There he much in equity inclusion, accessibility, and we take that on as a great badge of honor to establish expert training to ensure that our staff is able to work with people who have any type of learning disabilities or any type of challenges. If you see there is a need we are not meeting, let us know because we always want to improve. Welcome today to our first panel discussion. [applause] i spent over 20 years of my industry,nasa and the and i tell you, ive been around a lot of folks, and around Flight Controllers and directors over the last 40 years that ive this has been a fantastic experience for me. Gentlemen, theyre planning discussions like this or have been a part of the Mission Control that have been restored as a National Historic landmark where they actually have the missions. Through shuttle, but also included the Lunar Landing for apollo 11 and many other great spaceflights. If you have not gotten your tickets for that, hopefully you will today. They will go quick and i apologize if you are not able to go today because we run that on a quick circuit, but we are going to be open for quite a long time today. Hopefully you will be able to get that so that you may be able to do that. There was a great opportunity for us to partner with the Nasa Space Center and we did the fundraising for them as their federal agency could not do that. The city of webster gave a large contribution for that, three point 5 million, 5 million for that restoration. [applause] today, with our first panel, we thought it would be best to have a discussion. As we are talking about the Lunar Landing, talking about lunar Module Development start out with, and these are quick presentations and discussions, we really wanted to have commentary from the audience as well. We do have that, we ask that you have a quick question so that we can also have others who can answer and ask questions. Them to will allow introduce my name, and i will allow them to give a quick synopsis of what they did when they were in Mission Control. First is to my right, richard to. [applause] [no audio] [applause] bill reeves in the middle. [applause] knight on the far end. [applause] richard, what you start us off . I graduated college in 1966 and went to work for an Aircraft Company at the time. I started testing the Environmental Control systems on workedar module and that , that involved atmospheric relation systems which involved getting co2 out of the atmosphere because in a closed environment like that, you have to scrub it otherwise you are in trouble. Management, and all the lifesupport type things are going to focus in the development phases. Good morning. , i grew up ins arkansas and got here as fast as i could. [laughter] [applause] i joined here in 1967, and went straight to the Flight Control division and was a Flight Controller on the lunar module in the electrical power assist. We were responsible for all of the Power Systems which was just batteries, and the Distribution System and keeping track of our profile, so we also were in charge of the pyrotechnics license that separated the stages and opened valves. I was in the back room, which is called the Vehicle Systems support room, and we were the people that made the people in the front rooms look good. [laughter] [applause] anyway, i was 25 years old when on the11 landed and was previous shift and wasnt actually on during the landing, but none of us left shift to shift, we all hung around and watched it. I will turn it over to jack. Knight, i was a member of the air force family that bounced around the world a number of times, a number of places. Went to georgia tech, graduated in 1965, and came straight here at the manned space flight center, also in operations. Was signed to the lunar module. The lunar module wasnt quite ready at the time, so we participate in the Gemini Program a little bit. , apolloy were over moved out. The first lunar module was unmanned, i was involved in that. That went around the earth a few times and it automatically executed some of the critical events that had to happen such as trying to burn the engine, burning an asset engine, and he didnt have any people on board. Atmospheric integrity. After that, we started to really pick up and i was involved in all of the manned flights, apollo nine through apollo 17. Roomrted out in the back and was out for all of the apollo nine and subsequent. Ship shiftmy was right after the landing shift so i waited for that to happen. Came out immediately thereafter. Got to see armstrong step on the moon and the rest. Issued,ect of this was and there were quite a number of them, i think, on all of vehicles. As well as the lunar module. Of course, everyone is probably aware, we had the apollo one fire that set things back a little bit. We kept progressing and managed to get past that, rebuild the interior of the command service module. The liver module is running in parallel with all that. A number of interesting things to me later on, they were in areas that were not my specialty, but in particular, the asset engine. Nasa had a process by which, if they had uncertainty in particular areas, they would often put two contractors to work. The first one that came up with a good solution, they said, you are it, you do the rest of it. And the other guy that was paid moved on to other things. In this particular case of the asset engine, the problem was the eject or. They didnt manage to make it work, it turns out that you can only fire the engine once. No engine was ever tested other than the development by firing the complete parts. Until it launched from the moon. To me, that is kind of an interesting thing. [laughter] but it was simple, so you knew it would work once, and thats all it needed to work. Every one of them did. You want toer speak to that, rich . I just wanted to chime in on bill, raise the comment about being in the ss r. I was in the mission evaluating room working back room to those guys, and we help them look good. [laughter] [applause] as you can see, there is a lot of healthy discussion here. They all may had about 50 years to work up to this. That is a fact. That was the beauty of the organization, it was a very competitive environment. The always thought that Unsung Heroes of the program were the training people that and putall of us together the simulations and through all the failures in and all that. Those people were behind the scenes and related a great job. Really did a great job. How many of you all have seen the lunar module described as the lem . Documentation, in fact, when i first got here, there was still a lot of documentation that called it the which stood for a lunar excursion module and the original design of the vehicle was for it to land and move around but that was dropped way early on for cost and weight reasons. So there is your trivia question for the day. [laughter] but the power system in the lunar module that i was working on was strictly batteries. Main focus was, we would take the checklist that was being developed at the time as to what we were going to do, and we had to resolve the checklist anypower draw that we do at point in time how much power was being drawn out of the batteries, how much time we had left. There were four major batteries in the decent stage that were on during landing and there were two batteries that power the asset stage when they left the moon to go back to the command module. One design issue that we ran the asset batteries were only parallel on the power buses with the batteries during the landing, in case you had to abort. Had to abort the landing, the vehicle would go back. Was the you found out batteries which had not been used for quite a while timewise in the mission were sitting on cold plates and they were getting very very cold. And batteries had a characteristic where the voltage was very unstable for the first out of thep hours battery before the voltage got stable. We found out that if you stage the vehicle without getting that first 10 or 12 and hours out of the battery, the voltage on the bus were dropped during staging to the point it would dump the computer and affect a lot of equipment. We had to come up with a power aheme for the batteries on at certain point in time to get them to pick up the load and get that preconditioning out of the way. That was quite a challenge to do that. During the mission, we found out that they werent drawing as much as they were supposed to, so we wound up having to play some games with it. Alls well that ends well. [laughter] i just wanted to point out and wonder around out here, theres a lunar module and hanging from the sky, that was the test article number eight. Here i accompanied down from where it was located and put it through a full series of thes to validate that Environmental Control system as well as the thermal control system could manage and keep the vehicle from getting too hot or too cold and help the equipment make sure that the equipment did not get too hot. As i said before in space, there is no atmosphere. Heat is carried away only by direct contact with cold plates, and that was what bill was talking to. That vehicle was brought down here and put in the space environment layout on the back part of the center. Chamber. Ge vacuum vacuum, runull a liquid nitrogen through the walls, and they also had a number of lights that simulated sunlight. Module whichmmand was always in space and was rotating, so it would kind of barbecue and the sun would see different sides of the vehicle constantly, the lunar module, once it sat on the surface, had sat there, and it did not barbecue, so wherever the sun was, it was going to in page on that part of the lunar module all the time it was there. So the thermal design was different and validating that thermal design was done out there in that chamber. Among other things. That was done there. Another thing that came up, particularly, there was a number of changes that were made to the lunar module. , oneit arrived at kennedy of which was that during testing down there, they would put it in the chamber down there and the crewmen would get in. One of the things that happened kind of late in armstrongs life, apollo 11, was he indicated he was too warm. In the lunar module, in the chamber, and at that time, it was only air cooled, air flowing through the suit and out. Thatlans always had been we were landing, the crew was completely suited. The only cooling was air flow and he got to warm. So because they were also going to be on the lunar surface, they were wearing a liquid cooling garment which is a fabric that had water tubes running through it. In a seat with a portable support system, it ran water through that. It did not have enough capacity just for air . So, after that, they very quickly built a little pump and tubing system and put a heat exchanger in that lunar module and all subsequent ones. That was made available so that moon, itot to the plugged in those little water tubes and use those while they were still in the lunar module. I think there were other changes when certain subjects came up, but that capability was operation, one of the agreements we had was the age of the contractors for the lunar module in north america was those companies provide technical representatives that had contacts back to the factory to Flight Operations because we were making drawings and procedures and malfunction procedures, and those contacts were very valuable because they knew the people back at the plant and they a call and get information somewhat easier than a voice nobody had ever heard. Key was one of the fairly decisions that was made. Another big problem with the lunar module was when it was first built, it turned out to be too heavy. It was way overweight. You heard a lot of stories about apollo 10 which was a complete dress for her suffer apollo 11. The limb had gone through a massive Weight Reduction program to get the weight down to where it could land and take back off. Apollo 11 was the first lunar module that had gone through that Weight Reduction program. The lunar module that was on apollo 10 was to have the anyway. Heavy too heavy anyway. Was setrticles that it up so that they would land. [laughter] really not true, it was offloaded to reduce the weight of the vehicle. Perspective, the Weight Reduction program, first of all, affected the thickness of the skin on the loot or module itself, so it was more like an oil can. When we were testing, we could hear the pop of the pressure. Also, in that reduction program, it went from 18 days 18 gauge does a 22 gauge wire. . Guess what the people working on the vehicles things, they broke the connections, they broke the wires. It was a massive amount of time spent troubleshooting where the break was. Another little trivia was the or statement lunar module was a unique vehicle, it only flew in a vacuum and it only had to land on the moon and get back off. And not reenter the earths atmosphere. A skies always had a motto that heat shields were for sissies. [laughter] [applause] i guess turnabout is fair play. That is a hard one to follow. I do remember that decision, but they had a comeback which escapes me at the moment, i was trying to remember that. I dont remember it, unfortunately. It was 50 years ago. To the effect of you are not getting home without it. Drummond at the time made aircrafts for the navy. That thing had to land on carriers. Experience andof reputation for structures. Structures was part of the lamont module, it had to land on the moon. Cant just assume that you are going to land on a nice, last service. Youhave to account for might be also falling straight down, you might be going somewhat forward, somewhat to the left or the right. Account for the service might be tilted. All of that had to be built into the design of the struts. The struts were honeycombed aluminum. There was no spring or anything like that. They just would crush. On, there was a scientist named thomas gold, i think he was. Reputation,y good but he also had a reputation for assuming certain far out things. One of the things he mentioned was there was a possibility that the lunar dust on the moon would be very deep and it could be 40 feet deep. So the lunar module could just disappear. [laughter] now, nobody knew that for certain, and other people thought differently and designed it differently. Out, if you have ever looked back in history, our shots werelite moon called ranger. Ranger shot straight from the earth to the moon and went straight in and crash, but while it was going in, it had a camera to his pictures. And so you would post, post, post. You would get a field that might be landing spot. Aboutprovided information landing areas. The other one that followed that was surveyor. Surveyor landed directly on the moon. It had three landing gears and it had pads that would give you information about whether you were going to sink or not and how much pounds per square inch the lunar surface would support. We found out what the reality was with those missions. When the lunar module was designed, they put pads and took that kind of thing into account. Those, we had a pretty good idea there was not going to be a problem, provided the service you landed on surface you landed on was designed so you would not kilt over. You could look at apollo 15, or one of those videos, one of those landed with a fairly obvious tilt and it just stayed in their. On jacks point about the structure and the struts, mr. Armstrong, put that thing down a stroke ofd it had about a foot. Pads, there was a probe sticking down on each pad that was about five feet long that had a little switch on the end of it. , wheneveral design those probes would touch, it would mean you were five feet off of the surface. So that the, wired if any two of the four probes diagonally tripped that switch, it would shut the engine off so that it would drop in crush those struts. The crew said, nobody is turning my engine off but me. [laughter] so they changed the wiring on lightto where it lets a on the dashboard and during the landing, you will hear them say, contact light. When they say contact light, that meant that that light, the lunar contact light had come on which meant that the probes had touched the surface. And they shut the engine off. Probes, there was a concern with the one that was right by the latter. They ended up taking that one stickingse if it is up, it would be a surprise when they jumped down. [laughter] armstrong had pointed that out in one of his visits and they took that one off. So you only had 3, 2 sides and the back. Engineering was a little worried, although, again, it wasnt my area. Module,ook at the lunar it extends almost down to the bottom of the pads. Land with the engine still running and you are on a rock or some raised area, you thats whylosed they have that original design hes talking about, the crew talked him out of it. They would shut the engine off, hopefully before anything like that happened. Of course, nothing ever did. But if you hear the actual round, you hear it contact light, engine off, engine arm off, things like that. Time that theye actually were on the moon, the first words essentially were engine off. And then it was tranquility base, the eagle has landed. They also had a pretty good reputation for thermal analysis, which turned out to be very good because when you get into the Weight Reduction and you have to things, there is other what is remaining, those gold reflected thest sun energy and did a really good job. Theres another change that was and that was the theyfiring thrusters, finally determined that if you had enough down firing thrusters, you could damage the thermal protection on the descent stage. So, pretty late in the game, they added these little deflectors on the descent stage right under each of the four down firing rcs thrusters. That turned out because it was pretty late in the game, to may because a bit of a com problem on apollo 11 because those deflectors did not get modeled analysis,munications ,nd so when they came around the descent engine is having essentially toward the earth. So, the antenna has to point down. And if the antenna is pointing right at that deflector, you get multi path and that is probably ratty com early on. The other thing which is unusual wanted toas that neil be looking down at the moon when they started the burn. That meant that somewhere during the dissent, they had to rotate 180 degrees. You got to the point where you pitched over, you would be looking forward. If it st