The Man Who Gave the ‘Go’ for the Moon: Rocco Petrone

Documented family tree & key facts

Rocco Anthony Petrone — director of the Apollo program launch operations; director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center. b. Amsterdam, New York, 31 March 1926; d. Palos Verdes, California, 24 August 2006.
Parents: Antonio Petrone (b. Sasso Castalda, 7 April 1896) × Teresa De Luca.

The line — Petrone, of Sasso Castalda (Potenza), Basilicata

Donato Petrone (d. Sasso Castalda, 7 August 1835, aged 34) × Teresa Grosso (d. 29 March 1851, aged 57) — furthest documented
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Michele Arcangelo Petrone (b. Sasso Castalda, 8 May 1831; orphaned at four) × Caterina Cammarota (b. Sasso Castalda, 8 April 1836; m. 15 January 1857)
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Giovanni Petrone (b. Sasso Castalda, 24 July 1858) × Mariantonia Scelzo of Brienza (m. 30 June 1894)
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Antonio Petrone (b. Sasso Castalda, 7 April 1896) × Teresa De Luca — arrived New York 1921 (SS Princess Matoika)
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Rocco Petrone (1926–2006)

Worth knowing

Rocco Petrone gave the final “go” for the launch of Apollo 11 — the great-grandson of a Basilicata hill family orphaned young, three generations from the register of Sasso Castalda to the firing room at Cape Kennedy.

Documented by original acts (civil registers of Sasso Castalda and Brienza, Basilicata; the 1921 ship’s manifest). Names earlier than those marked “furthest documented” are not yet proven and are left out.

On 16 July 1969, the last word before Apollo 11 left the Earth belonged to a launch director whose parents had come from a mountain village in Basilicata. His name was Rocco Petrone, and the men at Cape Kennedy called him “the Tiger”. When he said “go,” three astronauts began the journey to the Moon.

From Sasso di Castalda to the “Glove City”

Rocco Anthony Petrone was born on 31 March 1926 in Amsterdam, New York — a mill town so devoted to one trade it was known as the Glove City. His parents, Antonio Petrone and Teresa DeLuca, were immigrants from Sasso di Castalda, a small comune in the mountains of the Province of Potenza, in Basilicata. Antonio worked on the railway. The year 1926 was cruel to the family: little Rocco was born on 31 March; his uncle and namesake, Rocco De Luca, died that April; and Antonio himself died on 8 October, when the boy was barely six months old — leaving Teresa a widow at twenty-eight with two small sons, Rocco and his older brother Dominick. She took work in a glove factory, and the children knew real want — the young Rocco delivered ice door to door to help the family survive. It was, in every sense, a poor immigrant childhood.

Antonio’s crossing is a matter of record. He had married Teresa De Luca in Sasso Castalda in 1920, and in February 1921 the young couple sailed from Naples aboard the SS Princess Matoika, bound for Amsterdam, New York, where Teresa’s brother, Rocco De Luca — from the same village, and in America since 1907 — was waiting to receive them. Behind Antonio the registers of Sasso Castalda run deep: his father, Giovanni Petrone, was born in the village in 1858, and Giovanni’s own father, Michele Arcangelo Petrone, born in the village on 8 May 1831, before him. Michele Arcangelo’s life had opened in hardship: his father, Donato Petrone, a farmer of the strada Castello, died on 7 August 1835 at only thirty-four, leaving the boy fatherless at four, and his mother, Teresa Grosso, was widowed for sixteen years before her own death in 1851. Grown, on 15 January 1857 Michele Arcangelo married Caterina Cammarota of the same village, and it was their son Giovanni who carried the line forward. Behind them the Sasso Castalda registers reach back two generations further still — to Donato’s parents, Giuseppe Petrone and Anna Coronato, and to Teresa’s, Francesco Grosso and Carminella Laurisano, all born in the eighteenth century. Six generations of Petrone in one Basilicata mountain town, farmers and day-labourers to a man, before the family name reached the edge of space. Giovanni had married Mariantonia Scelzo of nearby Brienza in 1894; her father was named Rocco Scelzo, one of several Roccos the family carried.

West Point, MIT, and the rockets

Out of that childhood came a formidable engineer. At seventeen Petrone won a place at the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1946 — he had played on the 1945 national-championship football team. As a U.S. Army officer he worked on the early Redstone missile and served in West Germany, then took a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. Rockets, not gloves, would be his trade.

The launch director of Apollo

Assigned to NASA in 1960, Petrone became the Director of Launch Operations at the Kennedy Space Center. He oversaw the building of the colossus that made the Moon landings possible — Launch Complex 39 and the Vehicle Assembly Building — and ran the countdowns with a rigour that earned him the nickname “the Tiger of Cape Kennedy.” On the morning of 16 July 1969, it was Petrone who gave the final “go” that sent Apollo 11 aloft. He went on to direct the entire Apollo Program (1969—1973), then the Marshall Space Flight Center — its first non-German director — and served as NASA’s Associate Administrator before leaving the agency in 1975.

A Lucano at the edge of space

A fatherless boy who had hauled ice through the streets of a New York glove town had become the man responsible for launching human beings to another world. In 2022 NASA gave his name to the building itself: the launch control centre at the Kennedy Space Center — from which Apollo once flew and the Artemis Moon missions fly today — is now the Rocco A. Petrone Launch Control Center. Rocco Petrone died on 24 August 2006 in Palos Verdes Estates, California, survived by his wife Ruth and their four children. His story begins, as so many American ones do, in the civil registers of a small Italian town — in this case Sasso di Castalda, in the Basilicata his parents left behind.

The documents behind the story

From the civil registers of Sasso Castalda to a ship’s manifest — the acts that anchor the Petrone family. Click any document to enlarge it.

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Documented genealogical research by Clemente Suardi. To trace and document your own Italian family, act by act, request a free preliminary evaluation.