Hello and welcome to nasas jet repulsion laboratory in pasadena. A hot afternoon and for our monthly Public Lecture series, im preston dyches. 50 years ago three human beings set out on a journey across a quarter of 1 million miles of space to the moon. Two of them sat down on a fragile Landing Craft and one stepped into history uttering a phrase we know by heart. For that one human being to make the one small step to the efforts of hundreds of thousands of people over the course of a decade. In industry, universities, and government. Didnt play the leading roles but for all who contributed to play a small role in the Space Program today, something that mattered. The primary role is to help lead the robotic explanation of the road of the system developing Communication Technologies that contributed to apollo. Used for communicating to all spacecraft. It was used to receive the astronauts tv transmissions from the moon and was also a Vital Communications backup especially during the tense days of apollo team. Caltech, long a world leader contributed to Field Training to the study of the samples that theyve returned. Tonight they will hear part of the apollo story. The road and how scientists at other institutions teased out some of the moons greatest secrets. We will have to go speakers. If you are watching a live webcast you can submit questions by you to chat. Our first speaker, jpl is fortunate to have an Award Winning producer on its task. Blaine baggett s first space production was spaceflight, the first nationally broadcast series ever made about the space race. One key advisor was apollo 11 astronaut collins who called spaceflight the real stuff. The executive producer of the astronomys also produced for pbs. In 1999 he joined jpl and is now a fellow working on films about their role in the like expiration of space. He is the recipient of the highest honor that nasa bestows on a civilian, the distinguished service medal. If thats not enough his birth they just happens to be july 20 which is the very day he they made the first human landing on the moon. Please welcome blaine baggett. [ applause ] thank you and good evening. Its fantastic to see you all here. Thank you for coming out. Im just delighted to see so many of you. My birthday also serves as the day that we first landed on mys mars, so something was meant to be i think. Maybe ill just stop while im ahead. The more that i have come to understand the moon, the more i appreciate them for their incredible diversity. With these moons, hyperion looks to me like a seashell. Looks to me like a ufo and if we have any star wars fans, i dont have to make a reference but theres the dark star. But theres more to the moon than just unusual shapes. Moons in our solar system are now the prime targets in our search for life. Saturns moon is a beautiful, icy world. Geysers are constantly a rep thing. Titan which also orbits saturn has rivers and lakes but they are made of liquid methane and nasa announced an exciting mission called dragonfly thats going to explore titan. On the right is jupiters moon. Beneath the icy crust is a waterworld to contain more than in all of the oceans of the earth combined. Here, we are hard it work for mission to be launched to this world. These moons and many other, there are almost 200 and the solar system, those and many others exist in the outer solar system. If we move toward the sun we find a different story. Mars has 2 small moons. Venus and mercury have none. Only the worth has a sizable moon, and a beautiful moon. Why that is, we only have one large moon, is a great mystery. I will leave the science and the engineering that it took to get us there to 2 great pioneers here with us tonight. Its a great honor and privilege for me to share the stage with them. As for the present, we are in the news not only because of the apollo 11 anniversary. We are in the news about the moon because nasa has declared we are Going Forward to the moon. Its the next step on our way to mars. Time will tell so that this is the latest case and whether being moonstruck is going to actually stick again. The biggest question i think is whether we will have the will that translates into the funding to go. Those in favor of going to the moon have the argument. First, the technologies have come a long way in the last 50 years. What weve learned about the moon helps to make the case for going again. For instance, once it was thought that the moon was bone dry. That has turned out not to be the case. Missions by nasa have found evidence of water and craters were sunlight doesnt reach. These are prime real estate for future exploration. There you see some examples. If you wish to live off of the land as nasa says it wants to do with a permanent presence you need water. By the way, india is about to launch, scheduled for a new mission next week. Its a combination of an orbiter, a lender, and a rover. What is the purpose . Its going to go prospecting for resources including water. And then theres china. Its Space Program is growing by leaps and bounds in china has made no secret of its interest in exploiting the resources of the moon. A Chinese River launched in january this year is now roving on the moon and on the far side of the moon were direct communication is it possible, its an impressive technological achievement. By the way, i dont know if you know where the river landed on the far side of the moon but its an a crater named after theodore von carmen. I hope that name stands familiar. Its none other than the first director of jpl and for whom this auditorium in this lecture series is named after. I cant help but wonder whether the selection of a crater named after him is somehow intentional in terms of where the chinese landed but im not exactly sure what the message might be. The point im trying to make is that we may be at the beginning of a new space race. A space race, this time, that is a multinational one. A moon rush where the prizes the stakeout regions suitable for establishing in the present. Speaking of space races lets go back to the first one to understand how apollo came to be. That means we have to go back to 1967 and we are going to watch a video clip from one of my documentaries, destination moon, which i have butchered it myself in order to show it in a short clip. Can we roll the first clip . In october 1957 the soviet union shock the world with the launch of the first earth orbiting satellite sputnik. Americas response, a satellite called vanguard was also a surprising inspect secular event. Vanguard was the only one in a long string of set backs in the United StatesSpace Program. On a visit to the us, Nikita Khrushchev made sure to understand the bit disparity between the two nations. A second spent a scientific feet have a heavily capitalized on by propaganda and games solid foundations to ghosts of soviet achievement. Americas hopes rested with its newly formed space agency the National Aeronautics and space administration. Nasa was given an assortment of facilities across the country. One was the jet repulsion laboratory in pasadena california. Of all the groups inherited, jpl was a part. This return Research Center was staffed by one of the worlds most renowned university. The California Institute of technology. Jpl were accustomed to independence. From jpls per spec of nasa was a newcomer with no no portfolio. In contrast jpl had built missiles in the First Successful satellite, explorer 1. Jpl was led by william pickering. When nasa asked his ideas for the robotic Space Program he responded with a plan that called for flying an armada of spacecraft to the moon and nearby planets. Sputnik has been called americas tech logical pearl harbor. It was a shock to the psyche and the reaction has ranged from reasonable like placing emphasis on science and math in classrooms, for which i suffered, to the extreme. The ideal of setting off a nuclear bomb on the moon to demonstrate americas tech logical capability. A number of well positioned people toyed with this idea including the father of the hydrogen bomb, and the jpl director at the time william occurring. Pickering. You see an air force report because they explored this idea to great depth creating a report that went 250 pages. One aspect was to consider what science might be derived from measuring lunar debris that would be scattered by an explosion. One of the credited researchers was a College Student of ce sagan. Thats right. The late carl sagan who would go on to become one of the worlds bestknown scientists and an outspoken critic of the nuclear arms race. Meanwhile the soviet union continued to surprise and confound. When chris jeff made the first visit of the soviet head of state, they timed the trip to coincide for the First Mission , kind of rubbing her nose in it. Two weeks after that they took the image to the far side of the moon. At the time it was a tech logical triumph. Eisenhower could only grin and bear it. 10 weeks after john f. Kennedy took office, the soviet union struck again watching the first human in space. In kennedys inaugural address it was allowed in a speech that the soviets and americans should so explore space together at the lunch changed that thinking. A frustrated kennedy wrote this memo directing the Vice President johnson to find a way, anyways to beat the soviet union. What would it take . A space lab, a trip around the moon . Or any other idea. Note his impatience. He wanted to know if the people involved in the Space Program working 28 24 hours a day, and if not, why not . To get the answers, johnson turns to james webb and the secretary of defense John Mcnamara believed the real hope to have the first person in space was landing an astronaut on the moon. Mcnamara didnt think that would be enough and argued for a mission to mars. A human mission. The more practical proposal went out, and kennedy took it to congress and made a very famous speech proposing to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before the decade is out. Whats not well known is the story of the phrase before this decade is out. It was a lastminute compromise. He was given an advance copy of the lastminute of what kennedy was going to say, and to his shock, it mentioned 1967. In 1967, we would not be saying today that nasa met kennedys goal. Now lets turn to his role of getting footprints. Even before the speech he was working on two common projects. The first was called ranger decide designed to be a series of spacecraft that would take closeup images of the moon before crash landing. Even crash landing turned out to be a lot harder than expect. I will be asking john casini to relive his life about those days but for right now let me summarize what happened. Ranger 1 didnt work. Ranger to core to work. Ranger three didnt work, ranger 4 didnt work. Ranger five didnt work. At this point the lab sat down and regrouped. A year later they launched ranger six. It worked perfectly except in the last few minutes when its camera refused to turn on. No pictures meant another failure. January 30, 1964 was jpl starkest day. In exactly this room as many people as you see where people listening to what was going on live. Imagine what they felt like. Lets see if they had any luck with ranger seven. Be aware you are sitting in the same room as some of the same people, some of the footage you will see of some of the same people. You have six rangers which failed. With each failure the pressure became more intense and after number six this was really a catastrophe. I had no fear of the lab falling apart. It was quite the opposite. Everybody pulled together and basically, what can i do to help . Six months after the debacle jpl was ready to try once more. It required working three shifts a day seven days a week. The next one, seven, was a severe strain on everybody because it had to work. And if it had not worked, theres no telling what jpl would have been like or what would have happened to jpl. It was a sobering experience. Lunch was a textbook flight. Three days after liftoff the auditorium was once again filled beyond capacity with people and tension. Tape recorders were started at 13 1307 and we are anticipating turn on momentarily. Five seconds from full power. We have full power on channels. All tape recorders are recording. Video is very strong. Seconds impact, video still good. Three, 2, 1. Impact has occurred as 1325 504. Dasher functioning properly. Roger. When impact occurred the auditorium erupted in a great cheer. People shook hands and hugged workforce has succeeded at the moon. The Television Camera recorded some 4000 images that are not much to behold today, but the time they were scientists in this room declared at the time. 1000 times better than any image of the moon from earth. Now, the rangers, by the way here is some headlines just to give you some sense of, i think it reveals the sense of anxiety that was relief, you know the relief of we had finally succeeded. I am interested in to hurting the mind rioters i do not know the story about that. I will have to look that up. Anyway, so after ranger came, the surveyor was a far more complicated mission, this was about soft landing on the moon and staying alive on the moon for some time. Lets just watch the video. I think that will tell more than i can. John, if we can roll it back, please. All all of the questions nasa wanted answered, the most important was doing with the surface was like for apollo astronauts. Was it solid, or would layers of dust act like luna quicksand and swallow them whole nasa had hoped the answers would come from surveyor. This is jpls First Experience in overseeing on behalf of nancy nasa, the work of an aerospace company. But, the contractor, Hughes Aerospace was struggling for good reason. Surveyor was far more technically challenging than the rangers. This spacecraft not only had to soft land on the moon, it had to do so autonomously. It was also expected to send back images and science data from the lunar surface, not for a day, but for weeks. That was a difficult trying period, because we were growing up at the same time that was growing up. We do not always mesh. A trying time. The aerodynamic shroud is often grand bahama is tracking. It is shown by the aerodynamic diagrams. The scimitar separation has occurred. 663 hours after lunch, surveyor one with only 1000 miles away from the moon, with the speed increasing as the moons gravitational attraction beckoned. Ignition looks stable. All is study. The vehicle was supposed to enter a fixed rated descent. That happens. 10,000, all signals normal. Surveyor recorded excellent condition. All signals good. 100 feet 13 feet per second speed. 70 feet above the surface the engines were supposed to shut off and they were supposed to rock to the surface. The engines all shut off. And, you could hear a pin drop. It worked. We were down, it is still transmitting. For the first time in american spacecraft had achieved a space landing on another celestial body. Surveyor one operated for six weeks. In all, the sturdy lender since back than 11,000 images before its batteries ceased to work. And nasa had the answer to its question, the lunar surface was solid, unsuitable for landing by the apollo astronauts. This is actually my favorite surveyor image, because every single time i look at it, what i see in it is almost and Neil Armstrong stepping off the lunar module. But, it is not, it is the shadow of surveyor one on the moon. Now, i do not want this evening to be guilty of committing the sin of omission. So, i want to acknowledge the soviets were the floor first to join the moon with lunar mine. It used airbags, which we adopted to go to mars. So, it could be argued that this was not a soft landing. And at the time, it was not large enough to erase doubts whether the lunar surface was able to bear up to the weight of an apollo lander. But, it is interesting to make a comparison between the lunar 9 image of the moon, and a surveyor image of the moon. And, we begin to understand that being first does not always mean being the best. What happens to the soviet Union Program in part was the concentration on first, actually hundred the technological development. For completeness, i have to mention one more first by the soviet, that few people know will remember. Would you believe if i told you the apollo 8 astronauts are not the first things to fly to the moon and return to earth . That is true, that is a fax. These were the first earthlings to accomplish that. It is easy to make a joke of it, but, zion five was serious business. It demonstrated the soviets were very serious about sending astronauts to the moon. But there are versions of saturn five that never worked. I would like to make one more connection between jpl and apollo and, it has to do with apollo 12. As you probably, if you have been watching, the great documentaries airing this weekend on the news, you probably know, now, it was not well known united space x 1985, but apollo 11 landed with only 20 seconds of fuel left. Something like that. That was because the computer overshot where they were supposed to land, and they were headed towards a fuel of boulder. So they had to find a safe place to land. The Mission Planners were not going to let that happen again, they wanted a pinpoint landing for apollo 12, and they wanted to make sure they had a landmark to know where they landed. So, they chose it, on the moon everything was the same. He decided to land next to another surveyor, surveyor 3. That is it, what you see in front of you with pete conrad. And, my favorite alltime astronaut. And behind on the horizon, you can see the lunar module they landed in. And they used a hacksaw to take off the camera of the surveyor 3 , and a piece of the scoop, and brought it back. There was a sense some scientists felt when they took it to the lab, that they found microbial life on the camera, that had come from earth, so they sneezed on it, went to the moon, survived for three years, and went back. That has been discredited now. They now think someone sneezed on it after they got back. But, what is important about it, this is exactly the same time scientists were beginning to u