NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Fred Haise, Jr., NASA astronaut during the Apollo 13 mission, part 3 of 3

Well, the driver was obviously things I could understand of budgets, diminishing budgets and intent to move on to the next program. And I think a real concern that we were lucky, and as we've gotten that far, we've gotten a lot of data on the front side certainly, and I think that the combination of feeling certainly in management was the risk worth the gain. We may lose somebody continuing down this road, and so I think all those things together added up to say, you know, we quit while we're ahead. Selfishly, obviously, I'd like to have still had a test to fly the mission, but just wasn't in the cards.

Now I look at, frankly, at this point in my life, totally different. I mean, I look at it as I've been very lucky and privileged to have been born at the right time. I ended up by accident in the flying business, test flying, so I had the right experience background that even be qualified to apply, get selected, and just have the chance to be in a part of that program that was the premier, my mind is still the premier engineering, and certainly the premier exploration program of the 20th century. Perfect. Great. Thank you. You ready to go?

Second mark. How did you train to get you to tell me to take me back on that? We went from the rudimentary training I mentioned on Apollo 13 where we were using Polaroid cameras, camping out, to getting it more high fidelity at the French on Apollo 16 at the training site would be a wooden mock-up of a limb with the same geometry, and you would always start the EDA exercise as if you had just landed, and you'd do the window view description from that wooden mock-up. And then you would start your field exercise, and we actually had backpacks with a radio embedded, a breastplate that we could hang the Hasselbad camera with the same geometry,

a belt to tie on our tongs and lunar tools. And so we were doing this real field exercise using this without a spacesuit, but otherwise trying to make it as high fidelity as we could to the real thing. We knew on these exercises generally parked off an attempt to the side where the real geology and scientists who were going to be in the back room during the mission, that would be there to talk to you on the radio as you would be doing the description, and incidentally, if any of those people had ever been in that area, and then from me with the geology, they were excused from the exercise, because that would be cheating. At the same time, you had the world's expert for that site as kind of the walk behind you and keep notes and be ready to critique you after each of these exercises, what you had done wrong, what you had not observed you should have, and also critique the back room

people if they did not ask the right questions based on some observation you had made. So the expert critiqued the whole team on what they should have done differently. Great. What do you think of Jean Schumacher? Jean, I thought all those people were outstanding. They were real thinkers. I guess you can't deal in the realm of time they do and not develop another sense almost of what the world's all about. Do you think it's worthwhile going back to the moon, Frank? You know, in the long term of the space program to me is frankly to plant the human race elsewhere. And I don't want to lean on the latest movies, the meteorites and comments and all of that, but truthfully, those are concerns that we all live on one single spacecraft.

The Earth is a spacecraft, it's got environmental system, and it may not be around forever, or certainly not around livable for us, for things we may be doing or things that may happen externally. So I look at as almost divine promise that we have been given the capability we really have. We can do it. We can go put people elsewhere and save the human race elsewhere within the universe. And we were given this talent, and to me it does not seem right, we wouldn't use it. Thank you. Great. Boy, am I glad I got that. Alright.