- [light folk music]

- It was a lot of stuff going on in the country, we were a little bit isolated from it, we were aware of that stuff going on, but we were so focused on what we had to do and still had a long way to go.

- All we knew was going to work, training, hitting The Singing Wheel after work or late night after some pad tests and get home [laughs] one or two o'clock in the morning and our poor wives just put up with it, a shame, but there was a sense of fulfillment, just like being in a, you know, warm blanket.

- We had a job to do, we understood the scope of that job and we worked hard every day. You know, most people would say, "What are you working on?" and we'd say, well, I'm working on going to the moon. [light uplifting music]

- We'd been working on an Apollo type program going to the moon and trying to understand what was involved, there was a lot of spade work done, before President Kennedy made that announcement, of course, that provided a tremendous amount of momentum.

- Well, I remember when the Russians first launched the first satellite, you know, and I was in a college football game and the thing went over and I'm not, I think we could see it, I think it was at a time, when it was reflective, but if you had a little radio thing, you could hear the beep, beep, beep of this.

- Well, you know, when I think about back when I got selected as an astronaut, when I got down here, we were one of 30 astronauts, I didn't know a one of them, most of 'em 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 and I looked at that as just another step beyond flying.

- I always thought it was meant to be, I don't know for sure, but it seemed like it was wonderful, because when I would go interview with oil companies, they would go, "Oh, you know," they wanted to give me secretarial jobs or something, that wasn't what I had done all that schooling for. I grew up in Livingston, Texas, which was a small town at that time and had a population of about 3500, but I'd had the basics, nothing fancy, but the basics and when I went to school, I started with a major in math, because I just flat loved math and I didn't even meet physics, until I started at the University of Houston, which was when I was a junior, I just thought I'd died and gone to heaven, I mean, physics was fun and physics was solving problems and physics was actually using the math, so I really enjoyed the physics.

- Born and raised in Beaumont, Texas, went to Lamar University over there, it was Lamar State College of Technology at the time. I was at home on a Christmas and ran into an old college buddy of mine, he was over here in Houston working, so I came over for an interview, Gene had this narrow, narrow office, behind his desk was a whiteboard, but he had all these different remote sites listed and he was on the phone when I came in and he was saying things like, "Okay, I've got so-and-so and so-and-so headed to Zanzibar, "I need them to get passports, I've got this and that," you know, he's talking to all these overseas remote sites and stuff, that just sounded fantastic to me. [cheerful folk music]

- I suspect it's kind of like joining the Army, where you know, you come in and everybody luckily has got a common goal, what you do, you become a band of brothers and sisters.

- I would say it was the greatest thing any engineer like myself could ever have as a job to do, it was a hell of a challenge, I can't think of a bigger challenge, I can't think of a better challenge, I can't think of a better thing I'd rather do every morning, and so I was happy to get up and go to the office every morning, I was happy to work 10, 14 hours a day, seven days a week and they had quite a few thousand people, who were willing to do the same thing.

- Those of us who are here, who were gonna fly the spacecraft in those days, it was not as a, 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.

- You're doing what you were trained to do and what you had become to do and nothing was better.

- They allowed me to travel to places where the Air Force, you know, like right pat, up in Ohio was working on little rockets and you know, it was just so interesting and exciting and I was like a sponge, soaked it all up. I viewed it as such an opportunity, it was so much fun and rocket engines for a chemical engineer were just a delight, man, you can't possibly work on anything more interesting, in my view, than a rocket engine, unless maybe it's brewing beer or something.

- Turns out that we were very aggressive personalities. If we didn't agree with you, we'd stick our fingers in your eye and tell you what we thought of your mother, among those reasons, because we were all so aggressive was the reason we got done what we got done, we didn't care what you thought, if you didn't think what we thought, tough luck.

- Probably I had some of the worst treatment I've ever had in the first year and in today's age, they'd probably all be in jail or something or at least gotten fired, but you know, that wasn't gonna happen then, but you have to understand I grew up with four younger brothers, I can put up with just about any male nonsense. So one day a bunch of them had been out and they came back and I was in a second storey of the apartment building, 'cause I wanted to go use the big drafting boards to do this little, bitty thing I was drafting for someone, I'm sitting up on a high stool and I'm on a drafting board and I'm working on something intently, so I'm not paying any attention, I can go into one of those modes and I don't know there's anybody around and all of a sudden, somebody just goes [coughs] and there were about 10 men standing behind me and another 10 over here and I'm looking at 'em like, what are you doing and they're going and up on the top of the big, big drafting board, they've got a piece of computer paper and they yank it off and here's a little garter snake or garden snake, definitely not venomous and I looked at 'em and they were waiting for me to scream or jump up or do something, so I just reached over and picked it up, turned around and got behind me and said, "Go play somewhere else," that probably did more for my NASA career, than any work I ever did. [light uplifting music]

- Time and time again, somebody will ask me, "Well, were you afraid when you lifted off?" and I say, the only thing that really got us irritated there at the liftoff is we were planning on lifting off at 11 o'clock in the morning, couple of minutes to go before launch and 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, no, they overran it, they went ahead and it delayed the launch by two minutes and 54 seconds, I think and that irritated us.

- In those days, when we first moved on site at the Johnsons base there, you could come in at you know, 6:30 or seven o'clock in the morning and half of the cars would be in the parking lot, you know, and you could go out and you could work till six and go out and get in your car to go home and half of the parking lot is still full and then you could sleep a little late on Saturday morning and maybe come in at 10 or 10:30, and you know, well, there's half of the cars are in the parking lot. It was hard on families, it was, I look back now and think, you know, I missed some time with my kids and I know my wife, you know, took a hit, because she was doing stuff, that Daddy ought to be there doing, that kind of stuff, but you know, after the landing, there was such a great gesture by Dr. Gilbert and NASA and the sooner, they sent a letter to every spouse, Dr. Gilbert signed all those, came to my wife saying, "We wanna thank you for your sacrifices "and what you did to enable Norman Chaffee to do his job, "that allowed us to complete this job, "that we were given by the US government," you know, she cherishes that and so do I. [light folk music]

- I think in the Recovery forces, we lost something like 15 people, had an airplane hit a mountain in Africa and the crew lost and offered me to take some pictures, you don't hear much about that, but the 14 astronauts you hear about. The effort of the country on Apollo was much bigger, than history talks about.

- I was proud as hell to be a part of what they were and be a part of what they did, I don't know how you could ever do anything better in your lifetime as an engineer or leader. [gentle uplifting music]