NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Charles "Pete" Conrad Jr., astronaut, engineer, and Commander on Apollo 12, part 1 of 2

Jim, was it important could we have gotten to the moon without it? The Jimney program was obviously very important and probably for three reasons, two of which most people know about and the third one is a little bit in the background. We obviously needed to get to duration. In other words, even in those days the doctors still weren't sure what the effects were going to be of zero gravity on humans. And so the obvious first thing was get Jimney to get out to at least 14 days and the way they did that was to double the time. We went for four days after the Jimney original flight and we doubled that and went for eight days and that was the flight I got to fly with Gordon Cooper. And then of course, Jimney seven then went for 14 days which was all the amount of time we needed to do the lunar missions.

The obvious other thing was the rendezvous. Learned how to do the rendezvous and you got to walk. I mean you got to walk before you run and the rendezvous started out to be the easiest way we could think of doing it. And that was to do a very slow catch up and get up there. But the ultimate one was to rendezvous in less than one orbit of the earth. And in order to do that, excuse me, the reason we had to do that was electrical power was going to be very, very scarce in the assent stage of the lunar module. So once you lifted off from the moon, you wanted to rendezvous as quickly as you could with the command module. So we built up on that and Jimney six was the first one to do the rendezvous and they rendezvoused with Jimney seven because they didn't have a target vehicle. They had a problem with that. And later on, we finally wound up on my second Jimney flight, Jimney 11, we got to do the rendezvous in less than one orbit of the earth.

But the other thing that I think is very important about Jimney, which a lot of people don't realize is a deep slate in our boss, wanted to make sure that anybody that was a crew commander on Apollo was going to be as experienced as possible. So one of the things that he kind of said as a requirement was to be on a rendezvous mission in Jimney. And if you could be involved in the other part of it, fine. And so if you look and see where the crew commanders came from, they all had good Jimney backgrounds when we got over in Apollo. So that's why Jimney was really very, very important. Back on the medical question, I know you're fondness for the doctors. What were they afraid of? Were you concerned about the things they were afraid of? I'm not, I don't think I was really that up to speed on what they were concerned with. Obviously, they had studied some bedrest, I think, back in those days. And I think they were just worried.

They had all kinds of worries that got put out, a lot of them got put out of the way with Mercury. And that was such things as swallowing. You wouldn't be able to breathe all right or I don't know what all the concerns were, but certainly the calcium loss and things like that, they knew that that was going to happen. And we knew that you would probably have to try an exercise. And we had some very crude exercise devices that Jim didn't work very well because Jimney was just so confined that you were really parked and that was it. What was it like spending eight days on Gemini 5? Well, personally, that was the longest of my life because, as I just said, that vehicle was really small. And you're in zero gravity, you're not doing any work. And so when Houston would say it's bedtime and we'll see in eight hours, you know, you're all like this and you're all bright, I'd wish he'd tell, you got no place to go. And Gordon Cooper and I had obviously trained together for a year. There wasn't a lot of sea stories to swap between ourselves and a lot of new conversations to have.

And it just was got really, really, really long. And it was not comfortable not being able to stretch out. I know my knees get painful and things like that. It just, just wasn't the most comfortable thing in the whole world. I'm sure that the only people that felt worse than I did were Frank Bournemann and Jim Lovewell having to fly the 14 day mission. Now, one of the things they had that was different than we had is they did have a much better suit. If you look at the pressure suit they wore, it was made strictly for the 14 day mission. We were in the hard Gemini suit and that was another thing. You had to wear it for, I had to wear that thing for eight days. Did you bring along anything to entertain yourself? No, we didn't have room. We had nothing to, that was another thing. We had nothing to read and we had no music. And you don't understand what quiet is until you're in something like a Gemini spacecraft. The machinery in Gemini, most of it was mounted outside the pressure vessel.

And I mean, it is quiet, quiet, quiet. What's it like being with Gordo for eight days up there? Well, it was great. Like I said, we didn't have enough stories to swap having just spent a whole year in the other training. Good, okay, cut terrific. Did it surprise you had difficulty EVAs where the spacewalking was? Well, we did get surprised on Gemini 11, no doubt about it because both Dick and I, even though I wasn't participating outside, we had done all the training in the 0G aircraft. And that really led us down a Primrose path. The 0G airplane only gives you about 35 seconds of weightlessness and having that reoccur over and over and over again, it was an obvious where we were going to have problems. And really, that's what led to finally doing EVAs in the water tank, which is still the way they do it today.

What was happening to Dick out there? Well, he was not able to grip with his legs and work with his hands on the test and he completely wore himself out just getting the tether hooked up. Now, fortunately, that was the first thing that he attempted and he got the tether hooked up after much, much work. It was very obvious to me, though, that he was getting tired. We didn't have ways of really carrying good heat loads out of the seat suit. He was beginning to perspire very heavily and that was causing him problems with getting in his eyes and so he was getting in trouble. And it was very obvious to me, I didn't want to make a direct order, though, but we discussed it and finally concluded the best thing was that he should get back in. Now, do you have any trouble getting back in? How would you have handled it if he had had trouble getting back in?

Well, I'm not exactly, I would have helped him as best I could. There wasn't an awful lot that I could do, but he did get in, OK, we got that squared away, all right. The mission rules were, though, that if he couldn't get back in, then I was supposed to pull a plug and say, goodbye, I don't think anybody would do that, but that was the mission rules. Good. OK, cut for a second. How you doing footage? Great. You keep doing it, then, while I'm doing this. Where were you at the time of the fire? What went through your head? Well, I worked late at the office in Houston that when it happened and I was actually in my car driving towards my home when they made an announcement about a problem at the Cape with the spacecraft. Then I sensed enough that I thought I'd better turn around and go back and find out what happened. So I did and I went back and of course we had to fire and we lost the three guys.

Did it make sense to you when you thought about what happened? Well, that sort of thing doesn't make sense, but I think from my personal point of view, Gordo and I were the guys that did the Egress work for that configuration. And as you may remember, one of the things was as you had to pull a hatch inward and the thing that was so bad as no matter how hard and how much time and effort we had spent on thinking things out, we had forgotten the one thing. It was because somebody might have to get out of the spacecraft because there was a problem in the spacecraft. Everybody thought the problem was going to be someplace else, the booster, all the propellants and all of that. You'd have to get out of it very quickly.

When it happened, it took almost a full minute to get out. When the spacecraft was depressurized and when the spacecraft was pressurized as it was, there was no way it could pull that hatch inward. I mean, it was tons of force holding that hatch closed. It was a two-piece hatch. That was one of the big redesigns that was done after the fire was we went to the outward opening hatch, which was similar to what we had in Germany. We had the outward opening hatch on Germany because we had the ejection seats. That's why that's a tougher hatch to design. That's why it was not that way on Apollo in the beginning. That was one of the big changes. You know, we're about to run out of film. Gus, do a move. Just look at me a second, Pete, and roll that on this thing. Because I want to talk to you about Gus and we'll change mags before we do that.

But because Gus had so much to do with the design of the Mercury capsule, a lot of people think he did himself in because he insisted on that hatch being a certain way. I don't remember Gus, and you've got me in an area that I'm not familiar with. Like I said, however the hatch got put in there, I know it was Gordo, and I did all of it. I think we did it out here, and if I remember right in California. Well, I had heard from a couple of different people, and it could be impactful because of the problems Gus had of his Mercury flight with a hatch. I think he was working on that block one. That may have been, but I'm not, that is not in my memory. I'm going to go to the excitement on 12th. Marty Kaden told me some interesting stories about prior to the lunch on 12th.

Marty was working with me on 20th, so how are you going to take it in mind? I don't think that's proper. You're going to have to change the author to a regular author list. He said, how do you imagine this will be referred to asylum comma L? I said, I would love that. And so they sent some of the most distinguished people in the country out to talk to me to prevent me from doing that saying Congress would be upset, and they would withdraw money from science and the Apollo program. And I said, nuts, if you don't publish it that way, I'll withdraw it. And so it was printed, and it's now been published in many, many journals, and they get many letters and packages, sometimes just lunatic asylum.

Great. Okay. Okay. Here we go. I want to just do a quick little walk through as a lab with Dr. Wassinger. That was great.