Although there were problems on every mission we flew during the apollo program. If you could look at the entire report, it is a book about that thick. It is in the archives so you could get it through freedom of information. And as an appendix it lists the problems, we call them anomalies, some people call them funnies, that happened on the flights. And they listed them museum air cally by flight auditor and you ignore apollo 7 and 8, they only have one spacecraft, they didnt fly a landing aircraft. Apollo 13 had the second least number of problems of all of the flights. We almost aborted apollo 14 and apollo 16. They had pretty Serious Problems they were able to work around and allowed them to land. So that was the nature of the business. And as i said, the very theme of this movie that carried very well was the story of somebody in problem, with problems, with a challenge, challenges really to face. And showed a group of people, a team in this case of Mission Control and ourselves. And actually a lot a few more people, a lot more people than they could show in the movie. I criticized ron howard when i met hame after a special showing that he didnt depict some of the key people i thought might have been in the movie as characters and he told me in the movie you ome have so much time and you can only develop so many characters. You only have that much time. So, but any rate, it was a fairly large team at that day and age. The peak of the program. In about 1968, before we landed on the moon, there were over 400,000 people working on the apollo program. If you go down to the contractors, the subcontractors, down to the vendors making supplying piece parts even, we had contracts in every state in the United States except one of the dakotas. By the time we flew apollo 13 the program had started tailing off but we still have a quarter of a Million People on the program. A great interest. So at any rate, it showed this team coming together, working together with the right leadership to pull off this miracle if you will. It was not an accident because we had a process as i mentioned before and a place to work problems. When the flight director like gene crans, played by ed harris in this movie, when they give a go for launch they had behind him a total dedicated, motivated team. There was nothing else more important than the mission at hand. The theme had been trained through really hundreds even thousands of hours. And various training modes. But probably the more realistic for the flight condition is what we call integrated simulations. We had trainered, simulators at kennedy where we trained, Kennedy Space center. They were replicas of the capsule, of the Landing Craft, same geometry. We laid in couches. We cheated and had padding put in to make it more comfortable but we laid in these simulators. All of the instruments worked and the systems functioned and it gave you the readings just as if they were operating in the real vehicle. They could impart fairs. In fact the command module simulator could put in over 500 fair. What we call credible fairs. And at the same time the simulators were linked back to Mission Control where the controllers there would see on their scopes the replication of the systems we were looking at and how they were behaving as well as as well as the manifestation offers. They had a special group called sim soup by a dozen people that worked behind the scenes for each of our simulatation. And we could do entries other day and on orbitar lunar landings. So it was done by mission segments. But for each of those runs, they had evolved the scenario with certain fairs to be put in at a certain time that only they knew. And these people are very smart people. They knew the systems very well. And they were very devious people. And took great glee in making us look bad. Making Mission Control or us combined in trying to handle the situations look bad. And some of the sims we never gave up until we had to give up. So some of the sims went on a long time. The lewanor ashity prepared for landing simulation may last eight hours before we had to give up the ghost. Now in the ernie days whether i was working apollo 8 on that backup crew and apollo 11 the first time we landed, we were still learning so the simulations were useful to drudge up situations with fairs that we had actually go back to work and back through the Program Office and worry about changing software or changing our procedures to be able to handle that should it ever happen for real. So were still in a learning curve in the early part of the program. But at any rate, apollo 13 had a particular fair with an explosion. And as we went through design and that is true of modern airplane, aircraft design, spacecraft. As you go through the design of the vehicle, you work through what we called i dont know what they call it in the commercial business, but we call fem mema. Failure mean effect analysis led by engineering where they looked at every component, every fail open or closed and every wire, fail opened and what is the manifestation of that failure and documented. And early on in the design before you built hardware that would even affect changes to the design, adding redundant legs or instrumentation, that sort of thing. And the explosions were thought of. Certainly in a rocket engine. We worried it had rockets billow up and certainly in the cryogenic situations where you had liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The manifestation of a explosion is thought to be the answer in the femas was youll lose the vehicle and lose the crew. So we gave them a situation that we never planned on because we had this explosion and an oxygen tank, too, and we were still breathing. So that there was no plan b. For most all of the credible fairs on board, we had procedures called malfunction procedures and airplanes we had the same thing, they were called emergency procedures. But we had these procedures. People in Mission Control had books behind them, behind their console they could reach and grab for certain socalled credible failures that would reach and grab and have set procedures. But for this particular case, the situation we were in, there was no plan b. So there was a lot of scrambling and the movie showed the hours worked by people on the ground. Many when i got back and talked to people, i think many got less sleep on the ground than i got in flight. So this was a truly a great story that does kind of become folk lore of working problems and people working together with the right leadership to make things happen and end up with, in this case, a good hollywood ending, im happy to say. But at any rate, now i would like to run a video and show you some of the real stuff. You saw a little bit of it from the ground side in Mission Control and the Launch Control center at Kennedy Space center and i was looking at the video from the back here, youre just seeing, but now ill show you what is called 13 first 13 minutes as called the quick look of apollo 13. It has no soundtrack. Ill narrate it. And well just let it run on through to the end. If we could now get the video cranked up here. All right. Were running. We have a countdown even. Three, two, one. It is appropriate. The satern 5 we used for all of the Lunar Missions and to launch the lab and sky lab. That part of the program is still the biggest rocket that weve flown. If you saw it today laying on its side at huntsville at kennedy and Johnson Space center, on the side laying down it would cover a football field plus both end zones, plus three feet. So that is the size of this rocket. It is three stages. Two spacecraft are on top and were way, way up on top at the very tippy top and laying in that little capsule. We suited up and the operations and check out bill at kennedy is quite a ways from the launch pad. So we hopped in this van, this van got a little fancier during shuttle days. With this, i think it was just a converted milk wagon or something that got painted up fancy and they had benches we sat on and we could hook up to intercom to talk to our suit techs who escorted us out to the pad. Deke slaton escorted us out to the van there, the original seven. There were four people waiting up at the top of the stack. So you had four people waiting for you and two suit teches to help you get inserted, strapped in and the hatch closed and they left you for a couple of hours until you got to launch. The launch pad looked kind of eerie because most of the time ive been out there, many times to test in the spacecraft, routine test and there is normally a lot of people up and down the stack and the day you go for real is as i said, just the people to get you hook up and ready to go. The engine started a little over seven seconds before liftoff. It allows them to observe the Chamber Pressure stabilize and the big f1 engines. There is five of them here running. They collectively generate 7. 5 Million Pounds of thrust, push if you will. It goes very slowly. This is not slow motion. This is the real motion. But the reason is the entire stack at this point weighs over 6 Million Pounds. So you dont have a great thrust to weight ratio. Havent been flown in airplanes and military airplanes, fighters. This is not exciting in sense of the glevels you sense. The peak g at first stage burnout because it is getting lighter as its going up burning tons of locks and propellent out every second. It gets to about 4. 5gs. The fighter planes i flew and routinely and you would pull 6 or 7 gs and i think todays fighters are up to 8 or 9 gs. So 4. 5gs wasnt that big of a deal. It was jerky. This is the front end of the digital age. So the steering im sure if you flew one of these today would be a little better. But the big engine is on the bottom and youre up on the top and you have exaggerated motion so you have jerking around with the engines and that is the most unusual thing i saw riding a rocket from flying airplanes from sensation. We went in earth orbit and went around a couple of times to have the opportunity to check out systems in the mothership, the command service module. Both the prime and backup to the extent we could to verify that nothing had been damaged during launch. And then the third stage was reignited by people on the ground. They accelerated us to escape velocity, 25,000 miles an hour and that is where you are here in this scene. Jack sweigert separate the the command module, moved away a couple of hundred feet and hes coming back in to put a probe in that dark circle, just disappearing in the upper right of this scene, using that target, about dead center, that little t with the black circle to keep himself alive as he put the into the upper hatch of the landing kraftd. And then you could find latches that would pull the two vehicles tightly together that formed an air tight seal and then you could open tunnel hatches on either side and be able to go between the two vehicles. And youll see a scene of that later. Thats the third stage as it was set up there as we pulled the Landing Craft out. And on this flight for the first time and they did that on all subsequent flights, they figured out how to use vining of the tanks to redirect its path so it was made to impact the moon. We had left seismometer on apollo 11 and 12 and put seismometers down on all flights that landed and with that meteor item pact you could look at sub strata on the moon. Same thing they use with looking for gas and oil. They use seismic events to search sub strata on earth. This is the mothership after we completely shut it down. Which it was obviously never supposed to i call it the mother ship. It was never supposed to be shut down. It was always supposed to be there for you. So that was probably the most worrisome for me, was how this thing would act trying to get it back up. Because it never planned to be shut down. We never tested it in the environment to be completely turned off. And in this case four days and froze the water tanks in it. This shows the scene of me drifting down through the tunnel with jim and jack jim level the commander and Jack Sweigert there doing the camera work and im playing around in zero gravity which is it is sort of euphoric to float yourself or float objects around. And actually made those little vehicles, smaller volumes seem bigger. I mean, you could imagine in this room we could have another set of chairs on the ceiling. Because we used this entire volume of this auditorium that youre not using now. This is the real people in Mission Control. A lot of furrowed eyebrows as i said. A lot of them got little sleep. Ed mitchell there, landed on 14. There was ken mattingly. Jim level there is rubbing his hands. He got pretty cold. We h we had to power the Landing Craft down to preserve the battery, it ran off Battery Power and this was meant to be a twoday vehicle at normal power so we had to go down to a low power vefl. We went down to 12. 5 amps on a 30 volt d. C. System. So if you think about your threeway light bulb at home and you go to the third click, if you did that on two lamps, that is about the power we went down to on that vehicle. So it got very cold. It was not meant to operate with that little that small amount of electronics on. We put on three sets of underwear. I had we had spare underwear so that is what we did to try to keep warm. This is the thing shown in the movie, the rig of the cartridge that was done on the ground. Deke slaton there is holding it. And they actually tested that in a chamber in building 7 at johnson with human subjects and most things they did that with. On the ground they did as much as they could after they perfected effects to go test it in some way to make sure it worked and that is what they did with this cartridge. They have a landing Environmental System and the chamber and in 7 and they put a person in there and let him live with that cartridge a while. We never had light on. Some of this photography, you could see it is pretty bad. I was shooting im shooting my own self. This is probably the first space selfie. I just put the camera out. It was a little 16 millimeter battery camera, you would push a button to start it and i just put it out there and let it sit there. So i was shooting my own picture. But we never had lights on. When we went to power down mode, we shut off all lights so we had to use the flashlight if we had to read or write or wait for the sunlight to be coming in a window. Someone shot me asleep. My arms is tucked in there. Not because i emulate a favor napoleon but the arms tend to do this, go to a minimum Energy Position and would wake me up so i always tuck my arms in somewhere. That is a brief shot of jean crans spoking a cigarette. Gene doesnt smoke any more. That is the day and age. This is the scene that we saw that surprised us. That upper section should look as shiny and smooth as that lower section. That is where one quarter of the spacecraft had blown off. Quite a surprise because thinking back to the explosion, it had not seemed as severe as what we saw. This is chow time. We gave up on all of the freeze dried, the powdered stuff because it is not too good if you have hot water and certainly aint good with cold water. So we mostly lived on cookie cubes, bread cubes, peanuts and jim was spooning out jim had a frankfurter package and i think jack was having a thick beef stew. This is the earth as were headed back in. Coming as you return. You end up coming back in at same velocity you left. About 25,000 miles an hour. And the upper entry was kind of strange. And the fact that we got rained on a little bit. Because it had been so cold and the command module turned off the long water head that slowly built up from perspiration and humidity had built up and the Instrument Panel when jack and i went to power up that vehicle, we had to use wash rags to wipe off the panel to read the instruments. They were just covered with water and a lot of that fell out on us at the front end of entry. But other wise, another one of those miracles. This machine, this command module that was never supposed to be powered down came on, came to life. And gave us the second most accurate splash down of the program. Only apollo 10 had a better hit the water at a closer point to the mark from the ship of the flights. Were picked up, recovered on iwo jima Aircraft Carrier. It had been on a tour to vietnam and it came back and navy s. E. A. L. S were the ones that jumped in the water and saved the spacecraft on the way back from vietnam as i said on a tour. And they actually saved the vehicle outside and get the flotation gear and when their ready they knock on the window to tell us their ready and they have a tool to open the hatch to let us out. This helicopter, interesting in the movie, ron howard went to the trouble to get a similar model helicopter that was shown in the movie. And brought on board. And i had a urinary tract infection so i just went to sick bay. Other crewmen went to a party on the hangar deck. That was people in Mission Control celebrating because they were so tired for this flight, they did not have the usual splash down party that they normally had after a flight when the crew was recovered. So we got to we were the only crew that got to attend our own splash down party because they held it two weeks later. So we got to attend that. I went off following this mission to backup john young as a backup commander on apollo 16. At the time i had hopes i would get to fly in apollo 19. That is at that point the last mission to go to the moon. And budgets were getting cut and nasa canceled 18 and 19. So i ended up being a deadhead crew assignment. Bill poeg and jerry carr who were going to fly the mission, deke slaton moved off to give them a flight because theyre running out of seats and i stayed on and inherited ed mitchell and stu rusa who had just finished their assignment. I had a view of eventually getting into program management. So i went off to Harvard Business school to the program mpnd course, and came back and went in the arbiter project office and early shuttle development and while there i was doing sport flying. I flew this japanese val. I was not flying as part of the movie making. These were aircraft that had been rebuilt to resemble those japanese aircraft for the making of the movie. And we inherited it in an operation in south texas and used them in airshows. One day flying steering from angleton, texas, where we kept this bomber and a couple of zeros at a crop duster field, i was flying it to schultz field in galveston to get it on a wash rack and get it cleaned up for an airshow coming up at dallasfort worth. And at 300 feet i lost an engine, put it in a sod field and this is a thick airplane. I couldnt raise the landing gear and it was the start of the Housing Development and it dug ditches. So one gear one landing gear went in the ditch and it flipped, cartwheel, wing dug in and went upside down backwards and i was trapped for a while before i could get out and received these burns, 65 coverage. Half second, half third. And spent three months in the university of texas hospital at galveston. And another thing that is in is initially emotional for me because i thought i had lost my career and passed the critical stage and i had not burned my respiratory system, i worked with the mixed team of doctors at u. T. , university of texas hospital. And the graphing was gone to be done by Shriner Burn Institute doctors. They had a partnership to serve the adult ward at u. T. Hospital. And worked out a protocol and did some things differently to assure i could get back to flight status. Incidentally, and the university of texas hospital, made sure i never told anybody i had graduated from the university of oklahoma. [ laughter ] but i did get back on my feet. 14 months. Some physical therapy. I had kinks in one elbow and one knee where i was burned all the way around the joint to work out scar tissue and get mobility. And regain flight status and named in the in 76 and this accident was in early 73. So in 76 i was named to be one of the two crews that flew the Space Shuttle enterprise, to fly the approach and landing test at edwards. This was in 1977. We flew eight test flights and i got to command five of the eight flights we flew in that program. Just like the real shuttle, we had no engine. So you didnt build up a lot of flight time. The longest flight was 5 21 or something. But had you to do test maneuvers on the way down to excite the dynamics an the aircraft and collect data. And this now is the scene of the first flight we were going to separate. It is called free flight one. And this is gardner fullerton and myself climbing up there. Most test operations you try to get things done early in the day because in the high desert there, the winds sort of kicked up later in the morning, early afternoon and air got a little rougher so to get smooth air you tried to get an early start. In this case just predawn. We climbed aboard and got all of the machinery cranked up in enterprise. A tug pushed the two vehicles out and we headed out here toward the runway. We just sit up there on top. And you notice were cocked up. Unlike later when they flew it from across country from edwards to kennedy, it was more streamline mode. So we were generating lift for the 747. It was kind of strange, the first time we got in the enterprise up there and looked out every window, leaned over. You cant see the 747. So it is kind of like magic. Like being on a flying carpet that took off and slowly climbed altitude and a big race track pattern to get to a point. And then fitz fulton and tom mcmurphy were the pilots in the 747. Vick harton and skip guidry were the two flight engineers. So there are four people aboard the 747. And fitz would push it over in the slight dive and call at the right speed and say launch ready and i pushed one button and that fired the pyrotechnics to cut us loose. We had a nice separation. Went straight up and away. We knew that from load cells in attach struts so we knew from physics that initial motion was upward. That is how we device the point at which to do the separation. And flights we didnt release. We were in the first flight we worried about the control system. We tuned the primary Flight Control to make it a good handling quality. And you never know when the first time you let loose the control surfaces how it is really going to act so we were happy to see that it we hit the wind tunnel data and collectively with the Flight Control designers, that really worked well. That was a good flying machine. Pilot ratings about one or two out of a pilot rating scale we used, up to ten where ten is unflyable, one is perfect. And it was a good glider. This thing with the tail on was better than say the x15. So it is pretty good glider. Up to probably about five or six lbd. Tail off it is right at about the x15. About a 4. 5. We flew two flights with the tail off. We landed on the largest bake bed on the rodgers dry lake. It is a test base for the air force at Edwards Air Force base. The north south runway we landed on is roughly eight miles long. I say a runway. They actually have just spread asphalt to give sort of a line to give you an alignment and a runway. But we really could have veered left or right off that pseudo runway up probably a quarter mile on that lake bed and still been all right. So it is a good place to do testing. And this shows us climbing out of the lower hatch. My come patriot has passed away. He had a stroke and he is gone as well as mcmurtry and vick harton from the carrier crew. But anyway, this program was highly successful. Schedulewise, we missed that First Release flight two weeks. We were two weeks late from a schedule that had been laid out two years before. So the progress was running pretty good. The program was delayed and mainly we had tire problems. With the tile system for those that remember the first ferry flight, someone fell off. So there was a lot of rework with the tile system to get it right before we launched it in 81. So it missed about a year over a year and a half on the first orbital flight. But at any rate, i feel very fortunate to have had the career avenue had ive stayed close to the business that i loved, flying. Even when i left youll get the lights up now. If we would. In the auditorium. When i left the program, i left nasa in 79. I went to work for gorman corporation and then next 17 years i worked in aerospace and ran Space Programs and i started a service company, a Subsidiary Company and when Northrup Grumman merged i ended up with their service so after 17 years i w i was running two companies. But widespread business and a lot of it very technical. Had one won tract with the university of california with ph. D physicist at los alamos, refining Nuclear Weapons and maintenance contracts at air force base, u. S. Navy advanced training command. So it was like i said, it is a lot of business close to what id done and loved all my life. I see there are some young people here. I think a key just looking back over my career, its made it successful but also for the most part made it like i enjoyed almost every day i had doing whatever i was doing. Was to find something that matches your inherent talent. All of us are born with an inherent talent. We are blessed with talent. And to kind of align that with the what side of it youre going to be good at in that career path and i was lucky to have literally gotten into the right path. Even before they were astronauts, because i couldnt want to be an astronaut. There were none when i was growing up. But i was in the right path to become a pilot and then a test pilot. And so, anyway, i lucked out in that sense and i hope for the young here that they work hard at figuring out what they like to do, what theyre good at and align that with a career path and it will make you a lot happier most days and a lot more successful in your life. Anyway, i guess now we open it up for questions if we can do that. We have to have a mic or something out there because my hearing, at my age my hearing isnt too good any more so. Any questions up front. Because i could probably hear you. I have a question. Yes, sir. [ inaudible ] used to be a wing man of yours in the national guard. Okay. He was asking questions about god. Did you find god up there. Ill answer that question. No, sir. To me i guess because of my knowledge and i studied astronomy in high school and Read Everything i could find in the library about that, blocks of mississippi which wasnt too hard, there wasnt that much in there. Anyway, i read a lot about astronomy. For me going to the moon on this mission, apollo, was a great adventure. If you really think about it, going to the moon is not going very far. Really the moon is our next door neighbor. To go to the next star, the closest one is about two and a half million light years away because the star, which may or may not have planets, but to think of as a size and scope of our universe, going to the moon is just a baby step. So i just didnt look like that put me any closer to being way out there in gods universe. Question. On the Aircraft Carrier [ inaudible ]. On the aircraft that carried the enterprise, was that structured for that or did you modify past your point . It seems like a lot of weight on there. Oh, youre talking about for the aircraft . The 747 had to be modified. It had added belly bands put inside the internal structure where those attach points were. And also the tail was beefed up because the later flights to to the tail coming off, they had the two fins to give it better directional stability and that structure was beefed up. But the the orbiter itself, the orbiter structure was never stabilized until the second one we built. For instance, the first was columbia, which we lost in entry. And then the second bird was the first time we really kept caught up with the load, what i call load state us, structural load data. So that refined, if you want to call it the production hole structure. Up to like on enterprise we add Something Like over a hundred stringers in the wing when we figured out what the load data was that we were under the design and structurally under design. So we had to have stringers on enterprise to make it flight worthy. There were doubler plates here and there on the columbia to make it flight worthy. So we finally caught up with the loads data, the right loads data to build the next vehicle. You know, space is a little different aircraft. It is aircraft business you build prototype airplanes and you might build six or eight prototypes and do your initial Testing Program and from that data you refine what your production airplane will really look like or be included in the systems. You dont have that luxury with a space program. So youre kind of prototyping as you go, so to speak. How sick were you on apollo 13 . How what . How sick were you . How sick . I had well i hope you never have a urinary tract infection. But the main components, you suffered was like a flu. You had chills and fever. And i just found out my wife had an infection, she didnt have fever so you may or may not have fever. But you also burn when you go to the bathroom which it doesnt feel good. So, but, i the movie overdid how bad shape i was. I wasnt quite in that they dramatized that a little bit. And i did not let jim lovell hug me. No way. Yeah. I was a marine and youre not going to let a navy guy hug you. [ applause ] so, but i got shots for two weeks after i got home and that cured it. So i never had it again so im lucky. Ive got a question. Ive got a question here. Can you hear me all right. I could hear you. I just wanted to ask you if you would tell us about your military career before you went into nasa. Okay. It is not that illustrious. I was a naval cadet. When i finished training and i was commissioned in the marine corp and assigned to bmf 533 at cherry point, north carolina. A flighter squad flying banshees and then another tour in vmf 114 which is had cougars, f 9f cougars. And from there my military experience was when i got out i went back to school on the gi bill to get an engineering degree. While there i served in the oklahoma air guard and we had initially the unit had the very first jet fighter operational in this country. We had the old p80 shooting star and then we upgraded to the f87 saber jet. When i started to work for nasa at Lewis Research center as a test pilot in 59, i transferred to the ohio guard at mansfield flying the 84fs in the 164 fighter squadron. And in 1961, i dot recalled on the second berlin crisis so i had a year of duty and tactical air command. So at any rate, i came back into i left nasa for that one year. Came back to louis and then transferred to nasa flight Research Center at edwards and from there went into the astronaut program. I basically followed the same path Neal Armstrong had. Neal and i both started at lewis in cleveland for nasa as test pilots. We both wend to edwards for nasa test pilots and then we went into the astronaut program. For us it was just another transfer at that point to another nasa center. I see the mic in the center there. Good morning, mr. Haise, my name is john greer, im from toronto. Got your note, sir. Thank you. Weve all been part of sports teams when we were kids and a lot of us are employees and we work in teams. As a person whose got a lot of people to be thankful to, for just being here and also as leader in a tremendously challenging business world, nautical engineering and all of the other aspects of that business, can you comment on the significance of celebrating the team and at the same time acknowledging outstanding individual performance, how complex that is as a manager. Well, i think that the thing you need to do, i found in both my own personal life is to have a goal, have a mission. And figure out what it takes to accomplish the mission. Now obviously youre talking personnel and i found that true in the business world. You have to assemble the right skill mix, the right talent base, the people that also you can get dedicated and motivated to the mission at hand. And when you get that, you have that attention, then theyre willing to give that 110 to be successful. Now i know you came with a personal story and ill send a note to the daughter. I was at the movie last night, i told a story of some people that got involved that werent even in the program. At the university of Toronto ResearchDepartment Six gentleman were tasked and not part of the apollo program, they were experts obviously in a certain regime that were called on to help look at what it would take, what pressure to put in the tunnel between the command module and the lander. When we got ready to separate it, to in essence blow it away with the air pressure and the tunnel and they worried structurally what that pressure should be so they tasked these gentlemen in the university of toronto in the Research Department experts who thought they could handle it, a fella from the grumman research called them. They volunteered. They were not in the program. They called another fellow guru at the university of Southern California and put him to work. And he assembled some of his people to also do a study and both of them produced data for nasa to review to decide how to pressurize that tunnel area for us to separate. Ron howard could not have formed because it is probably another 50 stories like that one that people were experts and got called at least for consulting that got involved to work some of the problems that will never be told or known. I getting the exercise today. Mr. Haise, my name is sam chapman. My uncle worked with you for years. I dont know if he worked directly with you or not. But i spent a lot of time as a kid looking at Kennedy Space center and stuff and, you know, the lunar module that was used in the movie actually was supposed to be for apollo 18. He actually let me sit on that one time. Now it is hanging from the building where the saturn 5 is that they built down there. My question to you, though, was what it was like to be, you know, i dont know how far you were above the lunar surface, but how was it when you werent around the moon . What was it like . Okay. We went around higher than normal. Most flights went around at about 60 miles and did a used the engine to slow down and went into orbit at about 60 mile of altitude. We were about 130 miles above the surface. So one i say one good thing about the flight is i was told maybe to maybe the lunarologist said we got some of the best pictures of the moscow and [ inaudible ] which was a Russian Rocket designer. Russia sent a spacecraft around the moon first so they got naming rights. But they were two major features that we shot pictures of going around the back side. And Jack Sweigert and i were just tourists. We had cameras and we shot a lot of pictures. We obviously had a lot of film we werent ever going to use. Jim wasnt too interested. He been there on apollo 8 and gone around 10 or 12 times on that Christmas Eve in 1968. So he was obviously down as we all were to the extent that we werent going to get to land. But at any rate, that is what we did. The moon is a very impressive in a different way. The earth is beautiful. If you look at the earth from low orbit and youve seen a lot of pictures that have been shot from space station now, and in stark contrast the moon looks very not very pleasant place. Its to me simply im not an artist so not a good description. It is a beat up rock. It is obviously been hit, hit over the eons. Several billion years by meteorites that keep impacting. So its surface keeps getting churned, little minuscule are hitting to to churn up the surface texture of the moon. And occasionally a big one will hit it. But its obviously no atmosphere. Lifeless. In fact, i was really surprised they worried about us putting us in quarantine, worrying about germs. We might bring back. There was no way at least any of the vermin we know about, viruses or bacteria, there was no way they would survive on the moon with the environment there. So its really a contrast. The earth is quite beautiful and uniquely from that view out there a ways, at the sun angle and we had at times a sun angle where you could look at earth and it sort of appeared to have a halo. And it really wasnt very thick wide halo that represented really our sensible atmosphere as the sun would shine in that area to create that. And i think apollo eight shot the first pictures coming around the moon of the earth in that view which started, i think, some of the environmental efforts and concerns about we ought to take care of things to worry about because we dont have a lot of it. Hi, my name is isabella and i was wondering how cold was it since had to save energy, how cold was it in the space visit. Was that amy . Isabella. We did not have a thermometer to measure. I could only tell you the command module, the water tanks froze when they recovered the capsule on board the Aircraft Carrier on the hangar deck and inspected it, the water tanks were still frozen. So it was obviously 32 degrees farenheit or lower. The lamb wasnt that cold. We had three bodies that had warmth and we had some electronics and pumps going so they were generating heat. So i would, we were mid30s, 35, 37, somewhere in that arena. One in the front row i could probably hear you without the mic. My name is andrew, i was wondering what was it like reentering the atmosphere. What was it like when we entered the atmosphere, andrew . Yes, sir. Entry itself, another thing if we just look at it from the dynamics, the pressure you feel, the g levels, it really wasnt that high. We got to about four or five gs on entry as all missions did. Because we did better we could do better navigation than we thought we could actually. And it was a thin carter that you had to get in if you hit the bottom of the carter you could get potentially the design point was 18 gs. And upper end is whatever you might skip out. You wouldnt reenter. So you wanted to be in this three degree cone. And we pretty much ended up centered as did all flights in the center of that cone. So all of them were pretty much five or six gs for those of us that flew fighters and airplanes, that wasnt too big of a deal. And youre laying down. Youre lying on a couch which is easier to take than an airplane where youre sitting up right in an ejection seat. There was not much vibration unlike launch with all of the shaking from the rocket steering. There wasnt much of that at all. It was a fairly smooth ride. There was a little motion. You could feel when the vehicle rotated, rolled actually. That was used for steering for the ranging control on entry. This vehicle had an off center of gravity off center set of gravity so depending on which way you rolled it if you want to call it cheated and use the drag vector to act like lift and steer you lift, right, up range or down range. So when it rolled, and that made a pretty pattern in the fiery ball because youre looking at the fire receding. When you think about it, when you come in for entry, youre facing backwards. So youre looking out the window at the trail behind you and it would create a swirling pattern as you retoted when it rolled. Nice view. My name is brenda ray and i wonder if you would share with us some about the something about the competitiveness of the process for the original astronaut crew. And maybe something about the subsequent training that was required. All right. The selection process, i assume is somewhat semblance of that today. You basically had nasa put out a call and publicized it all over the country. Some call it minimum qualifications which involved at the time that we applied they were interested in more pilot types so a minimum flight hour requirement and certain height and weight. But pretty general. And so basically a lot of people filed that were cast off mainly because of experience. You also had to list three references. Now it was different, i think it was military did it a little different. And i applied straight in to nasa since i was already a nasa employee. The military did their own selection as i understand. People applied within the air force, say, and the air force looked at the people who had applied to go to nasa, to join the program and then they filtered it to some degree and in some cases. There might have been people qualified that the military had an assignment, they wanted the person to be more involved there than with nasa and probably didnt even give their name to nasa. So they gave nasa the names and nasa would choose from that and that would be the navy, air force, or army as it turned out later. And even coast guard. We ended up having a coast guard people fly in shuttle. But then you went through a physical. A weeklong physical at Brook Air Force base in san antonio where they gave you a thorough physical. About a little more than a flight physical. And then you went to houston for a combination of a writtenes a questionandanswer type testing deal and went before a board where i think they looked at how you handle yourself in public to look at your demeanor, that sort of thing. And deke slaton headed that board that i went before. And mike collins was i think the only astronaut on the board at the time. And so that was it. And then so when we got to that point, it had already been winnied down since the initial cut off the paper filings through the physicals. There were probably at about, i dont know, less than 100 left. And so out of all of that, we ended up with 19 of us in my group being selected. And how that magically was done at the end, how the papers were laid out, i dont know. But thats kind of the process you went through. I think well take a couple of questions, a couple more questions and if there are no more questions in the front now, well take a couple of questions if it is okay from the students in the back. Sure. Certainly. For those with the hands up. Theyll have the tough questions. If you have not had a photograph with mr. Haise, line up here at the conclusion. For those of with you name badges that have not had your photograph taken earlier, just line up here. Media youre welcome to follow and then well do a media conference. Any other questions . I wanted to ask you on the reentry which took the five minutes in the im over here, mr. Haise. Jean guerra. Stand up. I wanted to ask you what was the reason it took five minutes for the reentry. Why the delay in coming back to earth . Yeah, that was truthfully its never been scientifically answered. I told ron howard we didnt answer because it gave him more drama for his movie. But, no, scientifically no one could discern what it was. I talked to gene krantz about that after the flight and he said, no, we had you dead center on the flight path coming in and there was there was no explanation for why the heat shield and the the sheath caused that blackout to last longer. One of the phytos, flight dynamic officers, had rereturn data and thought we ended up from certain bidding that we would end up a little bit shallow and thought maybe the entry ended up a little shallower and that had caused the length of extension at the time. But truthfully, the data didnt couldnt account for that much time. So, no, it is one of those unknowns. My name is peter ved and my friend peter gathered my interest on this particular subject. But if you dont mine sharing with us, what is your annual income . What is my annual income . [ laughter ] well, well i get social security. [ applause ] otherwise, i do some events. Im being paid to do this event which mostly i donate to the infinity science center. A project ive been working on nine years in mississippi where i grew up. It is right by space center. And im the vice chairman of a not for profit board that was given the challenge, were on nasa property and nasa bought property next to the state Visitor Center as you come in mississippi from louisiana on they gave us the property with 30year land use agreement. And we the not for profit board had the challenge of raising 40 million to build it. And now operate it. We have operated it two years. Fortunately, the second year were making money. The first year we lost money. But were moving along. We did, for those familiar with the bp oil spill, we survived as one of six projects in mississippi because earth gallery is dedicated it ecology education. So were getting a little over 9 million of funds that are coming this year to complete our pretty much our art gallery. So well be really doing good then. But all of that combined, i can only say its not enough. Its never enough. But truthfully, i have retirement from northrup grim t the top 1 but im okay. I have more money than i need. Im a Pretty Simple guy. I dont have much outside interests other than i do a lot of museums for fundraisers. This year i have seven events at science moo sdeeuseums around t country. Plus an air show this year in wisconsin. Anyway, im still having fun. [ applause ] sir. Hello . My name is tyler. I was going to ask you i imagine when you are in space and stuff starts rolling and thoughts are going through your life and your life before and if you made it back your life after, when you did make it back, how would you say had it changed you at all . Is there anything you felt you were going to do differently now that you made it back alive . No. The answer is no. The experience most people think a lot of people ask a different kind of question, was i scared or did i think i would die. The situation that evolved was not a heart in throat kind of thing. If you ever lost control of a car or Something Like that. If you look at the time line from the explosion where we got busy with troubleshooting, we were trying to save the second tank. We didnt know we were goes to lose both tanks for a while. We thought we could trouble shoot and isolate the second tank and come home with everything powered up. That evolved the peopled on the ground, Mission Control really didnt think it was a real problem for 18 minutes. They thought it was instrumentation that was giving them false readings. So it was 18 minutes before jim made the call about the stuff streaming away from the spacecraft that they realized now this is something real. It was almost two hours. It was an hour and 51 minutes before jim and i left the command module and went to power up the limb. So this was a lot of troubleshooting and things going on and that period for an hour and 51 minutes. Actually, i had left a little earlier. I knew we had run out of ideas. I had gone down to start powering up the Landing Craft. So it was never a thing where you are going to fall off the edge of the cliff. By getting to the limb and getting it powered up, i knew nothing had been damaged. So we had time. We had time using that ship to try to work things out. The thing i was most worried about was how the command module would act when we tried to power it up. It was two problems. First of all, there with a as n procedure to power it up. It had to be invented. There was a countdown procedure to get everything cranked up. It involved a lot of people. A lot of support equipment. They had to invent the procedure how to power up that ship. It took them about three daze. Proof it in simulators, get it ready. So i knew that was going to be a big challenge. We had nothing on board on how to power it up. We had abused it. We broke violated specifications on literally every piece of equipment. It was not designed or specced to do. So i worried about how it would perform. As i said, it was like a miracle it came back to life and gave us a second most accurate splashdown of the program. So i accused some of the engineers. I said, you over designed it. I was happy they did. Thank you for your service. My name is lee brady. Im a retired air force. Got a chance to work in spacecraft a little bit. Mostly titan rockets. But i did get to train for the west coast launches. With this new orion, do you have any thoughts maybe what these guys will go through and what to expect . You are talking about orion . Its the new vehicle. Incidentally, the time it flew, unfortunately, got canceled the first day. I was sleeping in the infinity science center. We had a sleepover for sixth graders. We had over 200 children there. With a lot of teachers and parents to keep them under control. We were we had blankets. I cheated. As a marine, i was probably better than i should have been. I had a blowup mattress. We slept in the museum that night. Orion is much like apollo. Its a capsule. Its a bigger one. People talk about it going to mars. Its not going to be the vehicle that will take you back and forth to mars, because thats a long trip. Its the vehicle you would come back through entry when you are ready to land. You would go nuts if you were confined in that small an area for months it takes to go to mars and months back. It would be a bigger machinery that will do that. The capsule was chosen also for those that read a lot about space, two commercial companies that are evolving cargo ships and have supplied cargo to the space station and are developing capsule designs. Theyre much more benign in terms of the safety than a winged vehicle like a shuttle. A lot simpler, too. The control system is very simple. As i set, on entry all you do is control roll. Its otherwise a stable vehicle, blunt end first. It cant tumble. So you dont have to worry about yaw and pitch. Its just roll control. Its a much simpler vehicle. With the heat shield, it can handle a lot more d. Nasa has gone back to capsule form. One more question. Good morning. I have a comment. First, i would like to say thank you for being here. You are truly a National Hero and inspiration. [ applause ] thank you. Thank you for your service in our military and our space program. My question is, i noticed in the movie early on theres a moment where the astronauts where you three are in the aquarius and you are talking back and forth to nasa. The man portrayed by mr. Hanks is startled and everybody thinks this is the first incident, the first problem thats going to happen. But its not. He turns around and he says something about mr. Haise is playing his pranks or tricks. There was a pressure relief valve that had gone off that you had let off some air. I wanted to know, were you a prankster . Did you do things like that . Any of that true . I had done there was one step, and its a normal step in the procedure in the activation of the Environmental System. Theres a point where you turn a valve called a repress valve. That makes a loud bang. The bang is exaggerated in the spacecraft because urine siyou inside a metal hull. Its look being in a tin can and hitting something on the side. Jim was hoping at least that was the problem. He was hoping i played a joke again. But i had not, unfortunately. Okay. I want to say a couple things about mr. Haise. Since we had the privilege of meeting him. Last night, we had a welcome building across from the library on circle drive. We never had a featured keynote speaker want to join us for the welcome party. So he came in early and he said, i would like to go. We were going to show the movie, and we did. But he joined us. He sat with us. Learning together. We were able to ask questions at that time. I have met a lot of famous people. To meet someone like mr. Haise that is so accomplished and so brave to have gone all the way to the moon. He is a man that has his feet truly on the ground. He is a great american. Were so proud of you. Thank you so much. [ applause ] thank you. You are watching a special edition of American History tv airing now during the week while members of congress are working in their districts due to the coronavirus pandemic. Former Bush Administration officials recount their roles in george w. Bushs 2007 decision to increase american troop levels in iraq and their subsequent efforts to document these events in an oral history titled, the last card, inside george w. Bushs decision to surge in iraq. This is the first of three programs on the surge that will air tuesday night at 8 00 eastern. The center for president ial history at Southern Methodist university in dallas hosted the event. American history tv now and also watch over the weekend on cspan3. Cspan has around the clock coverage of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic. And its all available on demand at cspan. Org coronavirus. Track the spread throughout the world and u. S. With interactive maps. Watch on demand any time, unf t unfilt unfiltered. Up next, we take you to the white house garden to learn how president s and first ladies developed and used their gardens at the white house. Television for historic times, American History tv on cspan3. Our final panel, the white house gardens today features speakers with lived experiences working in and around the gardens of the white house. We will hear from dr. Susan pell, science and Public Programs manager for the u. S. Botanic garden. Jim adams, manager from the United States botanic garden. And jim mcdaniels, board of directors. Like our Previous Panel we will hear three short presentations and then our panelists will return to the stage for a conversation moderated by dr. Pell.