Oral History: Walter Cunningham

when were you uh would you decide you want to fly an airplane well one of the in fact maybe the only recollection i have as a young child in a way to do anything is i wanted to become a lieutenant commander in the navy air corps lieutenant commander of the naval airport right and i'm sure is because i had seen a movie it was probably in 1940 might have been hell divers or something like that and there was a navy pilot and i wanted to be a pilot so when you got out of school well i never gave a lot of thought to how to do any of these things and i'm one of those people that never really looked back i only recalled that when someone asked me after i became an astronaut but i never grew up wanting to be a fireman all i remember is just kind of keeping my nose the grindstone and wanting to do the best i could as bef i didn't realize at the time but that was because i always wanted to be better prepared for the next step i've always been looking to the future i don't live in the past and so i didn't think ahead to it give you an example of how it led to becoming a pilot though when i was a senior in high school a lot of my classmates were in the national guard this was in southern california and they started calling up the national guard for the korean situation and i was not in the guard didn't get called up i graduated from high school but i remember thinking everybody's going to be called up they had a draft at the time and the best thing to do is to enlist and go ahead of everybody else then you'd be back ahead of everybody else and ahead of the wave and i convinced a friend of mine who was in the navy reserve a classmate that he and i should go join the navy and we joined the navy i joined the navy's enlisted man and ted cook was his fellow he's police chief of culver city california right now but i did better on the entrance test than he did so i left a month earlier went to boot camp we both were in the navy for four years and then i went on into the marine corps but i never saw him once from the day after i went to the band you also didn't realize when you went to the navy that you had to have some college requirement before you could fly airplanes did you no i didn't think a whole lot about it i was in my first year of college i was planning on being an architect kind of foolishly at the time and when i got into the navy in order to go to the various schools you had to take get tests and in this case the best thing was to get a two-year college equivalency test which i eventually took and passed and that enabled me to apply for flight training so you became a pilot went to navy flight training i've got several different discharges because i was discharged as a what was i i guess i was discharged as a an airman in the u.s navy and immediately enlisted as a reservist because all of the flight training was reserved i was navy reserve and while i was at pensacola i then opted to take my commission in the united states marine corps why did you why did you decide to be a marine pilot as opposed to a navy party well we all had the same training but in the navy in those days you ran the risk of being assigned to torpedo bombers or transport pilots and the marine corps guaranteed you that your first tour you would be flying single-engine fighter planes that's what you wanted to do right didn't want to take a chance of doing anything else and you did that i did that did you fly fighter planes in combat i was in the last squadron that had a mission in korea but we did not ever see any combat we got to chase a couple of these bed check charlie little light airplanes flying around at night tremendous competition in a fight to go to see who would get launched just to shoot down anything that you could i was flying night fighters at the time and we would have one might be having dinner at the officer's mess there and we'd get a the alarm would go off and we'd have an alert and we always had somebody on strip alert they would launch and we all would fight and run a half mile down there to see who would be the next airplane in line just so we get a chance to shoot never shot at anything never got shoot at anything never came back home the war is over all that training and nobody to show for it but but had you at that point figured that well okay i've had my fill of flying airplanes oh no you know it's uh flying is uh you can't get enough of it if you really are an aviator and it's the easiest thing i ever did in my life uh i've often likened it to sex when you're getting a lot of it there's no way you get enough and actually if you're away from flying for a long period of time and much like sex then it doesn't become quite as urgent for you but when you're committed to flying there's nothing i i have not really done hardly any flying in the last 20 years and yet i cannot hardly stand today to look up especially in bad weather and hear a t-38 going through the clouds up there it it it honestly hurts you went to ucla study physics that's not architecture well i came back uh went back to college as a freshman after six and a half years in the service and it's because i realized that in the marine corps even in those days without a college education i wasn't going to go very far i didn't expect them to be able to send me to test pilot school for example i didn't have the background that they were looking for so i took a career path which it turns out is the only way that i ever would have made it as an astronaut i went out and spent the next eight years full-time student flying with the marine corps reserve working on a bachelor's master's and eventually a phd in physics which i did not complete i won't talk about why you didn't complete it in a moment but did you did you go to ucla to study physics thinking that someday i'm going to become an astronaut was that the next thing no it was not i've lived my whole life as i said earlier just trying to do the best at this stage because it's going to make it easier at the next stage i'm not i'm not sure if i'm ever going to reach the point where it's supposed to all pay off but i'm always preparing for some payoff that may or may not be there so i this was 1956 when i went back to school 1959 they selected the mercury astronauts 58 or 59 and i can remember reading about it in life magazine and i remember thinking boy is that that's really neat you know sure wish i could do that but i was locked up full-time student i was just loving going down and flying whenever i could flying with a marine corps and then came along in 1961 i was a student at ucla graduate student at ucla and in 1961 we had the first american go into space that was alan shepard and at the time i was doing graduate work in physics at ucla i was a tutor i had a research fellowship i was working half time at the rand corporation i had about four different jobs i was doing because i was married raising a family and already had had one child and so i'd have to get up every early in the morning i'd get up very early living in san fernando valley i'd fly excuse me drive they thought i was flying i was driving a little porsche speeds during the time drive over the mountains and start to work very early in the morning like seven o'clock at the rand corporation and then through the day i would back and forth to school and do various other things and this was the morning of alan shepard's launch it was may 5th 1961 and i recall being vaguely aware that that was going on that day but i had the radio on in the car i was driving up to over mulholland drive and down in santa monica and i was listening it was just before ten o'clock in florida it was just before seven o'clock in california and as it got down to the last four or five minutes of the countdown i was so excited that alan shepard was about ready to be launched that i couldn't drive anymore i pulled over the side of the road and i listened and i got to the final count three two one liftoff and before that redstone rocket had cleared the tower i heard myself yelling out loud and didn't didn't even realize it says you lucky son of a and later i realized that that's kind of when it changed from being just a generalized envy to a real desire to go down and do that job and two years later i was sharing offices with that same allen shepherd and i began to realize he wasn't so much a lucky sob as he was a tough sob you probably know alan and alan was a great guy you work for the rand corporation doing research work that is remains classified to this day that was going to be your your doctoral thesis well you didn't get to write it because it it ends up being classified right well uh not exactly at the rand corporation i was working on defense against submarine launch ballistic missiles trying to write in as we look back at now the crudest fashion the equations that would intercept a missile on the rise assuming you had tracking data and now we have you know weapons are just unbelievably accurate on doing things like that but back in those days it was like we were kind of trying to invent that at the same time i was uh doing my doctoral work on a the earth's magnetosphere it was a triaxial search coil magnetic magnetometer and we were trying to measure fluctuations in the earth's magnetic field early very early uh science and space science and it was during this period of time that i applied and got accepted at nasa i never did finish the thesis that uh that work that you were doing at the rand corporation eventually ended up at nasa and ended up flying in a mission did it not well yes the unmanned program it flew on a uh the first orbiting geophysical observatory at the flu out managed by goddard space flight center i didn't have anything to do with it after that at what point did you start working very hard to get to become an astronaut the only thing i can ever recall doing specifically to become an astronaut because i looked at it that i had become one of if not the best fighter pilot in the world there you go i mean i just i never had anything but confidence in my flying ability but it takes a lot more than that and i had fulfilled a lot of the technical academic requirements because as time went on they asked for ever more demanding academic background and the only thing that i can ever recall doing specifically to become an astronaut was the summer of 1963 after applying i began to work more seriously on my physical condition i've always been an athlete a gymnast and did a variety of things did a lot of swimming but i recall that summer for the first time in my life i began running on the beach in santa monica because i read that that's what the astronauts did and you thought you were thinking i'm going to be an astronaut i'm going to be an astronaut i i don't recall being excuse me i don't recall being taken for granted that i was going to become an astronaut the the original seven astronauts were were the great heroes of the 60s uh take away john kennedy you have the astronauts left kennedy's the big hero the astronauts right underneath him everybody in the world knows who they are you looked at these people as gods you were in the what third class of astronauts second class of astronauts yes third third class of astronauts when you when you got to houston and met those tell me what what you thought of when you when you met those guys well when i flew down here excuse me let me stop the camera just let's get some water here so when you came to houston and met the original seven astronauts i want to know what your reaction was toward them and what was their reaction to all you new guys well i've always had a rather irreverent approach to authority and figureheads and things like this i remember back as a graduate student at ucla we had a illustrious professor on the staff a fellow named dr g j f mcdonald who had been a nasa scientist one time too coincidentally but you know everybody was always calling him dr mcdonald dr mcdonald and i always called him gjf like everybody else i think some of it was probably just kind of contrived on my part as i look at it but i just i've never held anyone in all when i after i was selected no i guess the first time i saw these guys was i was getting down the final round of the selection process we came here to houston and uh who was it uh not max peck but the guy that worked for max peck at the uh the rice hotel i can't remember his name now but he knew all these guys we were having the final selections at the rice hotel we were all there anonymously under assumed names but in the old cap club there they were there was a couple of them having drinks there was gus gus and i think al was there and a couple of other people and they invited me to sit down with him to have a drink i was i was impressed i was impressed that they could kind of take me for granted and i was kind of like trying them on for size if you will and i came away thinking they were like a lot of other fighter pilots i knew but then between then after i got selected there was a couple of months before we reported and myself and another squadron mate i hopped in a a4d i was flying at the time and two of us flew down here he was from beaumont he was a marine friend of mine came down went over and buzzed up beaumont pretty good came back and landed ellington never did get caught went inside the hangar and there was a couple of guys around and they let me have a locker and i remember hugh my friend from the marine corps he was looking at the names on the lockers you know and they i remember being impressed they all had daner boots which were custom-made boots and protection incorporated helmets little racer looking helmets and i remember thinking well i'm going to get some good flight gear and hugh purser was wandering around and looking at all the names on the lockers and i could see that hugh was beginning to look at me a little bit different and they were nice nice guys receptive i can only assume now knowing how i felt later when a bunch of other copycats would bees wannabes came in that they must have thought well you know what do these guys think they got on the ball anyway but they were nice and polite about it particularly a warm reception from john glenn who was kind of on the outs with the other guys by then you've i'm sure that the history has already been well documented and uh but he was very receptive and helpful to me i told him i want to retain my marine corps reserve affiliation he was helpful he knew the people at marine corps headquarters al shephard was kind of a cold guy you know at the time he and i became very good friends later but at the time i could understand how they looked at the way they did and deke had just been placed in charge of the astronauts had been grounded wasn't going to fly gordo was a very friendly guy so they all in all it was a much more receptive atmosphere than you might have expected i think they looked at us as kind of a necessary evil there were going to be a lot of flights they thought there were going to be a lot more flights than there were than it turned out there were yeah and so it's uh they have to share the wealth i personally felt that i had a couple of strikes against me showing up they'd selected 14 astronauts which had almost doubled the size of the group there's 16 there at the time and i remember coming down to the selections and i wasn't so much impressed with the astronauts themselves at the time as i was with the guys that i was competing with they'd start off with about 770 qualified applicants and i was getting screened without actually having any contact with them and making the cut and i'd get a call every so often saying you've made the next uh cut you know do you still want to do this still undo this thing and always say yeah and this was the summer when i was spending a lot of time i was flying with the reserves and i must have flown 90 hours and two weeks there at one period of time and never hardly had time except take calls say well sure you know why bother to ask me when i finally found out who i was competing with there were 32 of us left and we went down to the uh air force medical center over in san antonio and they were phasing us in there so at any given time you could i guess i saw a sampling of about maybe 10 of the people i was competing with roomed with one of them very fine guy and i remember stopping and thinking hey walt this is not going to be easy to get in here i mean i was tremendously impressed with the competition i had i to this day i think i had a little bit stronger academic skills which helped a bit i had you know great recommendations on flying but some of these guys have been flying half of them were test pilots i had never gotten to test pilot school they'd been flying later model airplanes i'd been to the reserves the regulars all on active duty kind of looked down their nose at the reserves they could have looked down their nose at me because i was studying physics instead of being an engineer that kind of thing so i remember feeling that i might be a long shot it was the first time i remember feeling i might be a long shot at the same time my wife and my mother who had mostly humored me had not given a any thought that i would possibly become an astronaut all of a sudden they started getting worried that i would be so at the same time i would stop into thinking maybe i might not make it through this crowd they were beginning to think oh lord walt's going to be an astronaut and start bothering them how did you get the word that you've made it i mean the prize patrol will show up at your house or how does that work well when we after the physicals there were four four people were eliminated the physicals there were 28 of us left in the running we didn't know how many they were going to select yet and a couple weeks later we showed up for final interviews and this was in person three or four days and i got to see some of the people that i had not seen during the physical selection they were even more impressive and they all seem to know these guys personally you know i remember dick gordon who i had met at the physicals and he'd come by my house for a drink and dick was a guy that had been setting a speed record in the navy and a contemporary of mine but he'd been on active duty and had a much better flying career and we showed up down here and here's dick saying hello to his old friend shepard and shira and he knew deke and i mean he knew all these guys and love them these are people that they'd been around the other guys some of them had been through the selection a couple of times and they knew these guys too and so i felt like when the upshot was all over and i was one of the 14 i thought i had been very fortunate to make it through the competition when you uh when you made it uh was your wife uh thrilled about that your mother thrilled about this are they apprehensive about you flying away to the moon well to be very honest and selfish about it i don't think it made any difference what they thought i think that my wife was proud and pleased my mother was probably frightened i don't recall ever having a big discussion about it and you asked how we were notified the we went back from here not knowing how many they were going to select but several of us had agreed to kind of keep in touch and we were told that the if you didn't make it they'd notify you first and so i came stayed in touch with a couple of the guys and every once in a while every week or so we'd check and you heard anything no then one day i got a call from one of the test pilot guys that i've gotten to know down here and he said well i got a call from deke and they're not going to take me have you heard anything and i says no so of course my hopes went up and eventually i i got the call from deke and he said well walt uh we'd like to have you if you still want to go to work for us so it was a that was a no-brainer did you did you get the special boots and the special helmet and the corvettes and all the other stuff that were the trappings of the astronauts well the boots and the helmets and the flight gear and the locker room and all that personal tension got all of that stuff that was trappings astronauts were not issued corvettes but we did have a fine deal with uh with general motors and also eventually with ford to get what they call brass hat cars and i had been driving sports cars all my life didn't have much else to to my name but i was like i drove down here in a porsche cabriolet and i'd owned three or four porsches and couldn't resist the temptation to get the uh a corvette because it was quite reasonable and i must have owned the corvette about four months before i gave up and went back to porsches on it but you had to have an astronaut car well yes i was aware that there was a certain image that to project there i didn't concentrate on it a lot as a matter of fact i i've always been considered kind of a square guy when it comes to those kind of things but it's not because i wasn't aware of them it's just because it always kind of embarrassed me to act like it was you do i have just always felt a whole lot more comfortable with people realizing that you too could do that if you just paid the price along the way i mean but the fact of the matter is when you became an astronaut when anybody became an astronaut back then you were elevated to a much higher plane as far as the general public is concerned automatically were you ready for that did you was that surprising to you yes it was surprising to me it didn't shock me i mean it was just something else to adjust to but i remember i had not even given any thought to it i'll give you an example when i was i was working at the rand corporation when i was notified and came out in the local paper headlines rand scientist named astronaut in the santa monica evening outlook and a couple days later i get a call from an old girlfriend from high school the last time i had heard from her was when i was supposed to take her out miniature golfing or something as a senior and i get a call from her saying that she couldn't go with me because she was going to marry somebody and that was in 1950 probably and here it was now in 63 the next call i get from her and she wants to come by and catch up with old times and she married moved away and all of that so she came by and we visited walked on the beach a little bit and it was only because i mean i was now somehow rather a different person you told your wife about that and both of you laughed about the fact that the world had changed yes yes absolutely changed overnight i began to get letters from kooks uh i was considered a better scientist all of a sudden all of a sudden uh at ucla i was able to at a doctoral committee that all of a sudden nobel prize winner was willing to come on my committee i mean all of this happens because of what people assume about you and i remember at the time stopping and thinking say i'm no different than i was the day before yeah what is this to the world you were right i mean i kind of resented the fact that people thought i was now worthwhile whereas the day before i might not have been so you start astronaut training was there ever a time and i may be jumping ahead here but was there ever a time when duke slayed and sat with all of you in a room and said one of you guys some of you guys are going to go to the moon did that happen oh yeah you have those kind of talks well actually we had very little of those kind of talks but we had some and it wasn't some of you guys going to go to the moon it was all of us that are here now are going to go to the moon i mean we all expected that there were going to be more missions for one uh and they all we always expected that some people were going to get killed and everybody wouldn't be around we didn't think that going to the moon was going to be a safe process it was going to be safe as we could possibly make it but we didn't think it was without risk uh and there were times when deke sat down and he never told you very much but he did that you know you were going to fly to him the selection process was what got you there as an astronaut you really weren't technically considered an astronaut you completed training and as john glenn not jungling john young always said you're not an astronaut to fly in space it was always expected that we were going to do these missions actually it turns out guys that were selected somewhat afterwards still flew a lot of those lunar missions but there was a time uh after the fire when deke sat down with about a dozen of us and said you look you guys right here you're the ones that are gonna we're gonna fly you guys you're gonna make the first lunar landing you know we don't know what all's going to happen after that but yeah i felt like i was fortunate to be part of that little group but i could already see from my position in the lineup i wasn't going to be very unlikely i was ever going to be on that first lunar landing because well we were flying the first mission that you have to go back up i didn't know that deak had other plans for me at the time even then but then you go back up then you go prime crew but just to be part of the group was a nice feeling your original assignment was apollo 2. am i right my original flight assignment flight crew assignment was as apollo 2 yes all right and then then you were then then what happened how did you get to be the back up to one i guess that's my question well apollo one was going to be gus grissom's flight and it was gus grissom ed white and roger chaffee apollo 2 was a flight that was with wally was the commander i later concluded that he was kind of a stand-in commander there and don eisley and myself and it was at that period of time when we were trying to wind up the gemini program some of our guys were still tied up as prime and backup in the germany program others were available to begin working early on on apollo which we were doing the the spacecraft was the first one being made by rockwell and compared to what we'd been used to seeing at mcdonald which eventually became mcdonald's douglas but mcdonnell in st louis it just was not all that good they did not have the same attitude they had at mcdonald new engineers they hadn't you know they had an nih syndrome that wasn't invented there wasn't any good they eventually did a lot of cross-pollination and partly because wally was insistent that they hire some of the people from mcdonald it all got straightened out in the end but at the beginning they were really off base they were way behind schedule they didn't have a receptive attitude to having the flight crew out there involved in the testing the design reviews sometimes even in the design and it was it was it just was not a healthy atmosphere to get a new program off the ground so apollo 1 was the first spacecraft apollo 2 was the second spacecraft gus and wally neither one of whom had any interest at all in any scientific activities and the scientists were busy trying to put experiments on these gus was able to prevail on apollo 1 that this is an engineering test flight and we're not going to have any science on it so anything they had on that they'd throw it off and they would stick it on apollo 2. wally was it no more receptive but he had didn't have the same kind of leverage at that time plus it develops that wally really was ready to leave the space program he'd flown mercury in germany he wanted to go off and become a millionaire and was had planned on leaving deke slayton who had been grounded with his heart problem continued to want to fly and later i came to realize it's hard to say no because it would still be controversial and some people would argue the other way around but this was supposed to be deke's flight because it was not a critical flight apollo 1 was important apollo 2 was almost a redo of the same thing plus had the science on it and if apollo 2 didn't work it wouldn't be too bad to have a guy who had a heart problem on apollo 2 whereas it would have been on apollo 1. plus we had come to realize that we were going to have to do a lot of redesigning of the apollo spacecraft and apollo 2 was going to be the last one that was configured in the old way so deke wanted to have it flight eventually the powers to be wouldn't have proved to do it he had prevailed in the meantime on wally to stand in for him you be there wally i know i know you don't want this flight but you you go ahead and fill the spot and his and he kind of his attitude was that way too while he wasn't serious about training or anything and don and i being rookies you know we ate up everything we just we wanted everything to be absolutely correct well eventually they said no to deke wally was stuck with this flight and it was the dead end mission kind of because it was the last one of this kind of a spacecraft so eventually nasa came to realize there's no not much reason to fly this and they canceled apollo 2. they canceled apollo 2. part of it was to save money and to put the resources on to the block 2 spacecraft so i believe that wally probably had an inkling of this we had no inkling they were going to cancel it to us it was the most important flight in the world first time to get into space eventually we were notified about it by being given a copy of a press release to they said this is going to go out this afternoon what do you think about it and we were sitting over in mission control for some reason some kind of a briefing and paul haney turned around and handed it to wally while he looked at i mean we all went out in the hallway to discuss it we really felt kind of put down i think we went out and had a few drinks maybe got drunk that night they cancelled it wally didn't seem all that sad about canceling it what bothered him even worse though was out of the reorganization since our crew had spent the most time except for gus's crew on this spacecraft they put us in his back up which was not too bad a a spot because we kept looking at this rotation thing every three flights if you're back up on here you'd be prime prime yeah for three as it were yeah three or four or four look good uh wally just didn't feel right backing up gus i mean because gus and he were you know there was a pecking order there the mercury astronauts the germany astronauts and the apollo astronauts a lot of other ways that this pecking order was broken down as well but but that one was important and he just didn't feel like he should back up gus gus made a personal appeal to wally they were very good friends neighbors in fact and wally agreed to go in and go back up so we were back up on for gus from november december january until they had the fire and were killed and that's how we ended up backing up follow on the night of the fire you had had been at the cave and flew back to houston not knowing there was any problem at all we knew that there were a lot of problems on the test we we'd run the test the night before without closing the hatch with any new vehicle and particularly with a new spacecraft lots of birthing pains on getting the systems to work not just the spacecraft but getting the means to check out the spacecraft so we were waiting it was a friday night and we were all going to come back home for the weekend because we were spending a whole lot of time they actually thought nasa did that there was within a month of launch we never actually believed that at all it was just too many things wrong but we were going through the fiction of having a scheduled late february launching for apollo 1. reel 2 of walter cunningham interview i had that we're talking about apollo the apollo spacecraft apollo 1. i read somewhere that that some of you characterize that as a piece of junk is that is that correct we tried in design reviews and in many ways we tried to make it plain to management and very explicitly it wasn't just the spacecraft itself that had a lot of problems because they were they wanted to maintain a schedule and they were pushing it through we found decisions going against us at a technical design review that would go against us for non-technical reasons that's not when we weren't used to that and eventually it went back to the way it ought to be but at the time everybody was being abused by the schedule president kennedy had said we'll land a man on the moon and return safely to earth in this decade and here it was it was 1960 at the time 1967 time was getting short and the schedule was considered god so anything that would slow things down it was really tough to get through they didn't ignore it but it just didn't have the same weight as it did before the managers had gold fever we knew that it was bad but we wanted to fly we also had such big egos that we felt that we could fly the crates they shipped these things in i mean we honestly felt that things that were wrong we always had a mental work around on them believe me we never launched with our fingers crossed thinking that i hope this works we always felt that this is just about impeccable just about perfect and the areas that it's not i know about in those areas i'm good enough to work around it foolish but that's the way we believed and i think it's probably essential but they do believe that so we had told them they didn't pay that much attention to it and besides astronauts had begun to get a reputation as being prima donnas [Music] had insisted on too many things in the past on the basis of personal prerogative that happened in the spacecraft that proved to be not necessary i mean you can only cry wolf so many times even though in this case it's better to air on the other side you know to to be on the safe side on doing it so we had we also had guys like some of the mercury astronauts who were not as technically well-versed as those of us that came immediately behind them the gemini group and apollo had better technical backgrounds and you could you'd have somebody like maybe a wally shara insisting on some point not pushing it on the basis of his technical explanation why it was necessary but on the basis of personality i want it i'm the commander therefore i'm right deserve it right yeah and that didn't go too well the guys that were really good you know the you know the jim mcdivots uh well i was gonna say frank barman but he was a lot like wally also but there were guys that really understood technically what was going on we had some really fine engineers i pride myself and my contribution to the space program was really what i did in terms of working with the systems of the spacecraft that and on skylab because a lot of people i know could have done the flying i did but not very many people i don't believe could have done the same kind of insightful thinking i did the fire kills the three apollo astronauts you learn about that when you come back to houston you pay your respects to the family and the next day you look at a most uncertain future not only for yourself but for the entire program we were i'll put it this way we were hopeful that it would not cause people to cancel the program it was the first real disaster we had having to do with the spacecraft we'd had astronauts killed but this one had to do with spacecraft it didn't make good sense to wrap the whole program up and yet we felt a certain threat about it or at the very least we felt there's going to be a long hiatus here without us being able to fly so and in particular we didn't know what was going to happen to our crew by now don and i were aware that wally was not all that enthusiastic about flying if you can imagine it he was like 41 or 42 at the time and that was awful old for an astronaut in those days yes so we thought that gee wally's wally's already old and tired out so we weren't sure what was going to happen to us we hoped that custom would kind of be followed and we would get the mission but we didn't know when it was going to fly and we also just weren't sure if we were going to make it to the moon now before the end of the decade which as we look back on it was nice as a target but totally irrelevant to the accomplishment i mean it wouldn't have made any difference if we made it later but as a matter of fact the fire in a perverse way made it possible to make that landing i believe that i believe that because we took we took the 21 months it took to fix things then and we fixed not only the things that could have caused the fire because we didn't know what that actually was but we fixed a lot of operational things that had been just rejected rejected out of hand but now they had the time and the money and all of a sudden the public in congress was concerned real concerned about astronaut safety again so we fixed a lot of things and were able to fly a much better spacecraft the one that we actually flew you've heard me describe apollo 1 spacecraft as a piece of junk and it really was a spacecraft go the one that we flew was almost perfect i mean it would just you couldn't have asked for a better piece of hardware for the first time so that happened and it enabled us to build one success on another and to make it with six months to spare and most of us believe that if there had not been that apollo 1 fire we would have lost some people in orbit and who knows what would happen you were on an emergency provisions review panel what was that tell me about that well after the fire there was a very high level accident review board that was formed and our lead guy on it was frank borman in fact he was heading up the accident review board being older and wiser about politics now i understand a bit more about why they had to have an astronaut sitting there and frank was a good guy to do it he was he's a guy that would have had positions like that had he never been an astronaut he said he really was good and several others of us worked on various panels on it i was on the emergency provisions panel as i look back now it seems so much more obvious as to why some of us were put in certain positions but at the time i just felt like all i was doing was flying i just concentrate on flying but the reason that they couldn't get out and i'm not sure they could have gotten out under any circumstances but the hatch was blocking them there were very few circumstances of an emergency inside of that spacecraft that they could possibly have gotten out okay so it was very important to take a look at the whole process of getting in and out of the spacecraft and that was the emergency provisions panel so i went to work with a number of other people and that was kind of my contribution to the accident review board plus immediately following the the fire the big question was you always try to find out the transmissions we didn't have black boxes in those days we did have an onboard tape that was probably running it was probably burned up but they had the air to ground which was from the spacecraft to the block house and in the 21 seconds from the time you first heard the noise to the time it was over no one was exactly sure what they said so i remember the very next day i think it was the next day i was down at the cape we flew back either either this was friday we flew back either on saturday or sunday i flew that back once i think to take gus's uniform down there for the burial and then i flew back and we stayed there done and i stayed there and we sat down with the tapes and we had to i think frank borman and don eisley and i because we knew the guys we knew their voices we sat down and went through this and even then we couldn't agree exactly on what went on and they wanted to get it down to timing so i ended up taking those tapes up to build labs up in new jersey where they broke it down did all the magic things they do with with it you know today it would have been easy with digitizing but it was tough in those days and they still had some controversy afterwards but we're pretty well convinced that what they had to say and what the problem was i i can't i can't imagine how difficult it would be to sit and listen to those tapes over and over yeah it was dying yeah it's uh it makes hair stand up in the back of my neck as i think about it now because you know it's you know it's it's screaming get us out of here you know we've got a fire you know we're burning up we're burning up and uh aviators that's aviators mostly anticipate that they're going to go either in a big crash where there's nothing or that they crash in a fire and they burn so fire is really one of the kind of horrors in an aviator's life he doesn't mind going fast but he really doesn't want to suffer so what did that do to you psychologically then the next time you got in to even though it was a rebuilt i hesitate to give my answer because most people think it sounds stupid and don't believe me it didn't affect me at all i've had lost many people in flying including my brother uh and you you develop a different attitude towards death you know my wife today thinks that i'm odd but i remember my thoughts and concerns were for them and hope they hadn't suffered too long or too hard and then it's behind me and i mean i'm going i don't recall ever having one thought about myself back in that same spacecraft and having any horror or any anything and maybe that is odd why did why do you suppose uh wallace sharon stayed to fly apollo 7. well apollo 7 became very important it was if we had not had a success on apollo 7 we really don't know what would have happened to the space program another accident and the faint-hearted in the country as we have a tendency to be would have been clamoring to stop it you know people don't realize that a lot of things worse than dying and a lot of things worth dying for in this life and certainly we believed that that was one of them we never even had any hesitation about that so when gus's crew died and we cannibalized apollo 2 to try to reconstruct what happened for the apollo 1 fire as one good use it came to all of a sudden the next flight which we had inherited a couple weeks later deke took us aside we were down to cape cleaning out our lockers and he took us aside and told us that we've got the next mission and that's a mixed feeling about it because you know you got it at the cost of your friends lives but you're also thrilled and exhilarated that the confidence has been placed in you and you get a chance to go show your stuff and do your thing so it's kind of a mixed thing but we went i think we went out and had a couple drinks that night too we were proud to be assigned the mission and wally's attitude was entirely different it was important it was to save the space program it became known as wally's mission i mean don and i hardly even existed in the eyes of the media and wally warmed to the task there was still a lot of work wally was not the world's greatest nose to the grindstone guy but he he began to realize that this was important and he wanted it to be successful so i want to know how it feels when you're sitting on that thing and it's rising up and you're going up on for the very first time in your life now you're not going to tell me you didn't think about that you're going to tell me your blase about that are you you are [Laughter] okay it is hard to talk about some aspects of being an astronaut and space flight to anyone except somebody who has experienced it i know there are a variety of reactions and particularly in more recent years when there's been such a variety of backgrounds of people people who were not just guided like a missile to do this which we felt like we were in those days i mean it was just an ever narrowing channel that took us to that and if we could stay in that channel that was that was it that was enough but i had thought about most of the uh sensations of doing this my greatest concern when we were finally in the final countdown was that something would happen and they'd stop the count i mean we really didn't want that we did have a tank pressure that had to be brought up and they had to stop the count we didn't want to stop the count they wouldn't let us call a shot so they stopped the count and increased the pressures in the tank and that made us two minutes and 56 seconds late and that bugged us i mean we really we felt it was an unnecessary delay but they were busy being safe in fact one of the problems we had after the fire was an over emphasis in many respects on safety there's only so much safety today it's quite uh popular to say something like well it doesn't make a difference how much effort do you have to put in as long as it saves one person's life well i've never believed that you know there is a cost benefit you go through and one person's life may be worth this much but not this much so we felt like they were bending over backwards to do everything super safe they didn't want to be criticized later if something happened and here we were we were the ones that would have been the consumable if you will and we weren't that concerned we did not want to saddle ourselves with unnecessary safety features that would bog down the mission and make it tougher and tougher when it came down to the end they were being safe pretty much and we really wanted to go we really had gold fever at the end too and you take off and you still haven't told me about a field day well it's a on the saturn rockets it's a ride that builds up to oh five and a half six g something like that which is not too tough considering that you're lying down but a lot of people forget that you're starting off at zero so it's not a sudden acceleration it's not like a cat shot on a uh aircraft carrier i mean that is like that and you see spots in front of your eyes with this you're starting off with zero velocity and it's just a slow building it's like a train behind you that's just building up it builds up rather rapidly and you know after a little bit of time with all the vibration you know that there's something powerful under you which they like to compare to a nuclear bomb going off if it went off fast enough but you're just moving ever so slowly and seems like it takes forever to clear the tower and you hear tower clear so it building up real slow you're taking voice checks in turn and i guess i was number three to make a voice check so it was probably the third minute that i would check in and say things were going okay you're the lunar module pilot where are you sitting can you see out a window somewhere well wally is sitting in the left seat i'm in the right seat the navigator it's don he's in between uh we have a boost protective cover over the uh the uh command module there's an escape rocket that you can use any time until you get rid of it and that's at about one minute little after minute into the flight because that rocket puts out a plume you had to have a cover over the command module so that you wouldn't coat the windows you wouldn't be able to see anything out of the windows in the event you were coming down on a parachute during an abort so the only place you can see out is over don's head in the center seat there's a little round window about six inches across and he could see out and he was the only one that could see out we had no windows until the boost protective cover goes by that time the spacecraft the whole rocket has rotated and you're pitching and when you pitch over you go in basically on your back in the command module even today you know the space shuttle goes in upside down on your back so you've got things to monitor if everything's going okay it's just a monitoring job and making voice checks going up throwing a couple of switches a couple of key times but it's a it's kind of boring you can enjoy the sensation and it really is bouncing around a lot but the most important thing is you know that there's nothing they can do to keep you from getting your flight i mean the bolts are blown the rocket engines are lit and you're gone and i can recall during that boost thinking well we're not going to have to worry about the telephone all these people in the last 30 days everybody wanted to call and mention their last little bit of concern here or there they're not going to get a hold of you we're mostly in control of the communications it's going to be a relief we really felt like that we had trained hard now we were getting the reward for it was that hard training was that emphasis on a very conservative approach to safety was that absolute fear that if this one goes wrong we not gonna go to the moon was all of that contributory to to what happened on the mission with regard to you guys having a little bit of trouble with folks on the ground uh later wally would say that that was there was some some real bickering back and forth between wally in the ground i frankly have never felt like i had any kind of a problem with the ground with going over the onboard tapes and air to ground and what have you uh done a little bit but wally was still demonstrating that it was wally's flight while he was in charge he has maintained since that he felt the responsibility he's never said that what he did was anything except the responsible thing to do but he's maintained he carried that responsibility because he didn't want to have anything else happen i really think it's a case of on some instances wally wanting to insist he was in charge when nobody cared who was in charge anyway so i don't think i really don't think that the pressure of another safe flight was really significant there were other factors that i thought were much more critical between wally in the ground he had a cold yes and and a bad cold apparently yes in that kind of environment a bad cold is a really bad cold well the cold four days before the launch we went uh dove hunting was october and it was kind of an early for dove were pretty good down there in florida and so we had some cold weather come in so it went down hunting it rained and i think what's happened is that's where the cold came from uh wally was one of those it was like kind of a general bull moose complex what's good enough for the world but good enough for bull moose is good enough for the world so when molly had a cold everybody had to be miserable yeah everybody had to be miserable and there is no question that that can make a little misery but we all work through that i think the real problem was it was the first mission we planned it for 11 days but you don't know how long it's going to last because something may happen you have to come back and even the planners and the engineers load most of the tasks at the beginning in case they have to come back early i mean so there's all always this awareness you may come back early now if you come back early and you got a bad cold it's like coming down in an airplane only much worse because you're coming down much faster you might break your eardrums so i think that that was a an honest worry that wally had in case we come back early yeah i'm in bad shape and i think that caused you to be irritable all of you complained about the ground giving you more to do than you felt like you could do not my take at all okay no uh as a matter of fact the at the end it was a mission was described as 101 successful and that's because they had added a couple of detailed test objectives and things on after we were up there so we actually accomplished more than 100 of the objectives but i always thought and i think don agreed with me that the initial plan was no more than about 60 to 75 percent of what we should have had on it because many things got thrown off of the flight principally through wally's efforts to not put this on there so we we felt like we could have accomplished a whole lot more i mean if you were planning for the 11 day flight it turns out that the last several days were fairly boring we were out of film we were out of we accomplished all these things we could have done a lot of other activities so we felt like no we didn't have too much to do so there was some complaining about it but it had to do it didn't have to do with the workload that was being put on it it was a fact that it was new injecting itself in to in this case the commander's thoughts that's wally and he had not been as well prepared as the rest of us had for all the objectives that were on there the the first television show was cancelled and and it was cancelled because none of you felt like you were really ready to do that am i right about that or that wasn't just that wasn't just him that was that was all of you feeling like we're not ready for this well you have to put yourself in a position we were rookies and it was quote wally's flight so it's hard to say where we agreed and where we acquiesced number one secondly even if we didn't agree we felt like our job was to do what needed to be done if that was what they wanted to do we would have tried to do it now that's the positive side the negative side is it was really moved up scheduled 24 hours earlier than originally planned we were brand new in a spacecraft brand new spacecraft two guys getting used to it we had no problem but we didn't know that wally was already starting to feel effects of his cold and while he was obviously into the who is in charge mode we would have had to hurry things around to do it because you could only make path make make the television on certain passes over certain sites so it's no question that it would have been a problem to do it early but it probably could have been done when it was done it became a tremendous hit did you realize uh we didn't know it was such a hit well one of the one they uh wanted an award well yeah i'm a navy i've got an emmy you're an emmy i've got an emmy yes you realize at the time that uh that all these people were hanging on every word the what what we call within the wally walton don show yeah no we didn't know that but we all we didn't know also that they were that our air to ground for the first time was going live every word was going live to the media over there yeah and that's where you got in trouble huh oh yeah oh and and the tapes we never thought about the onboard tapes uh there's two communication systems you've got the air to ground which had never been live before it always had some kind of a delay or they would decide whether to run it out of mission control and then the onboard tapes uh when you weren't oversight in those days we were only over a site like maybe six percent of the time now it's almost 100 yeah yeah and so in between you'd put stuff on the tape all the time you'd be talking back and forth and recording it then you get oversight they dump the tape and some little girls will be down there typing it and about second or third day they'd finally got into the tapes for the first day and they said hey can you guys clean up your language and all of a sudden we that's the first time it dawned on us somebody's down there taping all this stuff typing it all up and we just haven't been careful on what we've been saying i'm going to read you something from your book the all-american boys okay finally wally laid down shiraz law i've had it up to here today and from now i'm going to be the onboard flight director for the flight plan updates we're not going to accept any new games or do any crazy tests uh that we never heard of before we later learned at the next press briefing a newsman stood up and said to glenn lundy uh lenny rather the prime flight director of apollo 7. i've covered 16 flights and i don't recall ever finding a bunch of people up there growling the way these guys are now they're either doing a bad job or they're a bunch of malcontents which is it and his answer was i'd be a little hard-pressed to answer that one yeah glenn lonnie did a wonderful job under some difficult circumstances which was it mal contents are guys doing a bad job well i've always i've always objected to being lumped in that and i've been consistent about that i think that it was it was the prima donna in wally coming out i think it was that he did feel pressure with the responsibility i think he felt like he was getting old for the business you know he always said that this this business will is it kills you slowly i mean it just takes everything out of you i also think that wally was not as well prepared for the flight as a lot of other people have since been so things were new to him he was discovering things for the first time on the mission you did not know it at the time but robert gilruth i believe it was gilbert said these guys will ever fly again no i don't believe that uh that was supposedly chris craft chris craft i'm sorry yes forgive me chris craft said these guys will never fly again how what did you find out about that how long were you back before you found out about that well if you i'd have to say i i never officially found out about it and to this day it's a point of diffully between chris and i because i had been destined to go over to skylab when i came back and i expected to command the first skylab mission at the time because i was a senior guy with a flight experience that was on it subsequently others came on but at the time it looked pretty good and later i can't remember who but i had heard somehow or other through the grapevine that chris had said something like this so i went over to see chris and i face up to him i said is this true he says i never said anything like that i don't remember i don't remember exactly the conversation because i don't think it was very pleasant thing for me to do i kind of nerved myself up and went over because i didn't want to hear that it was but chris denied saying that now to this day now chris says otherwise he says that he uh he told me that okay now you know people can pick and choose as to what the thing is but that's what i had heard and that's what i in fact believe uh i believe that happened regardless of the fact that chris has never told me in fact nobody has ever confirmed it to me on what you would say officially okay this must have been a very low point in your life to realize that maybe it was true uh yes especially since i i felt like i had done an outstanding job and my peers in the office confirmed that to me i mean there were there there were guys in the office that came out and said says i felt so sorry for you walt he says that's always true they knew what we were going through up there they thought it was tough on the ground they should have been up there going through this so you were painted with a with a broad brush yes and and your career flying basically possibly is over but you're not sure it is yeah i'm not sure it is and i'm not sure that it was i'm not sure i'm sure that i'm convinced at this stage that's what chris thought and that's what chris said but i'm not sure that if i had wanted to stay and persevere that it would have been the end result who knows what's the apollo applications program that was what became to be known as skylab it was our first space station that it was it was bigger than the mirror has been up there actually the volume that it had in it to operate on you knew you were going to that when when your flight was over is that right well now deke didn't tell me until after i came back because it was considered if we all wanted to stay on apollo and rotate in apollo uh wally was leaving that's another reason that we didn't bring up wally leaving he had nothing to lose he could let it all hang out and he did yeah don had knew that he was going to go back up on apollo 10 and i didn't know what i was going to do but because of my background with science and the flight experience they never had a flight experience guy working on the workshop so deek told me right after i came back that that's what it was but i know that he had that plan in mind for some time but he didn't want to discourage me before i flew so i went over there and it was a good good time for me in the astronaut office it was not too many places where you can be in charge of something and i had about 40 percent of the astronaut office working for me at one time had some really good guys guys proved to have some really good careers later and one of them ended up being the administrator of nasa and you know directors of the several space centers around the country and it was my real contribution down there flying in space i know a lot of guys that could have done that and would have loved to have done it but i feel like my real contribution is when we took a program that was kind of ill-conceived at the beginning with a using a used s4b tank and a bunch of other crazy kind of things going on and getting it on track so that it eventually worked and worked very well you write glowingly about verner von braun and your your meetings with him and your discussions with him talk about that erner von braun was one of the i met a lot of people in important positions and he was one that i never had any reluctance to give them whatever kind of credit they deserved he he owned his spot he knew what he was doing [Music] and he was very impressive when you met with him he understood the problems he could come back and straighten things out he moved with sureness whenever he came up with a decision of all of the people as i think back on it now all the top management that i met at nasa many of them are very very good but werner relative to the position he had and what he had to do i think was the best of the bunch you collaborated on some key decisions with regard to what was going to happen in skylab yes yes because the marshall space flight center over in alabama was in charge of a lot of the hardware and so we go over there regularly and he always wanted to know if i'd go over there and i'd spend a day on some review or something he always kind of want to get his own briefing he was in tune wanted to know what the astronauts thought about these things he defended his engineers but he did not want to see them ignore astronaut flight crew inputs what did houston think about von braun and you together in this alliance did they see it as an unholy alliance or not well i think they were concerned at times we the orbiting workshop had its own management structure at johnson space center and there's always been kind of a power struggle that goes on between these centers and particularly between johnson space center and marshall space center so it got to the point where the johnson management on the workshop which i did not think was as capable as the marshall management working on the workshop they began to get very resentful when you work a problem with marshall they wanted everything to go through johnson because the project the program management at johnson space center weren't necessarily as sympathetic to the astronaut office there's been a uh interesting point that's gone on for years i can only comment on what i saw during the eight years that i was there and remember a few years afterwards when i was fairly close to it it's a still an ongoing balance that is not sometimes healthy sometimes not healthy in the beginning the astronauts had all the leverage in the world you had this management structure and way down the level the management structure was astronauts but their authority it's greatly exceeded the position that they had in management they were the end user there was never an engineer that didn't want to know what the astronaut thought about his piece of equipment we could always get things done far beyond our official authority and that was used and misused early on we had some examples of it in in the apollo program i know the people that ran the center most of them over those years came out of the flight operations director not the flight crew operations directorate we were all jet jockeys we thought a lot about flying the people over there that controlling the missions they had time to think a lot more about career paths and running the center eventually as they did chris craft came out of flight operation uh this is walter cunningham tape three we're talking about the the the broad picture about how how that whole thing is being managed and you were in the midst of that well the the astronauts if anything had too much leverage early on because they were the world's greatest heroes and you couldn't keep them on the farm i mean there's no way to keep them rounded up how would you like to be in charge of the original seven astronauts i mean almost impossible and a lot of good things happened because they were listening to the pilot input it's the way any new aircraft is developed today the end user should have a lot to say about it but along the way they also used that leverage and made some points that probably weren't so good it created a lot of resentment we created resentment over in the flight operations directorate which had the flight controllers sharp people but they weren't necessarily all they were all pilots they weren't flying the spacecraft it's like the difference between the american airlines captain and the guy in the control tower the guy in the control tower tells him what to do but the captain has the prerogative of doing it or not doing he's responsible for that and some people wear it different than others from that there came a reaction and management particularly in the time frame of chris craft made a concerted effort to reduce the influence of the flight crew on all of these decisions uh i was told one time that chris said something about he wanted to be able to have one mark iv mod 3 astronaut that he could pull off the shelf and plug it in and we resisted being just a number that you plugged in at least in those days we did so there became a a reaction in which the influence of the flight crew was way down many of us think that that was part of the contributory errors that went on building up to the challenger accident because new astronauts came in they had didn't have this history they were willing to accept anything to get a flight almost and they didn't know how the world was at one time so they've now since a challenger accident they began to to put flight crew back in some more responsible positions they've been directed to some of these centers as i mentioned you know richard truly was the administrator uh some of these guys did better jobs than others uh right now uh the director of the johnson space center has several astronauts on his staff i'm not sure though how much the office of astronaut office has the leverage it used to because it's an operational program they aren't developing so many things many of us think that the space station may suffer because the flight crew has not had the kind of leverage that existed back the last time we developed new programs you know apollo gemini and mercury these guys live with it so this is something that's been going on historically uh at the johnson space center and still being wrassled around i have my opinions about what's going on today but i can't speak with authority on it i i must say that in in reading your book walter i got the impression that here's a guy who learned how to play politics too late i never learned but but didn't were you were you shocked to find out how much a role politics played in being an astronaut i was i find that even today 30 years later i still find myself resisting accepting the level that politics plays in corporations and other life i'm much more of an entrepreneurial guy i've always believed that you do your best and it was good enough they recognize it it's acknowledged it has its own rewards and i've always disdained the politics now part of the reason might have been that i was never any good at if i had been maybe good at politics i would have more respect for it now in organizations so one i admit i was never good secondly i was always naive about it as well i didn't recognize how much weight it carried relative to just having the right answers when pete conrad came over to direct the skylab office did you say to yourself this is it it's time for me to move on uh no not immediately because i love i love the opportunity to work with pete pete's a really a capable guy but i knew that if pete was there there was no way that they were going to make pete back up to me it's tough enough to make wally back up gus there's a pecking order in these things pecking order i didn't like too much the accomplishments i did pete was really good pete had all the qualities it took to do a job like that so i became pete's backup fairly quickly and i could figure out that the next time i'd get a chance to fly would be when the space shuttle flew in the 1980s 1981 things like that so it was not too tough a decision to leave i i needed to i had kids that were growing up they had to i had to earn a living so they could go to college we didn't get paid very much and i felt like i had better things to do than wait seven more years eight more years possibly for another flight i didn't like that because one of the things i always wanted to do was command my own flight but it just seemed like a sensible decision to me you bring up an interesting point and i'm going to be nosy for a second here how did you guys live as well as you live not having any more money than you made uh well the military you you don't have to answer that if you don't want to no no i think it's i think it's a good thing to to point out i went to work as an astronaut in 1963 for the most pay i'd ever gotten up to that time because i'd been either in the military or a student working part-time and they the i started for thirteen thousand and fifty dollars a year and i remember thinking even though it was the most i'd ever made i remember thinking now this is the most sought after job in the world it's surely worth more than that but we for a few years there we we still had we had some residual income which was very unusual for the government to prove this but world book science service and life magazine had a contract for the astronauts personal stories which for a couple of years paid us sixteen thousand dollars i think for i think two years we got that and it was something that was it was a fixed amount that had to be split among all the active astronauts so as astronauts increased it went down plus the contract ran out about it so i think the last year i got 256 or something like that but in any event it helped because we really did need some assistance we traveled a lot we need to have a home and a safe place had to be convenient to the center we it was it was the closest thing to a 24-hour job that that you can imagine and we had offices all over the country i had west coast office east coast office houston office some places i had two offices and we just were on the run all the time so that's part of it the other thing is as an astronaut you became desirable you were invited to all kinds of things the people in houston opened their arms i got invited to all kinds of concerts or music shows it took me a while to figure out i remember one of the times when the innocence came off as we were invited to the theater in the round out here i can't remember what the performance was but wally and joshua went and my wife and i attended and we were sitting there and before just before the show started they introduced us and we stood up everybody's always wanted to see the astronaut and as we sit down wally says well we just paid for our ticket it kind of rankled me but but not enough so i turned these things down you see and it's like i mentioned that the cars for example you could get a car uh that you borrowed from the dealer and would turn back in i mean so four percent mortgage yes that's right uh i don't remember what the going rate was at the time but i sure loved that four percent mortgage on my house yeah yeah so you had to have those things to to maintain the the way of of life that you had to maintain well that's one way of looking at it but but people expected us to dress a certain way be a certain way and we absolutely could not afford it on a regular salary what did you what did your wife and kids do at this time uh they they suffered a lot more than uh than we ever thought about i mean many many weeks we'd leave sunday night or monday morning and come back friday night or saturday morning one year i was gone all or part of 265 days and when you came home you had to catch up with a discipline for the kids usually the law need mowing you'd be out there sweating shirt off mowing the lawn and the sightseeing buses come by and they'd all wave at you you had a lot of a lot of responsibilities a lot of people they would probably call it stress we ate it up i mean we we were proud of the fact that nothing could get us down you know it was stupid you you titled your book the all-american boys and i've never known whether that was a tongue-in-cheek thing or whether you characterize the astronauts as all american boys were they expecting the all-american boys or were they it was tongue-in-cheek and it came from when i was a kid they used to have a radio program called jack armstrong all-american boy and the public thought of us as all-american boys we were that hero that you said and most of the the guys played that hero role to the best advantage they could all the time i mean you know we got away with things that other people wouldn't get away with whether it was speeding or going places that we couldn't otherwise afford i remember getting invited to the island of scorpios for example when the most desired place in the world of course nasa wouldn't let us go to that but i mean there's one thing after another came our way and we didn't take the high road necessarily and we took advantage of a lot of those things you couldn't go anyplace without all the women in the place looked at you like all of a sudden you were superman it was just it was an unreal kind of existence because during those days we were the celebrities celebrity true that's very true it's a heady thing to do isn't it well you got to keep your head on straight some guys didn't then you become an ex-astronaut what's that like it depends once more on your attitude it's like an ex-jock an ex-athlete or ex politician some of those people can't get off stage they just they just don't know how and a lot depends on just how you decide to handle it and i'm not sure which is the best way but i know what the best way is for me i always looked at it as something else i did to help me in the future same as when i was in high school is i thought well that was good that's an accomplishment i took certain things out of it but i'm going to do something else i have to pay my dues i never i didn't believe that i had to start at the top in some other profession just because i had this admired role in one some people did that i can say with a straight face that i honestly believe that i gave more to the space program than it gave to me and it wasn't just the space flight sure that was great but i gave me and i gave my best thinking and i organized i i worked on things and got some things done that somebody else might have done but i did them and i'm proud of that i didn't walk away feeling like it had been a one-way exchange and that's that's been what i would like to do with my life i like to have a greater impact on what's around me than it does on me i don't want it to change me you've known me a long time how much have i changed you did come out of the uh out of nasa at a not the most fortuitous time in the world because the banking crisis hit and what the hell in a hand basket around here were you affected by that well uh i looked at several things to do when i came out and i had people wanting to set me up as a consultant i had people wanting me to come back and run for congress in california i had some interesting job offers but in the end somebody from houston says why don't you come and talk to us here in houston i've loved houston houston has people here that over the years they do so much for people coming in and i've tried since i've been here to do some of that back and can only hope that somebody coming in today will find the same kind of atmosphere when people stay in houston they stay here because it's the people yeah more than anything else so i was glad when i had an opportunity to go to work here first non-technical job of my of my life uh when i got back into some technology and felt felt good about that too i like to kind of repot myself every so often there was a time when i thought that i gave my 30s well going back my 20s to education my 30s to government service my 40s i was going to make my fortune and in my 50s i would maybe go back into government service and try to give it back again it worked okay until i got off schedule in the 40s i didn't make my fortune therefore i couldn't go to the 50s and it removed the obligation of going back into public service which i certainly don't have that same admiration for public service that i used to you do you're doing a radio show now among other things you enjoy being on the radio i'm enjoying it very much uh it's using something i've done all my life and i think we all look forward to that it's like an athlete playing baseball you grow up being a baseball player then if you get paid to do it that's wonderful it's like me being a pilot all my life nothing nothing was better than being a pilot and then you get a chance to do these wonderful things and they pay you and they keep paying you to be to be a pilot to fly these airplanes something you know we would have paid nasa to become astronauts that's how much we wanted it well all my life i've been an avid reader of everything things that i will catch myself reading and say why am i wasting my time reading it it's because i want to know so i collect things and i've got compartmentalized stuff all my life on character morality military business i mean just all these kind of things and so with this talk show where i'm the host of a talk show and call in talk show people can talk to me about anything they are willing to accord me being an authority even when they don't even know if i know anything about it i'm i'm free with my opinion and i think that i'm [Music] bright and aware of a lot of different things so it's it's great pleasure for me to do it i don't i don't like the discipline too much every night is bothering me you've done that i've done that and i'll tell you that after a while it gets it gets real old oh yeah but you know it's still great fun keeps your mind alive yes that's and that after all that's what it ought to be all about do you uh do you still have uh astronaut buddies uh you guys still get together and i'm not suggesting you raise a few but do you ever get together and raise a few and talk about the good old days well the good old days i definitely believe that we lived in the good old days we lived in the golden age of manned space flight we've been in space now for over 40 years the first 40 years of aviation we went from just barely flying to to jet transports you know and now we haven't moved that far since we went into space the days through apollo will be remembered they'll never there'll never be another time like that again even when we go to mars it will be different and i feel just fortunate that i was a small part of this particular time in space flight was original question you still get together with your friends and talk about the old days and as i get older i now appreciate it i took it for granted most of us did we never thought a thing about it we didn't collect momentos we didn't do anything it was us it was like it was all about us we're just charging through life and for many years after i left nasa i spent time trying to be perceived as something other than an astronaut because i knew it was hard for anybody to get by it you could get you could get a meeting almost any place if they knew who you were but that's not what you were there for so it's hard to move past it and so i went through that self-conscious stage where i think i was self-conscious about reminding people about the things i really could do i wasn't just a pretty face that flew a rocket and then i adjusted to it so now i no longer pooh-pooh it when somebody comes up and wants to say how much they admired me or what i did and how great it was i've i think i finally become comfortable with myself where i just kind of accept it and furthermore i find myself now preaching about the golden age of man's play space flight because something went on there within us that we're missing when we went to the moon it was not only just standing on a new plateau for all mankind we changed the way everybody in the world thought of themselves you know there was a change that went on inside of us and we're losing that i'm not so much concerned about the world losing it i am concerned about america losing it we have changed into a cautious fretful civilization over here and i cannot stand that life should not be risk-free we shouldn't be thinking only of existing we ought to be thinking about living and risk is very important in your life we grow by risk by overcoming challenges we grow as a people we have gotten to the point where we're afraid to take a chance i i use a quotation when i'm speaking from time to time that on apollo 11 they left microfilm messages from the leaders of all the free nations of the world and the one from australia the prime minister of australia gordon prime minister gordon at the time his message was wonderful because he said he had a couple platitudes sentences about the accomplishment then he went on to say may the high courage and technical genius which made this achievement possible be so used in the future that mankind will live in a world in which peace self-expression and the chance of dangerous adventure are available to all i believe that that's wonderful when you when you looked out the window as you flew in space and saw the earth did you think well in my lifetime we're going to be colonizing the moon we're going to be going to other places are you disappointed that we just have quit the at the time in space i don't recall many of my thoughts when i was in space and i can't even claim that i remember so much what i saw because i remember it from the pictures that we took now i mean it gets very confusing i remember my thoughts the first time i looked out second time around i looked down and this was in 68 right after the six days war in the middle east and looked out the window filling my window was the sinai peninsula and i remember thinking gee it looks just like in the drawings they had in the paper i mean very accurate and i just that thought i remember that so we didn't think a lot about where we didn't philosophize up there at all and maybe that's why they complained they wanted to put a poet up there there's not much room for a poet up there we had things to do and we thought about doing that all the time that's why that's why it looks so easy since that time i've done a lot of thinking about it and when i came back we all thought i was part of a study panel in 1971 to select the next major program for nasa there were several the two that i will mention is one was recoverable spacecraft and recoverable booster they didn't do the booster but they got the shuttle the other another alternative was to go to mars they rejected mars principally because of the cost would have been 120 billion dollars but it wasn't just going to mars it was going to mars by 1984. you know every six years you have a had a good opportunity to go to mars 84 90 96 102 we're not going to go to mars in my lifetime and it's because we have changed so much our attitude here people say well it's expensive yes it's expensive but we can't even count yet what our payback is from what we spent to go to the moon i mean it's what it does not only inside of us it's what it does for our economy and all the things we develop we're not going to go to mars because people are too cautious today we could go to mars do i favorite well i'm not sure if i was to pick everything i would say we need to develop a better propulsion system so it doesn't take so long but these are all details we have the technology to go to mars now they're talking about because they don't want to bite off something that's challenging they're talking about return to the moon why so we can rehearse what we need to do to go to mars and i say well where did we rehearse when we went to the moon you see faint heart never one fair lady we have become a nation of safety and security conscious people and that's not going to be the spirit that gets us there our society our country is not going to last anywhere near as long as the roman empire if we don't get off our duff and do something

Channel: Space Oral History

Views: 10,442

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Id: ALcExmhrW5g

Length: 106min 44sec (6404 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 20 2021