NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Robert Channing Seamans, Jr., Deputy Administrator at NASA and Professor at MIT, part 3 of 3

George Miller and how did he come into the program? What did his presence mean? And then we're going to all up test him. Well, finding the right people to run the lunar program was not easy. And we originally thought of something like a general shriever who had run the ballistic missile program and found that all the people we could think of who were in the military were not available. And so the first person we had was brained homes and he got us off to a good start and he went back to industry and George Miller came in in the summer, I believe, of 63. And I'd worked with George before I knew him. But I happen to be cruising on our boat when I came in out of the fog and the fire reaches

of the main coast. Somebody called out to me, Mr. Webb wants you on the telephone and so I went over to somebody else's boat who had a more powerful radio telephone. And he said, he would ride an I've been talking to George Miller and think he'd be an excellent person to run the man flight program, run the Apollo program in particular. And I said, I think that would be just great if he's willing to do it. I know him and I have a very high regard for him. And George was, by the time I got back to Washington, I think George was already there. And which is just a couple of days later. And he didn't take very long to figure out some things that had to be done immediately. And there were two in particular. The first one really resonated with me because we'd launched force of the first Saturn with nothing but sand in the upper stages and it all been successful. And I checked with Werner and others, you know, why are we wasting our time?

Why don't we move ahead more smartly and so on. And George came in with what I think even then he called all up testing. And it was right on the money that even on the first test, we'll put everything aboard. Now it may be only the first two-thirds work or something and then you have a failure. So you lose out with some of the equipment. And if everything works, then think how much you've gained. And I can't quite remember, but I think I felt this was sufficiently significant. We ought to go right to see Mr. Webb about it, right on the spot. Anyway, it didn't take long to get George and Mr. Webb together and he dried and George sold us all. And obviously there's some risk involved in that you could look stupid if you waste some stuff because of a failure. But to sell us to the German team was really, they couldn't believe it.

You know, they'd last something like 65 V2s before they worked at Pino Monday and they were for the careful step-by-step approach. And we certainly weren't going to go to the moon in the decade unless we speeded up the process. And I can remember when the first Saturn V was launched out of the Cape and that was with Werner and some of his team there. And they said, we just can't believe it, it all worked. And it had been for George, I believe, and this idea, I don't believe would have achieved our results in the decade. Now he came in with something else that was really equally important, but not his spectacular, namely that we needed more top managers in the program. And he not only came in with that as a generality. He came in with a list of the names of the officers in the Air Force and the Navy that he wanted transferred from the Department of Defense. And I thought, I couldn't believe that we could get them all.

Again, we talked to Mr. Webb about this and he in turn called General Bozol Maki, who was the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, who was very helpful. LeMay was then the General in charge. And he was not an easy person to work with, as you may remember. But we got most of those people that George recommended, a wonderful group of people. Sam Phillips being the key person who managed the Apollo directly. Described by Miller's management technique, pasteurized, you call them? Yeah. Well, another thing that George did was to figure out how to pull the Senate directors in the decisions without having them slow up the program. In the eye, he made them think that they were not only the custodian of their centers, but they also were on his management team on the board of directors. And so a Joe Shae, for example, who was in charge of the Apollo capsule and the Lunar Module and so on, would report to this board.

And they were meeting almost constantly when they weren't traveling around the world, practically. And they were saying this thing is done. And they used to use posters and slides and all kinds of multimedia ways of presenting. And there were times when all this information was sliding by so fast that it became George Miller's pasteurized program, pasteurized very fast. George was a demon. I mean, time meant nothing, sad days, Sundays, midnight. You name it. What was going on? You read that first Saturn V launch, you just described the German reaction. What was your reaction? What was it like, described viscerally to me the power of that Saturn V? The Saturn V was right at the end of my tenure in NASA, so it was pretty important to me. And we had a press conference just before the launch.

We had well over 1,000 media there. And in the background, we had the Saturn V puffing away with smoke coming out of a race parts of it and so on, which really gasses and so on. But anyway, the conference went pretty well. We were savage to some extent, as is always the case. And then the launch occurred, and anybody who saw Saturn V launch can remember that first you saw this tremendous flame coming out of the bottom. And then you saw the smoke and everything that sort of covered up the flame. And then that would last for about two seconds. When we were still holding it down, we could still stop the mission if we didn't get the right lift. And then the arms would let it go, and it would just see the crawl up so slowly up to the top of the tower. It took about 20 seconds before it cleared the tower.

And at that point, since we were roughly three miles away, you got the sound until and it was quiet. And all of a sudden that sound would hit, and you could not just hear it, you felt it. You could feel it in your chest. It was a thriving, deep sound that your whole body knew that something might, something mighty powerful that was going up into space. That's terrific. Right when Millie came in, they came out with a thing called the Disher Tishler Report. Do you remember what that was and what that said? Which one was that? I'm coming for a second. In the summer of 68, I was over in Vienna at a UN meeting on the peaceful use of space. And Jim Webb was over there, and quite a large group from NASA. By then I was back at MIT, but Jim brought me into his bedroom so he had something very

important to discuss with me. He said he just received a message from Tom Payne, who was his deputy, taking my place, with a recommendation that since there was a delay in the lunar module, rather than just tread water, that instead we insert the hardware that we had, which would permit a circumlunar flight. And Jim Webb said this is a pretty tough one. It's got pretty tough to make a decision like that when we're over here in Vienna. At that point he said, well, what do you think? And I said, well, you know, at this point I don't have all the facts before me, but it seems to me we ought to always be accomplishing everything we can at any period of time. And frankly, that was a philosophy that I'd followed, I remember one key example, which

was whether we're going to let Ed White go out on an EVA and a Gemini program. And I've been down to Houston discussing that possibility. And you may remember it, maybe you remember that Leonov had just gone out at that time for a spacewalk. And again, a little bit of a jump ahead of us, but I felt we were ready to do it. And Dr. Dryden, again, thought the risk might be too great. And I remember writing a memorandum and talking to Jim Webb on the basis that we ought to be accomplishing everything we can on every flight. Because there's risk involved or there's countless effort and dollars involved. So if you can do something on a flight, you ought to do it. Great. Okay. Sean, we're here going to you. Well, there's no question that we would not have gone, we would not have had a lunar program, a Apollo program, if we weren't being pressed hard by the Soviet Union, Soviet Union, by whatever circumstances, had a very, very clever, aggressive space program.

And they made maximum use of everything they had. We obviously were following the best we could, what was going on in the Soviet Union in addition to their press releases, which always, of course, very flattering. And they were using this for propaganda around the world. And they were having a major effect with it. And so we, when they started their very large booster, for example, our satellite photography shows that this was definitely a lunar landing vehicle. And so this was putting, again, pressure on us to keep going at flank speed. And it turns out, because by the time we did go to the moon, they said they didn't have a lunar program. Let's talk about the Russians. Did you feel you were trying to trump us and tell us, give me the progression of events? Well, I decided to help with Sputnik, because they staged that when there was the geophysical

year was going on, and you had an international geophysical year, everybody in Washington. And of course, that trumped everything that was going on at that meeting. And then they had their mutnik, you know, the dog went up, and they had a lunar when they flew around the moon, and then they sputnik, and then they started taking a not just one person in orbit, but several people. But before they did that, lo and behold, they took a woman in orbit. And she was really on a happy camper up there. I won't say she screamed all the time, but she let me know that she wanted to get back down in a hurry. And did you know that? Well, we had, in addition to our reconnaissance stuff, we had, we were listening in, but the best we could on their missions. And we're listening, and I'm obviously on conversations going on between automobiles, and all that sort of thing, to find out everything we could. And it was very fragmentary, but it gave us at least some feel for how well-run things

were, and also how they were trying to beat us at every corner. What are the things that they put three men in a capsule? What did that tell us? Well, once you put three men in a capsule, you can call it a space station, a lot of talk about space station. They can say, well, we already got a space station. We've had three men up there. They're up there under very poor conditions, with very little like it do, except be there, but still from a geopolitical standpoint, that counted for a lot. What about the first Alexi Leon, the first Walker in space? Was that a significant achievement? Well, it was obvious that we had to have the ability to get out of the capsule, to perhaps do work on the station or work, obviously work on the moon, and if we went there. And so the sooner we got people out into a vacuum or into weightlessness, the better.

And they did it with Leon often, and their spacesuits had more pressure in them than hours. In his space, it was not as well articulated as hours, and they had a hard time getting leaner back in, because he turned himself a balloon out there to pull him through the port. It was not easy. Now, when Ed White went out in space from Gemini 4, he had trouble getting back in too, because the Gemini was bigger than Mercury, but it was still like sitting in the front front of a Volkswagen, and to pull all these bellical stuff back in and all of them, they left his glove outside, but they got everything else in, forcing or able to close the hatch and bat it down. But the point is that most of us, I guess, who were involved in a program, or large number, had been involved in World War II, or a new, close hand, what World War II was about. And we looked at this as a real serious national competition.

Now, we ran out of film at the last time, so I didn't get all of this. Did the Russians have a lunar program, did they admit to having a lunar program during this period? Well, remember, Khrushchev said, we'll beat those Americans, no matter what they do, with the implication, he didn't quite say that they had a program. And our first indication that they had one was when they built a very, very large shed right next to a new, a large complex. And of course, we were waiting to see what would come out of that shed. And one day, the Rover Head Reconnaissance Photography captured this gigantic vehicle. It had to be big for them, because they did not have the advantage of liquid hydrogen. They just had caracene and liquid oxygen to deal with. They did not have as advanced technology as we had. And so it was obvious that that vehicle was to go to the moon.

We felt, we in NASA. There were skeptics out in the hill and so on. We couldn't discuss these photographs openly, but we could with selected people. And they'd say, well, you can't be sure of that. But we never were able to get our hands on the details of what they were planning. And until I think there were three professors in a group that were visiting right after the Soviet Union started to fall apart. And they were in one of the laboratories there and walked by a room and looked in and said, well, what are the vehicles in there, what are those spacecraft? And the person said, well, can we go on and look at them? The person was a little reluctant, but said, yeah, I guess you can. And it was a label right on it, lunar lander in Russian. But I guys could speak a little Russian. And they said, well, can we take a picture of it? And the guy was, he didn't quite know what he was supposed to do. He said, funny, you can. And it turned out that they were going to go to the moon by first putting everything in

Earth orbit that was needed to go, except for the capsule in which the men were going to ride. Then they're going to bring that up. And then they were going to go to the moon where they were going to use lunar orbit rendezvous just the way we did and then come back the same way we did. But with their technology, which really was not as advanced at ours, but they've made wonderful use of the tools they had. What year was this that we actually discovered this? As I remember it, though, this must have been in 93 or somewhere in there. And I guess it is recognized that when we went to the moon, the then Soviets, I was a great achievement. It's a pretty interesting achievement, but of course, we never planned to go there because why should you take men there when you can go off and get lunar samples without risking life? And they had done that just before we went to the moon. They actually brought a lunar sample back.

All right. The Apollo 11 landing. You were in the VIP gallery with Patron and Debus and Draper and Von Braun and Payne described the moon, how did you feel, what was going on between you and what it actually had? Well, I guess all of us had been there to see the lift our first. And we had followed the mission very closely and then here we were observing with the best information available here on Earth, what was going on, what Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were up to, and it came down to the short strokes and they were counting it off and there wasn't much fuel left and all of a sudden Neil says, a tranquility base here and at that point, the mission clawed for them to have a nap and after they sort of picked everything up and so we all went out to get something to eat.

I went out with Dr. Draper and Jackie Cochran was also the famous Aviatrix and a bunch of us and the conversation was, I'd say somewhat muted because it was wonderful that the men were there but then were they going to be able to get out and were going to be able to get them back. Now the mission wasn't over at that point. We're on the moon, that's great but we still had to get them, complete the mission and get them home and so some hours later, six hours later I guess you could, the TV wasn't very good but you could see this sort of image coming out and then coming down and then you heard Neil say one small step for a man, one large step for a man kind or words of that effect and that was obviously one of the most thrilling things I've ever heard. Even though I still had just a little bit of concern in the back of my mind, it's not

over yet. In retrospect, in those days before the landing, did you ever feel this is just, we're not going to do this, it's impossible. No, I never did. The closest I came was that the first time I testified on the possibility of going to the moon was before, actually before our President Kennedy came out to the Congress and said this is what we ought to do and I got myself in some trouble over there, I'm told I almost got fired for doing it but I was being pressed very hard by the Congress as to whether I thought this was possible and by then we had it carried out enough studies that I felt that I could see all the various steps and it seemed to me it was going to be possible but that night living in Georgetown, we went out for a walk we like to take and particularly in the days were rough and that had been a pretty tough day before the Congress just a couple of days after the Garen flu and wherever Montrose Park, it happened to be a full moon.

I was just there with my wife and looked up at the moon and I'd already told her what happened during the day and I turned to her and you said, I said to her, do you think I'm really nuts or not? I think we can actually go to that moon and that was always a little bit in the back of the mind obviously. What did Apollo mean to you think to this country in retrospect? Well what Apollo means when all is said and done is yes it was successful from a cold war standpoint and we did try our best to make maximum use of the opportunity for scientific purposes and we achieved that. And we certainly advanced our technology on many fronts much faster than we would otherwise and the long list of things that were accomplished in the communication field and computing and so on but I think much more than that was accomplished and I think some of the pictures, particularly the picture perhaps from the Bournemouth flight where you see the lunar surface and you

see the earth fully circumscribed with a blackness all around it and you think we human beings are nuts if we don't take a bit better care of our earth and I'm thrilled every time I see that picture is used again and again and again and that picture plus the feeling of the astronauts that they had I think Apollo changed our view of our environment and I think that's the most important thing to have it.