The Giant Leap - The Apollo 11 Lunar Landing

The Giant Leap: The Apollo 11 Lunar Landing An Interview with Dr. Dennis Sager By Annemarie Gray February 3, 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS Statement of Purpose Biography Historical Contextualization Interview Transcription Interview Analysis Works Consulted Statement of Purpose The purpose of this oral history is to provide a more complete understanding of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, through an interview with Dr. Dennis Sager. Dr. Sager’s perspective as an engineer at NASA doing calculations for the Apollo missions allows him to support as well as challenge existing knowledge on the event. This project also aims to examine the importance of this mission in the greater context of the space race during the Cold War. Table of Contents Biography of Dr. Dennis Sager Dennis Sager was born in 1946 in Richmond, Virginia. In his childhood years he read about the upcoming U.S. satellite program, Project Vanguard, in magazines and watched the early U.S. space flights of people such as Alan Shepard and John Glenn on television. Dr. Sager graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond in 1964. With an interest in science and engineering, he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He worked at the radio station at MIT and had a special interest in the space program. In the summer of 1967, after his junior year in college, Dr. Sager worked as an engineering trainee at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Langley, Virginia, focusing on flight testing of the Kestrel vertical takeoff jet. Dr. Sager graduated from MIT in 1968 with a B.S. in Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering. He began work at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, as a Trajectory Analyst. He provided real-time trajectory, systems, and computational support for Apollo missions 7 through 12, including the first lunar landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. From 1969 to 1975, Dr. Sager worked for the MITRE Corporation as a systems engineer in the development of air traffic control automation for the Federal Aviation Administration. He returned to graduate school at MIT, getting a Masters degree in aeronautics and astronautics in 1973. Dr. Sager also served as a research assistant in the MIT Flight Transportation Laboratory from 1971 to 1973. After years of working in the field of aeronautics and astronautics, he decided in the mid1970s to make a career change and become a doctor. He graduated from Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia in 1978 and became a resident in Internal Medicine at Wright State University in Dayton, OH. He has practiced internal medicine since 1981 in private practice and at Reston Hospital since it opened in 1986, serving in a number of positions, including Chairman of the Department of Medicine from 1993 to 1994. Dr. Sager has been married to Jeanne Kaswell since 1968 and has four grown-up children, Lauren, Deborah, Michael, and Jill. He currently resides in Reston, VA. Table of Contents The Space Race and the Apollo 11 Mission “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” Astronaut Neil Armstrong told mission control on July 20, 1969 as the lunar module softly landed on the dusty surface of the moon. An estimated one-seventh of the world crowded around their television sets to witness a human being take the first steps onto another world. “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” was the famous line Armstrong spoke as he stepped off the ladder of the module. The human race had achieved an epic and unparalleled technological feat and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit, only 66 years after the Wright brothers first took flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. This success was due to the hard work of hundreds of thousands of people. Space exploration requires expertise in every field, from rocketry to medicine and everything in between. Since Armstrong’s famous words, five other missions have landed on the moon, and humans have learned more about our Earth as well as the world outside our own planet. However, this triumphant technological achievement was not only about exploring our universe. It was the product of an extreme political rivalry on earth. The Apollo 11 mission was the result of a bitter competition between the Soviet Union and the United States at the height of the Cold War, known as the space race. Mankind’s fascination with the moon began long ago. The moon’s size and distance were determined with remarkable accuracy around 130 BC by Greek Astronomer Hipparchus. In 1609 astronomer Galileo Galilei used his telescope to reveal the rugged detail of the moon. As technology slowly advanced, people began to wonder what kind of vehicle could be used to transport humans out of the Earth. French author Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, describing a gigantic cannon called Columbiad that could fire a manned projectile to the moon. Verne was said to have “lit the fuse of the Space Age” (Reynolds 16), as attention was drawn to making this dream of space flight a reality. The development of the rocket was a key step for space exploration. In 1903 Russian theorist and teacher Konstantin Tsiolkosky discovered mathematical calculations and design concepts that laid the foundations for liquid-fueled rocketry. American physics professor Robert Goddard launched the first working liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926 in Massachusetts. The rocket played a major role in the Second World War from 1941 to 1945 and foreshadowed a new type of warfare where nuclear weapons could travel quickly across the world. The first atomic bomb was dropped by the United States on August 6, 1945 and helped end World War II. With the development of nuclear weapons came the idea that the rockets could be used for space exploration, as the engine of the rocket was the only engine that could operate in a vacuum. In the late 1950s Soviets and Americans began sending rockets into space for research purposes. The U.S. initially favored bombers, while the Soviets favored missiles and thus took an early lead in rocket technology (Collins 14). German engineer Wernher von Braun developed the V-2 missile, inspiring Americans and Soviets to develop their own long-range missiles. Following World War II the U.S. and the Soviet Union engaged in a bitter Cold War between the competing ideologies of communism and capitalism, and space exploration quickly became a battleground for this war. The Soviet Union and the United States believed that the country that had a larger presence in space would be seen as having better technology and political leadership. “It is quite possible that an aggressor nation that dominated space will then dominate the world; we just can’t let that happen,” as quoted by a speaker in the video To the Moon. In 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower said, “What makes the Soviet threat unique in history is its all-inclusiveness. Every human activity is pressed into service as a weapon of expansion, trade, economic development, military power, arts, science, education, the whole world of ideas…The Soviets are, in short, waging total cold war” (qtd. in Collins 7). In the United States, every American event of the space race was publicized and broadcast for the entire nation to witness. A common view was that “people weren’t that excited about exploration, but they were sure excited about beating the Russians” (qtd. in To the Moon). On October 4, 1957 the Soviets stunned the world, launching the first manmade satellite, Sputnik. This shiny basketball-sized sphere containing radio transmitters sent the space race into full throttle. This was a huge defeat for the U.S., a “Pearl Harbor in space” (To the Moon), giving the impression to the rest of the world that the Soviets were superior in science and technology. An article from The New York Times the day after the launch stated that Vanguard, the U.S. satellite program, was an “open” project and did not have the goal of rushing satellites into space in order to beat an opponent. The article suggested that “the Russians deliberately may have placed great emphasis, time and money in getting a satellite into orbit first in order to embarrass the United States” (Special to The New York Times). This “October surprise” was followed a month later by the launching of Sputnik 2, this time containing a dog named Laika. On October 4, 1959, exactly two years after Sputnik, the Soviet Union sent the first spacecraft around the moon. The Luna 3 recorded images of the moon’s far side and broadcast them to earth. On March 23, 1961, the Soviet test flight mannequin named Ivan Ivanovich orbited the earth to test the spacecraft and the space suit. The Soviet Union had another important first when they put the first man, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, in space on April 2, 1961. The idea of the Soviet Union beating the U.S. was a threatening one, and in 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, or NASA. Project Mercury began with the goal of putting an American in space. The seven Mercury astronauts, Walter Schirra, Donald Slayton, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and Gordon Cooper, were seen as national heroes. The video To the Moon refers to them as “Cold War warriors battling communism in space.” America’s first success came on January 31, 1958, when the first American satellite, Explorer 1, was lofted into space. Although still behind, the U.S. had overcome its initial stumble and was now a competitor in the space race. Americans figured that the only way to beat the Soviets in this race would be to make the first manned lunar landing. In the 1950’s a tiny group of engineers began a secret program to plan a trip to the moon at the Langley Research Center in Virginia. Before beginning work an approach to the moon needed to be decided on. This decision was crucial, for all were aware that a bad choice would mean losing to the Soviets. The first idea was a direct ascent using one tall spacecraft called the Apollo tail sitter. This approach required a new type of rocket, but it was not clear whether it would be possible to build. Another idea was an EOR, or an earth orbit rendezvous, where two small rockets would be launched, one spacecraft and one fuel-carrier, and could meet in earth’s orbit. The difficulty in this approach was that it would require two rockets rather than one. NASA engineer John Hoboult advocated for an LOR approach, or a lunar orbit rendezvous, that would require less fuel and less weight. In the LOR approach a lunar module would separate from the main command module in the moon’s orbit and land on the moon, while the command module would remain in the moon’s orbit. When the lunar module re-entered the moon’s orbit it would unite with the command module and the two would return to Earth. Though this was a risky endeavor, it was eventually the agreed-upon approach. On May 5, 1961 Alan Shepard became the first American in space. As the New York Times article on May 6 explained, The achievement of the first American astronaut also revealed to the world the vast difference between the practices employed by a free society as compared with those used by Soviet Russia …Whereas Russia’s first space test was shrouded in complete secrecy and the world was not told about it until it was an accomplished fact… the American test was announced long in advance and was done with the eyes of all the world watching…The country and the free world join in heartiest congratulations to Commander Shepard and the other six astronauts who trained with him… to uphold America’s prestige in its program to conquer space. (The New York Times 1961) This first success led to the next task of sending an American into orbit. Shepard’s flight instilled confidence in the U.S., and on May 25, 1961 President John F. Kennedy announced the nation’s goal, as well as setting a deadline: I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. (qtd. in Reynolds 42) The pressure was now on the United States to make a lunar landing, an extremely ambitious goal considering the total time spent in space by an American at this time was barely 15 minutes. Next, the nation took steps so it would be fully prepared for a lunar landing by the end of the decade. NASA took on a series of programs in which each program would build on and extend the previous ones. In February 1962, John Glenn spent five hours in earth’s orbit on the Mercury 6. After Shepard’s and Glenn’s successes along with four other manned missions in the Mercury program, NASA looked to the Gemini program. From 1964 to 1966 ten manned Gemini missions improved techniques of spacecraft control, rendezvous, and extravehicular activity, or spacewalking. Gemini missions spent as long as two weeks in space, assuring that a future crew would be able to survive long enough in space to make a lunar landing. In June 1965, astronaut Ed White became the first American to spacewalk. Although Soviet Aleksei Leonov had already achieved this feat in March of 1965, White’s publicly broadcasted spacewalk let the world know that the U.S. was working hard and slowly catching up to the Soviet Union. The Gemini program came to a triumphant finish in November 1966 and demonstrated that an LOR approach would be successful for a lunar landing. Finally, NASA began the Apollo program to travel the far side of the moon and land men on the moon’s surface. The United States faced its first failure in 1967 with the Apollo 1 mission. During a dress rehearsal in the newly designed command module four weeks before their scheduled launch, astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee were sealed in the high-pressure module filled with pure oxygen. Sparks from the exposed wiring in the module quickly turned into a fire. The astronauts desperately tried to unseal the inward-opening hatch, but it took at least a few minutes to open in normal conditions. By the time the technicians got it open the three were dead. The tragedy brought the nation to realize how dangerous the activities were. NASA investigated the causes of the fire and found serious design flaws that were immediately improved for future missions. This was crucial, since a flawless design was essential for beating the Soviets to the moon by the end of the decade. Though Apollo 1 was the United States’ first major failure in the space race, the corrections made as a result of the accident were necessary for a successful mission to the moon. Apollo missions after Apollo 1 proved to be successful. In December 1968 Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders took mankind’s first ever look at the dark side of the moon and witnessed the first earthrise. The famous picture of earthrise gave a new perspective of our planet: a beautiful island paradise in the dark, cold void of space. In the midst of the bitter competition of the Cold War this image showed the bigger picture of how all forms of life known in our universe are packed together onto one relatively small planet. Bill Anders later told space historian Andrew Chaikin, “We had come all this way to study the Moon, and what we discovered was the Earth” (qtd. in Reynolds 110). Apollo 8 was also the first manned Saturn V rocket, and it beat the Soviets in a manned mission to the moon. The astronauts were a record 69 miles from the moon’s surface (Chaikin 113) and studied the surface for an adequate landing spot for the lunar landing mission. Apollo 9 and 10 served as final tests for the lunar space suit and the landing of the lunar module. As astronaut Neil Armstrong said in Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, “All was ready. Everything had been done. Projects Mercury and Gemini. Seven years of Project Apollo. The work of more than 300,000 Americans. Six previous unmanned and manned Apollo flights. Planning, testing, analyzing, training. The time had come” (qtd. in Cortright 203). On July 16, 1969 astronauts Neil Armstrong (commander of the mission), Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins were strapped into the 363-foot tall Saturn V rocket and took off for the moon. The three coasted out of earth’s orbit and began the 240,000 mile journey to the moon. The early operations went smoothly. Once they were safely in the moon’s orbit, the command module, called Columbia and holding Collins, detached from the landing module, called Eagle and holding Armstrong and Aldrin, 70 miles above the surface of the moon. The command module was to continue orbiting the moon as the landing module was to attempt the first lunar landing. Even after over a decade of preparations for the mission, Armstrong and Aldrin only had a 50-50 chance for a successful landing. There was no backup mission ready to rescue them if something were to go wrong. If they could not launch off the moon Collins would have to return to earth alone, and Armstrong and Aldrin would be left on the moon, doomed with extremely limited supplies. On Sunday, July 20, 1969, as Collins fell out of contact from the earth on the back side of the moon, Armstrong and Aldrin began their descent. The landing module was going faster than planned, and it overshot the expected landing site. 1,000 feet above the surface, the module was headed for a crater the size of a football field surrounded by a field of boulders (Chaikin 196). The options for the two astronauts were land or abort. With no time to discuss the decision with mission control, Armstrong decided to land and took over the controls, searching for an adequate landing spot. Finally, Armstrong found what he was looking for: a clearing just beyond a small crater. With thirty seconds of fuel left, the contact light illuminated, verifying that the module was right over the surface. With the engine still firing Eagle gently settled onto the moon. After shutting off the engine, Armstrong said through his mike, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” (qtd. in Chaikin 200). A sigh of relief came from Houston’s mission control. Capcom Charlie Duke replied to Armstrong, “Roger, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot” (qtd. in Chaikin 200). Six hours later, after Armstrong and Aldrin were fully rested, the two prepared to take the first steps onto another world. On the brightly lit, dusty surface under the pitch-black sky, Armstrong stepped down the ladder of the lunar module. After briefly describing the surface, he stepped off and spoke the famous: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind” (qtd. in Reynolds 146). A man had set foot on the moon. This unparalleled event was watched by an estimated 600 million people, more than any single event in history (Chaikin 213). Armstrong and Aldrin captured some of the twentieth century’s most iconic images, collected 3.7 billion-year-old moon rocks and moon dust to return to earth for study, and set up experiments on the moon’s surface. They planted the American flag along with a plaque reading, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind” (qtd. in Reynolds 147). President Nixon contacted Armstrong while on the moon. Nixon said, “For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one,” and Armstrong humbly replied, “It is a great honor and privilege for us to be here representing not only the United States but men of all peaceable nations with an interest and a curiosity and a vision for the future” (Reynolds 147). An article in The New York Times the day after the landing describes the sense of awe people felt while watching the moonwalk, and how the lunar module and the astronauts seemed “more like a toy and toy-like figures than human beings on the most daring and far-reaching expedition thus far undertaken” (Wilford 1). The adventure had been born of an arms race and the Cold War, but ended in an unprecedented transformation. The winners of a bitter competition did no victory dance, but instead shared the miraculous experience with all mankind. David West Reynolds says in his book Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon, “Sputnik had begun the Space Race with fear. Apollo 11 ended it with hope” (148). After a short 2 hours and 21 minutes, the two astronauts returned to the ladder and prepared for return to their home planet. Though the United States had successfully landed on the moon before the Soviets, Kennedy’s goal would not be achieved unless the lunar module could launch off the moon, meet with Collins in the command module, and safely return to earth. Armstrong and Aldrin strapped into the module, and, using the lower part as a launch pad, launched the upper part off the moon’s surface. They successfully met with Columbia in the moon’s orbit, transferred to the sardine-can sized module and performed the necessary operations to return to earth. Upon arrival to earth the three astronauts were sealed in a trailer for two weeks as if they themselves were lunar samples. They recounted all aspects of the flight in extreme detail and were tested for possible reactions in their minds or bodies from the moon environment. When they were finally released they were world-renowned heroes and global icons of pioneering. The space race had come to a triumphant end for the Americans. While the U.S. was preparing their Apollo program, the Soviet Union had automated lunar programs that had orbited, landed on, and gathered samples from the moon. It even had a lunar landing scheduled for late 1968. However, since the Soviets did not reveal their projects the world was unaware of this. The Soviets had successfully developed a lunar orbiter, a lunar lander, and a space suit for the moon, yet they never made a manned mission. The crucial missing piece was a rocket powerful and reliable enough to send a manned spacecraft to the moon. The world was unaware that only about 20 of about 60 launches of lunar probes were successful (Collins 65). Unlike the mighty Saturn V rocket of the Americans, which made 32 successful launches and zero failures, the Soviet N-1 moon rocket never made it into space. In February of 1969 an engine fire caused an N-1 rocket to shut down and crash a minute after liftoff. In July of the same year a rocket shut down seconds after liftoff, fell onto the launch pad, and exploded, destroying the launch site along with any hope that the Soviets could reach the moon ahead of the U.S. Instead, they attempted to receive the first lunar rock and soil samples from a robot. The Luna 15 automated sample return craft was launched to the moon two days before Apollo 11, and was scheduled to return just hours ahead of the Apollo 11 crew. However, the Luna 15 crash-landed on the moon shortly after Armstrong and Aldrin stepped onto it. Recent studies confirm deficiencies in the Soviet space program that prevented its later success, such as problems with the supply of hardware, absence of a national space agency, low priority of a manned lunar program, and the lack of a long-term master plan for space exploration (Collins 76). Since Apollo 11, theories have arisen that the lunar landing was staged and Americans have never actually been to the moon. On February 15, 2001 Fox TV aired a program titled “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?” People believing in this theory argue that the nation simply did not have enough technology at this time and staged a lunar landing in order to win the space race. Their arguments include the lack of stars in pictures taken by Apollo astronauts from the surface of the moon, identical backgrounds in pictures, a waving American flag in windless space, and the absence of a crater from the rocket. Theorists accuse NASA of having killed the Apollo 1 astronauts because they threatened to let the secret out. With hundreds of thousands of workers on the Apollo missions, over 30 years since the missions, no traces of evidence for these theories from authorities such as NASA or the federal government, along with the fact that these theories have been formulated by people who are anything but professionals in the field, these theories hardly make sense and are impossible to believe. Critics argue that America’s space program and the space race in the 1960s with the Soviets was essentially a waste of time and money. The total amount spent on the effort to land humans on the moon, which culminated with Apollo 11, summed to about $25 billion (Lapp 1). Dr. Ralph E. Lapp argues that scientists gained very little knowledge from the manned space flights (Lapp 1). Lapp shares this view with Margaret W. Rossiter, who wrote Science and Public Policy since World War II: “Scientists thought more data could be obtained by sending instruments rather than men into space, and social critics questioned the need for such an expensive ‘stunt’ when Americans were starving and ghettos were burning” (Rossiter 289). Project Apollo cost so much money because of man: a robot performing useful scientific research does not create the same emotional effect as having a human being step onto the moon and speak to his fellow people, nor is it more impressive to an opponent in the space race. Though costly, the greatest experiences come out of manned missions, and some ask what the point of living is if one is unable to explore the surrounding world. Space exploration continued for the Americans, who launched 6 more lunar landing missions, Apollo 12 through 17, up until 1972. All were successful except Apollo 13. However, the missions following Apollo 11 received considerably less publicity. Humans had already landed on the moon; doing it again could not be as exciting as the first time. Also, by the time the space race was over, other national interests dominated the scene. As a congressional historian wrote, The high drama of the first landing on the Moon was over. The players and stagehands stood around waiting for more curtain calls, but the audience drifted away. . . . The bloody carnage in Vietnam, the plight of the cities, the revolt on the campuses, the monetary woes of budget deficits and inflation, plus a widespread determination to reorder priorities pushed the manned space effort lower in national support. (Compton 7) After the last lunar landing of Apollo 17 in 1972, the focus of the space program shifted to other projects. In 1972, the Soviet Union and the United States united to form the ApolloSoyuz Project, a joint venture in space discovery. NASA focused on developing a reusable Space Shuttle in the 1970s for future missions in earth’s orbit. In 1973 and early 1974, U.S. astronauts occupied Skylab, an experimental space station. Another development has been the Hubble Space Telescope, an orbiting observatory that examines our universe. NASA is currently working with other nations to develop an International Space Station. Another important legacy of the space race has been the ability to receive information and photographs from spy satellites. From 1960 until 1972 a reconnaissance project known as Corona was established. Corona was a response to fear of nuclear attack by the secretive Soviet Union, something that played a major role during the remainder of the Cold War. President Lyndon B. Johnson commented in 1967 that, We’ve spent between thirty-five and forty billion dollars on space… but if nothing else had come form that program except the knowledge that we get from our satellite photography, it would be worth ten times to us what the whole program has cost. (Collins 90) As said in the video To the Moon, “The quest that began as a desperate race against the Russians at the height of the Cold War has ended. How ironic that an effort born of bitter conflict produced the most profound images ever seen of the interconnectedness of mankind and opened a window on our common origins.” The effort and knowledge of hundreds of thousands of people eventually put two U.S. citizens on the moon, beating the Soviet Union in the space race. If it had not been for this battle of the Cold War, humans may still be dreaming of exploring other planets. This trip to the moon was the greatest technological achievement of the twentieth century. The 66 years between the Wright brothers’ first airplane flight and the Apollo 11 landing reminds the world of the incredible achievements of mankind in this century. Even more important, space exploration has given all of mankind a lesson in perspective. On our tiny earth millions of people are being killed and persecuted, yet our planet, our island paradise in the black void of space, is the sole and invaluable holder of the most precious and unique resource: life. An article the day after the Apollo 11 landing in The New York Times read, “For all his resplendent glory as he steps forth on another planet, man is still a pathetic creature,… able to conquer new worlds yet unable to live in peace on this one” (The New York Times 1969). Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman said it best while witnessing earthrise on Christmas Eve of 1968 when mission control radioed, “There’s a beautiful moon out there tonight,” and he replied softly, “There’s a beautiful earth out there” (qtd. in Reynolds 111). While it was a tremendous achievement to get to the moon, the ability to observe our world from a new perspective was equally inspiring. Table of Contents Interview Transcription Interviewee/ Narrator: Dennis Sager Interviewer: Annemarie Gray Location: Dennis Sager’s home, Reston, VA Date: December 20, 2003 This interview was reviewed and edited by Dr. Sager Annemarie Gray: What was it like growing up in Richmond during the 1950s? Dennis Sager: Well, Richmond was a very nice place to grow up. And, it was, it’s a nice city as a child. Things were different growing up in Richmond, and things were different in the 50s. I knew neighbors blocks away. I probably knew everybody within a two block radius of my house, at least I knew who they were. And I used to walk around the neighborhood as a small child unsupervised, a little different than it is now. AG: When did you become interested in engineering? DS: I was interested in the whole broad area of science and engineering from when I was, probably, even before I was ten years old. I used to read the articles in the paper about atomic bomb tests, about planes, about other science articles. There were a number of magazinesmagazines like Life and Look were much more popular and important- those magazines have gone away now, but they were very important because we didn’t have television at that time as developed as it is now. They would run articles about the coming space program, articles about the International Geophysical Year, which was actually a little more than a year, but a period of increased solar activity, I think it was increased- that was in the 1957-58 time frame. And the U.S. was planning to launch the first satellite, not talking about with people just unmanned satellites during that time- it was Project Vanguard. And there were a lot of articles in magazines about Project Vanguard, and I would read those and became very interested in them. AG: Did your interest in the space program influence your decision to go to MIT? DS: I think it did, although, at the time that I went I wasn’t sure that that’s what I was going to work on. I was interested in meteorology, I was interested in a lot of different science things, and I wasn’t certain what area that I would work on at the time that I went to MIT. AG: What was it like living during, what many historians say was, the height of the Cold War? DS: Well, the things that would be major news items today that we’d be talking about for weeks and months were happening every day, and this was particularly in the 60s. And there was one day in 1968, fall of 68 if I remember this correctly I hope I have this correct, where I think there was a hurricane, Khrushchev was deposed from power, China set off its first atomic bomb, and it was one day after another there was a major news story at that time; things were happening all over the world at a much faster pace, during that time. AG: How did you get involved in NASA? DS: I was always interested in the space program, from the very beginning of the unmanned program, Sputnik in 57, U.S. efforts in 1958, and the manned space flights- which I was in high school at the time. I was born in 46, and John Glenn went up in 1962, and Alan Shepard in 61, May of 1961, I was, let’s see, when I turned 15, I guess I was still 14, when Alan Shepard made the first sub-orbital flight. I used to watch all of these things on television, come to school late. (Annemarie laughs) Sometimes we would listen, things were going on- during school I would always bring my radio to school to listen, I had one chemistry teacher who wouldn’t let us listen, she’d say John Glenn would rather you study chemistry (Annemarie laughs) than listen to the space flight. And I can tell her, actually, that she was wrong. (both laugh) So, teachers aren’t always right. (laughs) So, I was always very interested in it- in spaceflight, at that time. I went to MIT, and I wasn’t sure what I wanted to study, but I picked aeronautics and astronautics. We had to pick our major by the end of our freshman year, and that’s what I picked to study. I worked in the radio station at MIT, and covered a lot of news, I was in the news department, assistant news director, and covered the space program, and I remained interested. After my junior year in college, I worked, in the summer after my junior year, as a research intern, for the summer. Summer engineering trainees, is what we were called, at NASA Langley. And, at that time, actually worked on vertical takeoff aircraft. Have you ever heard of the Harrier, vertical takeoff jet? This was a predecessor to that aircraft, that we were doing flight testing on. When I was there, you know, I would sneak over, well not sneak over, but take some time to go over and watch some of the Apollo astronauts training. They had no Apollo flights at that time, but the first crew was training in a simulator that they had at NASA Langley. So, that continued my interest.. I got a job at TRW systems. They supported NASA in the mission control center in Houston, and, so I went to work there. AG: And, how did you get involved in the Apollo program? DS: The timing was this: the Apollo program had unmanned flights while I was still in college. Remember I had done some broadcast work and I was interested in the space program, and actually in January of 1967 I went to New York during winter break, I stopped in New York, and I visited and talked to, actually, Jules Bergman, who was the science reporter for ABC. And I asked him if he was interested in having anyone work during the mission to help them out, just in the back room, not on the air, but in the back room, you know, just to help them out, during the flight. And he actually said that he might be interested in my doing that, I don’t know whether he was just being nice to me or whether they figured someone from MIT during the space program might be some use,. That was the end of January of 1967. And the first manned Apollo flights were scheduled to go into earth orbit in early 1967. And what would happen at the end of January 1967? AG: Was that Apollo 1? DS: That would be the Apollo 1 fire. And that was, I left New York, and came back to Richmond, and then the next night or something was the Apollo 1. AG: How were you affected by that? DS: I mean I was certainly upset by it. I wasn’t working on the program at that time. I didn’t know anybody involved. But in a very ironic way, this allowed me to work on the program. If all had gone well, I mean if they didn’t have the fire, the program would have gone- they would have landed earlier. And I would not have had the chance to work on it. AG: Well, I also read in my research that, they say that, if they hadn’t had the Apollo 1 fire, it wouldn’t have been possible to make a landing, because of the corrections that they made. DS: There’s probably some truth to that, because there were a lot of problems, and they took a step back and looked at them, they looked at everything again. The Apollo, you know that was called a Block I spacecraft, it was sort of the early design. Then they already knew as they were building it that they would have to make some modifications, for following flights. But yes, it did make them go back and look at the program again. They had been warned- you know the Apollo 1 fire, do you understand- there were a couple of problems that led up to the Apollo1 fire. First problem was that in the second Mercury flight that Gus Grissom was on, when the capsule landed the hatch flew off, and the capsule started to fill with water. This was a sub-orbital flight; it was the second Mercury flight. He almost drowned, because when the capsule started to fill with water and it started to sink. And, he got out, the helicopter attached to the top of the capsule but it was filling up so much that they had to let it go otherwise it would pull the helicopter down. He got out, and they had to pick him up out of the ocean. Now, nobody knows why the hatch blew off, some think he blew it off (laughs), but I don’t know, by accident. But they made it, in Apollo, in a very, really not very bright move, they made the hatch very difficult to open. AG: And it opened inward, I read. DS: Yeah, you had to unscrew a whole bunch of bolts. And, so it was a whole big process to get the hatch off. That was the first problem. The second problem was they were using pure oxygen at higher pressure, at atmospheric pressure. The reason that they used pure oxygen is that, have you ever heard of the bends, do you know what the bends are? AG: Yeah. DS: Yeah, the nitrogen in your blood.1 So they were using that. They had been warned that there was big fire potential with pure oxygen. And the person that warned them was my fatherin-law. When he was doing this, I didn’t know him, I wasn’t married at the time, we got married in 1968, so I didn’t know him. But, he was a textile expert, and he actually was doing work for NASA, and he had shown that what would happen if anything had caught fire in 100% oxygen that many things that wouldn’t burn in regular air would burn pretty rapidly in 100% oxygen. _____+. So you take the 100% oxygen, the door that couldn’t open, and really somewhat faulty workmanship in the command module- where the wiring and other things are not done as well as they should have been. AG: Yeah, I read that. You were in your early 20s during the Apollo program. DS: Yes. AG: Do you think your experience was any different being one of the younger ones there? DS: Yeah, I think so. Everybody was young. AG: Oh, really? 1 Decompression sickness or gas bubble disease, also known as the bends, occurs when astronauts, divers, or aviators move too quickly from higher to lower atmospheric pressures. This causes severe pain and weakness, and extreme cases paralysis. DS: I was the youngest of the young, but everybody was young. If I had been any younger I couldn’t have done it, because I graduated in 1968 and went right to work there, and the first manned Apollo flights were in the fall of 1968. So if I had been any later, any younger, I could not have worked there. If I had been older, a few years older, and I wanted to work there, I could have probably been at a higher level and a better position, and some of the people that had had very major roles in this were not too much older than I was. I mean, an old guy that I worked with was 34, but most of the people that I worked with were in their 20s or early 30s. One of the flight controllers, Steve Bales, played a very key role as a guidance officer, a very key role in the landing.2 He was only 24, 25 years old. AG: I wonder ___ that. DS: Yeah he was maybe 26, it might have been 24, he was very young. I didn’t know him, but I know he was about that age. AG: Going back a little, do you remember Sputnik? DS: Yes, I do. AG: And do you think Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s response to Sputnik with the establishment of NASA and the goal, what do you think of that? DS: Well, I think it’s great. And I think that there’s a historical perspective to all of this. A thousand years from now when people look back, and as we look back at what happened a thousand or two thousand years ago in history, one of the key points in history is going to be our going to the moon. Exploration has been one of the most important parts of history. And this is probably one of the most exciting pieces of exploration in the history of mankind, and they’re not going to remember the Vietnam War, a lot of other current issues, the war in Iraq, or all these 2 Steve Bales made the final decision to go through with the landing rather than abort after a descent 1201 Program Alarm went off. minor footnotes in history that people won’t know about years from now, but they will know about the landing on the moon. AG: I watched this video called To the Moon that I used for my research and I found this quote: “People weren’t that excited about exploration, but they sure were excited about beating the Russians.” To what extent did you feel this way or did you sense these feelings in NASA? DS: No, I think that that’s somewhat of a revisionist history. There’s an attitude that people have that, oh, go back and you sort of alter people’s motives, to have better motives, and its sort of to make it less important or less noble, to go out there, “well that was just to beat the Russians.” Well beating the Russians was important, there was an issue there, and it was important. And there was competition in the sense that if you were working on this great exploration that you would hate to be the second person there. You realize, for example, that there was this competition, that in the first manned space flight, that Alan Shepard, in early May of 1961, but he was the second man in space. Now he didn’t go in orbit, but he did go on a space flight, a sub-orbital flight. Yuri Gagarin was in April 1961, it was less than a month earlier. I mean it was close, if the Russians had had a little bit of a problem, or if the U.S. had been a little quicker, the U.S. would have had the first person in space- not in orbit, but in space. So, there was that sense of competition, and it did affect, certainly, Kennedy. That was a major reason Kennedy initiated the space race. But I think that to say that people didn’t really care about the exploration, but just wanted to beat the Russians, is not correct. I think it’s not giving people the credit that they deserve. AG: When you heard about the deadline that Kennedy had set, did you think it was possible to land people on the moon? DS: It was 1961 when he said it, on my birthday, in 1961, so I was 15 years old, May 25, 1961. Yeah, I guess I assumed, I mean I was 15 years old. At 16 you get a lot more wisdom (both laugh). From what I remember, I don’t remember one way or the other, saying whether that was a possible goal or not. AG: When you got involved in the Apollo mission did you think it was reasonable? DS: Yes. AG: Ok, how did the Mercury and Gemini programs influence the Apollo program? DS: I mean they were clearly essential first steps. I’m sure you know; it looks like you’ve done a lot of research. The Mercury was a single-manned capsule going into earth orbit of which there was no capability to maneuver in orbit. They could change the attitude- do you know what the word attitude- attitude, I’m not talking about your relationship with teachers here (laughs), I’m talking about the orientation of the spacecraft is called the attitude, and the terms are yaw, pitch, and roll. Do you want to know what yaw, pitch, and roll are? (both laugh) AG: Yeah, sure, briefly. [Interview interrupted to explain technical terms using small model spacecraft: Yaw- the shifting of the front of the spacecraft horizontally Pitch- the shifting of the front of the spacecraft vertically Roll- the spacecraft rolling to one side] DS: On Mercury, all they could do was change their attitude, the yaw, pitch, and roll. But they could not maneuver in orbit. There was no computer for the Mercury spacecraft. In Gemini, or Gemini [two different pronunciations of the last syllable], there’s an interesting story of what the program was called. The constellation, Gemini, the public affairs officer at NASA announced it, and called it Gemini [one pronunciation] when he announced it and so, he said, “Well, the constellation may be Gemini [other pronunciation], but I’m calling it Gemini.” So, it got called both. But Gemini was a two-manned spacecraft and they had a computer onboard, a small one. They could maneuver the spacecraft, they could change the orbit, and they could rendezvous and dock. And so the US, although they did not have the first space flight, and space walk, they did have the first rendezvous in orbit and that was in Gemini. And they had the first docking in orbit. AG: Were there fears that the Soviet Union had missions planned that would beat the U.S. to the moon? DS: Yes, there were. And they did have missions planned, and they had some big problems and they wanted to land but they had an accident. A number of people were killed, and I think that pretty much stopped their manned lunar plan. When I talked to you about the competition, although I downplayed its significance in some sense, the Russians were still competitive. So when the US sent Apollo 11 for the first lunar landing, the Russians sent an unmanned spacecraft– AG: The Luna 15? DS: I don’t remember the number. They attempted to land the unmanned spacecraft on the moon, scoop up rocks, and bring the moon rocks back one day sooner than the Apollo astronauts would get back to the moon. AG: I actually heard a couple hours in my research. DS: It could have been even a couple hours. It didn’t work, but the thing did go into orbit around the moon, and they were in a lunar orbit, that was very similar, we thought, to the orbit that the Apollo was in, and we were concerned that the two would collide so one of the guys and I attempted to figure out what the orbit was of the Russian spacecraft using very limited amount of data from the Jodrell Bank Observatory [a large radio telescope in England]. They Russians wouldn’t tell us what their orbit was. You have done a lot of research. I am absolutely amazed that you knew about this (Annemarie laughs). So we attempted to use the acquisition time of the signal. We were manually doing this. The other person had worked before, he was older than I was, and he had worked at the North American Air Defense Command, and he in the past had worked on attempting to determine the orbits of satellites, of Russian satellites before, around the earth, so he know how to do that. He was the main person, and I was helping him out. But the two of us were the two trying to figure out what the Russian satellite orbit was, and make sure there was no danger of collision. AG: Did you find anything? DS: I’m not sure we got a right orbit, we found something out, we made some estimate, but I don’t know if it was the correct estimate or not. They asked us not to say anything about what we were doing. I mean it didn’t officially get classified, but it was sort of like just do this quietly. AG: What was exactly your job on the Apollo program? DS: On the Apollo program I worked in a facility called the Real Time Auxiliary Computing Facility, RTACF, and that is also called, it has another acronym, called the Auxiliary Computing Room, or Auxiliary Computer Room, called the ACR, so the official name was this. [holds up binder with the name on it] When we would speak through the headsets between the support room and back to us, they wouldn’t say RTACF, they’d say ACR. We talked mainly to a place called Trajectory, which was the Trajectory Staff Support Room. Trajectory is the path an object takes. If I throw a ball in the air, the path that it takes, the speed that it has, and where it goes, is its trajectory. A bullet has a trajectory, a spacecraft has a trajectory. So Trajectory is just what they call the support room, because everybody had to have a name that was unique. So we were ACR, we talked to Trajectory primarily. AG: So you worked with the path. DS: Yeah, the most important thing we did was with the path to figure out where the spacecraft was going, and to figure out what maneuvers needed to be done to make it go where we wanted it to go. We also did, remember we talked about attitude, we also would give the spacecraft attitude – what attitude to adjust to, to orient, so that they could see things out the window, or see things through their telescope, or even what attitude to take so that the heating on the spacecraft would be right so that there would be more uniform heating, one part wouldn’t get too cold and another wouldn’t get too warm. So that was the second thing. So it was things with maneuvers, things with attitude adjustments, computing where the center of gravity was, which was important for the entry back into the earth’s atmosphere. We did other minor things. I computed the solar radiation dosage that people would have if there were flares. In fact there was a flare on Apollo 12, and I made a run, wanted to make sure there wasn’t going to be too much solar radiation on the astronauts during the spacewalk on Apollo 12. These were lesser ones, but we computed how much heat load the astronauts had walking on the moon. During Gemini there were problems on one of the extravehicular activities [spacewalks]. The astronaut in weightlessness, trying to control their attitude, was so difficult and required so much work that they began sweating profusely. AG: Which one was this again? Ed White? DS: No, Ed White was the first walk, and he didn’t have a big problem because he had a little maneuvering unit, and he was just kind of floating out, so he didn’t have much of a problem. The problem was on 9, Gemini 9 or 10, it might have been Gene Cernan3, I think who had the problem. And he had trouble getting back in. What happens if you start sweating and you’ve got a visor in front of you? It all fogs up on the inside, not on the outside, on the inside. So what can you do? Take it off and wipe it, I mean you can’t. So he couldn’t see. So he’s sweating profusely, his heart rate went way up, (?which is not good?). He can’t see to get back in. So they were a little bit worried. They had him just hold on and sit for awhile. So they said this won’t work. So they had to develop a couple things. They had to develop better cooling, and they had to develop a means for them to anchor themselves during extravehicular activity. They did develop better cooling. One of the things that I did during moonwalks was compute how much heat was being generated by the astronauts, how much cooling was needed. Well it turns out they so over-designed the cooling that no one ever took it out of the minimum setting. They had so much spare capacity in the cooling that there was never a problem, never even close to a problem. But that was on Apollo, because of what happened on Gemini they made sure there was plenty of cooling. They had suits with little tubes in it, with the cooling garment. And they would run chilled water through those suits, to keep the people cool. AG: How much more difficult were the calculations without today’s technology? DS: We used… I’m gonna see if I’ve got a sample printout. We used punch cards to input, and had paper output. We were the second real-time computer system. There were two real-time computer systems. The main one was made by IBM, a 360 Model 75 computer, and we actually had several of them running at one time. Their input was entered on a crude typewriter with a teletype type of input. It went clunk, clunk, clunk, clunk, and they typed on that, and they had display screens like you saw in the pictures in the control center. But that was revolutionary, that 3 Gene Cernan was pilot on the Gemini 9 mission alongside command pilot Tom Stafford. Cernan became the second American to walk in space, logging 2 hours and 10 minutes of extravehicular activities, during this 3-day flight in June of 1966. was really the first time anybody had this display. It was very crude type of display in today’s world. All black and white, of course, and not easy to read. Our system, which was the backup system, used punch cards and paper. We would put do computer runs on punch cards on a Univac 1108 computer. We had several that we could use. The Univac 1108 I think in 1968 cost $2 million a computer. It had 64K (both laugh), 64 thousand words of memory. A word is in this case, because of the Univac, 36 was 36 bits. So it was a little bit more than 4 bytes. But that was all the memory. And there were no hard disks, hard disks had not been invented. So we used magnetic tape. So they would have to wind the tapes, they have to wind to the right program and read in on the tape and then, so all the programs had to be written in this little bit of memory and then if you wanted to progress to the next part, you’d write out the information on a little piece of tape drive. You’d load in the next program. It would read that tape drive and then it would process that, and it was all put in on punch cards. AG: I think it’s amazing how we got there in the first place; without modern technology it seems impossible. DS: It is; the onboard computer in the spacecraft was designed at MIT, it was called the Instrumentation Lab. Now it’s called the Draper Lab, which is now independent, but it was part of MIT at that time. Most of the memory was woven cores. Cores were little iron things, much smaller than this [shows size with his hands], little iron circles with wires woven in one direction or another around it, and that was the memory. Now, the program was actually woven into that memory, actually hand-woven in there. And they had a little bit of erasable memory, and that was the onboard computer. The displays on there were three rows of five digits, sort of an electroluminescent type of display. In fact there was one spot where, for one of the program outputs, there weren’t enough digits. So the crew had to take that output and manually multiply it by two to get the real number, because there weren’t enough digits on the display on the onboard spacecraft (both laugh). I mean, these things were very, very crude by today’s standards. But it worked, that’s what we could do. AG: What were the biggest challenges in preparing for the mission? DS: From my point of view, I was on a low level, and so things we did worked. So we just worked, and prepared, and we went in the middle of the night for simulations, and we did our thing. So there wasn’t a major challenge from my point of view. AG: Do you think there were bigger challenges with all of NASA that you were aware of? DS: Oh yeah, there were, and there were things that were done that today they would never get away with doing, and they were lucky. For example, after Apollo 7 they were supposed to continue to do earth orbital missions before going to the moon. They had concerns that the Russians would try to beat them, and basically circle the moon, not to land, just to circle. So they secretly decided to do Apollo 8 and go to the moon on the next mission, and circle the moon, and not do a bunch of earth orbit stuff before going to the moon. And so that was kind of done in secret, it was done at the last minute. It was announced right away, so they went and they decided to do that. I think that… they weren’t ready for that. They had not worked everything out. They put things together very quickly. Even down to our facility, we couldn’t hear what the astronauts were saying. We could hear all the detailed inward private communications of the control center. They did this so fast they forgot to give us lines so that we could hear what the astronauts were saying. And we said, “We don’t have time to fix that.” And so we actually (laughs), we were having television sets to try to keep up exactly what was going on on mission. We had to have television sets if we wanted to hear what the crew was saying. What the flight controllers were talking about inside among ourselves we could hear, because we were part of those things, but the simple things… So, things were done very quickly. They had some people in our facility who weren’t part of our facility who were there working on some of the lunar calculations, and it just wasn’t worked out very well. It worked all right. AG: Yeah, Apollo 8 was successful. DS: It was successful. Recognize, though, that in Apollo 8, for example, if the same thing had happened on Apollo 8 that happened on Apollo 13 - there was no lunar module. So that would have been it. In a sense they were lucky. AG: I read in my research that there was only a 50:50 chance of successfully landing on the moon. Did you sense that? DS: No, I think that… I don’t know what the real feelings were, the quoted figure that I have heard which, at some point, at least that they were stating, was they thought the mission would have a 90 percent chance of being successful, and a 99 percent chance of getting the crew back alive. That was probably a little optimistic, however (laughs). I think that, looking back on it, they may have been a little optimistic. On the other hand, it wasn’t too far off. In Apollo all crews came back alive, and if you talk about – (thinking) seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen – if we’re talking about seven through seventeen, which is eleven flights, and then three flights to Skylab, and the Apollo-Soyuz, so that’s fifteen flights in all, of which fourteen were mission successes, if you count the ones beyond the lunar landing and such. Fourteen were successful missions. Apollo 13 didn’t succeed in its mission, but it came back safely. So, I suppose in a broad sense maybe it wasn’t too far off. I think there were a lot of things that happened. 13 happened, something happened on 14, something happened on 11, and something happened on 12 that were very significant. AG: What was going through your head as you watched Apollo 11 launch? DS: Well, I watched it and was very excited. I was also very busy at that time. One of the things that I did was compute a lot of things right at the time of launch and right at the very first part of the flight. There was emergency return to earth information I computed to pass up to the crew, and we did some other things right at the time of launch. So, I watched the launch. We had monitors in there, black and white monitors, so we saw the launch, but I was working at the time. AG: Do you remember the difficulty with the landing, when they kind of overshot the landing spot. Do you remember that? DS: Yeah, I remember it very well. I think that there were several things that were going on. First, there was something that people are not aware of that almost stopped the landing. There’s two kinds of communications from the lunar module. There’s the omni antennas that’s broadcast in all directions at a low data rate. And then they have a parabolic antenna that they point toward the earth, and that narrower beam that sends much faster data. It’s called high-bit rate. They were required to have high-bit rate data for the landing. During PDI, power descent initiation, when they were burning throughout the lunar landing, they lost the high-bit rate. We could not lock on to that antenna, and that was a major problem. Finally, as the spacecraft pitched over… several minutes before landing, pitched over to more vertical then it came back. They didn’t know this, in fact I was in one of the meetings when they were discussing this after, they thought that it was something called multi-path, bouncing off the moon. Well it turned out when they modeled the very funny structure – you’ve seen the LM, it looks like this [shows with his hands] – that one of these pieces stuck out… [END OF SIDE ONE, TAPE ONE: BEGIN SIDE TWO, TAPE ONE] So that piece blocked the high-bit antenna, and when they pitched over, then they got good communication. But the first thing that was going on at that point was the concern about not having high-bit rate communications, and if they had not gotten it back they would have aborted the landing. People don’t realize that that was the first problem. The second was the program alarms. The computer started alarming on board the spacecraft, and they were saying “computer overload.” Those alarms were actually, primarily put in there during the development time so that they could make sure there weren’t any problems, that the software would detect the problem and would tell them. But it wasn’t really meant to be during the mission, and they never expected that alarm to come up during the mission. What happened, they had done something, some simulations or something a few days before, and the alarms had come up, and somebody had looked into them and decided that it was ok that the alarm came up, even though nobody expected it. Somebody had said that this might come up, and it’s ok, so somebody had thought of it ahead of time. The alarm came up, and the crew, of course, was all worried about the landing. At the same time, Armstrong was looking where they would come down, and it was full of boulders. So he was going around looking for a place to land. The alarms were going off, and the crew wasn’t sure whether they’d have to abort because of the alarm…. But the controllers listened to Steve Bales, who talked to his support people in the support room, and they said it was ok. And they looked at the flight dynamics, at the trajectory, and they were where they were supposed to be. They could tell it was working right, because it was doing everything it was supposed to be doing, so they told them, “Go ahead and land. Don’t worry about it, just go ahead and continue on.” They were worried about running out of fuel to some degree. Now, they landed with just under 30 seconds of fuel left, and they have a warning, a standard warning that you have 30 seconds, and when you get down to no fuel you have to abort the landing. But at 30 seconds, it wasn’t very high and it wouldn’t take them a long time to get down. I’m not sure how high he was but it wasn’t very far off the surface. And he wasn’t sinking and he wasn’t rising. He was going sideways or forward across the surface, looking for a good place to land. So when he found a spot to land all he had to do was cut back on the throttle a little bit and he settled right down. And so it wasn’t as scary as it may seem when they say you’re going to run out of fuel, because you’re right above the surface, and so all he had to do was find a good spot and then cut back on the throttle, and the thing would settle down. AG: But he did overshoot the… DS: Yeah, they did, and we were looking for him, helping to look for them on the moon from the command module that was still in orbit around the moon so that they could look out through the telescope to find them. They never figured it out during the flight, later on I think they figured it out, but during the flight they could not figure out exactly where it was, and Mike Collins never could see the spacecraft on the surface. AG: Never? DS: No, he never saw it. We were picking different guess locations. People would look at, he’d describe what they’d see out the window. And so the geologists would look at maps - it must be here, because he thinks that crater there, it must be that crater and that crater. He’s describing a crater here and a big one there, so it must be here. So we would compute, remember I said we would compute where to look for things, how to rotate the spacecraft, and how to adjust the telescope to look at things. We did that. We would do that, they’d relay it up to the crew, and they’d look. But it didn’t matter; I mean it wasn’t a problem that they didn’t know exactly where they were. They didn’t know at the time. AG: Do you remember what you were doing as you saw them land and then walk on the moon? DS: Yes, I do. I was not technically on duty for the landing, but I came back in as almost everybody else did. So we were standing around in the ACR room, and I was watching. I remember watching the monitor and listening, looking back up at the monitor, looking at the data. Then I heard the crew say “contact light.” I’m going to show you one more thing. Be right back. [Tape recorder turned off as he goes to get pin.] On the day of the landing they gave out in the control center these buttons, the blue buttons, and it said ‘lunar contact.’ In the LM that light lights up. If you look at pictures of the LM, there are four legs on the LM that have little bowls so they rest on the surface in the lunar soil. On three of the bowls there are poles sticking down, and then those poles touch the surface. See we were worried about dust coming up, that people may not be able to exactly see where they are when they are right above the surface. It turned out not to be a major problem, but we were worried about it. So when they were settling down in an area, how can I tell when I’m down? Well, when the poles hit the surface the contact light would go on. So when they said “contact light,” I turned to one of my co-workers and said, “Well, they’re down.” I remember saying, “They’re down.” Then the crew said something about actually cutting the engine off, And then they said, “Houston, the Eagle has landed.” But I knew, when they said “contact light” I knew they were down. AG: How did you feel? DS: Oh, I was really excited. AG: Do you remember when you saw them walk on the moon? DS: Yeah, see I was on for that. And actually I came in a little early, because, that was something that I was on for. Remember, I was the one that ran the computations for the heat load during the extravehicular activity. So I was the one that had to run that program, so I was on for the walk. They’d scheduled the walk early. The crew was supposed to have a rest period, where they were going to sleep a little bit. But you might imagine that if you had just landed on the moon and you got to be the first person in the world to go walk on the moon, that you might be a little excited and figure, “Well, I’m not real sleepy right now.” So the crew says, “We’re not tired, we’d much rather go out,” and so they said, “All right go out.” AG: But I read that they still rested for about six hours. DS: They did. They landed at 3 something Houston time and I think it was 9 something at night Houston time when they went out. AG: I’m amazed they could wait that long (laughs). DS: Well, yeah. It took a while to get in the suit. I’m sure they ate, they probably did some checks to make sure everything was all right. AG: How did the Apollo 11 mission compare to the other ones you had worked on? DS: Oh, it was the best. (both laugh) AG: Well, yeah, but 8 was pretty… DS: But it’s different. Oh, I loved 11 much better. Things were not as well organized on 8 from a flight control point of view. And the landing was the real thing - I mean, 8 was great, but this was much better. See, everything becomes comparable, we’ll bring you something about today. During Apollo 8, right about that time, there was a major flu outbreak, the Hong Kong flu, which was a worldwide pandemic. Do you know what an epidemic is? AG: I don’t know the difference. DS: An epidemic, they’ve just declared, it’s like the flu currently going around now. A pandemic is worse. Worldwide – everybody in the world gets the flu. When there’s a major change in the flu strain – they had for 1918, 1957, 1968 – what happened is, after Apollo 8 everybody got together for a splash down party. And all the people – they had these huge parties right after – the day of the landing, right after the landing we all went out to the parties and everybody was all together. And everybody went home, because it was Christmas, so everybody went on vacation. And everybody caught the flu, including me (both laugh). But 11 was absolutely the best. 12 was nice too, in a different way. It’s not that I disliked the press, I mean it’s so important, I’m glad the press was there. The press was there in 12, but maybe it was a little less pressured. But 12 was fun, in a different way ___. But 11 was definitely the best. AG: Because it was the first landing, or because it went really well? DS: Because it was the first landing. I mean, I like history. I’ve always followed it and been a real fan of history. And I knew that this was the most historic moment that I’d ever see in my lifetime, and probably the most historic moment in this century as well, and I was part of it. I would have done all this for free. They didn’t have to pay me to do this. I would have done this for free. AG: In NASA, it must have been so exciting to be there. DS: Well, yeah, it was. AG: What would you say the legacy of Apollo 11 was, other than the first landing. Is there anything else you can think of? DS: I think that it’s just man’s exploration, a tremendous achievement. We have not been to the moon, it’s been since 1972. It’s been 31 years since we’ve been to the moon. If you go back to 1969, and go back 31 years before that, we’re talking about the 1930s. We’re talking about old propeller planes, and no jets, and no computers, and nothing. The degree of expansion of space exploration during that time was so spectacular. We’ve advanced in other ways, but not in space. The legacy is the historical one. We’ll remember Armstrong and Aldrin. Everyone forgets about Collins. AG: I know, no one knows him (laughs). You said the degree of advancement – what do you think that was due to? DS: Public interest. Funding, public interest. The public had lost interest after the lunar landing, because we’d done it. There was much less interest in 12 than there was in 11. 13 had a lot of interest but for different reasons. Right now there’s much less interest. You can see it in the funding. AG: I’m sure you’re aware of the theory that the moonwalk was staged, that we never when to the moon. Are you familiar with that? DS: It’s garbage. AG: Yeah (laughs). What’s your response to that? DS: It’s garbage. It’s garbage. AG: What do you think the future of space travel is? DS: Well, it will continue to advance. And you’ll see people go to the planets, go to Mars, and maybe it’ll be you (both laugh). AG: Do you think we’ll live on the moon? DS: It’s very hard for me to know whether we would set up some kind of colony on the moon in a similar fashion that we have in places in our world. It’s a possibility. Will we live on the moon like we live in Las Vegas, out in the desert in Las Vegas, in a thriving community? I don’t see that (laughs), not for a very long time. AG: What do you think the Apollo 11 mission taught the world about our universe? Do you think it had anything in particular? DS: The capacity for people to achieve great things, and the ability for humans to explore and reach out. We’ve always talked about the significance that people went out into space and they could look back on earth. And there was an environmental movement developing in the early 70s, in part as people went out in space and looked back at earth. Whether that was really a causation or just something contributing, I don’t know. AG: Yeah, that seemed like a big legacy to me. In my high school textbook, there’s very little written about this topic. If you were to write a textbook, what do you think should be said about the Apollo program? DS: It is a bigger exploration than Columbus, Magellan, Sir Francis Drake, or any of them. And there’s another part of this too. When Columbus went out, the rest of the world didn’t know what was going on. Word trickled out eventually. When Apollo went the whole world watched it. So we got to be part of it. And I think that’s one of the things to be mentioned about it, that everybody got to be part of it. And I think that the whole world got to feel that way. Americans, because we were the ones who did it, got a little more pride and rightfully so, got to feel that they had a bigger part in it. I felt like I had a bigger part too. AG: Anything you wish to add that I might have missed in my questions? DS: I don’t know. There’s so much, I don’t even know where to begin. What kinds of things are you thinking of? AG: Things that I forgot? DS: No, you certainly are very knowledgeable about Apollo. I can’t say anything about 13 since I wasn’t working there anymore. 12, I was there, and you know what happened on Apollo 12? AG: Refresh my memory, I read about it. DS: Struck by lightening. AG: Oh, right. It took off in a rainstorm. DS: The thunderstorm wasn’t there. The thunderstorm was a ways back. They had to change things and rules afterwards. But they tell you, if you were out playing soccer or something and there was a thunderstorm in the distance, that it doesn’t have to be raining over you to be struck by lightening. Well, you go and you take a potential setup and you take a rocket going through the air with all of the ionization and the exhaust trail. That hot gas is leading to the ground. Well it was like Ben Franklin putting a wire up – so it’s going to get struck by lightning. AG: You didn’t really mention the other ones you worked on – 7 through 12, right? Do you have anything to say about the other ones, other than 11? DS: 7 was the first one. Things went well. It was just in earth’s orbit. I don’t think there was anything remarkable. 8 of course was the flight going around the moon. They did the scheduling for us differently, only in that flight. It was not a very good way of doing the scheduling. When they fired the rocket to come back from the moon, from the backside of the moon, I went into the control center, up into the room that we supported. I was standing in there when they acquired the signal on the way back from the moon. But again, that was a fairly uneventful flight. I don’t think there was anything major. Apollo 9 – Russell Schweickart was the astronaut scheduled to do a space walk for 9. Unfortunately, and there’s no way of knowing on earth beforehand, he was exceptionally prone to space sickness – probably the most space sick of any astronaut ever. And after the flight he never flew again. Some of the things they wanted to do in terms of the space walk they never got done in the flight because he was sick for a much longer time than most astronauts. 10, again relatively uneventful, but 10 was a practice landing. AG: In 12, I read in my research something about how he took a picture or a video camera that was directed right at the sun, and it destroyed the whole thing. So, you mentioned that it was nice not to have the publicity. DS: No, no, don’t quote me because I didn’t say that. I said it had different effects, and I was glad they still had the publicity. But it was little, kind of a more congenial, maybe a little less stressful atmosphere in 12 than in 11. But no, the publicity is good, in fact I think most of us were upset that people lost interest. Yes, they covered the moon walk from television, but he inadvertently pointed the camera toward the sun and that did it. It was like the very beginning of the walk. He had only been out for a couple of minutes. He didn’t do it on purpose. They would have loved to have been on TV. Pete Conrad, who was the commander of 12, was a much more outgoing person than Neil Armstrong. AG: Did you want to be an astronaut? DS: Well at the time of all that, I knew I couldn’t be because I wore glasses, so it was never an issue. However, in the Shuttle program, they would allow you to wear glasses as a mission specialist. So I went to medical school after. Years later, when I was in residency, I applied for a mission specialist position, never thinking that I would get anywhere. But then I got information back to fill out my clearance forms for the top-secret clearance, and I heard people were investigating me for the clearance, and then I was invited down as a finalist for mission specialist. At the time I was still in residency. After medical school but before you go into practice, you do internship and residency where you’re a doctor but you work in a hospital. And I was in the middle of probably the busiest spot in my whole residency at the time. But I got a call from the head doctor in Houston who asked me, “Hey, what’s your uncorrected vision?” because there was an uncorrected vision requirement. And I said, “Well, you can give me a waiver. It’s just mission specialist, and I correct to 20:20, and I’ve worked in the program. You’re not going to worry about the uncorrected vision.” And he said “No, we can’t do that. They won’t allow me to make any exceptions.” It was a requirement at that time that it be 20/100 or better uncorrected. I said, “Well, I won’t make 20/100.” He said, “Get the most generous eye doctor you can (laughs) and see if you can possibly meet it. If you can’t, don’t come down. We will not be allowed to pass you.” AG: Were you upset by that? DS: Yeah, I was. I didn’t ever expect to make it that far, and then to find out that I didn’t meet the vision requirement - and today they don’t have that uncorrected vision requirement. AG: You could still do it now (laughs). DS: Too old. AG: Yeah, probably not. Anything else you can think of? DS: The lightning strike on Apollo 12 – you may have heard about this, too. Well first a couple of things. The emergency return to earth for Apollo 12, if it got into orbit and had to come back, was pre-loaded in case they lost communications. I had computed that a couple of days before, and they had put that on the spacecraft. If they had come back in an emergency from orbit because of a lightning strike, I’m the one who computed that information. They just took what I computed and stuck it in the spacecraft. Fortunately they didn’t need to use that. But a couple of things that I alluded to before showed up. Flight controllers were very thorough people. Approximately a year before Apollo 12 at the end of a simulation, one of the controllers noticed a whole bunch of garbage appear on the screen. And he called the simulator people and he said, “What was that?” And they said, “Oh, don’t worry about it. Simulation’s over.” “Well why did that appear that way on that screen?” So he pushed them, and he got an explanation, and he said, “What would happen if I saw that?” And they told him, “That will never happen. It’s just a simulation thing.” I don’t know the whole details, but it really wasn’t part of the simulation, it wasn’t supposed to occur. But they figured out what to do if that ever occurred. And when the lightning struck it knocked all the electricity out. All of the screens filled up with garbage in the control center, and they were just about ready to abort the launch when this controller said, “Turn this switch to this position.” “What are you talking about?” “Just turn the switch to this position.” And so they said, “OK.” The astronaut turned the switch, and all the data came back on. And if he had not asked about this and remembered it from a year earlier, they would have aborted that flight. They would have pushed the button, fired the rocket off, and the capsule would have come home. Second, things were built well. The reason that the rocket continued to fire was the computer on board the Saturn V rocket, despite two lightning strikes, was build so well that it continued to work. If it had gone haywire, the rocket would have gone haywire, and it would have been all over. Third, remember I told you about the little old ladies who used to be in the textile industry for years in Massachusetts, and all the textile industry went away, so they got jobs weaving those cores in and out, those little wires in and out of those magnetic coils. That memory, because it wasn’t like our computers – you know if you cut your computer off all that memory goes away and you have to reload it – that memory was there all wired in so the command module computer memory was fine. That erasable part had to be reloaded, it was small enough that they reloaded it and they actually could hand check every location while it was in earth orbit because there wasn’t that many spots in the erasable memory. They checked it all out and saw that it was ok and allowed it to go to the moon. AG: Why did you stop working at NASA? DS: It’s a good question. After 11 they decided that they didn’t need that much support, and they cut way back on 12. There were just a couple of us, in fact by the end of the mission I was the only one working in that facility. And then they said they wouldn’t need it anymore. Now I still had a job, and in fact they wanted me to do something else there. But I was worried that there would be major layoffs. I thought that NASA was going to lay off all the contractors they took on. I could see there was already decreased interest. And so I took another job. Even though I liked it, I was worried that if I stayed there would be massive layoffs. And it did not happen; they did have layoffs in 1975. AG: Were you upset that you left? DS: The next job that I took was very good from an engineering point of view. I designed part of the air traffic control system. I was by far the youngest guy there, and I designed a key piece of the air traffic control system. But in a sense, I wished I’d been there for 13 because some of the things that they used on 13 - we were the only facility that could actually compute using the LM to bring down the command module. do that.” AG: Do you remember when things went wrong in 13? DS: Yeah, I do. AG: Do you remember thinking, “Oh no.” Was it… DS: Oh, I thought they would get back. I wasn’t frightened. I felt confident. AG: Anything else? DS: No, nothing. I can show you some pictures. AG: OK. After 12 NASA said “We’re never going to need to [RECORDED INTERVIEW CONCLUDED; INFORMAL DISCUSSION CONTINUES AS DR. SAGER SHOWS PICTURES AND MEMORABILIA] Table of Contents Interview Analysis “History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon,” as Napoleon Bonaparte once said. However, just because a society has agreed to believe this version of the past does not mean that it is correct. As a historian it is necessary to constantly evaluate past events. Historian E.H. Carr believes history “is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, and unending dialogue between the present and the past” (934). Objectivity is the ultimate goal of a historian, yet it is a constant struggle to achieve the most objective history, since, “there is no such thing as pure history anyway,” as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. states in History the Weapon (53). One way to enhance objectivity is to seek sources of information from many viewpoints, including people who were directly involved in the events. Minor characters can also add information and perspectives different from those of major characters who are more often covered in books. One of these minor people is Dr. Dennis Sager, who worked on the Apollo program, most notably the lunar landing of Apollo 11 in 1969. An interview of Dr. Sager conducted on December 20, 2003 sheds new light on this major historical event through the eyes of a minor character. The interview with Dr. Sager is an example of oral history, which compliments more traditional sources of documenting the past. Donald Ritchie, author of Doing Oral History, defines oral history: “Simply put, oral history collects spoken memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews” (19). Doing oral history is creating a primary source that can add detail to the historical record. As oral historian Linda Shopes writes, “In addition to recording the perspectives of those in power, these interviews typically get at ‘the story underneath the story,’ the intricacies of decision-making, the personal rivalries and alliances and the varying motives underlying public action, that are often absent from the public record” (4). This is especially valuable in a historical event when the public can only observe the people in the spotlight and is often not aware of the people behind the scenes doing equally important work. Writer Judith Moyer adds, “History is no longer limited to the powerful, famous, and rich, and literate. Now history can give us a much more inclusive, and, one hopes, accurate picture of the past”(8-9). Since oral history depends on the spoken rather than the written word of one individual, it is especially susceptible to biases and “unconscious preconceptions,” a term coined by historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr.. This means that the historian must closely analyze the historical content of everything the interviewee says and attempt to account for the inescapable “presentism” of all participants. The interview with Dr. Dennis Sager discussed his thoughts and perspectives on the space race in the 1960s and the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The interview began with his early interest in the space program and his job at TRW Systems, which supported NASA at the mission control center in Houston, Texas. Dr. Sager discussed the beginnings of the space race with Sputnik in 1957 and the Mercury and Gemini programs that followed it. He reviewed the causes of the Apollo 1 fire and included details on Apollo missions 7 through 12, leading up to the major topic of the lunar landing of Apollo 11. He brought out many points of larger importance to him and potential interest to readers, including his attempts to find the path of Soviet spacecraft, his computations relating to the trajectory, radiation control, and emergency return to earth, the lack of adequate preparations for Apollo 8, the difficulty of computations without the use of modern technology, and details about the lunar landing, such as little-known elements that nearly stopped the landing. This oral history is valuable because it explores the perspective of a person directly involved in the Apollo program and lunar landing and features one of many individuals whose story has not been told before. The oral history is a particularly strong source because Dr. Sager was enthusiastic and answered most of the questions very thoroughly. For example, research from traditional sources revealed that the common view was “people weren’t that excited about exploration, but they were sure excited about beating the Russians” (qtd. in To the Moon). Dr. Sager downplays the significance of the competition with the Soviets. In response to this quote he says, I think that that’s somewhat of a revisionist history…Beating the Russians was important… And there was competition in the sense that if you were working on this great exploration that you would hate to be the second person there... But I think that to say that people didn’t really care about the exploration, but just wanted to beat the Russians, is not correct. I think it’s not giving people the credit that they deserve. (Sager 7-8) According to traditional sources, Armstrong and Aldrin only had a 50-50 chance for a successful landing. According to Dr. Sager, NASA was quite confident in the success of the Apollo 11 mission. In response to that statistic, he says, “[Mission control] thought the mission would have a 90 percent chance of being successful, and a 99 percent chance of getting the crew back alive. That was probably a little optimistic, however” (Sager 16). More traditional sources seem to have dramatized the landing more than Dr. Sager expressed, perhaps due to their need to attract readers. However, in the interview Dr. Sager revealed details that were never mentioned in other research. For example, in discussing the Apollo 11 mission, Dr. Sager remembered concerns that the Soviet Luna 15 spacecraft would collide with the Apollo spacecraft. He recalled how he joined another man in secretly working with limited amounts of data on the Soviet program, since the Soviets would not reveal their activities, to determine the orbit of the Luna 15: “[NASA] asked us not to say anything about what we were doing. I mean it didn’t officially get classified, but it was sort of like just do this quietly” (Sager 11). Dr. Sager also mentioned how “after Apollo 7 they were supposed to continue to do earth orbital missions before going to the moon. [But] they had concerns that the Russians would try to beat them, and …circle the moon…. So they secretly decided to do Apollo 8” (Sager 15). He described how NASA had not done enough preparations for the mission and there were small technical difficulties that could potentially have caused a major crisis. These problems were not mentioned in more traditional sources. Dr. Sager also revealed two problems with the landing that almost caused Armstrong and Aldrin to abort: the momentary loss of the crucial high-bit rate antenna, and the program alarms saying “computer overload,” which ended up being inconsequential. These details are excellent examples of how valuable hearing a first-hand experience is when researching a historical event. The main weakness of this interview was the limited perspective of the interviewee. One reason for this limited perspective is Dr. Sager’s relatively minor role in the Apollo program. It is possible that he was not aware of other important decisions that were made or incidents that occurred at that time. He was also only knowledgeable on one aspect of the program due to his particular job. Another reason that this perspective was limited involves a possible bias of the interviewee, although it was not evident during the interview. Human memory is innately imperfect and thus is selective regarding past events, as “the narrator compresses years of living into a few hours of talk, selecting, consciously and unconsciously, what to say and how to say it” (Shopes 7). Dr. Sager may have forgotten unpleasant or seemingly insignificant details that would have affected his responses. His perspective could also have been biased due to his young age at the time, or his nationality, race, gender, culture, or social status. For example, an engineer for the Soviet space program would have a much different memory of the space race than Dr. Sager. There could also be a bias just by being a narrator. As Linda Shopes says, “Narrators are a self-selected group; the most articulate and self-assured members of any group the literal and psychic survivors - are precisely those who consent to an interview, creating an implicit bias” (5). As an interviewer, I had my own unconscious preconceptions because I expected Dr. Sager to mention more about the competition with the Soviets and fears about the landing. I expected the landing to be a more dramatic experience, as depicted in a lot of my research. But despite these possible weaknesses, the interview went very well overall, and the content was strong. From this project I have experienced what it is like to document, preserve, and analyze a primary source. The role of a historian is difficult; re-creating the past in the most objective way possible poses many challenges. Formulating interview questions that encompass general topics but do not lead the narrator in any direction can be tricky. Deciding which parts of the interview are most important in the analysis is extremely challenging, for holding such power as preserving the truth is a big weight on the shoulders of a historian. If another oral history was to be conducted to further expand the historical perspective on this topic, it should be a person with a greater role in the Apollo program, such as an astronaut. The viewpoint of a similar character in the Soviet space program would also be important to further evaluate the space race in the whole context of the Cold War. From this particular oral history I have learned that the view from more traditional sources of history is often very different from an insider’s perspective. A historian must explore all of these different viewpoints, yet evaluate each viewpoint with equal skepticism. By using oral history one can document the experiences of people whose voices often go unheard. These people play minor yet necessary roles in important historical events and time periods, just as Dr. Dennis Sager did on the Apollo program. Table of Contents Works Consulted Carr, E.H. What Is History? New York: Vintage Books, 1961. Chaikin, Andrew. A Man on the Moon. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1994. Collins, Martin J. and the Division of Space History, National Air and Space Museum, The Smithsonian Institution. Space Race. San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, Inc., 1999. Compton, W. David. "Where No Man Has Gone Before: A History of Apollo Lunar Exploration Missions." . 9 July 1997. NASA Special Publication-4214, NASA History Series. 25 Jan. 2004 . Cortright, Edgar M., ed. Apollo Expeditions to the Moon. Washington, D.C.: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1975. Darling, David. The Complete Book of Spaceflight. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003. Lapp, Ralph E. “A Critic’s View of Apollo.” The New York Times. 17 July 1969. Moyer, Judith. A Step-by-Step Guide to Oral History. Plait, Phil. Bad Astronomy: Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax. 13 Feb. 2001. 4 Dec. 2003. Reynolds, David West. Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 2002. Ritchie, Donald A. Doing Oral History 2nd edition. London: Oxford University Press, 2003. Rossiter, Margaret W. Science and Public Policy since World War II. Osiris. 2nd Series, Vol. 1, Historical Writing on American Science. 1985, pp. 273-294. JSTOR. 14 Dec. 2003 Sager, Dennis. Interviewed by Annemarie Gray. 20 December 2003. Schlesinger Jr., Arthur. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998. Shopes, Linda. “What Is Oral History?” History Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web. Special to The New York Times. “Device Is 8 Times Heavier Than One Planned by U.S.” The New York Times 5 Oct. 1957. Proquest Historical Newspapers. 14 Dec. 2003 The New York Times. 21 July 1969. Proquest Historical Newspapers. 14 Dec. 2003 The New York Times. 6 May 1961. Proquest Historical Newspapers. 14 Dec. 2003 To the Moon. Prod. Kirk Wolfinger. Videocassette. NOVA, WGBH Educational Foundation, 1974. Wilford, John Noble. “Astronauts Land on Plain; Collect Rocks, Plant Flag.” The New York Times 21 July 1969. Proquest Historical Newspapers. 14 Dec. 2003 Table of Contents