- [Interviewer] Well I wanted to talk, go back to the beginning and when you were selected to be an astronaut I guess in 1963. What did you think that was gonna involve, what will you, how did that feel? What, you know, what did it, was it something you really wanted to do or you were just like, what's the next thing to do as a test pilot.

- When I think about that, when I got selected as an astronaut. I really realized how little I knew about what was going on in the space program. I had wanted to do that, I was a Marine Corps fighter pilot. When I got down to JSC down here, wasn't even called JSC then. When I got down here, we were one of thirty astronauts. I didn't know one of them. Most of them were test pilots. About a half a dozen of us were fighter pilots and I had no idea really what the job involved other than the objective of getting into space. I looked at that as just another step beyond flying.

- [Interviewer] And as you worked through the program in the first few years, did you think it really was realistic or did you think that this is crazy but, I'm gonna have some fun here while it lasts.

- Of course they had announced, President Kennedy had announced we're gonna land a man on the moon. And in this decade, those of us who are here, we were gonna fly the spacecraft in those days. It was not as an amazing a thing to do as to the public at large. We looked at it as another step forward, it was reaching out for the stars. We were all interested in flying faster, farther, higher and with all the people that were working on the program in those days, all total maybe up to 400 thousand people around the country. And so we looked at the moon as a step that we would eventually get to and we were involved in those days at developing what was essential to do that and those, all three of those things incidentally were accomplished on Gemini as a demonstration that we could do it. That was rendezvous, docking, extravehicular activity. And that put the tools kind of not out of the way but it showed that we could do all that capability which was essential for the Apollo Program to land a man on the moon.

- [Interviewer] We were talking about this several months ago but take us back to the day of the Apollo 1 fire.

- When we look back at the beginning of Apollo, these days I think most of the public thinks we were terribly dissatisfied with the, what was eventually called the Block One Spacecraft. And that was not necessarily the case. We were unhappy because we could not get changes that we wanted in but most of those were operation changes. If it became a matter of technical requirements, usually that would happen. But sometimes that was put off too. And the operational changes that we were talking about. All of these things cost money, all of them cost money from the contractor, North American, and so it became a part of the decision as to whether to go ahead with it now. Now were we happy when we couldn't get all the operational things in that we wanted? No, but we were professional testers at that time in our life and we could live with it. If we didn't think we could live with it, believe me, we would have insisted that something be done. But it's a different attitude today, we were not risk averse in those days. And we had shown with the Gemini, which all of those Gemini flights took place in two years and demonstrated the capabilities, the spacecraft was not near as large or as complicated as the Apollo spacecraft was. But with that we had demonstrated our capability to go ahead and do all of the things that were essential. And the Gemini spacecraft was considered in excellent shape. There were occasionally a mechanical kind of problem that went on in a mission that did not help it but we all had a very healthy attitude about that. When Apollo was starting, there were several things that were different. For example, McDonnell Douglas was doing the Mercury and the Gemini spacecraft and they had their system fairly well perfected on it. When it got to Apollo, North American was the contractor that got the award. North American had developed a number of military aircraft and they had a tremendous reputation in that area but they had not done any spacecraft work. So they were busy trying to kind of act like they were just developing another aircraft and they were not used to having flight crew like we were, that was living with them as this was getting designed and built and then having to go along with what the flight crew may have wanted. So there was a psychological change that was going on right there and when we got started on the command module, that would have been in the design back from like 63, 64. What the public doesn't realize is we assigned crews for the Apollo program, we assigned those crews back at the beginning of 66, I think it was February of 66. Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and I were on a crew and it was, it was the second Apollo crew. Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, that's what the public knows, actually there were several changes that went on in there. There were people assigned to those crews that had a problem, a physical problem and they got taken off so they could take care of that. So things were changing and the public was aware of the crews, I think it was about July of that year, they had had a public announcement of what the first two crews were. Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, and then Wally and Donn and I and at that stage of the game, we were basically living with the contractor. I was on the road for one of those years, I was on the road for 275 days, traveling and working away from NASA. As we were out there working with the crew, the spacecraft was not done, we had no simulators. We had no real training devices for it. So we were getting our training out of working with the engineers. Testing the spacecraft when it went in. We took part in the design reviews on it. So it wasn't as if we had a finished product that we then had to get used to. That created a problem for NASA and North American in some ways because if we were out there, we were putting our input into the design while it was still at the stage of just being developed. Sometimes the version of a particular piece of hardware, electronics was being done. And that's when it started causing a problem for the contractor because the changes that we want, we only insisted on if we felt like it was essential for our mission to be successful. But that left North American in a position of slipping. They had a contract that was costing more money for them to do this and I'll never forget one time, I remember who the head of North American at that time he was telling Bob Gilruth who was the head of the Johnson Space Center at the time. He said look we can't keep doing that, the astronauts are out here and they're asking for one thing after another and it's changing what we've been working on. Bob Gilruth's response was, he says that's okay, we're not charging you for the time.

- [Interviewer] You were brought to California for these trips to take up on the command modules, what was that like, you would go out there during the day and then at night you would go to the bottle, I wonder what you all did out there? [mumbles]

- I'm not gonna tell you what everybody did at night out there [laughs]. And we didn't drive. But when we look back at the program in those days, and the development of the command module, they were also developing the lunar module in Grumman which was on the other coast and we didn't have a command module scheduled to go with us on the early missions. So we were living at North American and the work was sometimes, it'd be in the middle of the night, sometimes it'd be during the day. And we had to be out there, so we would usually fly out there either on Sunday evening and we would hop in our T-38s, go out there either Sunday evening or very early Monday morning 'cause with the two hour time difference we can begin in there just about the time they were opening up the plant and we could start working with the folks. And then we would try to get back when we could. Sometimes we had to go from there down to the center of the launch complex. So we did a lot of flying. I think my flight time that I averaged when I was there at NASA was, I averaged about 32, 33 hours a month.

- [Interviewer] There's famous stories, especially about Gus, kinda tear assing up and down [mumbles] because you guys were all fighter pilots and everything. Did you do that in your T-38s also or was it, was that kind of stuff strictly confined to driving around Clearlake?

- You haven't read my book have you?

- [Interviewer] Eric wants me to. I have not yet.

- You haven't read my book [laughs]. Well I look at it as the greatest flying club we ever had because when we reported in here, our group, we were the third group of astronauts and they get seven Mercury guys, you'd had nine, what we call now the Gemini astronauts, and we were the Apollo astronauts, there were 14 of us, that was a total of 30. And they were just beginning to get the T-38s, we had several other aircraft around that we were relatively familiar with the military airplanes and before long we had 32 38s and their maintenance level was very good on em and they were almost always flying on those. So here was 30 pilots and 32 38s, it was like the last great flying club. And we didn't, we ended up doing things with the T-38 at least I can say that myself and Wally and I and three of the other guys, two of them I won't screech on here, I'm talking about it, but we started pushing the T-38 to levels that, anybody flying em today, 'cause the T-38 is still out there, will tell you no, you can't do that and the one that I'll mention here is flying non-stop from Los Angeles to Houston here, to Ellington Field. Well Wally and I started doing that and Gus did it, and Gus and Roger were doing it. Sometimes we were solo on the airplanes, sometimes we had both seats occupied by a couple of crew members but it was tricky kind of business because to do that, to make a non-stop flight from Los Angeles to Ellington, you would have to save as much fuel as you could. You would have to cruise to as high an altitude as you could and you would have to average for the entire distance at least 60 knots of tailwind. And of course to get 60 knots tailwind, that was only at higher altitudes, 30 thousand, 40 thousand, what have you. And certain times the air when you had jet streams, you had a better chance of doing that and I'm talking about the average so I'm at sometimes, you'd start off from Los Angeles and come out the after burn that you used for take off you'd be out of it as soon as you got the wheels up and start climbing and heading in the easterly directions down there and you might have only 20 knots of tailwind, 30 knots of tailwind. And can you get up the altitude, you'd still end up having to get back to find some place where you could contact a jet stream and that might not happen until you were down to past Albuquerque or even El Paso and I think probably the roughest one that I can ever remember was, it was Wally and I flying. Wally was flying and I was busy trying to keep track and keep our speed up and I'll never forget the fact that by the time we hit El Paso we still had not gotten our 60 knots of tailwind average but after that we picked up a real good tailwind, we ended up I think at about 160 nuts at one time but it was a good thing we did because we were running so low on fuel, we were cruising it all the way up to about 46 thousand feet at the time, maybe 47 and even so, when we passed San Antonio, Wally and I talked it over and we decided, well we better shut down one of the engines, which we did. We shut down the engine. Then we pulled back the other engine to idle and, to, as we were making a let down 'cause we started down probably 110 nautical miles away from us to come on in and the people here in those days, the tower operators, I'm sure they knew what we were doing because they helped us as much as we could, we tried to make a straight end approach from Los Angeles all the way to there and this particular one, the reason I remembered it was because we, it was the toughest one we had made and we were trying to be conservative and make sure that we could touch down there safely. And Wally was in front and it was at night and it turns out that he came over the field and not down for a landing, we were up at about 30 thousand feet. So he took a break and we took the break, we started up the other engine and there was, from 30 thousand feet it was still a pretty good circle down to the landing. And some time I can never remember is that when we were down to about 500 feet, I had my hands on both ejection handles on the backseat of the T-38 because it was, it was close but we made it. And you know, those days we never even thought a lot about it, we never talked a lot about it. It was just, boy, it was a good thing we got that tailwind there. That represents a kind of a difference in the attitude that many of us had in those days, not that I would recommend, not that will I say it's even healthy for people. But it's part of what made the people that were doing that program in those days what it's now remembered as.

- [Interviewer] So going back to Apollo 1, you guys decided to take the detour you used back to Houston. When you left Florida, you just thought it was a routine test that day right?

- When I look back at the beginning of the Apollo program, of course today it's really remembered just by the Apollo 1 fire but, the Apollo 1 fire occurred over a year after we got started on it and when they did, Gus and his crew were at Apollo 1, Wally Schirra and his crew, we were on Apollo 2. After we'd been there for about eight months, they canceled out Apollo 2 and then they decided to put us on because the spacecraft was very similar to Gus's. They made us the backup crew on Apollo 1. I'll have to explain why it wasn't called Apollo 1 at the time, I think it was AS two or four. We were there for about three months and that came up to, on January 27th back there, that was 67. And on January 27th, they were testing the plugs out, so the plugs out case that they had made on the test. And it was on 100% oxygen. The night before Wally, Donn and I, we had done, exactly the same tests, except it was plugs in, which meant that the hatch was open and the power connectors were in from the outside. And it went pretty good for us, didn't take too long. There was some communications problems. But there was, it was the end of the week and so we thought we would all fly back together, so again the next day, we had some things that we did, we were basically waiting there to fly back with Gus and his crew at the same time to get back to Ellington and finally, late in the afternoon, around five O' clock, they decided, they still hadn't been able to get that test done so we will go out and fly and we went down, got in our aircraft and we flew back. It was a real shock because when we came in, and parked at the parking spot there at Ellington, the NASA man in charge at the time, he was standing there waiting to meet us and that was very unusual. So we knew something must be going on and he took us upstairs then he told us about the fire and Gus, Ed and Roger were dead at the time and it was a real shock for the program because it was on the ground, it wasn't in orbit and all of a sudden they were killed. So we spent the next couple of days, a day actually, a day or so with the wives and the family and trying to make things right. Today it's looked upon as really bad because they had 100% oxygen and the hatch was closed. But there's a lot of differences, the public really should understand that, there's a lot of 100% oxygen flying that goes on in different places and we did then too sometimes. But it's different from all of the spacecraft, all of the Gemini spacecraft and Mercury spacecraft, they were all on 100% Oxygen. The levels of actual Oxygen at five PSI when the spacecraft was in orbit. So we had five PSI Oxygen. When they just did this test on the ground in, for the first Apollo mission, in order to have a positive pressure inside, they had to run that up to about 16 PSI. So that was a lot of 100% Oxygen and it made a real difference. Because of that pressure inside also they couldn't take the hatch open, it was still opening on the inside, so it was a real disastrous fire they were, the whole crew was gone in less than 20 seconds really.

- [Interviewer] Didn't the fire have to happen?

- The fire on that Apollo 1 mission, till this day, it's my personal opinion, they haven't actually pinned down precisely where the spark came that ignited things at 100% Oxygen because we also didn't have all fireproof material in there then like we did later but the material was soaked with the Oxygen. But the electric wiring for various systems in there was not really covered up, it was not considered the kind of danger that it became after the fire and so there was, a spark was there, they created it, but it was, I don't believe they have been able to specifically pin down just exactly where down there that that came about.

- [Interviewer] Recounting from a, the same question, recounting from a post-war perspective, would Apollo 1 have happened, would the moon landing have happened do you think, within the time period, without the reforms brought about by the aftermath of the fire I guess what I'm asking you is, was the fire historically as horrible as it was, was it historically kind of net positive for the completion of the program on time and for shifting NASA's culture?

- Well if you look at the impact of the, what's now called the Apollo 1 Fire, you look at the impact of that on the program to land a man on the moon before the decade was out. It's hard to say just what the real role or the real consequences of that were because one of the reasons that we kept pushing the schedule that way was because there was not that much time, that was January 1967. That meant there were only two more years in the decade to land a man on the moon. And after the Apollo 1 Fire, we took 21 months, with no flying, 21 months out of the remaining time, and I personally think that that's what made it possible. So I think the Apollo 1 Fire created the opportunity to get it done because of all the changes that went on after the Apollo 1 Fire. For example, the third spacecraft in line, we had already been working on having a hatch that would open outwards, there were a variety of other changes in there and in fact, before we flew on Apollo 7, which was the first command module to be manned, we put I think about 1040 changes into that spacecraft and a 21 month delay. So as a result of fixing things up after that, that's how we ended up getting to the moon in that decade. There was a couple of other factors though that are also significant. It was probably a couple of months after the fire that we had a staff meeting that Deke Slayton had a staff meeting and in that staff meeting we had, I can't remember but I think it was 15 of us or 18 of us in there. And we, this was a meeting to discuss the plan to get to the moon. And we basically set out five steps. I call it five giant steps to get to the moon. And Deke said, you guys here are the ones that are going to do it, you're gonna be the ones that make it to the moon. And the five giant steps evolved very slightly but basically what it was. First one, we run test the command module. We had then a second mission in that was gonna take the command module out a greater distance, I think eight thousand, 10 thousand miles away. And just to confirm everything was okay. Then we were gonna have to test the lunar module and then we were gonna have a mission that went out to the moon and went to orbit and everything except the landing, that was Apollo 10. And then Apollo 11. And I can remember those of us in that meeting, maybe some of em thought hey, I'd see if they were gonna make it just like that. But most of us at the time, we still, we expected to loose a spacecraft someway, somehow, we would try to prevent but we just couldn't count on it. After the Apollo 1 fire and the corrections that we made in the spacecraft, it was amazingly good spacecraft from that time on. And personally I think that if we had not had that time off that was established because of the Apollo 1 fire, I do not believe that we would be able to make it in those five missions. As a matter of fact, we took the second mission and changed it because, we were very optimistic about Apollo 7, having a successful spacecraft getting in orbit, we were getting optimistic because of the changes. So then they took the second mission and probably six weeks before we flew in it had been changed to fly out and go into lunar orbit and that was subject to us having a successful mission so it had all been decided that we're getting ready for it but it had to be dependent on whether we had a good mission. And Apollo 7 turned out to be the longest, most ambitious, most successful first test flight of any new flying machine, ever. And Apollo 8, very successful mission around the moon, Apollo 9, stay in the earth orbit, tested lunar module, command module. I personally think that was one of the riskiest missions because lunar module had no heat shield, couldn't re-enter from it, they had to make sure they got back to the command module which was the first time that ever happened. And Apollo 10 went out to the moon, lunar orbit, got down to 50 thousand feet. Sometimes people like to think they could have landed, actually they couldn't, it was too heavy and they hadn't gotten all the improvements in yet but it was a very successful mission. So then Apollo 11 came along and as I mentioned to Neil Armstrong one time, and he didn't laugh too much. I says you know Neil the only thing you did that hadn't been done before, yeah, the last 50 thousand feet. And he went on his flight Apollo 11, is one of the most impressive successful missions that I have ever even heard of, thought of and what have you and Neil did a great job, when you land and you got 20 seconds fuel left, it's pretty close.

- [Interviewer] After the fire and you're starting to realize in the weeks and months after that. You're about to, you're next on deck to go on this vehicle that just had a major accident and you're gonna take it into space and shape it out, what are you thinking right, are you concerned, are you ready for the challenge or what's going through your mind.

- Well now as time goes on, almost everyone that talks to me and finds out I was on the first manned Apollo mission, most of them ask, were you afraid? And they have a hard time I'm sure believing when I say no, we were not. Does that mean it was no risk? No. But in those days we had a different group of people and what we thought about this and rightly or wrongly, we thought we could overcome what would happen with it, and time and time again, somebody will ask me, well were you afraid when you lifted off and I said the only thing that really got us irritated there at the lift off, is we were planning on lifting off at 11 O' clock in the morning. The spacecraft was doing fine, all the checkouts were doing good. A little fight over the wind, it was a little bit high at the time for an abort but a couple of minutes to go before launching they said, put it on hold had to put it on hold to get the pressure back up in one of our tanks 'cause it was one or two pounds low and we says no it's okay let's go like it is. Nope, and they overran it, they went ahead and it delayed our launch by two minutes and 54 seconds I think and that irritated us. And it's just, it's amazing in the attitude, I don't recommend that that's, that the attitude we had in those days was great or perfect for everybody but at the time, we wanted to lift off at our scheduled time and perform as perfectly as we could.

- [Interviewer] You were kind of the spearhead of, but really I mean you were representing that NASA could get this done. I mean your mission, the world was watching as this took off I mean, talk about kind of how you felt maybe some responsibility to kind of carry off all the [mumbles].

- Well we did feel a sense of responsibility but that sense of responsibility was to get all of the mission objectives that we had during that mission, to get them to completed because we were worried, that was October of 1968 and we didn't have that much time left to make it to the moon before the end of the decade and we didn't know what to expect, there might be some other problem that's coming ahead. And it turns out our spacecraft was in marvelously good shape and I think we had the alarm go off only once, it was operating well enough that they added a couple of mission objectives to even over the air by the time we were flying it so we felt an object, excuse me an objective, we felt an objective to fly a mission that was impressive, that would impress people and feel successful for us and there's pluses and minuses that go on during a mission but the spacecraft was good enough to end up being, it was described at the end as, it's nearly officially at 101% successful because of the added objectives and I'm sure it made the Apollo 8 crew happy because they had to depend on this being good in order for them to get their mission out around the moon. And so it was very helpful in that respect.

- [Interviewer] I mean thinking back about it, if your mission hadn't come off successfully, none of the rest of the Apollo program which plays out in 1969, 1968, 1969 to get it done.

- Well if the Apollo 7 mission was not successful for some reason that, because the spacecraft wasn't good enough to accomplish what we had to do and all of the things that we had to do and that we had to test, they were there because of what we had to count on and take for granted in subsequent missions and if that had not happened, then we would have had a delay to fix the spacecraft and fix the design and some of the things and so, I think we would not have gone to the moon in that decade, had we not been successful and each one of those missions had the same responsibility to be successful. So we, every mission was thoroughly successful right up to Apollo 13.

- [Interviewer] And I think you told me once, you basically said that as you were going through the progression of getting to the launch site, that your attitude was this mission is, if this mission fails it's not gonna be because of me.

- Yeah we knew that that mission, the first mission was very important. I'm not sure how they, my fellow crew members felt but I do recall that I, and I will bet that they believed the same thing and felt the same way and that was if this mission failed, it's not gonna fail because of me. And I would suspect that the crew members of subsequent missions all felt the same way about it. We were not there for the fun of it, we were not there just for the notoriety of it, we were there to help an objective along that as we look back on it today, it's probably the greatest accomplishment of the 20th century.

- [Interviewer] Did things get, how do I phrase this? Do things get a little cantankerous in order, on Apollo 7, I know historically there is lots of discussion about what happened but what's your, you were there, you were flying up above our heads and you know--

- You haven't read my book have you? [laughter]

- [Interviewer] Tell us what happened.

- Well I'll tell you what happened but you'll find a lot of people today who don't know it and they think of it differently. When you look at Apollo 7, we did launch with a handicap that we didn't realize that we had and that was because four days before, we had gone hunting locally and I bet that it might have even been illegally. But we had to spend a day out hunting and it was cold and wet and I can remember Donn Eisele and I thought we might get a cold out of this so we went and we got some, we got a cold shot outside of NASA, didn't want NASA to know what we were concerned about and we mentioned it to Wally and Wally, no no no, I'm not gonna do that. So what really happened is we ended up launching and we hadn't been there very long before Wally realized he had a cold, so he started breathing hard and if you knew Wally, he was a navy captain and his family had been in the navy and he was the commander and the commander was in charge of everything and in Wally's approach to this, if Wally had a cold, everybody had a cold and so when he was talking to the ground, that's what he, he left that impression with the ground that everybody had a cold. Well uh, I can assure you that I never had a cold. I can also tell you that Eisele didn't really have a cold, he coughed a couple of times on maybe the first day and if Wally started taking the cold pills, we had some pills on board. But then if Wally was taking the pill, we all had to take the pill because Wally didn't want to be the only one who had a cold. So that caused a problem air to ground communications and stuff on it but till this day, it's thought of as the flight where everybody had a cold. In spite of a cold or anything else that was going on, everything that had to happen, all of the schedules, they all came about when they were supposed to.

- [Interviewer] I know you've talked about this before but what is your thoughts on how NASA faced with the Apollo 1 tragedy found the right balance between safety, but still getting things done. How do you weigh this in the way that the [mumbles].

- Some people ask about the balance between safety and getting things done. It's a strange kind of thought to me because, when you know what the objective is and you're designing a spacecraft to do it, you design that spacecraft to accomplish that objective and during the construction, the design and the testing of it, you will find some things that might give you a potential problem or if this happened, we'd have to come home, we couldn't stay up there and accomplish that. I'm sure that that goes on. But, I don't think they've ever launched a spacecraft or maybe even an aircraft, that they didn't think would do what it had to do. And especially with airplanes, this kind of evolves because you learn as it's going on. And we learn some things on the spacecraft too. It had been kind of a fight to get them to change the hatch to an outward opening hatch. But after the fire, it was a no brainer to get it done because it was felt like, if we had a subsequent problem with our crew or a crew after that, we could get the hatch open a little quicker on it, so, I can't imagine anybody designing a spacecraft that they didn't think could accomplish the job. Different people had different standards. Different countries do it too. We would go back and look at it in those days, the Russians were launching their spacecraft, they launched before we did, they had a very simple spacecraft. There was nothing you could do onboard that spacecraft really. And essentially Yuri Gagarin, those folks, they were along for the ride and the Russians were ahead of the United States with that mission. But by the time we finished the Gemini program, we had left the Russians behind in all fields really of operations in space, that was a long time ago and, as we have gone on in our program, we have changed. We've changed our attitudes, we've changed the objectives, and the Russians have pretty much stuck to their same kind of original approach to things, gotten better at it but even today, essentially we're passengers on board, the people they can learn how to handle some of the equipment in an emergency, but essentially the crew members on the Soyuz, they are along for the ride and, unless something goes wrong in that spacecraft, you get an automatic ride, it's up there, comes up and makes it. So there's a tremendous difference in the approach. If anything, here in the United States, we have become even more focused on safety and security. Instead of accepting certain challenges, we now are trying to avoid them 100%. And so we have to expect a different kind of outcome on some of these programs than we did back in those days.

- [Interviewer] So if you guys, [mumbles] sort of think about NASA's current plans in terms of [mumbles]. Do you think the agency is being bold enough to be successful?

- Well over the years, NASA has evolved as our society has evolved, as our governmental agencies that have evolved. They get bigger and bigger, more and more people and over the years, NASA has added layers of management on, become more bureaucratic. Ever since Apollo, they have managed to reduce the amount of influence that the astronauts and the crews had on what was going on, try to create more of a standard kind of operation. And some of that incidentally I think was fully justified and fully right but, we don't seem to be depending as much on flight crews today as they did then. You don't have to be a pilot to become an astronaut. They have to match, they try to match the males and females, blacks and whites, it fits into a world where they have a different kind of objective when it comes to crew member and yet, a lot of those crew members they turn out to be very successful at their job but the job has changed. When you're pushing back the frontier as we were in going to the moon, you have to have crews that are focusing on that and are willing to pay whatever price it takes to push that back and it didn't just happen here at Apollo. When Magellan set sail around the world centuries ago, they were trying to break the barrier to the next frontier which was to get around the world for the first time. So that's an attitude you're gonna have to have. Some of the other countries, I still think they are involved in some of that, the Chinese for example. The Russians seem to be a little less concerned about the safety aspect of it than we were and I think they have a different kind of a culture and society about it and yet today we are totally dependent on the Russians to get to the Spacecraft. It's a shame. But what's happening here in our space program is, I'm talking about kind of the negative aspects of what's going out, because we have some positive too. But when you talk about the negative aspects of it, it's a reflection on what's going on in our society today. We are, we have moved into a risk averse society. People grow up today with a different sense of taking risks and willing to stick their necks out to accomplish things. So that's a bit of a problem. And because this is detectable, we can see it in the government agency there's been a growth of commercial agencies and, not agencies, commercial companies whose objective is to go out and do this flying and they seem to be making a slow growing progress but they don't have all the layers of management, they incidentally don't seem to try to satisfy NASA astronauts now, it's just to satisfy their own. So they're in better control, they have lower costs and they're getting pretty successful at it I think.

- [Interviewer] So just to stay on this for one minute more and a lot of it and sort of, negative side of things. I mean the situation now is, what you guys did 50 years ago, to where we are now. As you said, we're relying on Russia to get to the Space Station and worrying about China beating us back to the hoove. After you guys blazed these trail a couple of years ago that must be pretty disheartening.

- Yeah as I look at how things have changed today, I think that those few of us that are still alive, 50 years ago are disheartened in general and are turning more positive towards the commercial space companies. Although we think they've got some problems wrong with them too and some knowledge to gain about it. But the attitude, the change in the attitude has been a bit disturbing to those of us who lived back in the good ol' days. I look at the 1960s as the golden age of space flight and the next frontier of course we got is really it's Mars and that's gonna take many years to get to Mars in spite of what some of the people are talking about these days. It's gonna take many years but it's gonna take a commitment, and it's gonna take a willingness, a willingness to stick their neck out again and I consider it extremely high risk even with our knowledge.

- [Interviewer] If you see private industry beat NASA to Mars, will that be upsetting, is that a bad thing?

- When you talk about going to Mars, I don't look at it as just something that NASA should be doing but it may turn out to be something that only an agency like NASA can do because of the kind of commitment it takes. Today people have no idea how much it's gonna cost to go to Mars. If you take a look at the Apollo for example. We went close, we went to the moon and the Apollo program, the budget for it was $20 billion, we did it for $25 billion, the whole program. In today's dollars, when you take a look at it, that would be equivalent to about a $135 billion. Now I can tell you that landing on the moon is going to be a piece of cake relative to landing on Mars. And so we're not gonna be able to do it for the kind of prices you see people talking about here, measured in billions of dollars. It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars and it will take a long time before that commitment is made. And there's a lot of questions about what we can accomplish by it other than putting man on Mars, putting him out in the universe. I'll tell you why I say that. In order to do that, you're gonna have to develop new technology, new capability that will find its way into the commercial world. And when we look back on what we've spent on Apollo, back in those days, say $25 billion, the technology that we developed is still evolving today and getting better and better. So we are benefiting a lot from it when the objective was to use that for exploration and this other stuff has been peeling off. Same thing will happen if we decide to go to Mars. Now should we have man on Mars, that's a debatable point. We've had unmanned vehicles exploring Mars for the last five years or so, and they're doing a very good job. We see a whole lot more information from that than we were ever able to see from the moon before we went and maybe even what we got after we went and the photographs and things like that and the information they got from it. But you see, the Apollo program, you develop technology that's still spinning off today. People don't realize when they look at their cell phone that we started flying Apollo on our, I can tell you on our mission on Apollo 7, we had a computer on board of course to do our star sighting and to help our navigation so we could re-enter safely. That computer was about 12, 15 inches, a cube, weighed 40 pounds, had total memory on board of 40 kilobytes, 35 which we couldn't address. So with all the things that's come out of that and developed it, we now are starting way down the line with much better stuff, but it's gonna go on to even better if we're willing to make the investment. That's a question of whether we should or should not go to Mars.

- [Interviewer] Sounds like maybe NASA has the resources and some of the technical know how but the private companies have kind of a risk tolerance and again sort of the brashness to push through things that NASA has been hesitant to embrace.

- I do believe that the commercial companies are in a better position to take the risk. I'm not sure that, the real requirements it's gonna take, I'm not sure that a non-government agency is gonna be able to cover that but so far they look like they're willing to face up to it and do it. That's not to mention the fact that we always have people in the population that are willing to go regardless of the risk on it and, they may end up doing some of that. I feel kind of fortunate that I was just a jet fighter pilot that had an opportunity to go higher, farther, faster. Today there are people that are willing to write their life off, just to go push back those frontiers and commercial companies are the only ones that would probably accept that and go do that.

- [Interviewer] So switching gears to a little bit, I would say you laid the ground work for the subsequent Apollo missions. Do you have moments when you were watching the Apollo 8 or Apollo 10 or Apollo 11, Apollo 9, for that matter, that sort of stand out to you. Did you feel proud of them when they landed on the moon what was your, what did you feel about it, how did you feel about it?

- Let's see, Apollo 7 we had a great mission. Now how did I feel about the other missions. I can only remember being excited at everything they accomplished because we were familiar with all the people that were crew on those things. We had some crews we expect to do better than other crews. Different people had different opinions, but we were all pulling for 100% success, we wanted them to come back perfect if they could. And most of them did.

- [Interviewer] What would have been, just a quick question, what would have been your spot on the rotation next after 7, if they hadn't changed it around.

- The plan in those days which, the plan back in the days of landing on the moon. Essentially we had prime and backup crew and then the third mission after that, the backup crew would become the prime crew and you could rotate it through and have done this with just the people we had. But it turns out some of those people left, some of them got injured, some of em got killed and other people were being brought in, other astronauts were being brought in to fill those positions. So if we hadn't had those outside of our original thirty, we wouldn't have been able to complete all the missions so you've gotta have the people around to do it.

- [Interviewer] One of the things we're trying to do is help the younger generation understand what you all did and achieved and I'm wondering what you would, what kind of a message you would have for that younger audience now. What would you really like them to know about it?

- Well I'm pleased to see, when I look at some of the young people today and some of the classes, and I look at the individuals and I see them excited about space. They want to do some of these things individually and that's when they're young. It's a little bit difficult in today's culture and society that's risk averse, that they can hold on to that and some of them do, and that's why we get them into the space program, they get them to NASA. It's still an opportunity for very few of them. But what's happening is our society and our culture has evolved to not acknowledge and recognize the outstanding people down there in those classes. They think everybody is equal. The grades are, they try to get the grades pretty close to the same. Well if they're competing in a sport as kids, they're all winners, they don't have winners and losers. So when I'm talking to young people today, I try to make the point, and you have to do this, just in little bits and pieces but I try to make the point that you have got to not count on others to make your life, you've gotta be willing to stick your neck out and get ahead and that works for you regardless of what your background is, you don't want to just buy into coasting because they made it possible to coast, you wanna be better than those around you. You don't have to be egotistical about it, but you wanna make sure that you're better than those people that you're competing with all the time and some people will succeed at that, but I'm not sure if our culture is gonna change enough to allow all that possible.

- [Interviewer] There is a common answer that a lot of people have when they consider space travel and this is something that has been around since before Mercury. Why do we need to send humans into space, be it lower orbit or Mars or the Moon, why, why not, why not robots, why not remote sensing devices, what are people for in space?

- Well a lot of people today are asking why why do we send humans into space, why do we send humans to Mars. Why not let the robots do the job? And I think that really is a really good point. I think there's a lot of things that we can do today that we couldn't then, we had to be manned. Today we can do a lot of things unmanned and many of it, of those things, it may take longer to do it, because they, even the robots, they don't work like the human mind yet but they don't have to evolve as much yet. So I think there's a very, a good case that we can make for unmanned exploration of Mars. Now there are people around who, they wanna go find life on Mars. Well I'm not, personally I'm not concerned about whether there's life on Mars, I don't think there is. I'm also very impressed with what the unmanned exploration does on it, I think there are some important things that we could do on the Moon if we went back and having maybe a observatory at the backside of the moon. There are some things that we could at least find out, whether we can generate a fuel or things like that off of the moon. But I don't think that's an objective to get us there, I think that we need to be perfecting the technology we can here and letting it evolve here to do it. Now are humans going to go to the other planets, probably eventually yes and they do it because we get so familiar with everything that's in this world and we push it out a little bit and we keep expanding it, I keep coming back to Magellan and his several hundred crew and five boats, they set out to go around the world for the first time. And when they got back, I think there were 27 of the crew, I think it was, started off with like 270, maybe more but when they got back they were like 27 crew members left. One of the boats, one of the original boats was still there. Magellan was not there. They had paid the price and look what we've done around the world since. But it started off with somebody willing to pay the price to open up the next frontier. For us the next frontier was the moon, space and the moon. Now the next frontier is getting on into the planets and Mars happens to be one of the key candidates to do that so I think some of that can go on. Whether it makes good commercial sense or not, I think the human attitude among some people to open the next frontier may lead to that eventually and it will take a long time before we get there.

- [Interviewer] So following up on that, what are kind of, certain things about the, when you talk at NASA about their plans at large, they're getting it directly from the administration that there has to be 99.9% chance of mission success or something like that. And I'm hearing that Elon Musk saying, well we know a lot of people are gonna die. Some people are gonna die and that first mission is gonna be really risky. There's a lot of reasons why SpaceX may not go to Mars but it seems like that's probably a healthier attitude to take than saying well we've got to have 100% chance of mission success or we're never gonna go.

- Yeah you sure NASA is saying that?

- [Interviewer] Yes.

- How stupid. Well, over the years NASA has evolved as well and not sure what NASA is like today as they reflect the society and culture that we've allowed in the rest of our society and if they think it has to be 100% successful to go to Mars, probably not gonna happen and the people you want to be willing to do that have to be people that are willing to stick their necks out and willing to take a risk 'cause there are things in life worth taking risks for and believe me, nothing is going to be more risky in our near future here than going out to other planets and both the crew members and the public at large that's watching this, has to understand that there is gonna be losses. So I don't know what we need to do to get there but that has to be our outlook today instead of making everything 100% safe.

- [Interviewer] We wanted to have you watch a little bit of video from your Apollo 7 mission.

- Alright look at here, The Flight of Apollo 7 and we are slowly going out to board the van so we can go out to the launch complex.

- [Interviewer] When you do this are you thinking about your launch procedures and kind of walking through the mission in your head?

- No [laughs].

- [Interviewer] What are you thinking as you ride in the van? I've never actually asked, I'd like to ask about that.

- Well as we're going out there I can remember thinking, boy am I fortunate. We're going to lift off today and we go out there and we have to ride the elevator up to the pad and up to the entry to the spacecraft and we had a problem with that elevator incidentally which was not too good because in those days we would have had to take the elevator down if we had to abort while the spacecraft was on the pad there and then eventually they put in a line so you could slide, go flying down from that. And here we are, the, boy here's the Saturn kicking off.

- [Interviewer] You guys were on the Saturn 1B right?

- Yep.

- [Interviewer] What was that like?

- The Saturn 1B was, I don't think it was nearly as exciting as the Saturn V, but we were concerned that it had enough clearance from the tower that we weren't gonna encounter anything but also here you light up the engine, but it's, it starts off kind of slowly and you look forward to 10 seconds later when you're passed the tower on it and from that time on, you're, I think every minute, every minute one or the other of us would report to the ground just to show the radios are still working and it wasn't really a big shock until we finally staged, and that's when we really started feeling like we were gonna go someplace.

- [Interviewer] As [mumbles] who's gonna take off or are you just read out numbers.

- Oh we were, I was monitoring all the systems in the spacecraft, except the launch systems. Eisele was monitoring a computer system up there. We tried to make sure everything is working right and we had I think 1800 different switches and controls so that was a bit of a pain.

- [Interviewer] If you had had to call SEE Ops would you have known what the switch was?

- Today I can't tell you what I knew then 50 years ago. Here we are we're in orbit and you're looking at, the window happened to be pointing down so we're looking and we're seeing clouds. When we get through with this, I'll be glad to say a few words if you want about what taking pictures then was like compared with taking pictures is today, hell of a difference. Okay mission control is doing their job, I guarantee you they were all exciting. And because we didn't have good graphics, we had to make a module to show how our command module would maneuver and turn around. Now here's a picture, most of these pictures that we have here are pictures that I took because I was sitting in a right seat. We had a couple of windows. Eisele was at his computer. And Wally was actually flying the spacecraft, maneuvering we had to. But after we got into, after we got separated, there was a problem we noticed right away is one of the pieces of the S4B had not come completely off or had not opened up far enough, they weren't scheduled to come off until after this so we couldn't get too close to simulate docking with the lunar module.

- [Interviewer] That's the angry alligator right?

- Well, this is long after the angry alligator but it was a similar problem as the alligator had and so the, but we had to also separate and rendezvous and then dock with this and well here I am floating around and so, I think Wally is probably taking the picture here.

- [Interviewer] I know you got space sick on your flight right, no one [mumbles].

- No, no, nobody got sick. That first day during the afternoon, Donn and I sat there trying to shake our heads a little bit 'cause we knew that it was a possibility, we weren't feeling sick but and Wally I don't think felt any motion sickness. But there was a big difference in the Apollo for the first time crews were free, and able to float around and do these things.

- [Interviewer] Can I ask very briefly, what was that like, for the first time you unbelt, and was your immediate temptation to do something silly like flip upside down.

- No, our immediate temptation was to do our duty and when we got a chance, then we did those other things. It seems kind of silly almost to mention today but that's, this was a job and in those days that's all it was really. Today I can't believe what goes on on a spacecraft. By the time it got to the second or third day, we were able to goof off a little bit once in a while if we were eating or something like that. But until it got to a week or so, we were pretty much, time was pretty much controlled and we, the whole mission was finally unloaded so you got as many things done as you could at the beginning so that left it kinda loose last couple of days, not to mention we only had, at today, I think we had like maybe 20 shots of film that we could take.

- [Interviewer] I'd like to ask one more question about, this isn't necessarily tied to the clips but as part of the testing procedure, as part of the Apollo 7 mission, you guys got to try out, my understanding is the, what's the [mumbles] way to phrase this. The fecal collection system, you guys got to test that for the very first time in close confines with a couple of other folks. Can you tell me briefly how exciting that was.

- It wasn't exciting at all. And I can't really, before we, I think the freest part was my way but maybe it then had fire, but for the first time ever we had Oxygen masks on board and so at least one or two guys might put on that Oxygen mask, 'cause pretty tight. So we had less room than the you two right there, yeah that's farther apart almost than the three of us really.

- [Interviewer] It means the vessel was very long.

- Yeah, so the, well I'll tell you a story about those fecal bags, it's more funny.

- [Interviewer] Very very very briefly describe what happened.

- Well I'm not gonna describe that aspect, you can read about that in my book but I will tell you this that I can't remember, it was about the third day, third or fourth day and finally people had start, we had started using fecal bags. But Eisele's chocolate pudding, which was the best part of our meal, you put water in it and mix that up and Eisele's was had it broken, he couldn't mix it up anymore because it was leaking out and well, what the hell do we do with this now, we can't just put it away like we would normally. I can't remember if Wally or I, one said, well let's put it in a fecal bag. So we pull out a fecal beg and Eisele took his chocolate pudding, put the fecal bag, put it in it, put the fecal bag in with the other fecal bags, we never thought a thing about it again after that. And after we got back, when we were on the carrier and waiting for the airplane to take us home, there was one other thing that was going back with us. All the fecal bags were packed there because they were studying the content, what went on as a result of being in orbit so all those fecal bags were, we never gave another thought about the pudding believe me. So, we thought it was kind of funny, it's us and the fecal bags were all going home. So when we got back, A lady, I can't remember her name, she was a nurse, but she eventually became the head of the Johnson Space Center for a while, dammit, anyway, she got all those and we never thought another thing about it until it must have been four or five days later. We got a call from her and she said, I can't figure out here but, the fecal bags, you only because there are logs, said we have one fecal bag too many and she'd gone through all of em to find out what was going on and couldn't figure it out how we had screwed up with the fecal bags. So we told her. When you look at the activities we had there, every once in a while, one of em might cause a problem with mission control, whether we get it right or not. For example, the taking the pills and being cold, and having a cold and being under the couches there like Wally was from day one for a while. The other thing was one of the objectives that we had was to do some live television coverage. Now it was a lousy television surely at the time. It was big and blocky actually and starting with day two, we were going to shoot some scenes of what it was like and it was only black and white and the like and during day one, I think it was, Deke Slayton called Wally and said let's go ahead and set the camera up and we'll get some filming on it. Wally was more involved with mission objectives than we were, not to mention the fact that he was feeling bad with the cold, what have you. But the long story short he says no we'll start tomorrow, on day two, which was when it was scheduled. So on day two, we set the camera up, we started doing those things. And it turned out that that was kind of the best break in our day because at the time you would do that, you could only do it when you had live air to ground communications and that occurred when you had a pass that was coming across the United States. Back in those days we did not have 100% air to ground. We had a few ships sitting out and a couple of other spots located in Mexico, Australia, so we didn't have much coverage. We had coverage for air to ground 4% of the time. So you had to wait till you come across the US and we started enjoying that actually because it was kind of a break and we'd tumble and we'd float some things around and so it was not a, it became not a drag but a kind of a nice way out for about 10 minutes when we could do that. But what really surprised us was when we got back and that was in October of 1968. A couple of months later we were contacted that we had gotten an Emmy. We'd been awarded an Emmy for the first live television from space. And so we thought well that's, that'd be nice, it'd be nice to take our T-38s, go out there and look around Hollywood for a day or two and get the award. NASA says no no, you're not gonna go get that award. So I can't remember six weeks later, I get a package in the mail and there it is, there is my Emmy, that's how we got it. It was kind of the most light weight part of what we did.

- [Interviewer] And you also mentioned taking pictures from space.

- Taking pictures, everybody likes to see pictures from space. And to do that, you've gotta be able to see something worth taking a picture of. And today in the International Space Station, you've got windows all the time. 100% of the time looking down at the earth. And you've got electronic cameras, and moving cameras, you could do anything really. Back with Apollo, there were only two additions that had any chance of taking any pictures of the earth surface here, it was not Apollo 7 and Apollo Nine because we were in earth orbit. What people don't realize is we were drifting all the time unless you had a mission objective like doing a burn or something else you had to track on the ground. And we had limited amount of fuel on board so we couldn't do too much of that but what we had also, we had kodachrome film with our, what was the camera is the, Hasselblad Camera, had Hasselblad Camera and we had a total of about 500 frames on nine different backs that we'd put on so that was for the whole 11 days we had like 500 frames. And to take a picture you had to be looking down to see something. That was very difficult because most time we're floating. If you go around our planet, every 90 minutes, 45 minutes of that is darkness, 45 minutes of it is daylight and we'd get a few and it's at the ground, they didn't want us to take a picture more than, unless we got at least five minutes away from the darkness. And to take a picture you had to have a window pointed down. Well, we had five windows in our spacecraft. The biggest one was about two inches across and that was in the hatch and all five of those were covering about 150 degrees like this, pretty much the same plain. So whenever we were pointed down, had to be daylight, the spacecraft was drifting so the earth is one small piece down here most of the time we're looking out at the universe out there as opposed to looking down. When you finally are looking down you gotta have a camera and be able to take it out the window. Well by day two I think it was, the windows first started deteriorating because it was the first time we had flown these windows and we had, each window was two pieces of 3 1/4 inch thick glass separated very so slightly and whatever they had used to mount them started out gassing so in between you would get various droplets that would get in there and start filling up in between so you couldn't see that. So what else, there are some other factors in there on taking these pictures, but you had very little time that you could take pictures and most of the best pictures that I look back out now, because at the time you couldn't see your pictures, you were taking kodachrome for and during that first day we separated from the, our S4B and then we rounded [mumbles] the next day. When you're doing that I was given the job because I had a good window on the right side, of taking pictures of the S4B. Well fortunately, part of our time, we were above the S4B taking pictures, drifting across, actually the Gulf of Mexico down here and on across Florida and that's 'cause we had air to ground across this. So, if you look at that the S4B has, is in front of a lot of these pictures that we took across there. Another thing I should mention that about 55% of the ground is covered by clouds. So unless you want a picture of a cloud, you're not gonna get much looking down there either. But probably my favorite picture after I got back was with the S4B and it's right over the launch complex where we launched out of Florida, you look down and then you see it and we didn't even know that we were taking it because we were just taking pictures of the S4B and after we got back and they show us the picture, ah, look at that. It was our second passover at three hours after we lifted off.

- [Interviewer] Let me ask you something, very very briefly in The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe writes about what Mercury astronauts thought supposedly when they went into orbit for the first time Glenn was, spoke a lot about the view, Shepherd Alan wasn't affected all that much, Carpenter talked a lot about it. When you got into the orbit, when you settled down and had time to look and see the earth and was it a very sweeping emotional there, how did you feel?

- I think by the time we got to Apollo it was not so much of a big surprise or a shock or anything, I think it was what we expected to see down there so I can't really say much about that. They did, for example you mentioned Shepherd on Mercury, he didn't even have a window and we didn't even know what the pictures that we took, we never knew what they were until we got back and they developed them and we finally got to see the, the kodachrome pictures.