Speaker 1: Nine Days in July is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio and Trade Traft Studios in association with High five Content.
Speaker 1: On May fifth, nineteen sixty one, just four months after
Speaker 1: he assumed the presidency, John F. Kennedy stood before a
Speaker 1: joint session of Congress and said the following, I believe
Speaker 1: that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal
Speaker 1: before this decade is out of landing a man on
Speaker 1: the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. No
Speaker 1: single space project in this period will be more impressive
Speaker 1: to mankind or more important for the long range exploration
Speaker 1: of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive
Speaker 1: to accomplish. Think about it. Less than three weeks after
Speaker 1: launching the first American into space, a trip that lasted
Speaker 1: only fifteen minutes, the President went before Congress and charged
Speaker 1: the country with landing on the Moon before the end
Speaker 1: of the decade, and why so that we could wallop
Speaker 1: the rush. Recognizing the head stock obtained by the Soviets,
Speaker 1: and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead
Speaker 1: for some time to come in still more impressive successes,
Speaker 1: we nevertheless or required to make new efforts on our own.
Speaker 1: For a while, we cannot guarantee that we shall one
Speaker 1: day be first. We can guarantee that any failure to
Speaker 1: make this effort will make us lost. Kennedy is inspiring
Speaker 1: and pragmatic. He wants America to go to the Moon,
Speaker 1: but he recognizes that the colossal technology, infrastructure, hardware, and
Speaker 1: workforce necessary to make it happen does not exist. America
Speaker 1: would be starting from scratch, and it was going to
Speaker 1: be expensive. Let it be clear that I am asking
Speaker 1: the Congress and the country to accept a firm commitment
Speaker 1: to a new course of action, a cost which will
Speaker 1: lost for many years and carry very heavy costs. If
Speaker 1: we ought to go only ah way or reduce our
Speaker 1: sites in the face of difficulty, In my judgment, it
Speaker 1: would be better not to go at all. Apollo would
Speaker 1: be bigger than anything NASA had ever attempted, by several
Speaker 1: orders of magnitude, requiring the most significant commitment of peacetime
Speaker 1: resources and innovation the country had ever seen. There is
Speaker 1: no sense in desiring that the United States take an
Speaker 1: affirmative position in outer space unless we are prepared to
Speaker 1: do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful.
Speaker 1: Kennedy is down to brass tax now, and he's not
Speaker 1: above baking. This decision demands a major national commitment of
Speaker 1: scientific and technical manpower, materiel, and facilities, and the possibility
Speaker 1: of their diversion from other important activities where they're already
Speaker 1: thinly in spread. In bringing it Home, Kennedy reminds his
Speaker 1: audience of the stakes. Finally, if we are to win
Speaker 1: the battle that is now going on around the world
Speaker 1: between freedom and tyranny, now it is time to take
Speaker 1: longer strides, Time for a great new American enterprise, time
Speaker 1: for this nation to take a clearly leading role in
Speaker 1: space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key
Speaker 1: to our future on Earth, freedom and tyranny. For most Americans,
Speaker 1: at least in retrospect, Apollo was about science, technology, and exploration,
Speaker 1: but not Kennedy. For the President, it was about stopping
Speaker 1: communism before it swallowed the planet whole. The stakes were
Speaker 1: literally saving the free world. But as we will learn
Speaker 1: this hour, there were many more Americans who didn't give
Speaker 1: a damn about either of those two motivations, and with
Speaker 1: very good reason. It's July nineteen sixty nine, day three
Speaker 1: of the Apollo eleven mission. This is Apollo control of
Speaker 1: forty six hours twenty eight minutes around the lapse of
Speaker 1: time a little more than a half hour remaining in
Speaker 1: the crew sleep period. Members of the Green team of
Speaker 1: flight controllers, headed up by Prime Flight Director Cliff charles Worth,
Speaker 1: are coming into the control room at this time, and
Speaker 1: that each console handover is taking place from the black watch.
Speaker 1: Have you ever stopped to consider the gargantuan undertaking that
Speaker 1: the Apollo project represented. Pulling off Kennedy's audacious vision required
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people, tens of thousands of companies,
Speaker 1: and tens of billions of dollars on paper, There's no
Speaker 1: way that Apollo should have worked. It should have been
Speaker 1: too big, too unwieldy, too time consuming, and too expensive.
Speaker 1: And yet, against all odds, in spite of tragic accidents,
Speaker 1: political hatchet jobs, and public protests, the United States pulled
Speaker 1: it off. But before we look into the army that
Speaker 1: was required to get Apollo off the ground, let's listen
Speaker 1: in as Bruce McCandless in Mission Control rouses our crew
Speaker 1: at morning hands. You're a great day, pride night. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we very quiet night down air. I've got the morning
Speaker 1: news here if you're interested over Yeah, already copy and
Speaker 1: comment already there uh Roder buzzes pointing out that if
Speaker 1: it's too thirty in the afternoon in Houston, this can't
Speaker 1: be called the morning news from St. Petersburg, Florida. Come
Speaker 1: to the radio report from a Narrowagian explorers or hired
Speaker 1: Doll which in the crew of his p pirates boat
Speaker 1: or well they'll end a break down Barbados and bite
Speaker 1: damage from heavy seas. Thor hired All was a Norwegian
Speaker 1: explorer who wanted to prove that ancient peoples were capable
Speaker 1: of making epics, sea voyages and contacting far flung cultures.
Speaker 1: He constructed a boat made from papyrus, just like the
Speaker 1: ancient Egyptians did, and attempted to cross the Atlantic Ocean. However,
Speaker 1: the raw would sink before reaching its destination. Thankfully, the
Speaker 1: entire crew was rescued and a year from now Thor
Speaker 1: will build Raw too and successfully complete the journey from
Speaker 1: Morocco to Barbados, a fitting terrestrial echo to Apollo Levin's
Speaker 1: extraordinary stellar journey. And in Corby, England and Irish wind
Speaker 1: John Coyle has won the World urried Gating Championship by
Speaker 1: consuming twenty three bowls events, and not meal in a
Speaker 1: ten minute time limits from a field of thirty five
Speaker 1: other competitors over I like Dianna and Time. Pretty good
Speaker 1: at that. He's, as you may have already guessed, Mission
Speaker 1: Control is curating the news, choosing only stories designed to
Speaker 1: bring a smile to the faces of three astronauts racing
Speaker 1: far away from everything and everyone they love. But the
Speaker 1: truth is all is not well back home. Spanning Apollo
Speaker 1: eleven's nine day mission, the streets of York, Pennsylvania, will
Speaker 1: become the site of a race war after a seventeen
Speaker 1: year old African American boy is shot by a white
Speaker 1: gang looking to stir up trouble. Soon, black and white
Speaker 1: mobs clash violently across the city. The next day, three
Speaker 1: police officers will be shot, and one, the two year
Speaker 1: old rookie who's only been on the force for ten months,
Speaker 1: will be killed. The mayor will declare a state of
Speaker 1: emergency and flood the streets with state troopers to begin
Speaker 1: restoring order, or so he thinks. Angry at the death
Speaker 1: of one of their own, the city police officers will
Speaker 1: begin telling white gangs they need to protect their homes
Speaker 1: and shoot any blacks they come across. Local cops even
Speaker 1: pass out ammunition. One of those bullets may have killed
Speaker 1: a twenty seven year old black woman and mother of
Speaker 1: two from South Carolina who is visiting her sister when
Speaker 1: the violence begins consuming the city. She and her family
Speaker 1: are returning from a fishing trip when barricaded streets forced
Speaker 1: them to drive through a white neighborhood, where several men
Speaker 1: opened fire in the car, hitting her in the chest
Speaker 1: and killing her. Why don't I bring this up? As
Speaker 1: the sun sets? In the nineteen sixties, race relations threatened
Speaker 1: to tear this country apart, and the systemic suppression of
Speaker 1: African Americans even intersects profoundly with the Apollo eleven mission.
Speaker 1: As we will learn today, the country about to land
Speaker 1: on the Moon seems incapable of solving its most fundamental
Speaker 1: problems back home. As the political turmoil at home rages
Speaker 1: on and our boys continue their trek toward the Moon,
Speaker 1: Let's take a look at how NASA made the impossible possible.
Speaker 1: The Apollo program dwarfs any other engineering project ever undertaken
Speaker 1: by humanity. Previous ventures like the Manhattan Project and the
Speaker 1: construction of the Panama Canal pale in comparison. I'm Bill
Speaker 1: Berry and I'm the NASA chief historian. So over the
Speaker 1: course of the nineteen sixties, the official numbers billion dollars
Speaker 1: in nineteen sixties money. That's a huge amount of money,
Speaker 1: and four hunds of thousand people worked on the project,
Speaker 1: and twenty thousand different U S companies across the unitsates
Speaker 1: were subcontractors are in some way, shape or form. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one, the year Kennedy kicked Apollo off, NASA
Speaker 1: spent about one million dollars on the program. Just five
Speaker 1: years later, it was spending roughly the same amount every
Speaker 1: three hours. NASA slice of the federal budget at the
Speaker 1: time was about five point five If the national budget
Speaker 1: were a dollar, NASA was consuming more than a nickel.
Speaker 1: Adjusted for two thousand and nineteen, the Apollo program costs
Speaker 1: two hundred and eighty eight billion dollars. Only the Vietnam
Speaker 1: War was more expensive. At the time of Kennedy's charge,
Speaker 1: NASA was just eight thousand employees scattered around a handful
Speaker 1: of small facilities, but Apolloscope made them instantly obsolete. NASA
Speaker 1: needed a lot more people and a lot more space.
Speaker 1: The first priority was a command center from which to
Speaker 1: run the entire program. It really need a much larger facility,
Speaker 1: and the decisions made located in Houston. So that's the
Speaker 1: birth of the Johnson Space Flight Center. At the time,
Speaker 1: the facility was known as the Manned Space Fight Center.
Speaker 1: This was to be the home of mission control and
Speaker 1: space flight missions to the Moon and perhaps the planets
Speaker 1: will be commanded from this control room of the Mission
Speaker 1: Control Center at NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, twenty two miles
Speaker 1: southeast of Houston, Texas. It was built on six acres
Speaker 1: of cattle grazing land donated by Rice University, the same
Speaker 1: Rice University where Kennedy uttered these famous words, Great, here's
Speaker 1: to go to the moon and this detained and do
Speaker 1: the other thing, not because they are easy, but because
Speaker 1: they are hard. Next up was a place to launch
Speaker 1: the rockets from. People have been using the Cape Canaveral
Speaker 1: Air Force Station down there on the coast of Florida.
Speaker 1: But they realized that for you, for quality're going to
Speaker 1: need much bigger facility. So the Kennedy Space Center. It's
Speaker 1: not the Kennedy Space Center is built next to the
Speaker 1: Cape Canaveral, a huge facility of its own, One of
Speaker 1: dasa's major installations devoted to achieving the goals of the
Speaker 1: nation's space programs is the John F. Kennedy Space Center
Speaker 1: Launch Site, or the Apollo Saturn five. It would not
Speaker 1: be named the Kennedy Space Center until after the President's death.
Speaker 1: At this time, it is the Launch Operations Center. To
Speaker 1: give you some context of just how much bigger and
Speaker 1: more powerful the Saturn was going to be than anything
Speaker 1: that came before it. The launch escape system that sat
Speaker 1: on the very top of the Saturn five to yank
Speaker 1: the command module free in an emergency was more powerful
Speaker 1: than the entire Mercury Redstone that launched the first American
Speaker 1: into outer space. The abort signaled figures separation of the
Speaker 1: module from the launch vehicle. Simultaneously, the launch escape motor
Speaker 1: and pitch control motor ignite, accelerating the command module away
Speaker 1: from the launch vehicle. NASA also needed a place to
Speaker 1: build the Saturn five. They decided to build a test
Speaker 1: facility in the middle of the swamps on the south
Speaker 1: coast Marshall Space Flight Center. Why in the middle of
Speaker 1: a swamp, building and testing rockets tends to be well noisy,
Speaker 1: So NASSI goes from being um sleepy eight thousand or
Speaker 1: so of personal organization there ultimately small leg and grows
Speaker 1: over fourfold. By the mid sixties, you've got over thirty
Speaker 1: eight thousand employees working for NASA, and all these multiple facilities,
Speaker 1: all brand spanking new that are all built all across
Speaker 1: the South and the United States. As these various centers
Speaker 1: were being built, NASA turned its attention to even more
Speaker 1: fundamental problems. Exactly how is America going to get to
Speaker 1: the Moon. The problem is really quite simple, find the
Speaker 1: best path to get from point A two point B.
Speaker 1: But of course this is a great over simplification. There
Speaker 1: are three options. Direct descent, where you take a big rocket,
Speaker 1: launch it to the Moon, the whole thing lands in
Speaker 1: the Moon, and the whole thing goes back again. This
Speaker 1: is the model made popular by classic sci fi films
Speaker 1: of the eighteen fifties, when the moon monsters, under the
Speaker 1: direction of writting, ruthless Dictator of the Moon, scheme to
Speaker 1: invade the Earth and have your rank un set up
Speaker 1: ready to blast them. This time you must not fail.
Speaker 1: And they decided, well, there's another alternative, where we could
Speaker 1: build a spaceship in Earth orbit. We launched pieces of it,
Speaker 1: so we don't have to build such a big rocket
Speaker 1: on Earth. So that's Earth orbit rendevou Verni von Braun,
Speaker 1: the x Nazi rocket scientists who designed the Saturn five,
Speaker 1: preferred this option. A voyage around the Moon must be
Speaker 1: made in two phases. A rocket ship taking off from
Speaker 1: the surface. We'll use almost all the fuel that can
Speaker 1: carry just to attain a speed great enough to balance
Speaker 1: the pool of gravity. However, if we can refuel the
Speaker 1: ship in this orbit with fuel brought up by cargo
Speaker 1: rocket chips, it can set out on the second phase,
Speaker 1: the trip around the Moon and back. And there's this
Speaker 1: other idea that they're called lunar orbit rendevout, where you
Speaker 1: build a rocket, sent it to the Moon and it's
Speaker 1: like a big cruise ship. It pulls into the harbor
Speaker 1: and then the passengers get off on a smaller dinghy
Speaker 1: and run into the shore to go to their visits
Speaker 1: and then come back out again. The problem was known
Speaker 1: at NASA liked this last idea well, almost no one.
Speaker 1: John Hubalt was convinced that lunar orbit rendezvous was the
Speaker 1: only way NASA would successfully meet Kennedy's vision. The idea
Speaker 1: of using l O R lunar Orbert rendezvous as a
Speaker 1: way to go into the Moon appealed to me tremendously.
Speaker 1: I knew, however, that it would meet with much opposition.
Speaker 1: People in fact, would probably think I was crazy. Who
Speaker 1: about This is a really interesting character. He's was an
Speaker 1: engineer at Langley Research Center where they were looking at
Speaker 1: questions about orbital mechanics. Hubbolt sort of grabbed this idea. Mathematically,
Speaker 1: this makes the most sense, and he basically championed that idea.
Speaker 1: The reason known at NASA like who Bolt's option is
Speaker 1: because it required the astronauts to dock their spacecraft two
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty thousand miles away. Remember this is half
Speaker 1: a decade before Project Gemini proved it was even possible
Speaker 1: in Earth orbit. So this terrified NASA's engineers, and so
Speaker 1: who Bolt was sidelined. He may not have been high
Speaker 1: ranking or well connected, but he was tenacious, and so
Speaker 1: he jumped the NASA chain of command. They really put
Speaker 1: his career on the line by being a real pest
Speaker 1: about it, you know, going over people's head, sending letters
Speaker 1: to Dept Administrator NASA and other things that you know
Speaker 1: could have gotten fired. Who Will argued that for direct
Speaker 1: descent to work, they need a rocket even larger and
Speaker 1: more expensive than the proposed SATURD five and Earth orbit
Speaker 1: rendezvous required multiple launches. But he kept at it, and
Speaker 1: eventually pounding away at it. You know, people realize, well,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe that's winder with thing around the moon
Speaker 1: isn't so bad, And look at the math on this,
Speaker 1: we can actually do with missing one Saturn five launch,
Speaker 1: you know it. Eventually it wins out, and hop Will
Speaker 1: becomes sort of the hero in the story, largely because
Speaker 1: he was smart enough to do it and brave enough
Speaker 1: to take on the powers that be to push the idea.
Speaker 1: The accomplishment of lunar orbit rendezvous is a vital portion
Speaker 1: of the Apollo lunar landing missions. The next question was
Speaker 1: what would these spacecraft look like and who would build them.
Speaker 1: Getting a very good view of the work going on
Speaker 1: in the come out on Service module tunnel preparation for
Speaker 1: the dress people Uner module. But first let's check in
Speaker 1: with Apollo eleven, currently one and seventy five thousand nautical
Speaker 1: miles away from Earth, where the astronauts are preparing to
Speaker 1: open up the lunar module for the very first time.
Speaker 1: They're filming the whole thing and beaming it back to
Speaker 1: Charlie Duke in mission control. We're really getting great a
Speaker 1: drug remment coming back. Once removal of the drogue is completed,
Speaker 1: they will have access to the lam hatch and be
Speaker 1: able to go into the tunnel. The drogue is part
Speaker 1: of the mechanism used to dock the two spacecraft to
Speaker 1: enter the lunar module. Neil must first remove the drogue
Speaker 1: as it blocks the narrow tunnel connecting the two ships.
Speaker 1: Looked like it's pretty crowded in there with that grove
Speaker 1: over alright, dv Cale will get in a way. One
Speaker 1: guess who the guy making the jokes is, of course
Speaker 1: as Michael Collins. If it sounds like I've been making
Speaker 1: fun of Michael Collins, think again, in a very real way.
Speaker 1: He is the most accessible of our crew. Neil and
Speaker 1: Buzz are always so straight laced. Both were described in
Speaker 1: their day as squares. Michael is much more well down
Speaker 1: to earth bare. He didn't really have a hanging card there.
Speaker 1: We can't really complain things like I had. They were
Speaker 1: about to open the hand now, but we don't see
Speaker 1: anything up there. Well, greas good, This is the first
Speaker 1: time that anyone other than the technicians who built her
Speaker 1: has climbed inside the lemb During the Apollo mission, this vehicle,
Speaker 1: the Lunar Module, will take two men and their scientific
Speaker 1: instruments to the surface of the Moon. While there, it
Speaker 1: will serve as command post and communications center, and when
Speaker 1: the astronauts finished their exploration, it will take them back
Speaker 1: to the orbiting command module for the return trip to Earth.
Speaker 1: In late July of nineteen sixty two, NASA invited nearly
Speaker 1: a dozen companies to bid on the Lunar Module design.
Speaker 1: The winning concept came from the aircraft manufacturer, the Grumman Corporation.
Speaker 1: These are the guys who built the F nine Panther
Speaker 1: that Neil flew in Korea. Later, they designed the most
Speaker 1: beautiful American fighter jet to ever take to the sky,
Speaker 1: the fourteen Tomcat. I'm standing on the floor of plant
Speaker 1: number five at the Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Best Page,
Speaker 1: New York. The Lunar Modules, or lambs for short, were designed, assembled,
Speaker 1: and tested at Grumman's Long Island facility in New York.
Speaker 1: Mike Lisa was a Grumman environmental test engineer. When I
Speaker 1: went to the interview to Grummin. They said, James, you're
Speaker 1: gonna be working on the LAMB. I go, Lamb, you're
Speaker 1: kidding So now I said, oh my gosh, I was
Speaker 1: through the day one. None of the engineers at Grumman
Speaker 1: had ever built anything like the LAMB before. No one had.
Speaker 1: The Lamb was for use on the Moon. It would
Speaker 1: never taste Earth's atmosphere. It would live and die in
Speaker 1: the vacuum of space. As such, unlike its gum drop
Speaker 1: shaped sibling, the Command Module, the Limb did need to
Speaker 1: be aerodynamic. Once you get two D fifty miles away,
Speaker 1: there's no atmosphere it obviously, it doesn't have to be sleek,
Speaker 1: doesn't have to look Because of that, it would never
Speaker 1: be described as beautiful. Instead of smooth, sleek sides, it
Speaker 1: was functional, bristling with sharp edges, antennas, weird bulges, and
Speaker 1: clusters of thrusters. Appropriately enough, it looked like something alien.
Speaker 1: The thing has a face, eyes, nose, even a mouth.
Speaker 1: It was a spider, it was. The Lamb evolved a lot.
Speaker 1: First it was roughly capsule shaped. Still later it resembled
Speaker 1: a helicopter cockpit with large curved windows. Then someone got
Speaker 1: out of calculator and added up how much it would weigh,
Speaker 1: and that was the end of that. The lamb had
Speaker 1: to be liked or else it would never get off
Speaker 1: the moon. Grumman's engineers soon became obsessed with taking weight off.
Speaker 1: The single massive window was ditched and in its place
Speaker 1: two small triangular shaped windows were substituted. Glasses heavy. Five
Speaker 1: landing legs offered the best possible stability, but that was
Speaker 1: one too many. Now it was only four. At one
Speaker 1: point in time on the lemb they actually had seats,
Speaker 1: and they said, now get these things out of here.
Speaker 1: Grumman proposed having the astronauts climb out of the vehicle
Speaker 1: by using a rope ladder, or even at one point
Speaker 1: repelled down the side via a rope. Ultimately they compromised
Speaker 1: on an aluminum ladder. Throughout the different phases of its
Speaker 1: design and construction, Grumman built full sized wooden mock ups
Speaker 1: for the NASA personnel to tour, equipment to be test fitted,
Speaker 1: and even space suited astronauts to try out. Buzz and
Speaker 1: Leo had put it on the backpack, and what happened
Speaker 1: was when they tried to get through the round opening,
Speaker 1: it was beaten the heckhead of the backpack, so it
Speaker 1: instantly was a redesign. I mean it was like, stop everything,
Speaker 1: this thing has to become rec dangular. The limb has
Speaker 1: two sections, the ascent stage from which the astronauts operated
Speaker 1: the craft, and the decent stage, with its spider legs
Speaker 1: and compartments for all of their equipment. This is the
Speaker 1: bit that gets left on the Moon. The engine on
Speaker 1: the decent stage is the most sophisticated ever designed. It's
Speaker 1: powerful enough to get the lemb down to the lunar surface,
Speaker 1: but it can also allow the lemb to hover like
Speaker 1: a helicopter while the astronauts choose a suitable landing spot.
Speaker 1: All that gold foil wrapped around the descent stage is
Speaker 1: milar insulation. It reflects hot sunlight away from the sensitive equipment.
Speaker 1: Beneath the foil is the craft's metal hull. At some places,
Speaker 1: it's the thickness of only three inches of kitchen aluminum foil,
Speaker 1: but once pressurized, it was remarkably strong. Think about it
Speaker 1: in terms of a soda can. After you've finished your soda.
Speaker 1: It's fairly easy to pierce the side of its aluminum skin,
Speaker 1: but it takes a lot more work to do, so
Speaker 1: when the contents are under pressure, it's the same idea here.
Speaker 1: Once the lemb was pressurized in the vacuum of space,
Speaker 1: it was much stronger than how it was back in
Speaker 1: Grumman's labs, where a misplaced foot or a fallen screw
Speaker 1: driver could have easily punctured the hull. Never in history
Speaker 1: had a flying machine gone into service without a comprehensive
Speaker 1: test fight. But when it came to landing on the Moon,
Speaker 1: there was no other way to do it, which meant
Speaker 1: that Mike and his team had their work cut out
Speaker 1: for them. It was their job to stress test every
Speaker 1: individual part that went into the lamb, not once, but
Speaker 1: thousands of times. I need you to picture a huge speaker,
Speaker 1: a regular ordinary speaker, except that the speaker is going
Speaker 1: to be about fifteen ft in diameter. Mike's vibration machines
Speaker 1: are basically speakers. They would mount the lamb on top
Speaker 1: of these shakers to simulate the vibrations experience during takeoff
Speaker 1: and all the other phases of the mission. It was
Speaker 1: shaking the lamb to the point where it was they
Speaker 1: would fall apart. I mean, we had actually introduced so
Speaker 1: many g forces that we wouldnock things off and m
Speaker 1: just to see if we can break it. We had
Speaker 1: to prove that the best thing was going to make
Speaker 1: it to the bone and back to Earth in one piece.
Speaker 1: On another test, they rotated the lamb upside down and
Speaker 1: shook it to see if anything would come off, and well,
Speaker 1: MD hold outcomes are nut a plane ordinary nut. It
Speaker 1: hit the ground on and the Nasser inspector was there
Speaker 1: and he pulled the plug on us. He stopped us
Speaker 1: for an entire week, and all of those units had
Speaker 1: to be inspected to a point where you wouldn't believe.
Speaker 1: Mike and his colleagues were obsessed with ensuring that everything
Speaker 1: they touched was perfect. Three folks life depending on this,
Speaker 1: and he wanted to be flawless. The importance that would
Speaker 1: leaned on everybody's mind was the safety of bringing these
Speaker 1: guys out and hitting them back. It wasn't an easy job.
Speaker 1: We were twelve hours a day here, sixty five days.
Speaker 1: He would never stopped. I remember taking a week off
Speaker 1: of my own, remember that. Other than that, no vacations, no, no, nothing.
Speaker 1: I couldn't wait to get to work. I knew this
Speaker 1: was going to be a big thing in all life
Speaker 1: I mean. To be a part of that history is
Speaker 1: absolutely incredible. I really loved doing that work. Mike was
Speaker 1: a new father when he watched the landing from the
Speaker 1: living room of his house, the same house in fact,
Speaker 1: where he lives today. I was sitting right here on
Speaker 1: this look with my black night television, the little baby
Speaker 1: upstairs crying, and uh. When I finally swear after they
Speaker 1: hit the ground, I couldn't believe it. I tell you,
Speaker 1: I had goose poems that you almost get a tear
Speaker 1: out of it. It was starting. It was incredible to
Speaker 1: see all all were finally coming to fruition. It was great.
Speaker 1: Today Mike volunteers his time at the Cradle of Aviation
Speaker 1: Museum in Garden City as a docent, talking to people
Speaker 1: about the lamb he helped build. Now that Neil and
Speaker 1: Buzz have opened her up, let's take a look inside,
Speaker 1: shall we. As you can see, there is not a
Speaker 1: lot of space in here, just room enough for two
Speaker 1: men to stand side by side. They each have a
Speaker 1: window angled down towards the ground. In the front there
Speaker 1: you can see joysticks, altimeters, a bunch of knobs, switches
Speaker 1: and circuit breakers. The hatch to get out to the
Speaker 1: Moon is below these consoles just here at their feet,
Speaker 1: and that whole directly above your head. That's the hatch
Speaker 1: connecting the lamb to the command module. The lunar module
Speaker 1: trammed with instrumentation, communications, equipment, and propulsion, all needed for
Speaker 1: the important job of jetting two men down to and
Speaker 1: away from the surface of the Moon. In all, it
Speaker 1: took an estimated nine thousand engineers and two point four
Speaker 1: billion dollars to design and build the lunar module. That's
Speaker 1: billion with a B. There are many at this time
Speaker 1: of history who felt that that money could have been
Speaker 1: better spent. America was losing about fifty men every day
Speaker 1: in Vietnam, some of the country's most inspiring leaders were
Speaker 1: being felled by assassin's bullets. Campus protests and street riots
Speaker 1: were breaking out across the country, and according to the
Speaker 1: US Census, of African Americans were living in poverty. In
Speaker 1: an era of intense racial discrimination, African Americans found themselves
Speaker 1: trapped between America's technological abilities and its social injustice. America,
Speaker 1: it seemed, would rather spend hundreds of billions of dollars
Speaker 1: on war and petty political one upmanship than actually improving
Speaker 1: the lives of its citizens. The plight of African Americans
Speaker 1: at this time inspired Gil Scott Heron depend these words
Speaker 1: in the song Whitey on the Moon. I can't pay
Speaker 1: no doctor bills, but White he's on the moon. Ten
Speaker 1: years from now, I'll be paying still while white is
Speaker 1: on the moon. You know the man just off my
Speaker 1: rent last night, because why it is on the moon.
Speaker 1: No hot water, no toilets, no lights, but White he's
Speaker 1: on the moon. Lelon, we haven't good to be to
Speaker 1: the window there. It looks like the turns farrently coming
Speaker 1: through there. We're back in the level. Kneel and Buzz
Speaker 1: have the camera with them and they're showing the world
Speaker 1: what it looks like inside. Now, let me tell you
Speaker 1: if you're looking the other way, Buzz turns the camera around,
Speaker 1: shooting back into the command module. That's a great good
Speaker 1: right there. That's Neil and mind better bigger line. Remember
Speaker 1: when Mike Lisa mentioned that they'd yanked the lemb seats
Speaker 1: to save on weight, Well, they swapped them out with
Speaker 1: tethered restraints so that Neil and Buzz didn't float around
Speaker 1: inside the spacecraft. Buzz decides to try them on early,
Speaker 1: but without being in his bulky pressure suit, they don't
Speaker 1: quite have the same effect. Restraints in here do a
Speaker 1: pretty good job of pulling my bands down. We haven't
Speaker 1: quite got that before the fifty million TV audience yet, careful, Buzz,
Speaker 1: this is a family show having that th real good
Speaker 1: camera work, probably the most unusual provision of cameraman's ever
Speaker 1: head hanging from a tunnel. One thing in a picture
Speaker 1: up down leven. You got a pretty big audience. It's
Speaker 1: live in the US, it's going live to Japan, Western
Speaker 1: Europe and much of South America. Appreciate the great skill.
Speaker 1: Hello there, poor Michael, he's feeling left out. Meanwhile, Buzz
Speaker 1: is fantasizing about pushing off from one end of the
Speaker 1: lamb and sailing all the way through to the other
Speaker 1: side of the command module, a travert from the bottom
Speaker 1: of them to the bulk of the command Model's interesting
Speaker 1: to not apply to putting off from one and founding
Speaker 1: on into the other vehicle all the way through the tunnel.
Speaker 1: But comperiance, if Colin is gonna go in and look around,
Speaker 1: we're willing to let it go. Come up with the
Speaker 1: price of the ticket again. But to advice invocate the
Speaker 1: man's off. This twitches well, buzzing. Neil are busy in
Speaker 1: the lem. Let's check out Michael's domain. The command module,
Speaker 1: after all, this is where the lions share of our
Speaker 1: podcast takes place. Cockpit, crew, quarters, command center. When America's
Speaker 1: three astronauts travel to the Moon, they'll use the Apollo
Speaker 1: Command module for all these things. And of the three
Speaker 1: modules that make up the spacecraft, this is the only
Speaker 1: one that will come back. The commanded service modules were
Speaker 1: built by North American Aviation. This is the company that
Speaker 1: built the P fifty one Mustang, one of the most
Speaker 1: extraordinary planes to come out of World War Two, Buzzes
Speaker 1: F eight six Saber, and Niel's X fifteen rocket plane.
Speaker 1: So yeah, these guys know a thing or two about
Speaker 1: building extraordinary machines. Chuck Lowry was working for North American
Speaker 1: Aviation in Columbus, Ohio, designing airplanes when he was given
Speaker 1: the opportunity to begin working on a new program that
Speaker 1: NASA was calling Apollo. I was invited to move from Columbus,
Speaker 1: Ohio to California to be in charge of the landing system.
Speaker 1: The parachute jumped at the chance to do that. Not
Speaker 1: many people in the early sixties believed a moon landing
Speaker 1: was even possible. Chuck remembers being at church one night
Speaker 1: shortly before they made the move to California. There was
Speaker 1: a leader speaking to a group of people, and he
Speaker 1: said something like a crazy government. Now they say we're
Speaker 1: going to go to the moon. Go, I don't put
Speaker 1: people at How many of you really believe that we're
Speaker 1: gonna put people on the moon? Of course, I raised
Speaker 1: my hand, and I looked around, and my hand was
Speaker 1: the only one up. And I looked over my wife
Speaker 1: sitting next to me and heard him was not a
Speaker 1: So at that point, not many people in the population
Speaker 1: really believe we were going to do that. I did.
Speaker 1: Chuck and his colleagues put in a lot of ours.
Speaker 1: We had so many heart attacks, so many divorces among
Speaker 1: the you know, the workers, and it was a hard job,
Speaker 1: but it was a thrilling job, and I don't regret
Speaker 1: a minute of it. All Right, listener, why don't you
Speaker 1: sit here in the center seat. This is Michael seat.
Speaker 1: It's going to give you the best view. Almost every
Speaker 1: inch of the interior wall space is filled with switches, dials,
Speaker 1: and gauges. Some are similar to those found in modern
Speaker 1: jet planes, but others are new designed for the require
Speaker 1: moments of spaceflight. That's seven foot wide, three foot tall,
Speaker 1: crescent shaped panel directly in front of you is divided
Speaker 1: into three sections, one for each of the astronauts. On
Speaker 1: the left is the panel for Neil, the mission commander.
Speaker 1: He has the primary flight controls, which govern things like
Speaker 1: the command modules, altitude, velocity, and attitude. The center panel
Speaker 1: is the Command Module Pilots. Michael controls the guidance and
Speaker 1: navigation computer, propulsion, the environmental system, and thruster controls. On
Speaker 1: the right is the Lunar Module pilots panel. This isn't
Speaker 1: Buzzes ship, but since he's going to be in that
Speaker 1: seat for roughly eight of the nine days, he gets
Speaker 1: to cover electricity, battery, fuel cells, and calms. In all,
Speaker 1: there are five hundred and fifty six switches in the
Speaker 1: command module and twenty four separate instruments, So yeah, this
Speaker 1: is one complicated spacecraft. Then when you want to move around,
Speaker 1: you can stow a couch and you can go down below.
Speaker 1: There's a lower equipment by which, of course a lot
Speaker 1: of storage lockers. There are six equipment bays and all
Speaker 1: they house everything from guidance and navigation equipment, medical supplies,
Speaker 1: survival gear of food, locker, drinking water, a waste management system,
Speaker 1: close tools, cameras, fire stingishers, and a dozen other mission
Speaker 1: critical supplies. Now, if you look up, you see the tunnels,
Speaker 1: which is what you used to go up and exit
Speaker 1: the command module and go into the lunar module. The
Speaker 1: command module has five small windows, two at eye level
Speaker 1: for buzz and Neil, two forward facing ones that are
Speaker 1: used primarily for rendezvous and docking, and a fifth on
Speaker 1: the hatch directly above you. You see those little black
Speaker 1: squares all over the walls. That's velcro in zero G
Speaker 1: where things tend to float away. It's really nice to
Speaker 1: have something to stick things to. Everything from your checklists too,
Speaker 1: small tools, and even your food pouches. If all of
Speaker 1: this sounds cramped, it is. The Command module is just
Speaker 1: over ten and a half feet in height with a
Speaker 1: diameter of just under thirteen feet, barely over two hundred
Speaker 1: square feet in volume. The mid seat used by the
Speaker 1: pilot of the Command Module can be folded back to
Speaker 1: provide working space and give the crew a chance to stretch. Luckily,
Speaker 1: the couches the guys sit in can not only be
Speaker 1: reconfigured for sleep, but the center one, the one you're in,
Speaker 1: can be completely broken down to allow them to stretch out,
Speaker 1: as well as access the telescope and the sextant. Despite
Speaker 1: all of the technological wizardry aboard the command Module, some
Speaker 1: of the astronauts equipment is relatively unchanged. In two hundred years,
Speaker 1: mariners aboard eighteenth century sailing ships use sextants to chart
Speaker 1: their course using the stars. The astronauts on Apollo eleven
Speaker 1: us theirs to do exactly the same thing. In eighteen
Speaker 1: sixty five, the French novelist Jules Verne, one of the
Speaker 1: founding fathers of science fiction, wrote From Earth to the Moon.
Speaker 1: In it, a group of post Civil War engineers build
Speaker 1: a giant cannon in well where else, Florida. With that cannon,
Speaker 1: they shoot a giant bullet shaped projectile, carrying three people
Speaker 1: to the moon helperically. Awesome is that the engineer's in
Speaker 1: vern story named the Canon columbiad Neil Buzzing Michael have
Speaker 1: dubbed this command module Columbia in its honor. The first
Speaker 1: time I had butterflies in my stomach because of apprehension
Speaker 1: about systems working. Was Apollo seven because that was the
Speaker 1: first man flight. A lot riding on that flight. The
Speaker 1: whole program was writing and lives We're writing on that flight,
Speaker 1: and by the time we got to Apollo eleven um
Speaker 1: it was pretty rude tinae. But that sort of confidence
Speaker 1: comes only after years of success and hard work. Chuck
Speaker 1: would go on to work on every Apollo mission, and
Speaker 1: even today is a consultant on the Orion spacecraft, which
Speaker 1: will be taking astronauts back to the Moon in a
Speaker 1: couple of years. I'm immensely proud in the fact that
Speaker 1: I worked on Apollo from the first to the last,
Speaker 1: the success of it, what it really meant to this nation,
Speaker 1: what it meant to the world, And the further I
Speaker 1: go in life, the more product I can live in
Speaker 1: all The total cost for developing and building Apollo's command
Speaker 1: and service modules was three point eight billion dollars. That
Speaker 1: is a lot of money. Between the lunar module and
Speaker 1: the command module, taxpayers shelled out around six point two
Speaker 1: billion dollars. That's sixty two and a half billion in
Speaker 1: today's dollars, and it is worth asking was it worth it?
Speaker 1: Many people today bemoan the lack of public support for
Speaker 1: space exploration. They point back to the halcyon days of
Speaker 1: the Apollo program, when everyone was rooting for NASA and
Speaker 1: support for the moon landing was universal, except those days
Speaker 1: never existed. Sure, fifty years later, the Apollo program is
Speaker 1: regarded as an unqualified success, but that's not how it
Speaker 1: was viewed at the time. In fact, the majority of
Speaker 1: scientists felt that NASA was moving with reckless speed and
Speaker 1: that the money and minds going towards space meant that
Speaker 1: other critical scientific pursuits were being sidelined, and the public agreed.
Speaker 1: NASA's Bill Berry and polls throughout the nights sixties when
Speaker 1: people ask the question is it a priority to you
Speaker 1: it should we be be spending money on sending humans to
Speaker 1: the moon? That pole question never got above support except
Speaker 1: for one week in the nineteen sixties and hours the
Speaker 1: week we landed on the Moon. Um So generally speaking,
Speaker 1: a majority you know, of Americans, uh, you know, we're
Speaker 1: not in favor of a major moon landing program. Back
Speaker 1: on Apollo eleven, exactly two days and nine hours from
Speaker 1: their launch, the guys are wrapping up their television broadcast.
Speaker 1: The consensus is that the Earth appears much smaller today.
Speaker 1: It appears now that we have a view of Earth
Speaker 1: out the window land. If that's not the Earth, we're
Speaker 1: in trouble and differing after day and to day, and
Speaker 1: that large and image every continuing. If I get a
Speaker 1: big Thankley Paller here and now hundred seventy deeven thousand
Speaker 1: miles out over, and I'd like to say I fellow
Speaker 1: got from Cator that Farragut State Park in Idaho in
Speaker 1: the night called gamboree there this week and up all
Speaker 1: eleven like to send the best ways. That was Neil
Speaker 1: other than Apollo fifteens, Jim Irwin, every single one of
Speaker 1: the Apollo moonwalkers were boy Scouts, and Neil and Charlie Duke,
Speaker 1: the two people chatting here, achieved the rank of Eagle Scout.
Speaker 1: And we're going to turn our V monitor off our
Speaker 1: short bit while we have some other work to do.
Speaker 1: A follow eleven find off right here, Levin, thank you
Speaker 1: very much that with one of the greatest goals we've
Speaker 1: ever seen, was here appreciated over in all. Their TV
Speaker 1: transmission lasted just over an hour and a half, and
Speaker 1: in that time they've traveled more than two thousand miles.
Speaker 1: Now it's time to get back to work, transferring equipment
Speaker 1: they're gonna need on the Moon from the command module
Speaker 1: to the lunar module. As Neil and Buzz work, astronaut
Speaker 1: Owen Garrett has commandeered the Capcom microphone to let Neil
Speaker 1: know that Mission Control is enjoying a little snack levin
Speaker 1: Youth and a little informaking to you their CD are.
Speaker 1: We've all taken a momentary brief respite from our work
Speaker 1: here to have a biden special Moon cheese that has
Speaker 1: understanded been sent to it directly from Wappa, Connectica. Wow,
Speaker 1: your own hometown. However, we can't pronounce the eather. I
Speaker 1: think you'll enjoy that. Make up a fine branded cheese
Speaker 1: roger there, and I'll police up the grammar for the
Speaker 1: next chef. And a little less than three hours will
Speaker 1: pass a milestone of sorts as the spacecraft passes into
Speaker 1: the lunar sphere of influence. At that point, the spacecraft
Speaker 1: will be under the dominant influence of the Moon's gravity.
Speaker 1: Neil and Buzz finished their work and seal at the limb.
Speaker 1: The mood inside the spacecraft is casual and stress free.
Speaker 1: The late workload is allowing the astronauts to relax, and
Speaker 1: they begin entertaining themselves with the music. The intermittent music
Speaker 1: that we're getting is apparently coming from the spacecraft. Eleven
Speaker 1: hit than we wanted his own horn. Yeah, we did.
Speaker 1: Had a little music there that was good. You can
Speaker 1: keep it coming down lever. Mission control wishes the crew
Speaker 1: a good night. They assume they won't be hearing from
Speaker 1: the astronauts again until the morning, and for ten minutes
Speaker 1: or so the radio falls silent, and then go ahead
Speaker 1: and eleven over. You have any idea where the for
Speaker 1: a year for refector sem I. Neil is referring to
Speaker 1: the third stage of the Saturn five that, as you'll
Speaker 1: remember from our last episode, was nudged a safe distance
Speaker 1: away from the crew and is now following them to
Speaker 1: the Moon. As they were settling in for the night,
Speaker 1: Neil saw a flashing light out one of the windows.
Speaker 1: Are you a phoe? Neil suspects it may be the
Speaker 1: third stage of the Saturn rocket. Paul eleven Houston be
Speaker 1: at four Bees, about six thousand nautical miles from you
Speaker 1: now over, Okay, so it's not the third stage given
Speaker 1: the distance between the two, it's highly unlikely the crew
Speaker 1: could make out what's left of the Saturn. So just
Speaker 1: what is this UFO? Well, to this day, the object
Speaker 1: they saw has never been identified. However, before the conspiracy
Speaker 1: theorists and our audience get too excited, it was almost
Speaker 1: certainly one of the four panels that protected the lunar
Speaker 1: module during launch, and we're jettisoned yesterday right before its extraction.
Speaker 1: Even though those panels don't have their own propulsion source,
Speaker 1: they were already whizzing to the Moon at more than
Speaker 1: twenty four thousand miles an hour and are going to
Speaker 1: continue to do so until an equal or opposite force
Speaker 1: acts upon them. Yeah, we got to the Moon using
Speaker 1: the discoveries of a guy who wore a wig and
Speaker 1: died in seventeen Thanks Isaac Newton. On July, the day
Speaker 1: before Apaul eleven lifted off, a group of five protesters
Speaker 1: set up camp outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center.
Speaker 1: They were led by Reverend Ralph Abernathy. This is the
Speaker 1: man who created Martin Luther King Jr's body in his
Speaker 1: arms as the civil rights icon died on a motel
Speaker 1: balcony in Memphis, Tennessee NASA's Bill Berry so a great extent.
Speaker 1: After Reverend King was assassinated, Abernathy sort of assumed the
Speaker 1: mantle of leadership of the civil rights movement. Abanathi was
Speaker 1: very smart about the training issues that he was concerned about,
Speaker 1: which was the fact that there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people living in poverty in the United States at the time.
Speaker 1: Abernathy and his protesters were hoping to bring attention to
Speaker 1: their cause by going to the one place guaranteed to
Speaker 1: have the majority of the nation's news cameras. NASA administrator
Speaker 1: Tom Paine said, Okay, we're gonna ignore these guys. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go out in with Reverdath Abernathy, and so there
Speaker 1: was a meeting. Um and Paine agreed that, you know,
Speaker 1: there were significant problems in America and that they should
Speaker 1: be addressed. Surrounded by protesters singing we shall overcome and
Speaker 1: holding signs reading hungry Kids Can't eat Moon rocks, Abernathy
Speaker 1: and Payne spoke for about twenty minutes. Abernathy asserted that
Speaker 1: money for space fight was a misplaced priority. We may
Speaker 1: go on from this day into Mars, into Jupiter, and
Speaker 1: even to the heavens beyond. But as long as racism, poverty,
Speaker 1: and hunger and war prevail on the Earth, we as
Speaker 1: a civilized nation have failed. Pain agreed. Everybody also pointed
Speaker 1: out that from his perspective that you know, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to the moon wasn't going to solve those problems,
Speaker 1: and in fact he actually said, you know, if me
Speaker 1: not turning to switch the launch to our to go
Speaker 1: to the moon could solve these problems, I would do that.
Speaker 1: You would cancel amission. But it's not. Pain told Abernathy
Speaker 1: he didn't know what NASA could do in the short
Speaker 1: term to combat poverty, but that the Moonshot was an
Speaker 1: example of what human beings were capable of achieving if
Speaker 1: they threw themselves behind a worthwhile cause. He wanted the
Speaker 1: civil rights leader to see Apollo as just the thing
Speaker 1: to spur the nation to tackling other giant problems and
Speaker 1: to use its success as a yardstick to measure what
Speaker 1: was possible. And you very smartly, asked the Reverend Aberna,
Speaker 1: I think if he had prayed for the ct to
Speaker 1: the astronauts, and then he invited at and a significant
Speaker 1: part of the group of people that were there for
Speaker 1: the march to come into the v I P Visitors
Speaker 1: site to watch the launch the next day, and it
Speaker 1: was a really, I think telling incident that that tells
Speaker 1: us a lot about sort of where the space program
Speaker 1: sat and popular imagination at the time, and how much
Speaker 1: strong leaders on both sides could make an impact on
Speaker 1: the conversation on the eve of man's noblest venture. I
Speaker 1: have profoundly moved by the nation's achievements in space and
Speaker 1: the heroism of the three men embarking for the Moon.
Speaker 1: But what we can do for space and exploration, we
Speaker 1: demand that we do for starving people. The hard truth,
Speaker 1: of course, is that we didn't use Apollo as an
Speaker 1: inspiration to eradicate poverty in America. We didn't go to
Speaker 1: the Moon because scientists were demanding it. We didn't go
Speaker 1: to the Moon because the public was demanding it. We
Speaker 1: went to the Moon because the President pushed the program through,
Speaker 1: believing that a successful space race would earn the United
Speaker 1: States a significant victory in the Cold War. The most
Speaker 1: audacious thing humans had ever attempted was also something only
Speaker 1: the planet's richest nation could afford to try. Yes, it
Speaker 1: was deeply controversial, but it also worked and directly paved
Speaker 1: the way for the technological age in which we now
Speaker 1: find ourselves. There may come a time when America will
Speaker 1: face a similar dilemma. Our planet is currently staring down
Speaker 1: unprecedented challenges in climate change, dwindling resources, terrorism, and a
Speaker 1: daunting refugee crisis. Some believe the solutions to these and
Speaker 1: other problems can be found amongst the stars. The next
Speaker 1: Apollo mission may not be about winning a Cold war,
Speaker 1: but rather saving the entirety of the human race. And
Speaker 1: when that time comes, that mission may be met with
Speaker 1: the same controversy and skepticism. And why not. Our world
Speaker 1: has never looked more like nineteen sixty nine, plagued by war,
Speaker 1: racial discrimination, and political scandals. The same complaints made in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty nine are being made today. It doesn't look
Speaker 1: like we've learned much in the last fifty years. It's
Speaker 1: hard to care about space when grinding poverty, state sponsored racism,
Speaker 1: violence against our LGBTQ brothers and sisters, and turning away
Speaker 1: refugees fleeing war and oppression dominates the news every night.
Speaker 1: NASA administrator Thomas Paine was right. The moon shot was
Speaker 1: an example of what humans are capable of. Achieving, but
Speaker 1: so is creating a sea change for every citizen on
Speaker 1: this planet. Our choice is not one or the other,
Speaker 1: it must be both. We must be bold enough and
Speaker 1: brave enough to transform life on Earth and the stars.
Speaker 1: This is Apollo Control at sixty one thirty nine minutes
Speaker 1: coming up. In less than ten seconds now, we'll be
Speaker 1: crossing into the sphere of influence of the Moon as
Speaker 1: the Moon's gravitational force becomes the dominant effect on the
Speaker 1: spacecraft trajectory. At that point, which occurred a few seconds ago,
Speaker 1: the spacecraft was at a distance of one eighty six thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred seven nautical miles from Earth and thirty three thousand,
Speaker 1: eight hundred two nautical miles from the Moon. Day three
Speaker 1: is over. Day four, July nine begins with our next
Speaker 1: episode as we spin back to tell the story of
Speaker 1: three stars, not celestial stars, but reality stars, the astronauts
Speaker 1: and their families who lived beneath the withering media spotlight
Speaker 1: on Earth as they trained to go to the Moon.
Speaker 1: A moon vet on day four loose large and Apollo
Speaker 1: eleven's windows as our crew prepares to undertake a series
Speaker 1: of dangerous maneuvers to get into orbit. This podcast is
Speaker 1: a production of I Heart Radio and trade Craft Studios.
Speaker 1: Executive producers Ashe Seroia and Scott Bernstein in association with
Speaker 1: High five Content, and an executive producer Andrew Jacobs. Amazing
Speaker 1: research and production assistants by associate producers Brian show Saw
Speaker 1: and Natalie Robomed. Our incredible editor is Bill Lance. Original
Speaker 1: music by Henry ben Wah thanks to this episode's voice
Speaker 1: actor Tim Gordon. The experts who contributed to this episode
Speaker 1: were NASA historian Bill Berry, Grummin's Mike Lisa and North
Speaker 1: Americans Chuck Lowry. Licensing rights and clearances by Deborah Correa.
Speaker 1: This is a brand new podcast and we're so excited
Speaker 1: to be sharing it with you. Help us spread it
Speaker 1: far and wide, tell your friends, leave ratings and reviews,
Speaker 1: and chat about it on social media. Our hashtag is
Speaker 1: nine D I J. We would love to hear what
Speaker 1: you think. New episodes come out every week, so we
Speaker 1: sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brandon Phibbs.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for listening, and I'll see you next episode.