The Californer - A Kickstarter Campaign for "A Cable To The Moon"

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Uncovers the Hidden Apollo Story of a 16-Year-Old Mexican Immigrant Who Built a Spacecraft Test Cable in a Los Angeles Warehouse

LOS ANGELES - Californer -- In the summer of 1968, a sixteen-year-old girl who had crossed from Tijuana two years earlier spent three months alone in a warehouse in Chatsworth, a neighborhood in Los Angeles, building a hundred-foot electrical test cable for a secretive aerospace job. She was too young and too far removed from positions of power to fully understand the significance of what she was building. Nobody told her it was for the Moon until the day it passed its final inspection.

Her name is Ramona Carrasco Ibarra. She was not an engineer. She was not on anyone's payroll with benefits or a badge. She was a teenager placed through a temp agency, working under a single supervisor in a building so quiet the only sounds were tools and meters. She built the cable while carrying trauma that most adults would not survive, enduring abuse at home during the same months she was performing flawless precision work on the shop floor.

Ramona was building the cable during one of the most turbulent periods of 1968, just weeks after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and in a year marked by war, protest, and global upheaval.

The cable she built was a ground test harness for NASA's Acceptance Checkout Equipment, the system used to verify Apollo spacecraft systems before launch. After nine previous candidates failed to pass the interview, Ramona was the tenth, and the one who got the job and finished it. She tested every circuit twice herself. A team of visiting engineers tested it a third time. It passed with no faults. Then she went home, and history forgot her name.

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Today, Los Angeles writer Guillermo Wightman launches a Kickstarter campaign for A Cable to the Moon, a narrative nonfiction book that traces Ramona's full life, from her childhood in Mexico, to her crossing into the United States, through the abuse and instability she survived as a teenager, into the precision electronics work that placed her inside the Apollo program, and beyond. The campaign seeks funding for final editing, legal review, design, and publication.

The book is not only about the cable. It is about what Ramona did with the rest of her life. How she built a career. How she carried a secret for decades without ever seeking credit, and what it means that a story this extraordinary sat inside a woman who was never asked to tell it.

Part historical investigation, part immigrant story, and part act of restoration, A Cable to the Moon sits at the intersection of migration, labor, gender, memory, and the hidden workforce behind Apollo. It argues that the history of the space race is larger than astronauts, executives, and official archives. It also belongs to the women, immigrants, and working-class laborers whose hands helped turn ambition into achievement.

Wightman, a Colombian American journalist and California State University, Northridge graduate based in Los Angeles, has spent three and a half years researching and writing the book since first hearing Ramona's story at a family gathering in 2022. He developed the manuscript late at night while balancing full-time work and family life.

The project has grown to roughly 42,000 words, supported by extensive interviews, archival research, and technical investigation into Apollo-era spacecraft checkout systems. Both the NASA History Office and the National Archives have reviewed his research and directed the search toward specific Apollo-era record groups where documentation of the cable may survive.

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"One of the most incredible things for me was discovering that a close family friend I had seen at countless family parties for years was connected to the space race," said Wightman. "I have always loved space, and although I studied journalism, I built my career in sales and marketing. I have always been drawn to unheard stories. What moved me most was the contrast at the center of Ramona's life: a sixteen-year-old who had migrated from Tijuana just two years earlier, who carried deep trauma and was being abused while building the cable, still created something with her hands that helped test the spacecraft tied to Apollo 11. Sometimes reality is more unbelievable than fiction."

The campaign launches at a moment when firsthand witnesses to the Apollo era are disappearing, and when the country is still reckoning with whose stories are preserved, celebrated, or left behind.

As NASA's Artemis II mission marks the first crewed lunar flyby in 50 years, A Cable to the Moon looks back to Apollo to recover one of the human stories left in the shadows of that first great leap. Through her journey, A Cable to the Moon connects Los Angeles, Mexico, and the Moon landing, reminding us that history's greatest moments are built from the quiet efforts of those who rarely see their names in headlines.

Backers can choose from digital editions, signed print copies, special acknowledgments, and exclusive behind-the-scenes material.

Campaign link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/acabletothemoon/a-cable-to-the-moon-the-immigrant-teen-behind-apollo-11