An Evening With Two Mercury Astronauts

well thank you very much ladies and gentlemen now I'd like to introduce our speakers the I'm Jack Dailey director of the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the eighth annual John h.glenn lecture as a museum with dual commitments to history and science we focus our activities in three major areas aviation space exploration and planetary studies tonight's event is guided by our mission to commemorate educate and inspire since it was inaugurated in 2002 excuse me 2004 the John h.glenn lecture stands out as one of the most popular events of our annual calendar and tonight is no exception in addition to the more than 1,000 people who secured tickets to be with us here in the museum thousands more will be watching on our webcast fifty years ago on the 5th of may 1961 America began its journey into human spaceflight with Alan Shepard when Alan Shepard traveled into space in freedom 7 followed by Gus Grissom in July the mercury project achieved its goal of orbiting the Earth when John Glenn became the first American to do so in February of 1962 and three months later scott Carpenter became the second tonight these two American pioneers will share their thoughts about the first human space flights as it was last year the John Glenn lecture was made possible through the generous support of the Boeing Company over the years the Boeing Company has partnered with the Smithsonian on many important projects including construction of the Steven F udvar-hazy center the building central hangar is named the Boeing aviation hangar and recognition of Boeing's generosity representing the Boeing Company here tonight is mr. Leo Brooks vice president's national security and space and Leo would you please stand to be recognized it's important to point out that none of these problem our programs would be possible without sponsorship and so we are deeply indebted to Boeing for its consistent support of many of our activities moderating tonight's discussion will be Margaret white a camp curator in the museum's division of space history dr. whitey camp is the curator for the social and cultural dimensions of spaceflight among her duties is the coordination of this annual lecture lecture series it's now my pleasure to turn the program over to dr. wad Margaret white a camp Margaret good evening welcome to the National Air and Space Museum for this evenings John h.glenn lecture in space history we're honored to have as our speakers tonight two original Project Mercury astronauts Senator John H Glenn and Commander M scott carpenter as we prepared for this conversation which will focus on the early days of American human spaceflight Senator Glenn reminded me of the numbers involved in selecting the first seven astronauts when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration began looking for astronauts they reviewed the records of 508 military jet test pilots 110 qualified 69 were interviewed 53 volunteered and 32 went through the best screening process that NASA could devise I'll let our speakers tell you a little bit more about that in a minute but when John Glenn began NASA's selection process he was a Marine Corps aviator who had flown 59 combat missions during World War two in the Korean Conflict he flew 63 missions with a marine fighter squadron and another 27 missions with the Air Force in the f-86 Sabre jet in the last nine days of fighting in Korea Glenn downed three MiG's in combat along the Yalu River he was also a record setter holding a transcontinental speed record from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours and 24 minutes 23 minutes I'm sorry sir as he joins us tonight he is a veteran of two space flights his history-making mission as the first American to orbit the Earth on February 20th 1962 and also as a mission specialist on sts-95 in 1998 and we're here at the museum were particularly delighted that his second space craft the space shuttle Discovery will be joining his first friendship 7 in our collection next year elected to the United States Senate in 1974 senator Glenn served with distinction for 25 years finally leaving office in 1999 in addition to all of that Senator Glenn is a great friend to the us here at the Museum and we're honored to have him with us tonight when scott Carpenter began NASA's astronaut selection process he was a naval aviator with a degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Colorado it's really fitting this year 2011 which is also the centennial of Naval Aviation that we have such two distinguished aviators as our speakers this evening during the Korean War Commander carpenter served with patrol squadron six by 1959 when NASA began its process he had graduated from Navy test pilot school and was serving as the air intelligence officer on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet as he joins us here tonight he is both an astronaut and an Aquanaut in 1962 he became the second American to orbit the Earth aboard Aurora 7 but in 1965 with the Navy's man in the sea project he spent 30 days living and working on the ocean floor at NASA he brought that interest in diving to developing underwater crew training when commander carpenter retired from the Navy after 25 years of service he founded sere Sciences Incorporated continuing his interests in diving and the world's oceans his the author of two novels and a memoir he's a businessman an astronaut a deep-sea diver and tonight were delighted that he is one of our speakers please help me in welcoming John Glenn and scott Carpenter to the stage musical chairs these are hot yes ma'am I seem to be up elevated here okay thank you very much senator Glenn did you want to begin I'll be glad to and I welcome everybody here tonight and we thank Boeing for sponsorship as general Daly has said very much but you know to be asked to participate in a fiftieth anniversary celebration of the early days of manned spaceflight is a very is a difficult task in two respects because sort of an exercise in nostalgia number one and then it seems strange to be talking about the early days of Mercury without having all of that whole first seven group here with us Scott and I are the only two left five of them have passed on now various reasons but it's so it's difficult to to speak about some of these things because that was a group that was dedicated to things never tried before in this country or anywhere around the world as far as that goes dedicated to starting that man program there were days of the Cold War that was the impetus we were determined to get back in this thing even though we'd been out done to begin with and it was a group dedicated to a task that there was a very difficult task and it was a highly competitive group because every person in that first group wanted to be on every mission that's the reason we had all volunteered for that but when the time came for a mission there wasn't a competition anymore everybody United completely in in getting behind whoever was in the cockpit that particular time and making sure that it was a good mission so I'd be well this evening if we just thought about this as Scott and I here we're glad to be representing that whole group of seven I wish they were all here with us tonight it was a great group but some of the days of the what it was like back then and what the selection process that selected the seven the training we went through and some of those early missions is what we'll be talking about this evening so thank you all for being here thank you would you like to say a few words about your colleagues I was saying I to him proud to be asked to be a part of the John Glenn lecture series but I must remark the fact that I am no stranger to John Glenn's lectures I was his I heard a lot of lectures from John telling me what to do to his space capsule that made it work right so John I'm glad to be asked to lecture again I listen to a lot to which I was not at anyway as a backup if I had caught the measles a day before you know who - gone I have to say this you brought it up when John I've got the second flight on the on the shuttle I said to him that I'd be glad to be his backup again but this time I make sure he broke a leg like but then it occurred to me to say to him but John NASA probably wouldn't let me do that because I'm not old enough did you want to say a few words about why the human spaceflight program began about the Cold War context and President Kennedy and what really began this race into space I think I think people today sort of forget what the the international situation was back in those days when we were first starting the Soviets at that time had been taking thousands of kids into therefore into Russia for their education and been the sending him back their countries as indoctrinated little communists and there were a lot of writing about what's communism going to at least being part of the determining factor for the rest of the history and it was getting a lot of credibility and they were saying that they were superior to us in in technology and in research and to prove this they were saying look at their missiles and their missiles had been orbiting while ours had been blowing up too often had been blowing up on the launch pads so it was in those depths of the Cold War and sort of a comeback that we were we almost went into some of those early flights as a combat mission because he was that important for our country that we not be looked at as a second-rate nation around the world and so that was one of the driving forces for it President Kennedy was aware of all this was very much for the program and so those were sort of the early days I think of one thing to say with regard to oh I gotta say one other thing about being not old enough John's idea for the flight that he took on the shuttle was to prove that that an old man and we were both older then but he wanted to prove that an aged age of the man could stand the stresses just as well as he gun man and he did that and it was was very valuable experiment to a lot of old fellow so nice well then we got to sort of jumped over mercury there but let me just comment on that briefly the the reason I was up on that second flight I was 77 and the as you get older some of your your faculties change they really do and the NASA is plotted some 52 changes in the human body occur in space things like the body's immune system gets weaker in space well that happens to old folks here the ability of the body to replace protein and the muscles pto protein turnover is more difficult in space than it is for older folks to the purpose of the flight then was to try and see if we could find similarities or differences between me and the younger people that would let us get a clue as to what within the human body turns these systems on and off making it possible maybe for younger people to go longer in space longer missions and the important to me was to take away frailties of old age right here on earth so that was really the purpose of me being on the second flight you spoke a little bit about the testing that you were doing on that orbital flight I'm very interested in getting us talking about the testing that you did as a part of the selection process how did you first hear about NASA's astronaut selection and the beginnings of the human spaceflight program naval officer on the carrier Hornet and I got I got orders signed by CNO saying well do those of you who don't know see you know that stands for the Chief of Naval Operations top man in the army and for others who don't understand these affairs CNO to a junior naval officer is two steps above god and when you get orders from CNO you obey the orders said report to Washington at such-and-such a time do not discuss or speculate with anyone for the reason about the reason of these or for these orders and so I obeyed I did discuss and speculate with my wife however but I went in to a briefing at the Pentagon and that's how I heard about the NASA project I don't really remember where I first heard about there were some rumors that that I was in the old Bureau of Aeronautics at that time I just come off a test duty at about three and a half years of doing test work at Patuxent River Maryland Naval Air test center and the rumors at that time and the old NACA NASA's predecessor nice Advisory Committee for Aeronautics was doing some studies on a computer they had down at Langley that were about orbital flight and they wanted someone to come down there and and sort of go through some of that and I went down teared for that and that's when I think we first realized that we really were going into this I realized anyway what kinds of tests were done to determine your physical fitness and your psychological fitness for becoming an astronaut well I think I think on the screen you have the those were the basic conditions that they were looking for at that time and I won't repeat those now but I think the one of the things was they they put us through the most complete physical exams that they knew how to do medically possible back at that time doctor Randy Lovelace had been in charge of the at wright-patterson Air Force Base have been in charge of high-altitude research on pilots and he had had a loveless clinic out of Albuquerque and that we were sent out to Albuquerque it was such hush-hush then we even signed in under assumed names as I recall I don't remember what my name was but anyway we reported in and they ran the most complete physicals you ever saw in your life everything that was possible the couple of things that were different than anything I've ever done on a physical ever since then that I recall was one of the tests it was you went in they put your bare feet into a bucket of ice water and that gets rather painful after a little while and that was supposed to be a test of later in life whether you're going to have high blood pressure or not now I don't know whether we have any doc I imagine there's a doctor too in the house here we ought to ask their opinion of that test today and the the other one that is still used I think is that was not on a regular physical I'd ever taken before was cold water not ice water but cold water in the ear pour it in your ear and that makes your that makes your the fluid in the vestibular part of your ear the inner ear ear canals move randomly and gives you a nystagmus which means you can't keep your eyes focused on a particular point and that the the more they cold why they put in the more your eyes would twitch and go to the side and then they would time once they stopped that time how much fit how long it took to for your eyes to recenter and get to control of your eyes so those are two that I remember in particular out there at loveless and then we move back to wright-patt for a whole battery of tests later on so what are your recollections of Albuquerque anything different well yes you characterized the tests that NASA gave us best by saying everything they could think of that would be possible to test they did to us mainly because nobody knew what stresses the human body would be subjected to by the rigors of spaceflight so they tested us under all sorts of conditions many of those tests we're not applicable to to spaceflight because it they involved stresses that didn't occur in in space so the testing and training changed as a result of that a lot of the things they did to us are no longer done because they didn't tell us anything that we related to spaceflight except I have to accept the cold water your feet in cold water that had purpose but you on the surface you have to realize that you don't need in order to fly in space to be able to keep your feet in cold water it does however give the medical people a way to measure perseverance and perseverance of course is required in any major effort like this and putting your water does measure perseverance so that was a valuable to test and there were others John mentioned the stag must that the cold water does to your ears that was also induced by another training device that went by the acronym Mastiff it stands for multi axis spin test inertial facility and that tested the your ability to recover quickly from the nystagmus that is also induced by rapid tumbling which around all three axes which was suspected to perhaps be present when we were separated from the booster but it never happened nystagmus never was a stress experienced in and spaceflight but we sure did experience if in the training yeah we went back to after loveless we went back to wright-patterson for all the things that they knew how to do back there measuring responses on the human body to different stimuli and that was quite a list of things and I don't know whether we have a list of that to put up here or not but one was we wrote at four G's four times gravity in the twenty five-foot arm centrifuge they had their right pat some of the other things we had a heat chamber and these were this shows to some extent what Scott said a minute ago about NASA was really going overboard on just trying to cover everything that they could measure and all these tests to see how you responded not knowing exactly how you were going to what was going to happen the heat chamber you had a rectal thermometer in that that was remotely they could read it outside the let your body soak I think we're in the heat chamber at 135 degrees a sound chamber where they could change the volume and the frequency of sound make it so you - her whole body just literally shook when you're in that one the and and just the opposite of that a chamber that was no sound and no like an echo ik chamber with baffles in there that reduced the sound to nothing and no light and see on they didn't tell you how long you were going to be in there but they had sensors on you that were read outside to show how much tension you were under in that kind of an isolated situation which I suppose it'd have some relation to the the isolation of space at a shake test on a vibration chair where you shook again they had a strobe light test where at the body's nervous system responds to different frequencies and one of the frequencies that was supposed to be particularly bad and I think still used may be to some extent today was a strobe light flashing in your eye at 10 cycles per second and to some people that carriage is sort of over the edge I guess so they can't control themselves at that and so that was a test also an altitude chamber up to 35,000 feet and take your mask off see how what response you had at their tilt table they're taking different actions and reaction time measurements those are ones that I I can remember that we did physically and then of course our whole batteries of a psychological test we went through and we could talk to them about that too I was just gonna ask you could you tell us a little bit about the psychological test that they did yeah the first they they had a questionnaire I looked this up the other day the first questionnaire they gave us we checked in was answer 566 questions 566 questions you had Rachel will answer out to these each one of them and they covered different things they give us a Rorschach test you know the Rorschach inkblot passing to separate him you always look like we have one behind you see I always look like butterflies at one kind or another to me but they were there was a little joke back at that time too I might say about the psychiatrist showing these ink blots of the Rorschach test and everyone on the the the subject said oh that was something he described some very pornographic event and this went on I won't carry this out I think he could but he did went through about five or six the every time he did the guy would describe some brand new psychological event or sights like a pornographic event and finally the psychiatrist said the look everything I show you you seem to come up with some pornographic why do you think that is and the guy said I don't know doc you're the ones who on the dirty pictures but anyway we went through all of that and Rorschach test and then one I thought you might try at home tonight to have to go home I am blank and give me a minimum of 20 answers and you get brownie points for all over 20 but you get up most people I think get up to about 16 or 17 I am man I'm a husband I'm a father I'm an officer I'm up whatever or whatever you keep on and on and on everything you can think of and that was sort of an interesting one to the there were some been reports back from some of the psychiatrists at that time that they thought that space travel might be so euphoric that you might not they had what they called the breakaway phenomena that you might not really want to come back at the end of this once you're up there and I never took that one very seriously I can tell you that but I thought one of the one of the humorous things that did happen and this was one that you may have heard before because we've used it several times maybe and in some of the lectures here even but Pete Conrad was on the who's no longer with us but Pete Conrad was on that first election group and the Pete was a great guy had a sense of humor like you wouldn't believe and always had a joke about something or other people came in and the psychiatrist slid a piece of white paper across in front of him just with nothing on it like that slit a piece of white paper across in front of him on the on the table and said mr. Conrad what do you see there and without batting an eye Pete turned it around and slid it back to him said well first thing I see is you have it upside down piete piete was not selected on the first go-around but anyway we went through every psychiatric test that knew how to run at that time and anyway the or the I guess we were the ones that came out good we never knew whether they selected the ones that were nuts or not but anyway anyway and we're gonna connect let me carry on for just a second unbeknownst to the senator I had occasion to trust hid to test his ability one time to recover from quickly from a stressful situation we were in John's little tiny print automobile him it had two cylinders I think had great gas mileage went about thirty miles an hour but John was was commuting from Washington to Bethesda and it got good gas mileage and it was economic to run we were in this car trying to get to the airport which used to be called friendship right that's my friendship Baltimore Baltimore Washington we were racing down the road with the top down trying to make an airplane I had all our papers and our tickets and itineraries over in the windy passenger seat and as John was hell-bent to get the friendship in a hurry I shuffled all of the papers without the tickets into one hand and let them fly and john saw them running past and I said Oh John they're cool our tickets and he looked at me strangely but he didn't he didn't he kept his self-control and I was pleased with that and he never got mad at me and he recovered quickly especially after I showed him showed him the particular still in my hands he recovered very note I hope we made the airplane when you were training to be astronauts no one had ever had that job description before so what did astronaut training entail everything yeah every test you can imagine but we had a lot of systems to learn about we had a lot of machinery to look at and we you know we had in those days and it's no longer so and maybe that's good but we had total control of how that capsule was made and what it had and what it could do and it was a good one was a good capsule it flew six times without failure it might be good at this point to talk about the heat shield well stand at the weight limit oh go ahead well that's your heat shield now they're gonna say about some of the limitations before we get into what the training did and what the experience on the flight because we were under very strict weight limitations and they came about because and this sounds backwards we were better we were in trouble on manned spaceflight as far as what we could put up there how light it had to be by the fact that we were better than the Russians technically better than the Soviets technically that sounds backwards except it's true in that we had been able to miniaturize nuclear weapons make small ones and the the Soviets had not been able to do that they were still making fat boy type nuclear weapons and so they had to have a huge booster we had a smaller booster the biggest booster we had was the Atlas booster because we didn't need a big moon like that well then when we're using those boosters and converting the manned space flight the the we were limited in putting up about 4,000 pounds worthy they could put up their house practically if they they wanted to almost and so we were very limited in what we could do that's the reason that when you go out here and they in the outside here and look at space friendship 7 and how small it is it had to be under well under 4000 pounds fully-loaded astronaut all consumables and everything on board and so that's the reason they're on the original mercury design there was not a window because it was going to be heavier than the structure around it had to have supporting structure and all and and it was very very light and very small and if we were going to be in the space program we had that we could only use the Atlas which was the biggest booster we had at that time so that was one of the constraints that we're really under when we went and so then we I thought of throw that in and then we go to training after that I'm gonna follow up one question then we'll go back to the training what kind of trade-offs did you have to make in order to make that weight in order to achieve what you wanted to do with the mercury capsule well the the engineers have designed this they use the beryllium and titanium they use oh this is another and this is a very important one too they went with instead of going at sea-level pressure as you're breathing here right now fourteen point seven two and a mix of about twenty percent oxygen and and eighty percent nitrogen a couple of the little gases in there but but about twenty percent oxygen that you breathe here instead of doing that they'd have to make a fairly substantial structure they could make a lighter structure if you went with a a design that went with a hundred percent oxygen inside one hundred percent oxygen and reduce the pressure then in space and you got the same oxygen absorption rate that you would get here with a mixed gas at fourteen point seven two here at sea level now that and that's the way the first flights went that's where our flights were all made in a hundred percent oxygen now you know what happened in high school if you had a beaker of oxygen here and you had a glowing red hot wire and you just put that in the thing would just burn like that so and that caught up with us after a while we were lucky on Project Mercury that it was later on on the pad fire when they were still in a hundred percent oxygen environment the pad fire in the early Apollo mission that Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee and Ed White were killed on the launch pad and then the whole program stopped for about two and a half years while we converted back over to a sea-level pressure but on the early days we went with 100% oxygen in order to save weight on the structure of the vehicle itself and so you had the but you had the same oxygen absorption as you would have here on sea level at the higher pressure if you follow all that anyway that was a very great limitation an interesting figure I think the weight of the the payload and so to speak on the Atlas we were part of it at a hundred fifty pounds we were told to eat carefully and don't gain any weight begins and the capsule itself was weight limited jhanas spoke of spoken of that because of the rule of thumb in those days was that it takes a thousand pounds of fuel to orbit one pound of payload and we were feel limited because of that so you see a few gain too much weight the appleís couldn't carry enough fuel to orbit you so it was critical it was very critical you had that you had to what you're trying to do is get up to orbital speed and that was about 17,500 miles per hour which that's a big figure but if you think about a different way it's almost five miles a second you're trying to accelerate to almost four point eight miles per second is what actually is to get up to orbital speed and so with the limitations on weight we were very very tight I think at the end of the at the end of the launch period I think I think mine to figure they calculated I had about three seconds of burn time left and just got up to orbital speed and just had three seconds of burn time left on a five and a half minute burn from launch up into orbit but we could get into some of that little later I do want to bring you back to some of the training that you did because you've described that you were over tested when you were selected and then you essentially over trained when you were training because you weren't sure we mentioned that go ahead you mentioned overtraining and and I think I think we we over they don't do some of the training that we did now yeah I don't think of any instances but we were subjected to there were so many unknowns in those days they were unknown unknowns and we were subjected to tests that had no relevance at all and I can't think of any in particular but that the bear mentioned now but we we did a lot of work that was unnecessary because we essentially didn't know at that time what we were doing there were some extraordinary pieces of technology that were created in order to simulate some of the forces that you would be or possibly be encountering can you tell me a little bit for instance if you mentioned the Mastiff - I don't know how many hours you have left to talk about some of these things but a couple of these were really things that I never want to do again and I'm sure Scott done neither we they didn't know what g-level you could get up to and so we were we trained on the 50-foot centrifuge 50 foot arm centrifuge that were in a circle like this and keep going keep building in gzip and you're on the outer end of this thing out on the end of the arm in a spacecraft a simulated spacecraft cockpit in a unit yeah there it is and that thing out on the end as its as you started spinning that long arm that 50 foot trestle there it would get up at about a 4,000 horsepower engine drove an electric motor in those drove this thing in the middle as you went up this the space capsule land which was inside that toroidal shape or whatever it is behavior Rodian out there that would tilt so that your cheese were always still straight into your chest as though you're lying down your bed was being accelerated up that was the direction of the G's now you did you know one had established at that time what G levels you could take and they didn't though they were trying to train us I guess for if there was an overshoot and you got up to higher G levels in plant then there's the 7.7 planned for launch and re-entry if you got up above that what would happen and so we went up and trained on that thing and started going up and up in the G levels and I got up to 16 G's and at 16 G Scott described that yesterday when we were talking about this go ahead about what you you really had to put into it you ever had how do you endure 16 G's with difficulty I remember thinking that what came naturally I think to all of us without any guidance from the medical people watching from the outside wasn't natural you feel the stress that tends to drain blood from your head and your heart and you tense every muscle in your body like you would if you were trying to to clean and jerk a thousand pounds off the floor and that that that automatic response to acceleration is exactly what the doctors were telling we us to do and I thought at the time you know the human organism has no evolutionary experience with AI acceleration the maker didn't didn't conceive centrifuges or spaceflight or high accelerations but the human body is constructed with the intellect that tells it how to respond to that stress I find that remarkable the Scott you're just at 16 G you're straining every muscle in your body the maximum you possibly can to keep blood enough blood to keep from passing out you know if you just try and relax even a hair your vision starts closing in and you're just about to pass out so it's 16 G's where we ended it because we figured we'd never go over that no matter what happened on the on the boosters one other thing though that we did on the on the planetarium to plant on the the centrifuge age creeping in there yeah on the centrifuge was of what we called eyeballs into eyeballs out runs now that unit you see they're going around on the end of the centrifuge now and say you're up to a certain number of G's they can rotate that thing rotary around the round part you're looking at there so that you go from G's into the chest to G's out of the chest and you're coming out against the straps and the reason that they want us to train on that was because if you come down on a spacecraft and let's say the spacecraft comes out at the end of a mission and the chute is up here and you come down and you hit the ground and the chute is released if you had a 30 or 35 knot wind and this is the caps of the spacecraft bounced and came down the other head first would you come out against the straps and and break your restraint system and be killed that way instead of some other way and so what they were trying to do was we've tested it that way then and we went up and worked on that thing to see what we could do see whether we needed a better restraint across the chest than just the two straps like you have in most private airplanes now and that was all the restraint you had the 16 Jesus course was taken with G's coming straight into your chest and that was enough I might add too when we got out we had little thousand little spots on your back where blood vessels that Brody called petechiae the doctors could describe that better of his little broken blood vessels that disappear after 3 or 4 days but we're putting the bodies through some very pretty tough stuff and this was to do the other direction so we went we'd get up to a certain G level say like 3 G's or 4 G's and going around and they would rotate that simulated spacecraft on the end of the arm it would rotate to an eyeball from an eyeballs in position yet and two eyeballs out on the straps the EO position as we called it and you'd hit the straps and they could rotate it in about three seconds from one spot to the other so you had a delta a change of G from a positive to negative G of about say at for your +4 G's and they'd rotate it to be a 4g Zout a delta of 8 G's in about three seconds and that was a fried and one of the doctors up there made some runs that that was the only test I ever remember where the doctor one of the doctors ran tests ahead of us and Bill Alderson was his name he was running these tests ahead of us and built it's I think it was a maybe it was a six to six I think we'd been up to five to five he did a six to six and came out coughing and coughing and coughing and coughing so they thought we'd better stop and see what was going on and they went that we went down to a an anthropomorphic dummy that was down the lab and I started peeling the pieces off the dummy to see what happened your internal organs and they had the same vectors and what they finally the doctors came up with was that the heart had come up and actually hid behind a lung and knocked the air out of one lung and the that's why he was coughing was because the alveoli in your lung were compressed and it took a little while to get that back normal again that was where we decided that the e-i-e-i-o had ended right there that was a that was enough so the centrifuge was pretty good and I don't we had another good one that we you might want well we talked a little bit about the Mastiff we have a good picture of that I believe that we can put it up I can give you a minute or so to walk us through what that did to you how did that work doing because three there are three axes of rotation and an airplane you call a column pitch roll and yaw and we put a seat inside of three the concentric Kimball's that could rotate around of three axes roll pitch and yaw and we built this machine that would get to pretty high rotational speeds with a man in the center given all of the stresses to his vestibular or the middle ear and then as soon as they stopped it the the cockpit was still there would be a doctor with flashlights and and magnifying glass watching your eyes stop the nystagmus and slow down and that was to test your ability to recover from the tumbling that was expected on to be present if things didn't go right when you separate from the booster on insertion to the orbit but that never happened in flight and so although this was an interesting ride it was not pertinent to spaceflight well let me let me tell you one other thing about about the centrifuge in order to fly in space you have to have speed in order to get speed you must accelerate and if you want to get very very fast you must accelerate at acceptable levels for a long long time that would be very handy on a flight to Mars they've got one of the fellows who ran the centrifuge postulated that if that if you were to ride a centrifuge at - jeez that's a simple test to G's is easy the it is important to say that G's can be can be debilitating but the the debilitation is dependent on time - you can stand 16 G's for five seconds that's what we did but at a minute at 16 G's I figure not to be fatal so the time at a certainty level is is important to this fellow postulated that that two G's for a day would give you close to relativistic speeds if for a flight to Mars and that would be a good way to get the MA in a hurry is get the speed that two G's for a day for 24 hours would give you he proposed that to his boss and said that's a good idea let's try it but try it on a chimp first not you and that was done and the chimp died after six to six hours at - geez so we learned something from that mistaken idea yeah back the massive just a second to that the you had a hand controller in our controlled roll and pitch and y'all like that and those were hooked up to reactions thruster reactors then out on these arms to stop the rotation that they had induced so and about whether it's about the same ratio as it would be in the spacecraft itself and so you trained on one axis at a time then two axes and the graduation exercise it really was something that's hard for me to still believe we did but we did it and this is one of Morris one of the photographers from Life magazine took he put lights on the thing our graduation exercise was that we did 32 RPM enroll pitching you all at the same time if you you figure that you just figure if you can visualize the the convolutions your body was going through that's the reason that whole thing was known better to in the astronaut group as the barf machine but it was a real right at the centrifuge and that Mastiff is something I never want to really fool with again they were we were over trained on those things that's for sure and they don't use those now at all I'm gonna move us forward to your flights because as you're talking about acceleration and talking about the feeling of being on the mast if I'm wondering what it does it feel like to launch aboard an Atlas booster I mean just before you do that if you could Margot let me just run through some of the other trainings just very very briefly here some of the other training we did we did zero-g flights and the c-130 one on the f100 we did planetarium training down at the University of North Carolina on star navigation training if you lost all the communication the ground you'd still be able to look out the window with a cursor across a window when certain stars came up you would know to fire the retro to come down within a certain thousand mile area or so we did the disorientation training in a slowly revolving room where you the room rotates and you're inside this room and you everything just looks normal the couch is there and so on but then you try to move around or do something and it's very very disorienting we did things on the balance beam that was one that showed me on the balance beam do you have the other one there that's Scott on the balance I knew I'd get back okay and the scuba training we did that they thought that was good training for us and it was we did flight training we had to 102 f-102 assigned to us we did survival training on sea and desert and jungle and wish we had time to go into all those just one little thing on that one and the only thing we like here is smellivision that was at the end of three days of desert training and I always remembered there was a sir Master Sergeant urban at sted Air Force Base who gave us some of our our desert training and he told us about don't be afraid of snakes out there because if you get hit by a venomous snake he talked to he gave the survival training for a lot of the Air Force and went through regular classes there and then you standard with you if you have a snake venom bite you slash it with a knife and suck it out some people will refuse to suck it out because they're afraid it's going to get in their system and kill them to show that that wouldn't happen he milked a water moccasin in a little shot glass squeezed it until it put venom in there and it had a little venom in the bottom of shot glass he drank it and he said that it's just pure protein and it won't hurt you be safe you got ulcers don't do this would kill you and that was when I still remember doubt that kind of training we did jungle training where they put us down through high canopy jungle for and you survived for three days went put down two people to time the alarm strong and I were a team on that one and those are just some of the other things in addition to the things that were mentioned here I thought I'd just mention those because we hadn't covered all the different things we did while you were doing that you were also going down I know and at the Cape and watching the work that was being done on the Atlas booster which was having some problems within a year or so of your flight there were I believe two failed flights within a year of your flights can you talk a little bit about what it was like to be preparing to launch in an Atlas booster and again I really want to know what does it feel like well the first launch any of us saw was pretty interesting we've just been in the program a short time and they had the mercury Atlas adaptation they're going to thought that was going to be a good good flight they took us down because none of us had ever seen a missile launch and it's going to be a night launch and we go down there we're on a camera pad just two or three thousand feet from the launch site and starless not I mean it's very starry night and that you know the the searchlights are on and it's almost like Hollywood steam coming off of it finally comes down five four three two one it lights up and we're watching this thing go up and up and up and it hit the highest area of a aerodynamic pressure after about a minute of 59 seconds of launch and we're watching this thing go up and up and all at once it blew up right over us and that was our introduction to the Atlas that we were gonna ride and so it was a it was quite impressive as I recall we looked at each other and wanted to have a meeting with the engineers morning so that was the first one and so we went then there were two more failures in the process but we did have a successful two successful flights before my flight and so the analyst just comment inside the Atlas is a very fragile vehicle it's made out 16,000 stainless steel and if you it had to have pressure in it all the time or on the top ring have that intention to hold the thing up if you didn't have either pressure inside or something to hold it up it would just collapse and so it was very fragile and what they found eventually the been causing the problems was that when you mounted a mercury spacecraft on there and during launch you got some vibrations on this thin metal up right close to the vehicle that broke through and caused the whole thing to explode and so the fix for that that that gave us the two successful missions before my flight was to put up what we called a belly band they were put it doubled that thickness of the of the booster down about four feet or so down from where the the spacecraft was located up on top and that was successful and that seemed to cure the problem and it did through the mercury flights those three launches that we saw that ended so catastrophic ly we called those the back to the drawing board launcher it's really well we had on I was the Atlas right we had that person was destroyed after 59 seconds ma - it was designed as a shorter flight just to go up a little bit and then be propelled back down in the atmosphere some for some checks on equipment on that then the next one ma three was a failure and destruction by the Range Safety Officer the thing wasn't under control was going all over then we had ma 4 was ok and ma 5 was ok except it was ended at the end of two orbits and I think the it wasn't because there were problems with the booster I think it was the I don't remember what the reason was but anyway it made two orbits and then next flight was a man flight that's my flight so that was the history of the Atlas you asked about can you tell us about your launch sir what does it feel like to be going up in the tower in your spacesuit well ready to make the first door little flight for me people ask well what's it feel like when you're getting ready to launch and we have a sort of a standard answer in the astronaut corps and you may have already heard it but it's how do you think you'd feel if you knew you're on top of two million parts built by the lowest bidder on the government contract and it's not that bad because you really have you've studied this thing you've experimented you've gone through training and it's really something you've looked forward to and it's a time period of great concentration and you're a glad to get going lift off off the launchpad after all the training at G different G levels I know a lot of people think you're under your maximum stress when you're lifting off the launch pad because of all the fire and the steam and everything going out it looks bad but if you think about it that's the heaviest that the booster that's the heaviest condition you're going to want ever be in and so you're that applied thrust there you're going to lift off very gently I remember being very amazed at how gentle liftoff I didn't know for sure until I saw the clock start and I knew that that was and that's what I said on the it's on the recording of the flight was the clock is operating we're underway and the and so he's very gentle but you're accelerating on up your launch back at that time was about five and a half minutes from launchpad into orbit and so you go up you're outside booster engines come off and you continue on the sustainer engine then that is the one that takes you into takes you into orbit and that's where you're down to a light weight and that's the toughest part or that's the hardest part of the of the launch because you're you're running right up peaking up to right up to the maximum G's about 7.7 G's in that same position again just as you get into orbit and then you're cut off and you go from 7.7 G's to zero and that's a good transition you really are happy with that and then the first thing I'm sure I was waiting for at that time was a call to the ground that their radar tracking showed that it was a good orbit and I wasn't going to get cut down and and and told to retrofire immediately to come down short of Africa because you don't have full orbital speed and so you got to come down someplace and the the maximum that you were prepared to go if you had to at the end of this thing was seven orbits and that's the one that was always used as a signal that you were okay to go for orbit flight orbital flight was they you're cleared to go for seven and that was the most welcome message it just about I'd ever had I think so the liftoff itself is very gentle but your main part of the is the acceleration of there where you just just as you're inserted into orbit is where you're at their maximum G level and as you watch the progress of this flight that the thing that I remember is the gradual loss of blue sky and it gets black hmm and I remember looking at the instruments we had which really dropped out of any meaningful measurement at a hundred thousand feet and I remember looking at my altimeter that said something over ninety thousand feet and I looked outside it but that's probably we didn't have a mock measurement but you're looking out at a totally black sky see an altimeter reading of over 90,000 feet and realizing that you're going straight up and the thought crossed my mind what am i doing but it's a beautiful that's when when people ask what is it like I think of three things meaning orbital flight the view is unforgettable and the weightlessness is is the greatest thing that's ever happened to your body and the view and of Mother Earth and the weightlessness is that is an addictive combination of senses in that picture you're looking at you can see the curvature of the earth up there and we weren't very high on those first flights that curvature becomes more pronounced the higher you get of course as the first flights ran up about 160 statute miles something like that and so that's the that's the curvature you see from that altitude I don't know that which pictures we have here but the we took the that weight thing again and destructive the astronaut the original idea was not to have a window in the spacecraft and not to have the astronaut take a camera because it would be distracting and one of the cameras on display we headed out of the case out here yesterday was a camera that Bob Gilbreath finally approved to take just a couple of months before the flight the NASA didn't even have a photo shop down there then at the Cape and one day I was in getting a haircut those were days when I still got haircuts and got a haircut and next door was a I saw the first of the minolta high Matic cameras which was the first one that had automatic exposure to it and we didn't have a camera yet and I bought that and I still NASA still owes me forty five bucks for that camera but that's the one the camera that is on display here that's the one that I used up there it was called a Nancy oh that was one of the either subsidiary or the unmanned old or something in the States at that time there was a Minolta camera that had the you can see the right shoulder whatever it is down here the pictures down there right above the hand we tried it one reason I got it too we one of the camera that you could work it with the forefinger and to trip the picture and use the thumb for film transport it didn't have automatic film transport and so that was the camera that was used as out of a drugstore down there at that time because it was sort of a last add-on before the flight so am i right that that camera is essentially upside down so that the controls are on the bottom now yeah and you can use it I think we were looking at it yesterday I think I used the thing with it and this shows whether a being used with the right hand here I think that's wrong maybe - I think it was used with the left hand because we looked at it yesterday and I couldn't remember for sure but I think the way it's rigged they used this trip the shutter with a finger forefinger and transported the film with the thumb and to this so those are the first handheld pictures ever taken in space where was that what else were you being to asked to do during your mission what kinds of tasks did you have well the me those the early flights was as Scott mentioned earlier I think that was just the the objective was to see could we do this can man operate in space and be an integral part of the Machine and that the whole mission in space and that's what we're trying to do we had to have some things like another camera that was to take a spectrographic picture of the Sun and some things like that that were research even on those early flights but the main thing was determined whether we could do this and what role man could play in define man's role in in spaceflight and of course through the years we've now transitioned over where spaceflight is a place to do basic research now and so that the I was limited in what I could do somewhat on my flight because we had a failure of the automatic control system at the end of the first orbit and the NASA had a policy at that time any you made a backup for any critical path system and fortunately they had done that with the control system and so the automatic system was supposed to control wasn't working a little thruster was stuck and was going to waste fuel and I was going to have to end the mission early and but it would be able to cut all that off and go to manual control and that was the and that was the what I did then the last two orbits and so I was rather busy didn't get to do some of the other things that I might otherwise have done the picture you're looking at there though shows the hand controller down here on the on the lower right side with the hand on it and I might end over on the left side if you see the handle over there with a little thumb button on top of it that that was the one that was the abort switch if you're launching and the something was going wrong and the automatic system didn't pick it up you could punch that little button on top and swing at 45 degrees to the outside and that would set off a detachment and I you a rocket tower that pulled the whole spacecraft away from the blowing the booster that you thought was blowing up and so you rode all during a launch with your hand on that left one over there and that was colony panic but the chicken switch one thing about what I was asked to do I've mentioned we have mentioned that that there were so many unknowns in those days one of the unknowns was whether the body could metabolize food it was an unknown the medics asked me to eat and I ate some PAP from us too from a toothpaste tube just like baby food and it was radioactive so that it could be traced through the body to make sure that peristalsis at zero-g still worked and that you'd be able to metabolize whatever food you you ate that's an example of a very important unknown that was solved by these early flights one thing in my name is mentioned too and on the on going around and back in those days we had big communication gaps you're down as I said fairly low allottee about 160 miles up and so you went over the horizons my radio stations my tracking station you went over the horizon fairly early and you had no communication until you came to the next tracking station and those were all located along in flight there so you were back in in communication once you went through that but there was I don't know probably a a third or half the mission I guess I don't know the exact amount but you're you were out of communication which wasn't bad people on the ground looked at that worse and the astronaut did because you don't have people to talk to my ship it at you know what time that's right so it sort of welcomed some time when you went off the station now we have the fort during the shuttle flights you have the teachers technical data relay satellite which is up there to higher altitudes so that almost any anywhere that you are on the orbit you can either communicate directly with the ground and the spacecraft on the shuttle or you can communicate with the TDRs which will could connect you with the ground and so now you have all kinds of communication and and you never are out of communications and TV and and another question just as to clean that up to was the people asked sometimes about the number of computers we had on board the mercury spacecraft the answer of course is zero we didn't have any at all and the only the computers back in those days were rare enough that they were the big ones had a name and I think the one up at Johnsville as I recall was computer typhoon and what they called the control the the centrifuge up there and if something went wrong with it the tech people went out in an area about half the size of a gymnasium and got up on their ladders to find the vacuum tube the vacuum tube and just a your cell phone that probably two-thirds of you have in your pocket right now your cell phone has a bigger computing capacity I guess then that computer typhoon did back in those days by several times over I know that both of your flights were eventful you took manual control of the vehicle and the senator you've had issues with the fireflies I'm watching a clock and I know that our audience also wants a chance to ask you some questions so I'm gonna have to bring you back to earth can you tell us how you bring a mercury capsule from orbit back to recovery well when you're when you're in or but you're you're balancing out what the reason you need that kind of speed going around the earth is basically if you look at like centrifugal force if you had something on the end of a string and swung around you feel the force well think of gravity if you could take a spacecraft up there and just set it up there in space and cut it loose it would fall toward Earth now if you if you get up to speed though where it's either the land is dropping away underneath you at the same rate you're going around or look at it as though they've the pull on the spacecraft of gravity is just being equalled by the centrifugal force trying to throw you out the other way then you're going around and that's the perfect balance that you want to hit if you go a little faster you go into a higher higher orbit if you go a little slower you come down and come down in the upper part of the atmosphere and that's what you do on re-entry you slow down a little bit and that starts you angling down a little bit you get the upper part of the atmosphere and you slow slow even more and then dig in and come on down and that's the part where you were on mercury we hit about 7.7 G's coming back in at the end of a flight like that and then you're falling straight down and you go by about your supersonic until you get down to about 25 27 thousand feet at which time is sort of unstable because of the the shockwaves and so on and so you are coming straight down and that drogue chute comes out to stabilizes at that time and then when you get down to ten thousand feet the main chute comes out in a reef condition which just means it's not fully deployed then the reefing is cut this and the thing billows out then and you have the the chute then lets you down the water you're coming down when you hit the water you're doing about 32 feet per second and it's a good solid impact when you hit the water but it's quite quite tolerable it's not bad at all it's okay to mention the fact that the heat shield falls away after you're on the chute the heat shield falls away it's detached but it's held on the capsule by a circular curtain where the holes on it so in it so it essentially is the bottom of air cushion as soon as it hits the water the capsule comes down over the top of it but it's cushioned by the air that is escaping through those holes so it's a soft landing it is however the only stress if you can call it the that we didn't simulate pre-flight yeah but it was easily withstood you can even say maybe not noticeable and that would be the rent Rianne that bag and it coming down on that the air bag that Scott just described that's what happened to my flight there was an indication went to the ground two different tracking stations that that heat shield had already deployed in space and that the heat shield was loose and so what we did they've we left the retro pack on because it is held on to the retro pack is held on to the main part of the spacecraft by two three metal straps and thought that would hold the heat shield in place in until some aerodynamic force buildup on it during reentry as it turned out those two two different stations that got these signals on the ground that would the erroneous signal we found out later but it we let the retro pack burn off then during reentry and you're getting up you're out about an ionized layer out ahead of the spacecraft is about the surface of something like the surface that's on about 95 9,000 or 9,500 degrees and about 3,000 on the heat shield and it ablates away it burns away and carries the heat off as you as you come down so made for a very interesting reinter ease he burning chunks going back by the window and that couldn't be absolutely certain whether they were the heat shield or the retro pack and obviously they were the retro pack oh and beer denied so anyway it and you can look at if you look on the mercury spacecraft our friendship seven it's out there in the in the gallery and the main gallery and look up on the heat shield and you can see the burn pattern and see where the center of pressure was and see the flow of the ablative material out from it and that was a later on on Mercury flown on Gemini flights on Apollo they used that as a you deliberately miss misalign ru and deliberately placed the center of gravity off of that center of pressure so you then could guide the spacecraft coming down and that's what they used later on but on on Mercury we took just AB listen once once the retros were fired it was ballistic you didn't have any control of us men you're just gonna ride it in from there on and that was the that was the reentry what John mentioned he saw through the window with the retro pack burning up was was a beautiful sight I'm sure with all of the colors coming from all of the metals that were involved in the evolution of his heat shield I didn't have a lot of those colors but I got a bunch of colors in the ionized stream of air going on behind me and that's a beautiful sight yeah but it was assumed to be followed by another sight which I think both of us will say is more beautiful that's one of a fully inflated bearish ooh you can see and you can look out that window it's right here you're looking right up you see that parachute deploy that's a prettiest thing you ever saw when do you feel like you're safely home splashdown or does it come after that oh yeah I think that I felt once I was down I knew I'd get picked up yeah sittin on the water is fine yeah well we're delighted to have you here this evening to tell us the story of your selection your training your testing and of these historic flights thank you very much gentlemen thank you okay we have time for a few questions from the audience you sir in the yellow really yell I'm sorry sir I'm gonna repeat the questions so that the folks outside and on the webcast in it broadcasts can hear us the gentleman was asking about the experience of flying alone versus flying with a crew can you talk about that yeah the the first flight as we said earlier was just to see if we could do this thing and you're all by yourself second flight I was fortunate enough to be on and we talked about the aging studies earlier but that was with the seven people and were up nine days and the mission of the whole space program had changed in that hundred and some flights between those two flights thirty-six years between the flights and we'd gone over to basic research and we had 83 different research projects on the on the discovery and Columbia had 90 later on on the on flight before its accident and the so the whole mission had changed you had seven people on board and big space you could float around on Mercury all you could do is loosen the straps to be more comfortable but on the second flight it was very different the purpose was different we cross train we had lectures by the scientists to to tell us what they wanted us to do with their particular experiment that was on board and we cross train to back up each other on those experiments I had for four days I had 21 different leads brain waves and respiration and EKG at 21 different body parameters being recorded and sent down to the ground to try and pin it down any differences in my reaction to flight to those of the younger people so it was a very different mission and very different experience especially when you are up there down instead of just under five hour flight which Scott and I had the now you're up there for nine days and you can float around and and you change clothes and get more comfortable and go to work on your research so it's a whole whole different light and different purpose and energy levels we talked about G levels G levels on the on the shuttle launch it's a longer launch about eight minutes in 20 seconds I think it is at a lower G level to get up to that same speed and so you're you're up to and you never get above about three GS on launch at anytime right an insertion into orbit you finally get to about 3 G's re-entry is only about 2 G's on that one but you start your reentry clear out about 9,000 miles out over the Indian Ocean in order to hit the landing strip down the Cape so they're completely different flights and different experience and as we you know the the first was a much more tenuous thing and as Annie said on the first flight she lost 12 pounds on the second flight she gained 12 pounds while I was gone I see a little boy up here really laugh he wants to know for you commander carpenter what was it like being an Aquanaut a lot of fun it said it's an interesting place the ocean and we lived under the ocean for a long time and we got used to looking out the windows in that underwater house and seeing fish and seaweed instead of trees and birds but it was a comfortable place it was warm it was dry and we did some very interesting work out in the water and we I guess what I'd have to tell you in a shorter way is that it was so much fun because we were learning so much about the ocean while we were there that's what's fun about spaceflight we're learning more about our environment and about our bodies we it's great fun to learn and that's what we do in both of these programs we learn new important truths that's the important part of the space program to me as we're doing research you're learning new things I think what this put in a bigger context I think this country got to be what it is by two things education the average person is better educated was back years ago than most people in the world and then we put more into basic research we learned the new things first and that little combinations yeah it's just as true today if we lose that edge in research and education we won't be a leading nation in the worlds that simple I believe we have a question from the milestones gallery yes I have a question about your colleague Gus Grissom in the movie the right stuff he was portrayed as kind of a screw-up and yet NASA appointed him or annoyed in him as the second mercury pilot commander the first Gemini and he would have been commander the first Apollo and I just wondered what was if you have anything to say about that I do right now the question is about listen okay I disagree with what you said I don't think the right stuff portrayed Gus as a screw-up that's a misunderstanding of what the book said and what the movie intended to say and it is certainly an error regarding the man himself it's named I don't think any I was really cared for the movie the right stuff I didn't I think they advertised as almost a documentary of the early space days and it was not and if you want an accurate movie Apollo 13 look at that one that's a good one and then where they were these things that you were able to tell the question is with all of the training in the simulation that you did were there things that you could only learn from actually flying the missions and were you able to share that then with your colleagues who were flying yeah we we went through the the early mission briefing Scott on his on the second flight and what I learned on the first one so he could take off from there I think we just went through as I recall we went through every step just minute by minute we had all the tapes and all the things and they encouraged us those days to talk all the time even though you're out of contact with the station keep talking give your impressions of everything that you're we're just learning everything and put your impressions down on tape and those were there to be gone through in detail even though they hadn't come down to the ground to one of the tracking sites they went through all those things in just every experience so that we could gain from mission to Mission that's what we did back then every every mission built on the build on the experiences of the previous missions or sets of missions and and you tried to make progress each time and and and just like we did after mine Scott went on did other things and had other research on his flight that I didn't have on mine at all and he's flight built on the other as part of an answer of that question is the only thing you can do in flight that can't be done elsewhere is prolonged weightlessness everything else can be very well simulated but you can't get prolonged weightlessness without space flight orbital spaceflight young woman over here can the question is can you speak to your vision for NASA now and where do you think NASA should go I will field that one thank you Jack we got another hour no I think you got to look back at this thing as two and this I don't mean to make this thing political but here that just the facts of the case are these here's the reason we're where we are right now and you first George Bush George HW Bush proposed on the 20th anniversary of Neal's landing on the moon that we go back to the moon and an establish a base on the moon belong to Mars and there was nobody got excited about that and it was sort of dropped and there hadn't been much preparation for the proposal I don't think in January vote for though the whole mission of the space program was changed just by presidential directive in a speech at at Aaron's Bernard air and space as speech at NASA in which of President Bush W Bush said that NASA's now is going to change their direction or going to the moon and to Mars and but no additional money and the money had to come from within the current night and that's a budget I know what I think of that I'm not sure what you think of it but anyway that you couldn't did have a money for this great new mission it had to come out of existing budget the NASA had to change direction under presidential directive and try and take it out of that and and also he directed that the shuttle program end at the end of 2010 and if the Space Station's be ended at 2015 even though it to complete the station we have over a hundred billion dollars just over a hundred billion invested in that as the most unique laboratory ever put together and yet it was to go down by by be ended by 2015 it's now been extended out to 2020 but and the the shuttle of course is the extension of the shuttle the shuttles are expensive they run average of about 400 million per launch up and down a little bit above or below that but that's about an average and so they are expensive and that was supposed to pay for the new direction of going to the Moon and Mars well I didn't at the time that came out I objected to at the time I thought it was ridiculous and still do I think in our international situation that we're in and our competition we have the most unique laboratory ever built and I'd to my view I think we should be keeping the the shuttle going it's the most unique it's the most complicated vehicle ever put together by human beings to get us back and forth and by ending it now we have no way within our own country after July 8th which will be the last shuttle launch we have no way of getting to our own space station and so we're paying 60 some Millions I think it's 65 points something-or-other million dollars per astronaut to the Russians to put our people to have our people have to go over there and get on the Soyuz to be transported up and back and we pay sixty five million for per individual to go up and back and and that comes out to whatever that figures out too close to a billion dollars a year I guess because they're two flight crews of six will change each year twice a year so there'll be 12 people a year on a normal normal year but the reason I just object strongly is I think that this nation will go up or down as I said earlier on education and basic research and here we have the most unusual research capability that's ever been put together by human beings Chinese see this they have a space station planned already and are moving in that direction they have a moon base planned I don't think we're in a position where we can say with the space program should have unlimited money certainly not but I hated to see us take this after all this effort that we we did in putting that station up there the greatest engineering marvel of all time International Cooperation 15 nations beside us involved with it and now we're we're making maximum use of it and I just don't think that's where we ought to go so I would much rather see us continue the way we were I think it's important internationally and our relations with other nations I think it's important just my basic research standpoint of what we can learn there in a time period when we were trying to encourage research and innovation so that we don't become a second-rate power and it's one of those those things that I think we should be maximizing instead of planning to to cut it down we just got the thing completed here in this past year and there are a lot of problems with it but we've invested a hundred billion dollars in the thing in our colleague nations the other 15 nations involved have put in about another 12 to 15 so there's a hundred fifteen billion dollar investment that we're not maximizing by being able to use our own vehicle to go when we want to go back and forth to this research station so that's my view we're not going to get a better summary than that to end on the statistics show that education in two takes place in a museum environment has a greater potential of being the lasting memory and that's certainly the case here tonight we want to thank you too for sharing with us can I say a word I want you know jack is he doesn't never never toots his own horn I think he should give one of these lectures one of these days on his Xperia he said long experience it's in common dad the Marine Corps he was over NASA deputy spot over there and here running this he's done a wonderful job with this and I think is a real key factor in education of our young people and deserves a lot of credit thank you very much sir but I'm in charge tonight so we're gonna put this to it we have a small token for you not so small it's actually pretty heavy but it's a National Air and Space Museum autobiography since you wrote the foreword senator you probably recognize this book but we'd like each of you to have a copy and we'll send it to you you don't you don't have to hear it in your language thank you thank you very much for what we knew is going to be a great evening it's a this is the Hall of Heroes this is where it all takes place and you certainly are two of the leading individuals who have taken this country to great things and in air in space but in many other ways and so we are indebted to you for sharing this evening with us well we want to thank once again Boeing for sponsorship of this evenings event and we want to thank all of you for being here tonight and for supporting our programs that we're going to continue to bring this quality throughout the years ahead and stick with us and we'll have a great time together please exit exit via the rear of the theater there will not be an opportunity to meet with the speakers this evening so you can move on out and drive safely on the way home thank you very much you

Channel: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum

Views: 95,574

Keywords: John, Glenn, Scott, Carpenter, spaceflight, human, lecture, NASA, mercury, seven, astronauts, astronaut, training, history

Id: iX-ayUlNPMs

Length: 95min 58sec (5758 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2011