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Hi, everybody, welcome to Dance Dance History. This is a very special podcast, one of my favorite podcasts I've ever, ever broadcast is a repeat of a podcast I recorded back a couple years ago now when the legendary the legendary Alfred Wharton was in the U.K. Now, very, very sadly, he died on the 18th of March this year, 2020. He was a fighter pilot. He was a test pilot, and he was also a NASA pilot.

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He flew to the moon with the Apollo missions. He was on Apollo 15 and he told me what that was like. It was one of those experiences that I will never forget. In fact, I will take it to the grave. And I've told my kids and everybody else I know all about it. And the best thing about doing a podcast is you guys can all listen to it, too.

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He flew to the moon on Apollo 15 with David Scott and James Irwin. The two of them then went in the lunar module and landed on the moon's surface. Al-Watan spent three days alone in the command module. In the process of that, he became the individual who's travelled further than any other human being in the history of mankind, a distinction that he still holds. He took lots of extraordinary photographs of the moon.

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And then on the way, this is the most amazing. On the way back, he performed a spacewalk, but not one of these spacewalks that you see in the International Space Station that is in orbit around the Earth. He performed a deep space spacewalk so you could see the whole of the moon and the earth at the same time as he did his spacewalk in deep space. It is the spacewalk to this day that has taken place furthest from the earth, as NASA and SpaceX have combined this week to send astronauts to the space into space together.

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For the first time in a while, I thought it'd be nice to rerun this podcast with the brilliant Al-Watan. You can watch the documentary I made with him and many other documentaries. History hit TV. It's like a Netflix history. You head over to history. Dot TV used code pod 151 and then you get a month for free and your second month, just one pound euro or dollar. Please, please go and check that out. But in the meantime, enjoy the wonderful Al-Watan may rest in peace.

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You are a fighter pilot, correct? What gave you the first inkling that you could apply for this space program?

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Actually, it was when I had an application program, I was following my career as a test pilot and teaching at the test pilot school never gave NASA thought, but they had an application program that came out and, you know, I think December of sixty five. And I thought, what the heck, I'll just throw my name in and see what happens, because I had lots and lots of squares filled, if you will, by then. So I threw my name in.

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There were eight hundred and thirty of us that were qualified by the minimum standards and they picked 19 of us.

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The paperwork study or the paperwork review of our of our careers up to that point, like efficiency reports, health, our physical reports, that kind of thing that cut the list down to seventy five. That's seventy five went to a in an Air Force hospital in San Antonio, Texas, to get physical exams. And then from there that was cut down to 50. That 50 went to Houston and did written and audible. We actually met aboard and answered questions, that kind of thing, in order that they picked 19 of us.

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But I never gave it a thought before then. I knew there was a space program. I actually I had. I had entered my name back in nineteen sixty four when he had a selection, but I was but I was already committed to coming to England to go to the Empire Test Pilot School. So they said, no, no, no, we can't we can't touch that. So I missed that one. And then I left to participate at school, went back to Edwards to teach at the test pilot school and they had another selection program.

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It was kind of interesting because the age limit was thirty five and I was rapidly getting to thirty five. And I'm thinking I'm just never going to make it, you know. But they had the selection program while I was still early. I just turned thirty four and so I put my name and wobble. I got in.

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Well, I think a lot of it was because I had a I had a pretty extensive engineering background, I had three Masters degrees from the University of Michigan. I only needed three more hours of study to get a master's in math. So I was kind of well up on the academic side. As a matter of fact, I came to the Empire Test Pilot School because of my academic background. They sent me here because of that. And I ended up doing very well at the inpart test pilot school.

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And then I got selected to come back early. I was supposed to go to Bedford on a two year tour when I left the Empire Test Pilot School, but they they cut all that short and brought me back so I could teach to the test pilot school. But they were they looking for C.V? Were they looking for boxes? Were only looking for character. Oh, I think it's a little of each.

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When we met the board down in Houston, the board was comprised of like three astronauts and a couple of the of the support type crews, the management people. And I think I guess they were by maybe 10 people on the board and they talked to all of us. And I happened to have several friends on the board that certainly didn't hurt. Mike Collins was probably my my biggest supporter on the board. And I think he was very instrumental in making sure that I got selected.

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I think I would have been selected without him because as it turned out, I ended up pretty high on the list because of my academic and test pilot background. I had all of that that they were looking for. I was under the age limit. I was under the height limit. I was in good physical shape. I was twenty ten. I my eyes were twenty ten at the time, you know, I was the perfect candidate that they needed and we had in my group of nineteen.

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Well let me let me back up just a little bit. The minimum requirement was a thousand hours, a bachelor's degree in one of the engineering sciences in a thousand hours of flight time under thirty five, under six feet tall. It could pass the physical. Those were the kind of the minimum requirements and. The way it turned out, once they selected the 19, I would say the average academic level was at least a master's degree. We had like two PhDs in my group.

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There was only maybe two guys out of the 19 that were not test pilots. So everybody kind of fit in that mold of academic background and test pilot training. There are lots of others who are minimally qualified. But, you know, it's like any job you go to, you can apply for any job. And there might be 100 people that apply for it, but there are only two or three that are. Are are ahead or above the others that are going to be pretty much the target group as you're talking, I'm feeling less and less about myself.

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Every single one of these minimum requirements you just mentioned, I now fail.

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Thanks very much. So don't feel bad about that. You didn't want to be you're tall anyway. I mean, OK, so why do you say you applied more than once? I mean, you were pumped about this. Was there a feeling that this was the way everything was going? If you want to reach the pinnacle of your career of going to space?

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Well, we we fell back on a day that being an astronaut was the pinnacle of the flying career. And probably the greatest day I ever had in my life was when I got a call from Deke Slayton, who was one of the original seven guys who was the director of flight crew operations. And he called me on the phone and said, we'd like you to come down in Houston and join us. And that was probably the greatest day of my life.

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And I felt that way until I walked into the astronaut office down in Houston and I was given a ration of truth.

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The guys who were there who made flights didn't take well to us. All right, well, we're new guys. We don't know anything. And so we're the gofers. We are go get coffee and we sweep the floors and we do that kind of thing. When you first get there and it's like everything you do in life, you go to school and then you go to college. And when you go to your first first time in college, when you go as a freshman or whatever, you feel so overwhelmed because all these other people are all up.

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They're juniors and seniors and they're are way ahead of you. And it's very intimidating until you've been there a while and you get adjusted to all that and you say, hey, I'm as good as them so I can do OK. I felt the same way when I went to West Point. I was in all of the other cadets who were who went to West Point same time until I'd been there a couple of months.

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And I really hate those guys who just like me, there's no big deal there. Just do your thing, keep your nose clean, work hard and you'll be OK. And I was so the astronaut office was the same kind of thing. You get there and you are the slime on the floor to the guys who have already flown. And it takes a while to get. We really spent a lot of time in the classroom that first year. And once you get through that and you get assigned as a support crew engineer, I would support crew engineering on Apollo nine.

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And my my responsibility was the docking tunnel between the lunar module and the command module. And I and I did that. And and gradually the older guys begin to accept you.

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And once you get assigned to a backup crew, then you're part of the group, you're not really an astronaut until you made a flight.

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But that's my that's my question is you can train on your fighter jet. You could train you even if you won in combat, you could do very realistic training simulations, but you can't. How do you train for a mission into space without actually going to space? How do you create realistic training? Well, yeah, it's very different from flying an airplane. If I if I'm training in an airplane, I get in the front seat and the instructor gets in the back seat.

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You go up, you fly and you do all kinds of things. You come back and you make a bunch of landings and you learn how to land it and the instructor talks you through it and then you just do that. That's how you train as you just fly in like an hour and a half at a time and you make landings. You do this and do that space flight.

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First time you go, is it you only got that one shot. So you have to train in a different way. You you cannot fly an Apollo spacecraft with an instructor to find out how to fly it. Right. You've got to do it the first time. So we had simulators that were absolutely spectacular. The only thing they lacked was the motion. And we spent countless hours over a three year period training for my flight. I spent about fifteen hundred hours in a in a simulator.

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Now, if you figured that a normal working year is two thousand hours, which is kind of generally accepted. Five hundred dollars a year, that's twenty five percent of your time. You're sitting in a simulator. The rest of the time you're in a classroom, you're doing geology, field trips, you're flying, you're doing this, you're doing that, making public appearances around. But that simulation is the biggest block of time you spend getting ready for flight.

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And those simulators were absolutely superb. I don't think there was anything except for the lack of gravity in flight, but everything else was perfectly as we had trained in a simulator. How did it feel making backup? Were you pleased to do that? We didn't make the make the full team.

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Oh, as a as a backup. That's the step. That's your step up. You have to be assigned to a backup before you can get assigned to a flight. That was the normal rotation in the in the program back then. As a matter of fact, I was supporting her a nine back on twelve prime crew and fifteen. So it's three flights down the line is is how that that would go back in the day once you get assigned to a backup, unless you mess up some way when that when that crew that you're back up to has made their flight, then you get announced as the third flight down.

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So there were 13, 14 and 15. We got we got we got announced in December after Apollo twelve came back. So we had another year and a half of training to do to get ready for fifteen.

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So. So you kind of knew you were going into space. Oh, yeah. When you were announced as backup, was that the big what was the big moment for you? Well, the big moment, of course, you can be backup and you never know until you are announced on that crew, the prime crew, there's always a chance that something could change. So the the really big time is there is a time you you get told by Deke Slayton, we're going to announce publicly next week that you're going to be on a crew of fifteen.

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And once they make that public announcement, you know, you you're kind of there unless you mess up, you're going to be there. You're going to be OK. And what was that moment like? What was that moment like?

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Oh, that was almost as good as getting the call from Deke to say, would you like to come and join us? That's your second big one. The problem is a year and a half away from flight, everything is peachy keen. To do anything, we're going to we're going to max this thing, we're going to kill it, it's going to be a piece of cake. It's going to be easy to do. As you get closer to a flight, you begin to rethink all of that.

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And it's sort of like the day before the flight. You say to yourself, what the hell am I doing? Why am I here and then you realize that it would be it would take a lot more courage to back out of a flight at the last minute than it would be to go. So you strap yourself in and go. You got no choice at that point. So in the week leading up to it, if someone offered you a way out, would you have taken.

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No, no, no, no way. We had developed kind of what I think of as a far Eastern mentality that making a space flight like we were going to do was much more important than us. There's a there's a there's a bigger calling out there. There's a bigger thing that we're responsible for than just us. So we didn't worry about it if we didn't come back. You know, there's a there's an old joke about if you don't come back from a space flight, at least your name is going to be in history books forever.

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I'm thinking, yeah, that's going to be a lot of that's going to be a lot of joy for the guy that's there. You know, but I would say we developed a mentality that was sort of like, I don't care if I don't come back.

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Is that tough for your family? Because you're basically saying to your families, this means more than you guys?

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Well, while I was divorced at the time I was a bachelor, it was once again kind of kind of kind of funny because my two daughters were in mission control during my flight. And there are some pictures in Life magazine back in the day that show them sitting in mission control. One of them is sleeping, the others yawning. So they're not terribly excited about what I'm doing. But you see, they're the next generation and they're growing up in a community of all astronauts and astronaut families.

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So everybody's kind of in the same boat. And so it's now it's kind of like a whole home thing to them. They didn't they didn't really worry about it too much. It must be tough saying goodbye to them, though. Yeah, it was. It was. It was. But I knew I'd be coming back. I wasn't worried about that. The only thing I have to say about that is that we kind of gave our lives up on launch.

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We kind of said to ourselves, we're probably not going to come back, but I'm OK with that. I'm comfortable with that, provided we do something that's good. And the second thought that comes right after that is if we if that happens on our flight, the only thing I'm hoping I'm you know, I'm I'm concerned about is that I don't make a mistake that causes it. You want to make sure that you're not the cause of an accident that cost you your life.

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Outside of that, if something mechanical happens, if something else happens, you know, you don't come back, then you don't come back.

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What was it in the build up in the training, the final bits of training? What is the thing that you would you guys were trying to get just right? What is the main area concentrating on geology?

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You see the first year and a half of training when I was back up crew and 12, I trained almost exclusively on equipment, the system, the command module, how to maneuver, how to do everything that I need to do on a flight that's that's kind of the major part of the training that first year and half, the second year and a half. So I trained for three years for the flight.

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So the second year and a half after Apollo 12 had flown, we focused on the science that we're going to do. And we studied geology and I did extensive photography training.

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Geology was kind of split into two pieces. Dave and Jim are going to be on the surface picking up rocks. So their geology was kind of what I'll call micro geology. What does the rock look like? Can you see a crystal in it is or, you know, that kind of thing up close and personal. My geology was what I call macro geology because I'm looking at large features like impact meteor impact craters, volcanic activity, lava flows, kind of observing how the how the the the large expanse of the moon's surface was formed.

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And of course, there are all kinds of discussions going on about that at the time. So our observations helped clear up some of the mysteries about the moon. As an example, one of my primary tasks when I was in orbit by myself was to look for syndications. Cinder cones are kind of a last gasp of a volcano when it erupts. It's the light fluff that comes up at the last and it goes up and it falls back down and it forms a cone over the funnel.

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And you can see these here on Earth. They're all over any place. There's volcanic activity, you'll see these things.

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And I and I actually saw a field of these. Now, I was told that I probably wouldn't be able to see him because your eye can only distinguish a certain angle. But what I found out was that if I scanned the area like night blindness, if you scan and you don't use frigatebirds, the rods or the cones or whatever, but if I scanned the area, then I could pick out small features and I found this whole field of silicones.

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And I took some High-Resolution pictures of it because I had a fabulous High-Resolution camera on board. And when all that data got analyzed back in Houston, they actually changed the landing site for Paul 17 to go to that area. So those observations were important. So this is the kind of thing and I took a lot of photography, I can tell you all about the low light level photography that I took, which was the most fascinating thing to me of all.

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I had a I, I had a Nikon camera specially made it had a one point zero one lens, which is almost perfect transmission. And I could film not too many of us remember back to the film days. But, you know, when you when you had a camera that had film in it, you would go out and buy a film that was like Assaye, 300 or 400. Some like I had film that was Assaye five thousand. I could take a picture on a dark night and it would come out look like daylight.

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It was absolutely Eastman Kodak really went to bat for that. So I carried this very, very sensitive film in a Nikon camera that had almost perfect transmission through the lens. And I took pictures of what we call low level phenomenon from from an astronomical point of view.

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One of the things that I focused on was a thing called the gegen shine. Not too many people know the gig in China, but beyond Pluto, there is a a a ring of unconsolidated material that never coalesced into a planet in a small meteor. So small asteroids that are out there and they're floating around and they're in orbit around the sun. And the only thing you can see, you can't see it itself, but you can see if you're in the right spot at the right time, you can see a reflection of the sun off that ring back there in the only place here on earth you could even have a chance of seeing.

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It is on top of a mountain in Chile. Well, with this very sensitive film, we figured, yeah, we could we could get that and we did. The other thing that we looked at was a Lagrange point. The Lagrange points between the Earth and the moon are equilibrium points. There are three of them on off the center line of the earth and the moon, one behind the moon, one my New York, one in the middle.

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And then there are two offset. That's four and five. There is a very large organization in the states called the L5 Society, and they would really like to utilize L five for all kinds of things. L5 is a positively stable location in space all by itself, and it's positively stable because of the rotation of the earth and the moon and the earth and the moon around the sun and that. All adds up to make this if you throw something into it, it'll stay there forever.

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OK, the idea was that if that is in fact true, nobody ever seen one. Nobody ever. I mean, it was all theoretical. If that was the case, then there should be a cloud of dust at L5 because it's going to collect stuff from the atmosphere.

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So I got pictures of all five and that dust was there. It was dust, big cloud of dust. L5 would be the perfect place to launch to Mars. That's that's see, that's the key to something like it. I think we've all we've all probably all watched Star Trek. And if you remember some of the episodes in Star Trek where they had to come back and resupply and do maintenance work, where did they go? Well, they went to a warehouse for a repair station in space, had to be all five.

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So that's what all five would be good for. Let's take you back, because I'm getting to we're getting too excited. Let's go back to the launch. OK, your how do you get to the how do you get the rocket for that final trip? You walk. Is there a vehicle, how do you get to the rocket on the big day? Oh, OK, well. We were in crew quarters. We'd been in crew quarters for months in isolation.

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Why, why, I just say don't get distracted, OK? Well, if you remember, back on Apollo 11 and 12, they put him in quarantine after the flight and that was because we want to make sure that they didn't pick up some bugs or something on the way. On Apollo 13, we had to change the command module pilot out because they suspected Ken Mattingly, who was assigned to that flight. They expect they suspected he had German measles.

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So they put Jack Swigert in Apollo 13 because of that episode. And they realized in the meantime, we're not bringing any bugs back. So they said, well, you know, we've got to protect these guys to make sure they're OK on launch day. So we went in quarantine a month before the flight, the day of flight, we got up kind of a funny little thing. We got up early in the morning. Deke Slayton was there, our boss, and he came woke us up and we went through a little routine.

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The routine was we go to the bathroom and give him a little sample. Which is kind of funny because we never knew what they were going to do with it, but they got their little sample and then we went down to see the flight surgeon. We got our final little physical check and we went down to the room, down the hall where we got a haircut. I never quite figured out what that was all about. Why were they giving us a haircut when we're not going to see anybody for two weeks, you know, but we got a haircut, so we're down to the dining room, had our last breakfast, which is a low residual breakfast.

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Then we went down to the sit room, put on those suits. We started breathing pure oxygen because. If we lost cabin pressure on the way to orbit, we'd be susceptible to the bends, just like deep sea divers, too. So we prebreathe oxygen. We carry little portable oxygen containers with us. We walk down the hall, elevator down to the ground, got in a van and the van drove us out to the launch pad. When we got out there, we got an elevator, went up to the platform.

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The launch launch, that mobile launch platform, got up to the top of that, walked around the spacecraft to another elevator and went to the thirty fifth floor, which is where our spacecraft was. And is your heart thumping or is the training prepared you for this moment?

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Yeah, we'd we'd been through that dozens of times. It was kind of fun that day because it was for real, but I can't remember getting overly excited. It was just, you know, you can mentally, you can put yourself back in training and you say, well, there's another kind of training thing and you get up there and you get in a spacecraft. And then when they close the hatch and they put the heat shield on and and your ground crew gets the elevator, they go down, they drive their cars three and a half miles away.

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Then you realize that, hey, this is going to happen. Yeah. Here we go.

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And was that was the fun conversation. There was old. Totally professional.

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Yeah. We had very little conversation. We as a crew didn't talk much anyway. We were not bonded that tight. Dave and Jim did most of their training on their own because they were doing a lunar module and they're doing all the ground stuff. And I was kind of on my own. So we never became a family, if you will, now, which is different from Apollo 12. Pete Conrad, Dick, Gordon and Albian were like three brothers.

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There are three peas in a pod. You never saw one without the other two. You never saw one of their cars without the other two. We were not quite like that. We were we were different. And in fact, I would have to say that Dave and I professionally worked extremely well together, but we were not good friends. And so it was very easy not to say anything. And so we sat there in the spacecraft. It was dark.

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They had it chilled down to 45 degrees because that was one of the abort modes would would would be very high heating rates on the spacecraft. So they told us down inside so that we'd be OK. There was very little chatter on the radio. The only thing I heard at the time, we had an inverter down in the corner of the spacecraft that made a little noise. It was just kind of electronic converter, made a little humming noise and that was it.

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And to be honest with you, Jim and I went to sleep. So how long are you on the ground floor? We were there two and a half hours. We slept about 45 minutes, 15 minutes for flight. They woke us up and we did our final checks and off we went. Cheezy, we didn't even know we're off the ground, as a matter of fact, because my flight we had the heaviest flight in the program. We were almost seven million pounds on liftoff.

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And we were lifted off the ground with seven and a half million pounds of thrust. So the weight was almost equal to the thrust. And we lift up first. But we didn't even know the ground had to tell us we're on our way. And it took us 13 and a half minutes to get into orbit. Compared that to the shuttle. The shuttle jumps off the launch pad rather quickly because the shuttle has the same thrust, but it only weighs four million pounds.

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We weighed seven. So it's a whole different thing. Took us a long time to get to get to orbit.

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Is it physical? I mean, can you feel it? Is that you. Not at first. You can I tell people it's kind of like. The launch itself right off the pad is a little bit like driving a car with an automatic transmission, you come to a stoplight and you stop, you put your foot on the brake, and then when light changes, you take your foot off the brake, but you don't put it on the accelerator. What happens?

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You start creeping and you go a little faster, a little faster. And that's how we got off the launchpad. We didn't even know it was really weird. And what can you see? The wind? Nothing. Nothing. We're we're all tucked inside. There's one little window that you could see out of, but it was worthless. So basically, until we lost the heat shield, which is up around, oh, maybe one hundred thousand feet until we got rid of the sea, the heat shield went off with our with our abort launch system, which is a rocket that was stuck out the nose.

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And if we had to abort, that would pull us up high enough or even off the launch pad so that we could come back down to earth on the parachutes until we got rid of the abort launch system, which is attached to the heat shield that was around the front of our spacecraft. Once that was gone, then all the windows opened up and we could see what was on like, oh, fantastic. In fact, I still think back, but we went into orbit.

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We didn't really do much looking until we got to orbit because you're too busy looking at making sure everything's right. Once we got into orbit, it was like every man for himself get unbuckled as fast as you can and get to a window and you got to look out and you got you got to see there is going by don't. And you've got to get the TV camera out and start taking pictures. You got to do this. You got to and you completely forget where you are and what you're doing until ground control.

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Mission control, I should say, they start getting rather severe, getting us back on our flight plan so that we to make sure we got all the final checks before we went to the moon. But that first that that first inclination when you get into orbit is to go to a window and watch the Earth go by. Amazing, so I'm not a scientist. How do you fly around, it's like when you're in orbit, are you just being held in orbit and then do you have to just turn right and put the accelerator on and go for it?

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You're going to have to get my lecture. It's pretty simple, actually. Let's say I got a small stone and I'm up on the top of a tower and I dropped the stone. Go straight down. What people don't realize is that that stone is on a trajectory, an orbit around the center of gravity of the Earth. As it happens, the earth happens to get in the way and it hits the earth. OK, but if the Earth weren't there, it would be going down to the center gravity and back up again.

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It would be in orbit. If I throw it out a little ways. The only thing that happens is, is it that orbit gets instead of going straight up and down, that orbit begins to look oblong in and the stone is going to go way, still going to go towards the center of gravity. So going to orbit around the center of gravity and come back up again. Now, if I throw that stone at seventeen thousand five hundred miles an hour, still trying to do the same thing, except that when it's trying to get back to the center of gravity of the earth, the earth is going out underneath it.

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So you never get back to Earth, you just go around it. But it's exactly the same idea. I understand that's amazing. So you're in orbit and NASA like guys, come on, let's go. I mean, could you just choose when you want to go to the moon? No, no, no, no, no, no.

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We were here. We were on a very, very tight timeline because of the weight that we had, the mass that we had in our flight.

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We couldn't go to a safe altitude that would allow us the pleasure, if you will, of deciding where we want to go. We could only get up to 90 miles. We didn't have enough fuel on board to go higher than that. If you were to look at the if the launch altitude of most flights, even the shuttle, you're looking at one hundred and twenty one hundred and three hundred and forty miles, we could only go to 90 miles.

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There's enough atmosphere, the molecules in the atmosphere, enough they hit us and slow us down. So we only had maybe six or seven revolutions around the earth before we were slowing down to the point where we'd have to go back in then. So we had a limited time to get everything squared away, to go the moon. We actually did it in one and a half revolutions. That would be about two and a half hours. We came up over Hawaii the second time and fired our third stage engine to get us the velocity.

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Now, I'm going to go back to the gravity thing, because now, instead of trying to get back to the center of gravity of the earth, we're going to raise that orbit higher and higher and higher and higher. We're still trying to get back to the center of gravity, the earth, until we reach a point where the moon's gravity became greater than the Earth's gravity and that captured us. And then we go around the back side of the moon.

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So we were under the influence of the moon's gravity at that point. Not here. That's how you get to the moon. And how long was that trip then? It's about three and a half days going out. How much sleep you do?

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First, they had to get a whole lot of sleep because it's different, we don't think about it very much, we take gravity for granted. But gravity does a lot of things for us. For instance, when you go to bed at night, you put your head on a pillow. What gives you her gravity, OK? When you're out there, you don't have that gravity work, you're still under the influence of gravity. But but but the centrifugal forces is balancing gravity.

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So you're floating. What happens is as you try to go to sleep, your head. Kind of gets a mind of its own and it starts wandering around on you, and I'll tell you what, there's nothing will wake you up faster than that. It's like and I think most people have had this feeling, if you've ever been in bed and all of a sudden had this feeling like falling off a cliff. And a lot of people have had that.

[00:33:55]

Well, see, that's exactly what we were doing, was falling off that cliff. We're in freefall. That woke me up four or five times the first night. And I had to figure out a way to stabilize my head so that it wouldn't wander around on me. And then only then can I go to sleep. The second night was a little better than the third night. I didn't need anything. I just let it wander. I go to sleep anyway the third night and the rest of it was pretty easy.

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Space is a very easy thing. It's very comfortable.

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Where are we are I have to say. We're very used to that environment now, a lot of people liken it to being in the womb as a baby right here in the fluid and all that, because I'm not sure about that. I just think that human beings have a history in space that we don't even know about. It's a genetic thing. And I think that we're very comfortable being in space. So the rest of the flight being in space was.

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Just to Joy, as a pilot, is it easier to fly from 90 miles up to the moon or make a landing on an aircraft carrier in a crosswind on a foggy day in the North Atlantic? I would not make a landing on a carrier in any weather, regardless of the wind. That's the most dangerous thing I can think of. Going to the moon is not safe either. I mean, don't get me wrong, things could happen, but.

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You're going in one direction, you don't have to do a thing, you're going to keep going. In fact, we went because of the heating rates due to the sun. We had to we had to turn perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic, which is the thing that contains all the planets. We were perpendicular and we rotated very slowly so that the sun setting over here heated the outside the spacecraft at a constant rate all the way around. So about every two minutes we did a revolution.

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We had to stop that once in a while to do a little midcourse correction. I could put the numbers in the computer and then I could move to the attitude I had to go to very easy, like flying an airplane. We had an attitude indicator, just like in an airplane. And I and I had a little little control stick for attitude and one over here for translation. And I could I could go to that point and then set up the computer to fire the engine and go whatever, five feet per second or whatever we needed to do to make that little correction.

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And that was easy. No big deal.

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Are you just driving right back towards the moon? Can you see it? No, well, yeah, because we were perpendicular to the plane of the ecliptic until we got close to the moon. I could sit in the window and I could watch the earth just fine. And I watched the sun drift by and then I watched the moon drift by on the way up. As we're approaching the moon, we had to turn around backwards because we had to slow down to stay in lunar orbit.

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And the engine is behind us. So we had to align the engine to fire forward along the line of our trajectory to slow us down so we'd stay in lunar orbit. So we when we got close, we never saw the moon till we were there, till we were in lunar orbit. We never saw the moon. And I you know, I can I can I remember one thing that always stuck with me. I said that as the point at which I really respected mission control.

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Because they had us in exactly the right spot. If they if they had made a little mistake fifty thousand miles out, we wouldn't have done that. We might have crashed on the moon, but they had us in the right spot. What's it like saying goodbye to the other two guys when they were going to go down to the surface? Have a good time. Have fun. The truth is, after being cooped up with those guys for four and a half days, I was really happy for them to go somewhere.

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So I had it all to myself and I could do whatever I wanted. I actually had so much work to do that I that I worked 20 hours a day. I got about four hours sleep a night. I had just had so many things to do. So anyway, I was glad to get rid of them because it gave me a lot of room to maneuver and do whatever I needed to do. And knowing that I had a very, very full flight plan to follow, I was happy to get rid of them.

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So they you wave them goodbye, they detach, go down to the moon to hold it. Do you think about that much? Are you able to see you not able to see them or anything? So then it's just your mission.

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Yeah, I could keep up with them because if I'm in contact with mission control, we had communications. They would transmit the Mission Control Mission Control transmitter back up to me. So if I'm in view of the Earth, then I can kind of keep up with what they're doing. I didn't care about much about what they were doing. I mean, they're on their own. I didn't think I had much do that. I was concerned with the stuff that I was doing, which was rather important.

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Speaking of on your own, lots of people like to say about you, the loneliest man in history and all this kind of stuff. I mean, how far away from you from any other human being at that point? You know, I've never I've never calculated I've heard thirty five hundred miles. I've heard this. I've heard that. I don't know. I have a suspicion that, you know, Mike Collins, who is command module pilot on Apollo 11, and I have talked about this lots and and we figured that it was probably pretty close for we're probably both pretty much in the same position.

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It's just that Guinness picked up on Apollo 15 and gave me the certificate, which was kind of kind of cool. And then and then they also gave me a certificate for the for the first deep space walk, which was that now that one is real and that's one that will always be there. They'll never take that away. Being the loneliest man, being the most isolated person. We go to Mars, that's going to be shattered. I mean, somebody else will be doing it.

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Yeah, no question. So your job was to orbit the moon.

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Doing geology, doing scientific, right? Right. Interesting little sideline when we got into lunar orbit the night before. Well, we got in we got in lunar orbit the day before they were going to land. I put us in an orbit that was 60 miles high behind the moon and 50000 feet above the landing site. So we're about 10 miles above the landing site. They've had to fly the lunar module over Hadlee Mountain to get to the landing site and had minus 15 thousand feet high.

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So we're at thirty five thousand feet above the top of that mountain. And we went to sleep that night, got up the next morning. And I'm look, I pull the shades out of the window. I'm looking up ahead and I'm looking up at the top of the mountain. I'm thinking, oh, wow, we got a problem. So I called Houston, they said. Good thing you called. I said, why is that? And I said, well, we think you're getting a little close to the mountain.

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Oh, really? Yeah, well, I can kind of see that. What are we going to do? Well, where are we now? I said that was my question. Where are how long are we? Well, we've calculated your trajectory every time you're going around the moon every two hours. And the your altitude above that mountain has dropped considerably over tonight. And we now have you down to like thirty three thousand feet, plus or minus nine.

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And this is where I always I get engineers and mathematicians. I nail them on this because I tell the crowd, I said, if an engineer ever tells you a number with a plus or minus on it, you know, he does not know what he's talking about. So nine thousand. So we're thirty three thousand. Nine thousand feet. That's twenty four thousand. We're seven, eight, nine thousand feet above the top of that mountain. And I'm thinking, oh, wow, we're getting pretty close.

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Going over a mountain at the moon at two miles at night. Well, not yet. Nine thousand feet, something like that. We could see some pretty small rocks with our eyes. So very quickly got Dave and Jim and they're in their lunar module and got them on the way. And I went back to a 60 mile orbit, but that was kind of exciting.

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And so what was it like being up there by yourself, looking at the moon? I mean, you've talked about the things you observed, but what was it like as an experience?

[00:42:05]

Well, it's it's it's a mixture of a lot of things. I had a lot of of projects to do, which required me to think a little bit the low light level photography. As an example, I had to stabilize the spacecraft as best I could. You can't you can't always do it because in space there's nothing that that that provides stability. I mean, if you start moving in a direction a little bit, there's no wind or anything to keep you in one attitude.

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So you're just going to keep moving. So you have to be very, very careful. Set up the spacecraft. To get the drift rates down as low as you can and then take a 10 second exposure with 5000 is a film which is a tough thing to do. That was part of it. And that takes a lot of concentration, a lot of thought, other things, visual observations of the moon. I had a high resolution camera. I used to photograph about twenty five percent of the moon.

[00:43:07]

I had a mapping camera to take pictures of about twenty five percent of the moon. I had a series of remote sensing devices like microwave and X-ray and all those kind of things that I use to scan the surface of the moon. These things were in in operation all the time. So I was always going from one to another and running all that stuff. It kept me busy.

[00:43:31]

I went to do your spacewalk on the way back home. So so you so you finish up to the moon, you go and pick up the guys. Right? Right. They come back up into lunar orbit.

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And how tricky is it to to join the spacecraft? Well, we had to do it a certain way. Part of the problem is that the lunar when the lunar module went down to the surface, it was a thirty seven thousand pound vehicle there. A little reaction control engines that they use for translation and attitude control. They're just a little bitty rocket engines and they're sized for thirty seven thousand pounds. Those same rocket engines are on the ascent stage, coming back up off the surface of the moon, which only weighs twenty five hundred pounds.

[00:44:18]

So these rocket engines are way too big for precise flight of the ascent stage. Once they got in orbit a little just a little touch on one of the squads would cause a fairly big motion, right? So the idea was that they've slowed down, got those motions as close to zero as he could get them. And then I did the docking from about 50 feet away. So I did the docking on that. They didn't do it.

[00:44:47]

I did not go smoothly with that. Take a few guys. Oh, no. Perfect. I did the same thing after we left Earth orbit, had to do the same docking maneuver because the lunar module was stored in the in the nose of the Saturn of the S4 B stage, and then we're sitting in front of that. So it's in a hole that is protected because the lunar module was designed only to work in a vacuum in one sixth gravity.

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So coming off the earth, we really had to tie it down and protect it and all that. But once we got on our way to the moon, then I had to move out from the S4, move forward. Explosive bolts that released this, go forward a little bit, turn around and go back in and dock with the lunar module sitting inside, floating around for a while. Well, it's. Yeah, but but I go out and turn back and it's pretty stable.

[00:45:44]

So I had to go back in and dock with it. And that was the first time I did it and we had no problem. And it was the same procedure when I picked up the guys coming around the moon because now they're in an asset stage is really, really light. So I had to be a little more careful and make sure that the docking was pretty much on center, which is no problem. We did it.

[00:46:07]

What did the guy did he say, hey, what's the moon like? And they were like, pretty good. No, no, I got to tell you what I what my thoughts when I when they first came back, my thoughts were. You guys are too dirty to come in my spacecraft because he got all that lunar dust on him, so I said go back to the lunar module, take the vacuum and get yourselves cleaned up before you come back.

[00:46:32]

We never really talk much about the moon.

[00:46:34]

I talked about there about there being dirty and then you start heading back towards Earth and you go for the first deep space crack in history.

[00:46:47]

Well, that's because we had two large cameras there in an open bay back in the service module there, about 30 feet in back of the spacecraft. Those cameras were the ones that I used to photograph like twenty five percent of the lunar surface. They come in in a cassette as a 90 pound cassette. It's like eight inch, nine inch film. Had 11 hundred feet of it wound on this cassette. So it's a fairly big, you know, like 20, 30 inches in diameter, weighed 90 pounds, had to bring it back inside the command module because the only thing that survives flights was inside the command module.

[00:47:24]

So I had to bring those back in. So I made two trips out and brought the body back. And I did have a chance to put my feet in some foot restraints out there and just kind of look around and probably the first time in history that anybody's ever been able to see both Earth and the moon at the same time. So I did that. It was pretty cool. Problem I had was that I had trained so well to do that, that we finished the whole thing in record time and then I had no excuse to stay out there, so I had to get back in.

[00:47:56]

You should have said I'm just a little tricky. I know I should have I should I should have been smart enough to figure out something I could say to stay out there longer. But we didn't do that and. I was going through that you just focused on the task at hand or you thinking this is pretty extreme, the first human being in the history of the race to see this.

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I tell you how that goes when you're on the flight and all through the flight. As a matter of fact, not just that one time, you never really think about it too much, but you store it all away in your head and you start thinking about it after you get back home. So then when you relive it and how all these other ideas and I've gotten a little bit far out into the universe and my thinking based on because of the flight, I didn't think about it that much when I was on the flight.

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So then when you go back to Earth, how did it change you? I don't I'm not sure it changed me, it just made me more conscious of our place in the universe, our place in the solar system, our place in the universe, the rest of the universe that you can see out there like we're in the Milky Way galaxy is part of that. And then you you do a little study and all of a sudden you find out that there are four hundred billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is our galaxy.

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And then you find out that there are two hundred billion galaxies out there that we know of.

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Holy mackerel. Yeah, you go back to Carl Sagan, Carl Sagan, his his big theory was that there's so many stars out there that's going to be a finite number of them. They have a son the size of our son and know those are going to be a finite period. They have a planetary system and there's going to be a finite number of those that are going to be on Earth. And there going be a finite number of those are going to have intelligent beings, intelligent life.

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You can't you can't escape it, there are just too many a mother. It's got to be so that's kind of the path I've been following. Why is it important that we keep exploring space because. It's not so much. Well, it is exploring, I think it's critically important not just to go to Mars, I could care less about going to Mars, I could care less about going back to the moon. What's important is that we develop the capability to go to another earth.

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And we'll do that someday. I think there's no question about it and why do we have to do that? Because we know right now we can calculate exactly when the sun is going to die. When that happens, we're going to be gone. We better be somewhere else. To me, that's the whole purpose of the space program. We don't even realize it. It's a genetic drive called survival. And that whole genetic drive is pushing us to the point where we are eventually going to have capability to go to another earth like planet and survive for the species to survive.

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When you came back, how did you make sure the whole rest of your life wasn't just a huge anticlimax? Oh, gosh. Well, OK, another lecture. Making a space flight is a skill set. It's like fly an airplane, it's like driving a car once you learn all the things you need to know to drive a car after you've been driving that car for six months, you don't even think about it anymore. You just drive it right.

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That's the skill set. I think intellectual curiosity is a different thing, so I've been much more interested since the flight and doing other things, as a matter of fact, I ran for political office back in the country because I, I tend to have a big mouth about certain things. And when I say what I think, then I rethink that a little bit and I say, well, you really ought to put your money where your mouth is.

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So I ran for Congress. That was a very stimulating, intellectual thing to do. I lost because I was an outsider to the party. I believe that was why. But since then, I've taught in college. I've had my own companies. I done R&D inventing some avionics things for airplanes. I went to work for the company that was going to develop our product. And when I retired from them, a company called B.F. Goodrich, by the way, when I retired from B.F. Goodrich, then I got very involved with the Charity Foundation, the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, and I spent a lot of considerable amount of time supporting that and raising money.

[00:52:28]

And I was chairman for seven years and we now get about four hundred thousand dollars a year in scholarships to the best and the brightest in the country. We have this we have the colleges that we work with pick there one or two top STEM students. We don't care what discipline are in. And then we'll we will fund one of them, give them a check for ten thousand dollars, no strings attached. They can do anything you want with it.

[00:52:49]

And I do that and I and I work for a couple of other charities and and and I keep going today because I like to get out and talk to school kids about STEM education. And I think that's that that's the thing that we've been losing in the last. I'll say the last eight, nine years, it's not been important to the leadership in the States, and so we're finding that the students who go to college and engineering is an example.

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There aren't, as many of us are used to be. And that's because there are often other things in there. And it's not it's not it hasn't been important.

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But my opinion, and I think a lot of people agree to share it with me, is that the future of civilization depends on these kids growing up and becoming the inventors and the innovators and the and the disciplined engineers that we're going to need to develop the technologies that are going to get us further out there. It's going to come from the STEM courses. It's not going to come from philosophy or English or or foreign language or any of that. It's not going to come from there.

[00:53:53]

It's going to come from the STEM courses. And that technology is something that we critically need in the world, not just not just the U.S., but everywhere. I would love to see us very involved as an example with the Chinese. I think that's a mistake, that we're not that we're not heavily involved with them because they got technology that is pretty much parallel with the kind of technology we got in the U.S. And it should be because we've taught most of them here in England.

[00:54:22]

You've got the same thing. But I think STEM is is a critically important thing. And I spent a lot of time. In fact, that's why I'm here. When we leave, we'll be doing talks all over England to schools and high schools, talking about STEM education and trying to motivate that kind of thing. And so that's that's the intellectual part of what I like to do. And I think that's much more important than learning a skill set.

[00:54:48]

Do you want to tell us about the book? Hmm? Well, the book. This book we wrote in in 2011, I was fortunate that the Smithsonian Institution published it. And they're very difficult to get to publish a book for me like this is a gravity book from what?

[00:55:13]

Yeah, kind of OK, no falling to Earth that has has to do with a lot of things that happened on the flight and some some bad things and not only coming back to Earth, but some bad things that happened on our flight that had to do with postal covers. And so that's all part of this book.

[00:55:31]

Was there ever a moment on the flight when you thought you were not going to get back? That was not an issue at all. So anyway, I wrote the book and it turns out that it's the best seller that the Smithsonian's ever published. That doesn't surprise me. There are over eighty thousand copies of that that are out now. And as a matter of fact, based on this, they've asked me to do a sequel. So we're in the process of doing it now.

[00:55:53]

And in the sequel, I'm going to talk about. Sumerians. I'm going to talk about Go to Space, the space program. I'm going to talk about the universe. I'm going to talk about other planets. I'm going to talk about the fact that we are. Somebody asked me I did a dish with you some or do an ITV the other day, they asked me about did I believe in aliens? And I said, sure. What do you mean you believe in aliens, so have you ever seen one?

[00:56:24]

I said, yeah, sure. Where have you ever seen an alien? I say, every time I look in the mirror. Because I happen to believe we came from somewhere else, that's a whole different see if if we're establishing a safe space program so that we can escape here when we have to just survive. Who's to say somebody else out there a million years advance on us hadn't done the same thing and come here and why are you doing this to Iraq?

[00:56:50]

OK. Basically, I'm here for World Space Week. We did The New Scientist live for the last few days promoting space and selling a few books, but but bringing people into the British Interplanetary Society booth so that we can promote interplanetary society. I will be doing a tour around the UK over the next well, actually, the next 15 days.

[00:57:18]

Promoting STEM STEM courses to schools and high schools will be speaking at Sheffield University, speaking STEM going to the National Science Museum, I think in a couple of days to talk about the same sort of thing. I'm I'm sort of evangelizing education, if you will, because I think it's so important and that's what we're doing.

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I hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go, a bit of a favor to ask.

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Totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or have you get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review. I really appreciate that. It's tough. Well, the law of the jungle out there and I need the fire support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts.

[00:58:16]

It's so tiresome. But if you do, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.