Purdue University: The Cradle of Astronauts

West Lafayette, Indiana sits at the bend of the Wabash River, and on the bluffs above that river, Purdue University has spent a hundred and fifty years producing engineers, agronomists, and astronauts in numbers that defy reasonable expectation for a land-grant school in the Indiana corn country.

Purdue was founded on May sixth, eighteen sixty-nine, under the Morrill Land-Grant Act, which channeled federal land sales into creating agricultural and technical colleges across the states that had remained in the Union. Tippecanoe County's winning bid included one hundred fifty thousand dollars from a Lafayette businessman named John Purdue, fifty thousand from the county, and one hundred acres of land. John Purdue was not an easy man, controlling, vain, and quick to demand that the institution bear his name, but his money built something that outlasted him by generations. The first classes met in September eighteen seventy-four with six instructors and thirty-nine students.

From that small beginning grew the school that now claims the title Cradle of Astronauts, and the claim is backed by arithmetic. Purdue has produced twenty-seven astronauts, more than any other public university in the world. Neil Armstrong, who flew from here as an aeronautical engineering student in the class of nineteen fifty-five, became the first human to walk on the Moon on July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine. Gus Grissom, class of nineteen fifty, was among NASA's original Mercury Seven and the second American in space. Eugene Cernan, the last human to walk on the Moon, was also a Purdue man. Roger Chaffee, who died in the Apollo One fire of nineteen sixty-seven, studied here.

Beyond space, Purdue built the foundation of American agricultural science, pioneered aviation training, and sent engineers into nearly every major twentieth-century industrial project. Its research farms stretch across the county. Its engineering buildings generated patents that changed how Americans ate, flew, and manufactured.

The campus is one of the largest in the country, and still largely built in a confident collegiate Gothic style that says permanence, even on the Indiana plain. But its real monument is the list of people who studied here and then went somewhere extraordinary.