Which could not have been endessful if it did not successfully. The panel we have today is the panel on command module landing and recovery operations. They always say the job is not over until the paperwork is finished. The job is not over until the spacecraft is floating in the Pacific Ocean and the astronauts are successfully retrieved. We have with us four heroes of that era, people i looked up to and admired as a 14yearold watching on television back in 1969, and i wished i could be with them in the Pacific Ocean helping to retrieve those astronauts. Left,e on the panel to my heflin, melmily heflin, melmilton richmond, and terry watson. I will open it up to questions from the audience. It us started. Tell us a little bit about who you are, how you got to be involved in this business, what you did for apollo. I got here in june of 1967 after graduating in tennessee, just outside the appalachian poverty zone. I could not wait to get here because i needed to make some money. [laughter] i went to work in the landing and recovery business. At that time, in the training world. I will let these guys talk to you about what it is like to be on the recovery ship during an actual recovery. Global,very effort was and i spent all my time in the airshipsan righting into contingency landing spots. I moved off into the Flight Control world and retired from nasa after 35 years, and spent about 15 years consulting. You can do the math on that. I was one of the children of apollo. [laughter] kunzt of all, thiis deb in the audience . I was hoping she would be here. I wanted to embarrass her. She is the daughter of the man in 1966. Me i showed up here on 6666. Retired in 2013. There is a story about the sixes we probably dont have time to tell you, but maybe we do. I was hired by wayne koonz, debs dad. He lives in kansas now. His health is not that good. He was the command marine command chopper pilot that ofked up alan shepard in may 1961. A very special guy. Have been in eight downs during apollo in eight splashdowns during apollo. In then the splashdown unmanned spacecraft that came back. I was on the spaceship i was on the ship that recovered orion. 2014. As in i had fun with that because when i left and i am consulting with the Kennedy Space center, who is in charge of landing recovery, like we used to do. When i left the team, i made a comment to him. I said, this is my ninth splashdown, and i am still eight ahead of you. And i hope you can catch up. After that, i became a Flight Controller for the approach and landing testing. I worked as a Flight Controller in four different positions in Mission Control during the first Nine Missions of the Space Shuttle, and was very fortunate to be selected as a flight supportedn 1983 and 20 Space Shuttle flights as a flight director, seven of those as the lead flight director. The most fun i ever had was by luck of the draw. I got to be the lead like director for when we went back to the hubble and restored its vision. That was a big thing, really enjoyed it. Beyond that, i guess if you are good at something, they like to kick you up into management. So, i probably had five or six different management jobs. I wont mention them all, but i was chief of the Flight Office for a while. I was on duty, i was there when we lost columbia, and i was chief of the office. That did happen on my watch. I ended up in my career working in the Center Directors office. They made a special job for john young when john could no longer technicalt was called director technical of the Johnson Space center. They created a job for him, and he was the eyes and ears of the Center Director at operations and safety and that sort of thing. That job was vacant for about three or four years, and i was asked to come and take that job. And he said, replace what john young is doing. I said, i can take that job, but i cannot replace john young. I have been blessed with a lot of Different Things in this business and a lot of these guys. It has been really fun. I guess i need to leave some time for the rest of these. [laughter] i came to nasa in 1965 after four years as a weather officer in the air force. The first job i had after i got here, after about a month i was told to go to hawaii and get on a ship out there. I was in a hotel on waikiki beach, and i said, i think i will like this job. [laughter] that night, i was on a destroyer, and i thought, im not going to like this job. [laughter] and i was gemini 6. So target failed to deploy, i got to come home. Of my career in recovery. Agreement when nasa was formed at the department of defense was responsible for so the navy and air force did all the recovery, but they constantly changed people. Fornasa was responsible showing them how to do it. Developing the equipment for them to do it, writing the requirements for each flight, tell them how many airplanes and where to be and which ships and where to be. I was not here doing mercury. I know they had a lot of ships out in the ocean, a lot of airplanes. And Apollo Apollo skylab was over, i think we had one ship, and that was the prime ship. During that period of time after i got here, i was responsible for writing the requirements of the department of defense. I did not do it by myself. A lot of people had inputs into it. It developed, as we went along each nation, we learned more and had more confidence the spacecraft more confidence in the spacecraft. 11,rked for apollo 7, 9, restnd i think i wrote the of them, but i dont remember. I was on the recovery ship for apollo 9 and i was on the 17,very ship for 11, 13, and three skylabs. And on the skylab, i was the nasa team lead. It was a good job. After apollo and skylab was over, we no longer had water landings, so i was training flight directors and flight crews. I can say i was training them, but i wasnt. Letting them work on the problems. That is pretty much everything we did. You could say you did it, but you were really part of a team. Everybody did their part. Like towhat you would know is what i did on apollo 11, and as i said, i was on the recovery ship. And i was kind of the nasa trajectory guy. I knew about the mission. So i was assigned to a nasa office on the ship, which was next to the combat information center, and we spent about a week going through exercises, throwing the boilerplate over we didnt throw it over, we dropped it into the water had theamed off and airplanes hone in on the begin and the ship on the beacon and the ship would drive up and people,would pick up pretend they were astronauts, drive the ship up my pick up the command module, put it on the ship, and go through the procedures we would go through on a regular flight when it came back. I was thinking about it this morning. It was sort of a thing you did everyweek after practice, other day, with all the people. Then the day of the flight, it just happened. The spacecraft was going to come back and you were going to do your part and it all worked out because you had done it so many times. Guess the only thing that i remember most about it is when the astronauts got off, the helicopter went into the mobile the deed facility when astronauts got off the helicopter, went into the mobile quarantine facility. The president went to talk to them. I was standing six feet behind nixon, and i remember that about the flight. I also remember that i was a courier for some of the film that was shot. I remember bringing it back. It came back commercial, and i was checking in with the airlines, and they were saying, we want to xray this film. I said, i dont think so. [laughter] while, and finally, i said, i am not leaving this film and you cannot xray it. So they let me go. And i know came back and i must have given it to somebody, but i dont remember who. [laughter] i guess that is what my career has been. Thank you. [applause] i graduated from georgia tech february 1967, and i had been going on various job interviews for engineering jobs. None of them were very exciting. They were exciting a little bit, but you would go off to huntsville, alabama, and they would say, this is fred and joe and charlie and this is where we go to eat lunch, and this is the lab. I had interviewed with nasa and did not hear anything back. They came to campus and i came up. I thought that would be great. One day, i got a call from a man in the landing recovery, and he said, we want you to come out to houston, work in the landing recovery division, travel around the world, travel on air force planes and get on navy ships, see the world. Air travel back then was really expensive. I dont think i had actually flown on an airplane until one of my job interviews. It is not like it is today. So this job had a big adventure checkbox next to it. I said, how much is this going to cost me . No, we are going to pay you to do this. I am thinking, what could be better . So i came out to houston right out of college, a great degree. I am going to show these people have to do things right. You walk into your first job, and you are the dumbest guy in the office. There is a lot of learning experience going on. I worked mainly in the control centers, so i got to spend a lot of time in the Recovery Room next to the Mission Control center, and also went out to some of the d. O. D. Recovery centers, worked on the mobile quarantine facility. We took it out 10 days to sea. So we were quarantined for 10 days. That is another story. Ended up on the recovery ship for apollo 10 with milt heflin. Actually, i was ordered on the ship. I said, is there anything i can do on the ship . He said, read this book. You can powerdown the spacecraft and pull all the stuff out of it and seal up thrusters. I am thinking, this is incredible. Last you think this was lest you think this was exciting, part of it was cleaning out the waste antigen system and bagging Waste Management system and bagging it all up. They studied everything. [laughter] i think my job was better than theirs. [laughter] that one thing i should mention. You have never lived until you have crossed the equator on a navy ship. It is a big ceremony for the first timers. If you were in a fraternity and ever went through hell week, it does not prepare for what the navy had for you. I carried that card for years. I was not going to go anywhere without that shellback card. Any shellbacks in here . There are a few. I anyway, after apollo 10, thought, is that all there is for recovery . I felt that i wanted to do more. I spent a lot of time next to Mission Control and had friends in the Flight Control division. Somehow, i came back from hawaii and was immediately in the Flight Control division and never looked back. Started off in one of the back rooms, worked my way up. Apas the lead on on apollo 16 and 17. I worked the console. I think i was the only guy i worked the job on the skylab vehicle and also on the apollo spacecraft. Quite often, i would do two shifts in a row where we would be doing a launch or a reentry. I have to say, it was a really great experience, working with some of the greatest people i have ever after that, after we stopped flying the Space Shuttle, the whole environment changed. Things became different. I felt it was time to move on. I went to the west coast and sit and did ajpl stent stint with jpl. And then in houston, where everything is right now. Then you go to an organization done by committees of phds that take a week to decide anything. I felt like i was trying to swim through quicksand. I dont want to belittle it. They do good work there. Their whole role was different. Not have the action or excitement we had in houston. And it of moving to trw, where i was doing Mission Operations on nasa satellites. Some other satellites i cant talk about. Thanks, that is a good introduction to the breadth and scope of the panel members. I want to ask a couple of questions, then we will turn it over to the audience. The first question relates to the fact that i understand apollo was a Global Recovery requirement to the spacecraft code conceivably splashdown anywhere in the world. What was the planning that led to that kind of uniformity of recovery location and time and what other factors might have influenced that . Maybe others can answer. The beginning of the Apollo Program made planning easy. They drew a line right in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. One down the middle of it one down the middle of the atlantic. The planning was to time it so the landing will occur over one of those two places. It just depends on how fast you wanted to come back from the moon. And where the earth was turning that it would land. Ocean thanwas more pacific. That was a longitude line. It was a longitude line. Anywhere along that, depending upon mechanics, depending on where the moon was, and its orbit around the earth, with a result there were down there, it would land on that line. One of the reasons for the earlymorning landings was, when we landed on the moon, one of the requirements was to have the sun around 20 degrees of the horizon, so she had slant lighting. The moon landing fixed on where this is to the relative to the earth and the moon. You figured out where the pacific would be at the end of the missions. Probably saw the figure eight around the room moon. That put the landing zone on each side of the earth opposite the moon. The southup in pacific partly because of the way the moonlighting was the earth moon son earthmoonson geography. N geography. Depended on where the moon was the time. Apollo 13 ended up down south near samoa. Hawaii is a good place to leave from as well. I had the privilege of being in the atlantic. That was four apollo eight, the first lunar return. Ship hadry recovery fromologists and engineers rockwell and all the worlds press. On a stone and i were Troop Carrier in the middle of the atlantic ocean. We had one of these metal suitcases that had a recovery strap in it. A couple of throat boards and a recovery manual. Early return. Could hit the atlantic about 12 hours quicker. If you needed to get back early and about to of the primary recovery, the atlantic was your place. In december. We around the equator. Had the mission slipped, we would have been as far south as uruguay. Just based on what the difference in the trajectory was. End up as far south as montevideo and uruguay. The captain of the ship was perplexed as to why he did not to multifor deyo series, heeo, when a had a good end of career tour planned. We interrupted it. Today,end of the day, people are so used to talking to their friends who are in afghanistan. The communications and 68 1968 were not that. We were on the recovery ship. Randy and i were to single guys. Two single guys. Everybody wanted to be with their families, and we were single. We got to the middle of the atlantic and we were told it launched. Another one in that checked out ok. Another one in that checked out ok. Another one said they were ok. We had no clue as to what the mission look like. Looked like. We got home and were put into rio de janeiro. Life magazine of the earth on the front and a big spread on what happened. It was in portuguese. Anyone have any questions about recovery operations for discuss for apollo 11, the quarantine. How many people went into quarantine with the astronauts from the Recovery Team . You had a doctor. They were responsible for the. Obile quarantine operation there were five people inside the mobile quarantine facility . The two folks from the Recovery Team and the three astronauts. Was there consideration to making the apollo 11 recovery carrier the uss john f. Kennedy the primary recovery vessel . I cant speak for the navy. I suspect not. Once the flights were over, the ships seemed to disappear from the inventory. It worked well for what we needed. Mothball madee think about the ticonderoga. We used it on apollo 16 and 17. That was it for the ship. What i remember is i kept seeing chairs, a lot and of furniture taken in and thrown into the ocean, because that was the ships last sale and they were getting ready to decommission it. By the time we get back onto the west coast, i dont know what we got into, but that carrier was really high in the water. They jumped up a lot of weight [inaudible] can you tell us about your feelings about being involved on the recovery of apollo and i hope ims . Answering your question. Was a longer duration. There was concern about the condition of the crew once they splashdown. At that time, we decided we were the the crew inside the command module. Instead of them getting out and getting to the helicopter. They could have done that if they needed to. We werent knowledgeable enough to know what the condition of the human body would be for 50 days or whatever it was. Did i even get close to your question . [laughter] danny says the answer is no. I dont know what the question was. It was, how did you feel to be a part of the Recovery Team . [laughter] terry, you are to answer that one. It depends on what position i was doing at the time. The first time, i was out at apollo nine. The weather was terrible and the captain never came around. The press was terrible. I threw up in my bosses state room. I was very happy to be off of the ship. Apollo 11 was kind of an adventure. Thesee went through shellback ceremony. At the time, i dont know how to explain really. It was a worldwide operation. Once we figured out what was going on, and the military would only give us a little information, and when the landing occurred, i think we were listening to the radio or something, as everyone else was watching it on tv. I told my boss, i dont want to go on those ships anymore. He said, ok, you dont go. Up, whichb was coming was two months or three months, my boss didnt want to go out there all the time. He said, now youre going to do all of them. I said, ok. A different position on that. Then,a Deputy Team Leader and skylab, i was a team leader. A lot more responsibility. I dont know if i would say i enjoyed it, but it was a different kind of job. I will take a different take on that. I worked in recovery for years. It was bliss. It was the coolest thing. I couldnt believe they hired me to do this job. How did i get so lucky. A lot of us were really lucky in that respect. We were in the right place at the right time. There wasnt anything special about us. The opportunity presented itself and we took advantage of it. We were part of a bigger thing. I was blessed to have been associated with the navy, air force, and marines, basically the dod that made up the team. I really liked what i did during that time, because what i learned, being around our military was commandandcontrol, dedication. That has served me well through my career. I wouldve never been in the service. Experience at im so glad i got it, because it made such a big difference to me. The camaraderie and all these units we worked with was remarkable. It made you feel good. [applause] i was blessed to be at the cape for the first launch. Recovery was not treated like everybody else. In the old mercury control room, which was around the air force station side. No lock on the door. The room wasnt brief rough shape. It was functional. We were all squeezed in. There, and it was a test of the heatshield. At two minus nine, the guy i was with, to this day, i am in his great gratitude, theres no reason for you to sit here and listen to all of this. Why dont you watch it . I had the privilege of standing on a little stand just above the keep, whendown to the first one went off. Later, youinute inld see the sound standing the way and knocking down the brush coming across. I have heard shuttle launches from closer. The only thing that everybody that was down there could hear was it was an earthquake. That was an incredible sound. Of 1967. In november i had only been there for about five months. It hurt me for 50 years. [applause] we have time for one more question. [inaudible] how has technology from back then to now advanceds technology from the 60s to now made the i have or has it . A good example of that. Im on a modest consulting contract with Kennedy Space center. Been observing the space Center Landing routine. Its a doubleedged sword. There were a lot of things we where, n the day, im 26 years old. I am a nominee im on an aircraft coming back from the command module from pearl harbor back to houston and i am a Senior National official and im boarding the plane at 26. Almost everything we did was simple. Lots of stories there. See, is that the technology these young men and women have available to them are theres a number of things you could work on. Back in those days, it was about going out and trying something. Youre basically in charge of getting things done. Are a lot theres a lot more overhead and what we do. Craft, i had conversation with him when i was chief of the directors office. He asked me how things were going out there the Johnson Space center. Specifically in operations. Man whot is the invented the business of mr. Mission control. I wanted to tell him that i thought the men and women who showed up this is like 10 years ago the men and women who showed up to do this job , they had the fire in their belly that we had in those days. What i wanted to do craft was, was that i thought the teams always seem today worked in Mission Control. Asy were probably as good what he had back in the day. As im getting ready to tell him, i said, dr. Kraft, after terry, the men and women of Mission Control today are he said, stop. Kraft, who invented this business. To getnking, im going my head handed to me. He said, milton, no. Than we were. R they are better because of the tools they have today. This country could do this again as long as they are being told to go do it, get what they need to do it, and then, everybody else who doesnt have a clue how to get it done, get out of the way. [laughter] you specifically asked about technology. When i lived here, did a lot of unmanned satellite work. I can tell you the technology we have today is orders of magnitude better and smaller and quicker and more efficient and does 10 times more the movie had in the apollo era. On apollo, we were looking taking star sightings to frame the altitude of the spacecraft. Now they have Autonomous Car trackers that look at the stars and they tell the satellite with the attitude of the spacecraft is. No ground intervention. We had gyroscopes that were strapped down that was a backup attitude control system. Down on theoked strapped down system. It was rude and crude. 99 of the satellites satellites in order today have dropdown systems. They are really good. Hubble telescope sees things like that. Little magnetic cords, wrapped with hair size wires in the programming was coded by the which way the wires ran around. If you wanted to make a software change to the apollo commuter computer, it was a big deal. They had to change all the wiring. It was a major thing. Technology was huge. It should make the job easier. I dont think politics and all that other stuff makes the job easier. Technologies worlds ahead. I will give you an example. We hadoned before landings in the atlantic and Pacific Ocean. All over the world. Lots of ships. Orion, no matter where the moon will land off of san diego. The matter what the trajectory has come and gone, theyre gonna land in san diego because of the increased knowledge from the atmosphere. The guidance was so much better. When we were doing it, we were worried about acting the atmosphere and skipping out and going back into space. We dont worry about that anymore because the guidance is so good. Technology has changed a lot of things in that aspect. With that, we will wrap up this section session. Thank you very much. [laughter] you are watching American History tv, 48 hours of programming every weekend on cspan3. Follow us on twitter at cspan history for information on our schedule and to keep up with the latest history news. Years ago, woodstock attracted nearly half a Million People to a dairy farm in upstate new york. Next, wade lawrence, director of the museum at bethel woods describes how the threeday rock concert ended up in bethel, 60 miles from the town of woodstock. 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