosen in nineteen sixty-three for the third group of NASA astronauts, training for the Gemini and Apollo programs that would carry Americans to the moon.

He never made it. On October thirty-first, nineteen sixty-four, as Freeman approached a landing in a T thirty-eight jet near Houston, a goose struck his jet and knocked out the engine. He steered away from military housing before ejecting, but his parachute opened too late. He was thirty-four. Ted Freeman became the first American astronaut to die in the race to the moon, and the highway to the Cape May Lewes Ferry now carries his name.