About a program that put more than a decade of nasa astronauts into space. At morehead, we still talk about the role that we played on the front lines of the cold war. The space race was a Major Initiative within the cold war. T 10 t minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 0. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, we are in the campus of the university of North Carolina at chapel hill. I am standing in front of the morehead building, home of the morehead planetarium. John morgan the third is from a famous North Carolina family. His family was the governor of North Carolina. John morehead the third attended carolina for undergraduate school in chemistry. Made an accidental discovery in a Chemistry Lab as an undergraduate that ultimately led to the founding of Union Carbide and the fan he became an extremely wealthy man, and he came up with this idea, what he leading Science Education contribution was he built the planetarium. When we opened in 1949, the planetarium was the first one in the south. His contribution was significant. We are also the first planetarium in the world on a university campus. He visited a planetarium in chicago, the hayden planetarium. He also visited the leading lens manufacturer in the world. They arguably still are in germany. To projectce model are installed, which was at that time the very best star projector in the world. Was as anal vision place of education and enlightenment. Is what you will see in the lower half of your television screen. Make sure that you watch very carefully. About in the center screen, in the lower third. In the late 1950s, the u. S. Government in response to sputnik launched and the advancement of the soviet union in their technology, specially with rocketry and space exploration, the u. S. Government felt threatened and felt like there needed to be a response, so nasa was formed in the late 1950s, and shortly thereafter, an announcement was made that we were going to send humans into space. Time, theor at the head of nasa at the time, communicated about the possibility of celestial navigation. As the agentg that mariners did, sailing the seas using the stars as a way to navigate, the new pioneers could be able to use the stars, just in case there Navigation Systems would fail. 1975, morehead planetarium trained all of the astronauts in celestial navigation. I like to say that unc chapel hill was the only university in thoseuntry that can claim astronauts as alumni. They came here for continuing education in celestial navigation. Prettyd always used primitive technology themselves throughout the training. Which was projector, eventually replaced in 1969 with the model six, which was a better projector. The philosophy of the training stay the same. The Main Technology that they used, if you want to call it that, was a barbers chair, and different wooden or cardboard attachments they would attach to the barber chair to simulate whatever the capsule would be. The idea was whatever you could do to reorient the astronauts. Barbers chairs seemed to work well. You could spin, you could rotate, you could pitch. All of those things had to be simulated because that would be with the astronauts would experience in space. Here astronauts that came needed to know the night sky better than anyone. Specific constellations, stars they could relate to. They could figure out where they were in space in relation to where those constellations were. You have to remember that they had no horizon in space to reference. Their vision was restricted through the side windows. Have only seen 1 8 of the night sky that we would see without any horizon. Astronauts knew where they were because they knew where the stars were. These were used in all the early missions. Although the celestial Navigation Training was used on every mission to calibrate Navigation Systems, the First Mission where it was critical that the knowledge of the night sky was used to get the astronaut back home safely was the mercury Atlas Mission in the early 1960s. In that case, they faced all ds of equipment salyer equipment failures. They use the knowledge gained from morehead and the training here to relocate and manually reenter the atmosphere. Enough, that was the only one of that series of missions that landed manually. Splashdown inate the history of that series of missions. Happened, 31 hours. The apollo 12 was impacted. They were struck by lightning on takeoff. We had a whole bunch of buzzers drop off. Usehe crew was able to their knowledge of the stars and Navigation Training here to recalibrate their Navigation System that was thrown out from the Lightning Storm and they were able to reset pretty early in the mission and they were able to complete the mission. Apollo 13 is probably the most famous that did not land on the moon in the polys in the apollo series of missions. There was an explosion and a fire. Easton, we have a problem here. I dont know what it was. Field, soa debrief jim lovell and his crew could not see where they were throughout the mission because of the debris cloud that surrounded the spacecraft. When they aborted the mission to land on the moon, they orbited themoon right before reentered earths atmosphere, the debris field cleared and they were able to look out their windows to confirm that they had adjusted their Navigation Systems correctly. Knowledgey use their gained from morehead training to ensure that they were on the right path. Houston, we show you on the main. It looks great. We like to say that we trained astronauts and we are training future astronauts. Here toevery visitor see that the sky truly is the sky is not even the limits. There is an entire huge universe out there that the pioneers of at, the are looking challenges of deep space but also the challenges here on earth. The things we are learning today, we have no idea what will advance. People,want is for the especially the children that walk through the doors, to know that whatever contribution they can make is important. Have no idea where it will take us and how it will impact us. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. Visit ncicap. Org] [captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2020] to watch more video from chapel hill and other stops on our tour, visit cspan. Org. Next on history bookshelf, from lori wallach talks about her book Whose Trade Organization . At nprarks were recorded in washington, d. C. In 2004. Welcome to the second event in the event series for the everett Public Service internship program
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