Seen this movie and i was a little worried about them making this. There were some things i might have done different out of some hidden language that gave it its pg13 rain but the one thing i thought carried very well and ron howard did a great job was to tell the basic story of people that were in trouble and we certainly were in trouble although, there were problems on every mission we flew during the program and if we can look at the entire Apollo Program report its a book about that dick, its in the archives if you can get it through information. There is an appendix that lists the problems or we call them anomalies and some people call them funnys that happened on the flights and they listed them numerically by fight order and you ignore apollo seven and eight who only had one spacecraft. Apollo 13 at the second least number of problems of all the flights. We almost aborted apollo 14 an apollo 16 in response that theyre it will to work around and had them land. That was the nature of the business. As i said, the very thing about this movie that carried very well was the story of somebody with problems with challenge, challenge is really to face and showed a group of people, a Mission Control in ourselves and a few more people in a lot more people would show in the movie we criticize rod howard when i met him after the showing that depicts some of the key people i would have been in the movie as characters and he told me the movie only has so much time to develop and you can only develop so many characters and so little time. At any rate, it was a fairly large theme and we had the peak of the program in 1968 and before we landed on the moon there were over 400,000 people working on the Apollo Program. If you go down to the contractors, prime contractors, subcontractors, down to the vendors and the parts even we had contracts on every state in the United States except one of the dakotas. By the time we flew apollo 13 it already started tailing off and we still have a quarter Million People with the great brain trust. At any rate, it showed this team coming together and working together with the leadership to pull off this miracle if you will and it was not an accident because we process this to work problems and when a flight director like gene kranz played by ed harris in this movie, when they give a go for launch they really give him total dedicated and motivated team. There is nothing else more important than the mission at hand. The team had been trained through hundreds and thousands of hours and various training modes but more realistic for the flight what was we call integrated simulation. We had trainers, simulators and Kennedy Space center that were replicas and then the capsule of the landing craft, same geometry and we laid in couches, we cheated and had pigs put in to be more comfortable. He was in the simulators and the systems functioned and gave the readings just as they were operating and they were identical. We had layers and the simulator for instance you put in over 500 credible fares. At the same time these simulators were linked back to Mission Control and the controllers there would see on their scopes the replication of the system we were looking at how where they were behaving as well as the manifestation of affairs. The systems were run with a special crew called sin about a dozen people, that work behind the scenes for each of our simulations and its our piecemeal with two launches of maybe half a day, we have trees another day, orbit and lou landings so its different segments so for each of those runs they had evolved a scenario with certain failures to be put in at certain times that only they knew. These people are very smart people and they know this very well and the very devious people and took great glee in making us look great. Making Mission Control, us and trying to handle the situation look bad. Somebody never gave up until we had to give up. The sims went on a long time and they are prepared for landing and the simulation may last eight hours before we had to give up the ghost. When i was working apollo eight, on that backup crew and polo 11 we were still learning so actually the simulation was useful to dredge up certain situations and failures that we had to go back to work and back through the Program Office and worry about changing software or changing our procedures to handle that should ever happen for real. Were still in a learning curve in the early part of the program. At any rate, apollo 13 had a particular failure and an explosion. As we went through modern airplanes and designs are spacecraft, as you are going through the design of the vehicle you work through what we call i dont know what they call it in the commercial but we call failure effects analysis and led by Reliable Engineering where were looked at every component, every fail open, phil close and they are charted and what was the manifestation. It was documented, and early on in the design before you built hardware they had an effect of changes and it was instrumentation and that sort of thing. Explosions were thought of and they had rockets blowup and certainly in the systems where we had liquid hydrogen, the manifestation of an explosion was thought to be the answer was that you will lose the vehicle and lose the crew. So, we gave them a situation that we never planned on because we had this explosion and we were still breathing. So, there is no plan before most all of these troubled failures we had procedures and malfunction procedures and in our minds we had the same thing about our emergency procedures. We had this procedures, Mission Control had books behind the council and they can reach and grab for certain so credible failures that could reach in grab and have separate procedures. For this particular case, the situation we were in there was no plan b. There was a lot of scrambling and the movie showed a few of the innovations and a lot of hours by people on the ground and when i got back i talked with people and we got less sleep on the ground then i got on the flight. This was truly a great story that is working with problems and people working together under the right leadership to make things happen and end up in this case a good hollywood ending im, happy to say. laughs id like to run a video and show you some of the real stuff and you saw a little bit of it on the ground site of Mission Control and the Launch Control center at Kennedy Space center, i was looking at the video from the back here and now ill show you its called first 13 minutes is called the quick look of apollo 13. It has no soundtrack i will narrate it and will just let it run on through till the end. If we can now get the video cranked up here. All right, we have a countdown even, three, two, one, thats appropriate. The saturn when used for our missions to launch the sky lab that part of the program is still the biggest rocket that was flown if you saw today its laying on the side of it in huntsville now down to Kennedy Space center. On the side laying down and it would cover a football field plus both end zones, plus three feet. So thats a size of this rocket and its too spacecraft on top of each other and its way up on the top and landed in that little roll. We were quite a way away from the launch pad and we happen to be in this then it got a little fancier over the days but this i think was a converted milk wagon or something. laughs it was painted of fancy and got benches and hooked up to the inter calm who escorted us out and decrease layton was out in the van there and there are four people waking up at the top so you had four people waiting for you to help get inserted and strapped in and hatch closed and they were waiting a couple hours he got launched. The launchpad looks kind of eerie but ive been out there many times and tested the spacecraft and its normally a lot of people up and down and the day eagle for real is just people that are with you that are ready to go. The engine starts a little bit seven seconds before lift off and allow this the Chamber Pressure to stabilize with the fone engines and theres five up here running and they collectively generate seven and a half Million Pounds of thrust, push if you will. Goes very slowly and its not so motion this is the real motion. But the reason is, the entire stack is over 6 Million Pounds. You dont have a great thrust ratio. Having flown the airplanes with fighters, its not that exciting in the sense of the g level and the peak gee and first state burnout because its going up and burning tons of blocks and propel and every second. I guess its about four and a half jeez. Even the airplanes i flew you routinely come back and you go six to seven and the bigger ones up to eight or nine. Four and a half wasnt a big deal. This was the front edge of the digital age and im sure if we threw one of these today would be a little bit better but the big engines at the bottom were exaggerating the motions instead of jerking around with the engines now is probably the most unusual thing that i saw riding the rocket from sensation. We went into earth orbit and i read around a couple of times to get the opportunity to check out systems in the mothership and Service Module and back up the prime to the extent we could and verified nothing have been damaged during lunch. During the stage as been connected by people on the ground and accelerated the state philosophy velocity a 25 Miles Per Hour and thats where you are here in this scene, jack has separated the module and moved away a couple of hundred feet and is coming back good with the probe that dark circle and disappearing on the upper right and using that target and that little tee and the black circle to keep himself aligned in the control of the top of the upper hatch of the aircraft. Then you can find latches that were tightly together and formed an airtight seal and would open hatches on either side and be able to go between the two and you can see a scene of that later. That is the third stage, its up inside there and this for the first time has been all subsistent flights have figured out how to use vinnie on that stage to redirect this payout so it made an impact to the moon. We had thermometers there on apollo 11 and Paul Bob Paulo 12 and we had thermometers on all flights. With that meter impact youre looking at some several things they use without looking for gas and oil. They use seismic events to search substratum on earth. This is the mother earth to be shut down which is the mothership but its never supposedly shut down its always there for you. That was probably the most worrisome thing to me is how this was going to act to trying to get back up. Because it never planned to be shut down and never tested it in the environment until we can turn it off. In this case, for days in the water tanks. This shows a scene of me drifting through the tunnel and jim level, the commander and im playing around at zero gravity which is a euphoric being able to float yourself with certain objects around. And actually made those little vehicles probably seem bigger. I mean, you can imagine in this room we had another set of chairs on the ceiling if we use this entire body and a program thats not using. This is real people in Mission Control, as i said, little sleep, and mitchell and theres kim mattingly, and jim level is rubbing his hands and it got pretty cold when you have the power way down to preserve the batteries and they ran off battery power. This is meant to be a today vehicle if you kept it at normal power so weak went down to a low power level and we have 12 and a half ands, 30 bold d. C. System. If you think about your threeway light bulb at home and you go to the third clip, if you did that on two lamps thats about the power we went down to on that vehicle. It got very cold, it was not meant to operate on that small of that draw next. We put on three sets of underwear, we had some layers so thats what we did to try to keep warm. This is shown in the movie, the rid of the cartridges and they actually tested that chamber that has been going on with human subjects and on the ground they did as much as they could after they perfected a fix, they tested it and made sure in some way it worked as a did with this cartridge and the environmental system. The chamber in bill seven and they put a person in there and live with that cartridge for a while. We never had lights on, it seemed to pretty bad and this is shooting my own self and this is probably the first space selfie. laughs it was a 16 millimeter battery and i just put it out there and let it sit there so i was shooting a picture. We never had lights on. We are in power down mode and we shut off all lights so we had to use a flashlight if we need to reader light right. Someone shot me asleep and my arms are tucked in and not because im a favorite of napoleon or something. The zero gravity the arms tend to do this and that would wake me up so i always cutting my arms. That was the small glance of gene kranz smoking a cigarette, smoking was okay in Mission Control. That was the day and age thats the thing we saw that surprised me. The upper section there, looking shiny and smooth as a lower section thats one part of the aircraft. We were surprised because of the explosion, it has not seemed as severe as what we saw. We gave up in all the powdered stuff, its not even too good if you have hot water and certainly not good with cold water. We had queue key cookie cubes, snacks and jim had a package there and jack was there to and this is the earth as were heading back in and were coming in at the same velocity and the upper entry was strange in the fact they got rained on a little bit because it had been so cold and they turned off that that slowly built up from that respiration. Humidity built up and this panel, they went to power of that vehicle and they wiped off the panel and it was covered with water and it fell out at the front end of entry. Otherwise, another one of those miracles in this command module that was supposed to be power down came on, came to life and gave us a second most accurate bring down and only apollo ten had a better the movie ron howard went to the similar helicopter that was shown and brought on board. I had a urinary tract infection so the crew went to a party on the hanger deck. People in Mission Control celebrating, because they were so tired they did not have the usual party right after a flight when the crew recovered. So, where the only crew and we got our own party a few weeks later. We got to attend that. Were following this mission to backup jon young on apollo 16. I knew i was going to get go fly apollo 19th at that point, the last mission to go to the moon was that and we are getting caught in canceled, 18 or 19. I ended up being a deadhead assignment with bill hogan jerry car who moved out to go from giving them a flight which were running out of seats. I stayed on and inherited mitchell who was on apollo 14 and finished off that assignment. I eventually get into pro management so i went off to Harvard Business school with the mp and decourse and came back into the project office on early shuttle development and there i was doing Sports Lighting including this japanese val. For any aircraft that had been rebuilt to resemble the japanese aircraft and we inherited an operation in south texas and in their ship. When they, flying from hamilton texas where we kept this bomber and with a couple of zeroes in Crop Production fields it was in galveston to get it on track and get it cleaned up for their show coming up a dallasfort worth. At 300 feet, a lost an engine and it clearly what i thought and this is an airplane airplane why couldnt raise the landing and it dug ditches. One landing year flipped, cartwheeled and flipped and ended up going upside down and awhile before i could get out and receive 65 coverage. Thats second half or third and hes got three months in these diversity of texas. Another one of the things thats initially unemotional thing for me because i thought i lost my career, after he got past the critical stage and ive not burned my respiratory system and knew i survived we went to the doctors and the team again, its a mix team of doctors at the university of texas hospital and it was going to be done by two doctors and they had a partnership that was in the adult ward at the ufc hospital. It worked out a protocol in some things differently that will get back to fight status. The university of texas hospital they need shirt to never tell anyone i graduated from the university of oklahoma. laughs i did get back on my feet and in 14 months physical their b it was one elbow and one knee that was burned all the way around the joint and had some scar tissue and had full mobility and regained flight status and was named in 76 and was in early 73. In 76, i was name to be one of the two cruise that flew the Space Shuttle enterprise that had a personal landing tests and this was in 1977. We flew a test flights and i got to command five of the eight flights we flew in a program. We dislike the real shuttle, and the longest flight i think was five minutes and 21 seconds, you had to do test maneuvers on the way down with the dynamics in the aircraft. This is a scene of the first flight we were going to separate and its called free flight one. This is me climbing up there and most tests operations are done early in the day because in the high desert the winds started to kick up later in the morning and early afternoon. It either got a little refers so when you are there they are trying to know when to start in this case its predawn. We climbed on board and got all the machinery at the enterprise and push the two vehicles out and we headed out towards the runway over sitting up there on top, you notice were cocked up and later when we are flying cross towards kennedy it was more streamlined so we were generating lift of the 7 47. Its kind of strange the first time we got in an enterprise it looked like everyone knew that you cant see the 7 47. Its kind of like magic with a flying carpet to cue up and suddenly climbed altitude and racetrack pattern to get to a point and tom mick mercury where the pilots and sam where the two flight engineers and fits with push it over and call that the right speed and as a launch right in i would push one button and that happened to cut us loose and we had a nice separation and went straight up in a way. We knew that from load cells so we knew just from physics and motion at least was going to be upward and its of which to point the separation. The flights we didnt release. The first flight we were worried about the control system in the primary fly control with good handling qualities and you never know if you let loose of the control services how we will do that. We are happy to see we hit the wind tunnel and we did that collectively with the control designers and really worked well with a defined machine and power range of about one or two, power rating scale we used were ten isnt liable and this was perfect. It was a good glider and this thing was better than the extra dean so it was a pretty good glider of about five or six alberta the and kept coming off though right at the theme, about a four and a half people to flights and we land on the largest roger dry lake its a test base for the air force and enters edwards there for space and what you and don is eight miles long and i say a runway, the actual spread ash fault to give you some lines of number one, ray. It couldve veered left or right off that runway up. Its a good place to do testing. This shows him and i the lore hatch. My compatriot has passed away, he had a stroke and as well as richard hartman. This program was highly successful, schedule wise we miss the release flight, two weeks we were late from a schedule that was laid out two years before. The program was running pretty good and it was delayed and many times we had problems with the system that those remember the first time flying. There is a lot of really work with the file system to get it right before we launched it and we wouldve won so it missed about orbital flight. At any rate i have i feel very fortunate, really fortunate to have had a career i had and i stay close to the business and at that level, flying. Even when i left i turn the lights up now and in the auditorium. When i left the program i left and 79, i went to work for a corporation and the next 17 years iran space promise and then iran a Service Company for two Aerospace Companies so when i retired after 17 years i was running to companies and widespread witness and a lot i had one contract in california with ph. D. , business and those tiny Nuclear Weapons with the maintenance maintenance contacts in air force base. , like i said, a lot of business that was close to what i had done my whole life. Some young people here, i think the key looking back over my career that has made it successful but also for the most part made it like i enjoy almost every day i loved doing whatever i was doing was to find something that matches your inherent account and all of us are born with inherent talent, with blessed talent and to rely on that with what which side youre going to be good at in a career path. I was lucky i literally got in at the right time even before we are astronauts because there were no astronauts when i was growing up. I was in the right path and anyway, i looked out and that goes for the assembly and work hard and what you have to do and align that with a career path that will make you a lot happier most days and a lot more successful in your life. Anyway, i guess we open it up for questions if we can do that. Well have to have a microphone or something and at my age, my hearing doesnt really go up anymore. Any questions upfront i can probably hear you. I used to be a wing man for the National Guard and we have a lot of questions about god. Did you find got out there . Ive been asked that question and to me, i guess its because of my knowledge and i studied astronomy. I studied astronomy and high school and was in the library in mississippi which wasnt that much in there but anyway, i read a lot about astronomy and to me a polo was a great adventure. If you really think about it, going to the moon is not going very far. The moon is our next door neighbor and to go to the next star, the closest one is two and a half million light years which may or may not happen but to think of the size and scope of our universe. Thats going to the moon is just a baby step. It didnt look like that put me any closer to being way out there in the universe. Question . On the aircraft that carried the enterprise was that structured for that . Did it modify because a look at a lot of weight on their . Are you talking about for the aircraft . The 7 47 had to be modified and had benz put inside the internal structure where the points were. Also, the tail was briefed because the later flights that would take off, they had the two fins that were directional stability so that structure was briefed up. The arbiter itself, actually, the structure was never stabilized until the second one we built and the first arbiter was in columbia which we lost 93. Then the second bird was the first time we wouldve caught up with the social data which refined a production poll structure. In the enterprise we had Something Like over 100 stringers in the ring when we figured out what it was and were under designed and structurally under designed. We had those stringers of the enterprise that would double their plates and here and there in columbia to make it flight worthy. We finally caught up with the data to build the next vehicle and its a little bit different aircraft its a prototype airplane he might have six, are eight prototypes with your initial Testing Program and for that data will find what your production airplane would be including the systems and you would have the Space Program where your prototypeing as you go so to speak. How sick were you on apollo 13 . How . What how sick are you . How sick . I hope you never have a urinary tract infection. laughs the main components was like a flu and i had fever and she didnt have fevers and you also burned when you go to the bathroom which doesnt feel good. I think the movie over did how in bad shape i was and they trauma dramatize that a bit i do not let jim hug me. No way. laughs i was a marine and you do not let a navy guy hug you. laughs applause i got shots for two weeks after i got home so ive never had it again so im lucky. I have a question. I have a question here. Can you hear me all right . I can hear you. I want to ask you if you could tell us a little bit about your military career before nasa . It is not that illustrious, i was a naval cadets when i finished training. I was commissioned in the marine corps him and assigned to do my 5 33 at chair point North Carolina and flying banshees. I had another tour, which is head cougars f nine f. From there my military experience was i went out and got back to school on the gi bill, at the university of oklahoma, in aeronautical engineering. Well there i served in the oklahoma air guard, and we had initially the units had the first jet fighter operational in this country. We had a shooting star, then we upgraded to the f86. When i started to work for nasa as a test pilot in 59, i transferred to the ohio guards flying 84 deaths. In 1961 i got recalled into the air force for years on a Second Airline crisis. So it a year of active duty. At any rate, i came back in left nasa for a year, came back to lewis, and then went back to nasa flight research. From there i went into the astronaut program. I follow the same path as neil armstrong. People started at the same place at test pilots, nasa test pilots and then we went into astronaut program. For us it was just another transfer at that point to another nasa center. When i see somebody in the center there. Good morning, i am from toronto. We have all been a part of the sports teams when we were kids, a lot of us employees and we work in teams, as a person who has a lot of people to be thankful to, for being here and also as a leader in tremendous challenging business world, aeronautical engineering, and all the other aspects of that business, can you comment on the significance of celebrating the team . And at the same time acknowledging outstanding individual performance and how complex that is . I think the thing you need to do, personally, we have a goal and a mission. Figure out what it takes to accomplish the mission. I am talking personnel, and i found that true in the business world, you have to assemble the right skill some. The right talent base. Some people you can get dedicated and motivated to the mission at hand them. When you have that and that attention, and they are willing to give that hundred and 10 to be successful. You came with a personal story and i will send a note to your daughter. We i was at the movie, and last day they told me a story about people that were not even in the program. Six gentleman were tasked, and they were not part of the program or experts, they were called on to help look at what it would take, what pressure to put them in a tunnel between that command module and the land manual. In essence to blow it away with air pressure in the tunnel. They worried structurally what that would be. They tasked these gentlemen at the university of toronto who are experts, and they went to work on their own, they volunteered were not in the program. They also called another fellow at the university of Southern California and put him to work. And he assembled some of his people, to do a study and produced data for nasa to review and decide how to pressurize that tunnel area so that we could separate. Rod howard, there are probably another 50 stories like that one that were experts and were called for consulting that got involved to work on some of these problems that will never be told them. Im getting the exercise today. My name is sam, my uncle worked with you for years, i dont know will work directly with you are not, but i spent a lot of time as a kid looking at Kennedy Space center and you know. The lunar module that was used in the movie was actually supposed to be for apollo 18. He let me sit on that one time, now it is hanging from the building where saturn five is. My question to you is, what was it like to be, i dont know how far you were above the lunar surface but how was it when you went around the moon . What was it like . We went around higher than normal. Most flights went around at 60 miles and use the engine to slow down and win an orbit 60 miles at. We are about 130 miles above the surface. When good thing about the flight is that i was told, a lunar geologist wanted to make us feel better, that we got some of the best pictures. We saw a Russian Rocket designer, who sent a spacecraft around the moon first. But at any rights we shot pictures of them. Jack and i were tourists, we had cameras and we shut a lot of pictures. We had a lot of film that we wanted to use. Jim wasnt too interested. He had been there on apollo eight, and they went around ten or 12 times on that Christmas Eve in 1968. He was obviously done. And down that we could not land. The moon is a very impressive in a different way. The earth is beautiful, if you look at the earth through lower boat from space station, it is a stark and stressed to the moon. The moon is not very pleasant place, it is a beat up rock. It is obviously been hit over the eons, several billion years by media rates, that keep impacting. Its surface keeps getting churned. Theres miniscule meteorites that are hitting it every day and breaking the surface texture of the moon. Occasionally a big one will hit it. Obviously theres no atmosphere, it is lifeless. I was really surprised, because they are worried about putting us in quarantine im worried about germs. I mean there is no way, at least the vermin we know about virus or bacteria there is no way to survive on the moon. It is really a contrast, the earth is beautiful from and uniquely from that view out there. The sun angle, we had at times the sun angle where you could look at the earth and it appeared to have a halo. It really wasnt very thick or a wide halo, that represented our sensible atmosphere. The sun would shine in that area that created that. I think apollo eight shot the first pictures coming around the moon and the earth. And that view started some of the environmentalists efforts and concerns, that we should take care of things. Because we dont have a lot of it. Hi my name is isabelle, i was wondering how colds was it. Since you had to save energy how cold was it . We did not have a thermometer to measure. I can tell you the command module the water tanks froze, when they recovered the capsule on board the aircraft carrier, the water tanks were still frozen. It was obviously 32 degrees fahrenheit or lower. We had our three bodies that would provide some warmth. We had some electronics and some pumps running so they were generating heat. I would guess we are probably mid thirties 35 to 37, somewhere in that area. I can probably hear you without the. Mike my name is andrew, what was it like reentering the atmosphere . What was it like when we entered the atmosphere . Yes sir. The entry itself, if we just look at it from the dynamics of the pressure that you feel, the g levels, it was not that high. We got to about four or five jeez. We could do better navigation than we thought we could and it was a thin card that we had to get in, if you hit the bottom of the carter you can get potentially the design point of 18 gs. And you had to be careful you wanted to be in this threedegree cone, and we pretty much ended up centered. As did all flights, it just in the center of that cone. All were about five or six gs for those of us that were fighters that was not a big deal. And youre laying on a couch which is easier to take when youre sitting in an airplane and upright. There is not much vibration, unlike launch, where i was shaken from the rockets, there was not much of that at all. It was a smooth ride. It was a little motion when you could feel the vehicle rotating or rolling, that was using for steerage or ranging control on entry. This vehicle had offcentre of gravity, so depending on which wayyearolds, if you want to call cheated, it used the drug factor and would acts like a lift and steer you left right up range or down rage. It made a pretty pattern. If youre looking at the fire receding, when you come in from entry you are facing backward so you are looking at the trail behind you, and it would create a nice swirling pattern of fire as you rotated. Nice feel. My name is brenda, could you share with us some something about the competitiveness of the Selection Process of the original astronaut curriculum . And maybe something about this up secret training that was required. The Selection Process, i assume was somewhat similar to today, you basically had nasa put out a call to publicize it to people all over the country, some call it minimum qualifications which involved pilot types, minimum flight our requirement, certain height and weight requirement, pretty general. They sickly a lot of people were cast off mainly because of experience. You had to list three references. Now it was different, i think it was military did it differently, i applied straight into nasas, the military did their own selections as i understand. That was people that applied in the air force. The air force looked at the people who had applied to go to nasa, to join the program. And they failed probably unfairly at sometimes. The military had consignment and they wanted the person to be more involved there than nasa. Military gave nasa names and then nasa would choose from that. That could be the navy, army, or air force. Even the coast guard to. We ended up having the coast guard flying the shuttle. And then he went through a long physical, we in san antonio, it was a bit more than a flight physical, and then he went to houston for a combination of a simple written essay question and answer type test, and then went before a board and they were looking at how you handled yourself, how you handle yourself in public, your demeanor. Dick head of that board before, i think there is only one astronaut on the board at one time. That was it. When we got to that point, it had already gone through the initial cut, there were probably at about less than 100 left. Out of all of that we ended up with 19 of us in my group that were selected. And how that magically was done at the end, how the papers were laid out, i do not know. That is the process you went through. inaudible if there are no more questions from the front, where from students in the back . They will have the tough questions. inaudible for those of you who have not had your photograph taken earlier, lineup right here. Media youre welcome to follow us. Any other questions . I wanted to ask you about the reentry, which took the five minutes, i am over here. I wanted to ask you the reason it took you five minutes for the reentry, why the delay in coming back . That was, truthfully its never been scientifically answered. I jokingly told ron howards that nobody answered and it would give him more drama to his movie. Scientifically no one could discern why that was. I talked to gene about that and he said no we had you dead center and your flight path coming in. But there is no explanation why the heat shield and the heat sheath caused the blackout. One of the flight dynamic officers rerun some data and thinks we ended up, a little bit shallow, maybe the entry ended up shallow. And that had caused the length extension of the time. But truthfully the data didnt account for that much time. So its one of those unknowns. My friends peter gathered my interest on this subject. If you dont mind sharing with us what is your annual income . laughs what is my annual income . Well, i get social security. laughs applause otherwise i do some events, usually i donate that to the st. Enter, a project that ive been working on for nine years in mississippi where i grew up. It is right by the space center and i am the vice chairman for the nonprofit board that was given the challenge, we are on nasty property. As you come in from mississippi on interstate ten, and they gave us the property with a 30 land use agreement. The notforprofit board had to raise 40 Million Dollars to build it. Now we have operated it for two years. This is the second here we are making money. First year we lost money. We are moving along, for those that are familiar, we survived as one of six products in mississippi. We are getting a little over 9 Million Dollars of funds that are coming this year to complete our are gallery. Well be doing well then. All of that combined, i can only say it is not enough. It is never enough. But truthfully i have been retired but iran a couple of companies, i am pleasantly one of those that are not the top 1 but i am okay. I have more money than i need, i am a Pretty Simple guy. I dont have many outside interests other than a lot of museums for fundraisers, this year i have seven events at aviation science museums around the country. I am still having fun, that is the point. applause sir, hello . I was going to ask you, when you are and space and things start to go wrong and thought start going to your head about your life before and if you made it back your life after when you did make it back, how would you say how to change to it all . Is there anything you felt you were going to do differently when he made it back alive . No. The answer is no. The experience, most people asked this type of question, was i scared, did i think i would die . The situation that evolved was not a heart and throw type of thing. That feeling when youve lost control of a car or Something Like that. If you look at the timeline from the explosion, where we got busy troubleshooting, we try to save the second tank, we didnt know we are going to lose both tanks, we thought we could isolate the second oxygen tank and just come home. That evolved, Mission Control did not think it was a real problem for 18 minutes. They thought it was instrumentation that was giving them false readings. It was 18 minutes before jim made the call from the stuff streaming away from the aircraft. That is when we realized it was real. It was almost two hours, an hour and 51 minutes, win jim and i left the band module. This was a lot of troubleshooting for an hour and 51 minutes. I had left a little early, i knew we had run out of ideas. I started powering up the landing craft. It was never a thing where you could fall off the edge of the cliff. And by getting to the getting everything initially powered up, we had time. We have time using that ship to try to work things out. The thing i was most worried about was how the command module would act when we tried to power it up. Two problems, there is no procedure to power that. That has to be invented. There was a countdown procedure at kennedy, but it involved a lot of people a lot of equipment, now they had to invent this procedure on how the power of that ship. It took them about three days. I knew that was gonna be a big challenge to be on board. The second thing was there of that there is literally every piece of equipment, there is no designer specks to do. So our survive i was worried about how the problem was, it came back to life. It was the second most accurate in the room. I told some of the engineers when we got back that they over designed it. But i was happy they did. Thank you for your service, i am a retired, i got a chance to work in spacecraft a little bit, mostly titan rockets, with this new spacecraft coming out it is a lot like the paulo program. Do you have any thoughts to share about what these guys are going to go through and what to expect . You are talking about all . Ryan that is the one that flew not too long ago. The time it flew, i unfortunately got canceled that day, i was sleeping in the Infinity Science Center we had a sleepover for sixth graders. We had 200 children in their, with a lot of teachers and parents to keep them under control. And we were just heading in blankets, i cheated, as a marine i was probably better than i shouldve been i had a blowup mattress. Oh ryan is much like oh paulo, it is a bigger one. Its not going to be the one thats gonna take you back and forth to mars its the vehicle that you come back on entry when youre ready. He would go nuts if you are confined to that small of an area for months that it takes to go to mars and back. You would need a much bigger machine to do that. The capsule was chosen also, that you read about space that is to commercial companies that are getting cargo ships and supply cargo disposition, and they are developing capsule designs. They are much more benign in terms of the safety, instead of that wind vehicle shuttle. The whole system is very simple, on entry all you do is roll. Otherwise it is a stable vehicle, it cant tumble so you dont have to worry about it all. It will just roll and control. It is a much simpler vehicle that way. Okay with the heat shields, it can handle a lot more dispersions, for instance on entry. Nasa is going back to the capsule form, to the commercial ventures, as well as bryan. One more question. inaudible . applause thank you for your service in the military, my question is, i noticed in the movie early on there is a moment where the astronauts were in the aquarius and you are talking back and forth to nasa, and tom hanks has a moment where he is startled, he hears a noise. Everybody thinks this is the first incident, the first problem thats going to happen, but its not. He turns around and says something about mr. Hayes is playing his pranks again, his tricks. There was a pressure relief volfefe that you had let out. Were you a prankster . Did you do things like that . Is any of that true . I had done, there is one step, a normal step in the procedure in the activation of the environmental system, theres a point where you turn a bell called the repress valve and it makes a pretty loud bang. The bang is exaggerated in the spacecraft because youre inside a metal pole. It is like being in a tin can. We jim was hoping at least that that was the problem. That i played a joke on him. But i had not, unfortunately. I want to say a couple things, since we have had the privilege of meeting you, last night we had a Welcome Party and we had never had a featured keynote speaker to join us for the Welcome Party. We are gonna show apollo 13 the movie, and we did, and he joined us. We are able to ask questions at that time. I have met a lot of famous people, and to meet someone like mr. Hayes that is so accomplished and so bright, to have gone all the way to the moon. He is a man that has his feet on the ground. He is a great american. Thank you so much for being here. applause