Major Major Initiative within , the cold war. T minus 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. Ignition. 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, which is now the morehead planetarium and science center. John moreahead, iii is from a famous North Carolina family. His family was the governor of North Carolina. John morehead the third attended carolina for undergraduate school and chemistry made an , accidental discovery in a Chemistry Lab as an undergraduate that ultimately led to the founding of Union Carbide and he became an extremely wealthy man, and he came up with this idea. What he did as a leading Science Education contribution was he built the planetarium. When we opened in 1949, the morehead planetarium was the first planetarium in the south, so his contribution was significant. We are also the first planetarium in the world on a university campus. So he visited the admiral planetarium in chicago, the hayden planetarium. He also visited zeiss, the leading lens manufacturer in the world. They arguably still are, in germany. He had a zeiss model 2 projector installed, which at that time, was the very best star projector in the world. His original vision was as a place of education and enlightenment andhis is the satellite, what you will see in the lower half of your television screen, so be sure that you watch very, very carefully. Center of your screen, in the lower third in the late 1950s, the u. S. Government in response to sputnik being 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, and so, nasa was formed in the late 1950s, and shortly thereafter, an announcement was made that we were going to send humans eventually into space. Our director at the time, tony genzano, and the head of nasa at the time, communicated about the possibility of celestial navigation. The idea being that as the ancient mariners did, sailing the seas using the stars as a way to navigate, the new pioneers could be able to use these stars just in case the Navigation Systems would fail, and so from 1959 to 1975, morehead planetarium trained all of the astronauts in celestial navigation. I like to say that unc chapel hill was the only university in the country that can claim to 62 astronauts as alumni. Because they came here for continuing education in celestial navigation. Morehead team always used pretty primitive technology among the team throughout the training. We had the zeiss projector, which was eventually replaced. 2 was 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 hood attachments they would attach to the barber chair to simulate whatever the capsule is. The idea was whatever you could do to reorient the astronauts so , a barbers chairs seemed to work well. You could spin, you could rotate, you could pitch, and all of those things had to be and simulated because that would be what the astronauts would experience in space. Those 62 astronauts that came here needed to know the night sky better than anyone. They learned specific constellations, specific stars that 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 by the size of the windows. They may have only seen maybe 1 8 of the entire night sky that we would see without any horizon so they had no points. These astronauts knew where they were because they knew where the important stars were. These were used in all the early missions. Because the Navigation Systems were so primitive. Although the celestial Navigation Training was used in every mission to calibrate and recalibrate 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 of gordon cooper, in the early 1960s, and in that case, he faced all kinds of equipment failures, including the Navigation Systems. He used his knowledge gained from morehead and the training he received here to relocate and manually reenter the atmosphere. Interestingly enough, that was the only one of that series of missions that was landed manually. It was also the most accurate splashdown in the history of that series of missions. Ended, 34 hours, 20 minutes, and 31 seconds. The apollo 12 was impacted. They were struck by lightning on takeoff. What was that . Gradually. We had a whole bunch of buzzers drop off. Throughout the Navigation Systems, the crew was able to use their knowledge of the stars again through their celeste real celestial 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. [radio sounds] apollo 13 is probably the most famous that did not land on the moon in the apollo series of missions. There was an explosion and a fire. Houston, we have a problem here. We had a hardware restart. I do not what was. Houston, we have a problem. There was actually a debris field so 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 they were heading back to earth right before they 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. So, again, they used their knowledge gained from morehead training to ensure that they were on the right path, and they made it home safely. Houston, we show you on the main. It looks great. [radio chatter] at morehead, we like to say that we trained astronauts and we are training future astronauts, so we want every visitor here to see that the sky truly is the sky is not even the limit. That there is an entire huge universe out there that the pioneers of tomorrow are looking at, the challenges of deep space , but also the challenges here on earth. So the things we are learning today, we have no idea how that will advance us, and what we want is for the people, especially the children that walk through the doors, to know that whatever contribution they can make is an important contribution, we 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. 2030] our cities to travel to chapel hill, North Carolina. To learn more visit our website. Talk aboutstorians two lesserknown world war ii u. S. Army air force initiatives, operation matterhorn, which targeted mainland japan and japanese territory from chinese from china and india, and operation frantic, which targeted items from soviet basis. This was part of the World War Ii Museum annual conference. This next session is special seee, not only because do i our next three panelists as distinguished colleagues, as distinguished scholars, and colleagues in the history field, but also as friends. Atot to spend time with tom, the Army Heritage and education center, and you all know him well as a frequent presenter here at our conferences. One of our longestserving president ial counselors, and now is it is my
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