Astronaut Encounter

Anna: Annemieka Wade

Bill: Astronaut Bill Pogue

Q: Audience questions

Voiceover: 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1, We have showtime. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the astronaut encounter! And now please put your appendages together and welcome the host of today's show!

Anna: Welcome folks. Thank you very much to coming today to our astronaut encounter! Today's actually a very special day for us, because we are being broadcast live via webcam all over the world. So not only will we be taking questions from the people here at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor's Complex, but we'll also be taking them from the web. So, that's something very special we don't usually do and you guys get to be a part of it today. Let me start things off by saying my name is [Annemieka], I'm your host, and we have a really great show for you.

We have a very good astronaut named Bill Pogue, who has quite a history behind him. Let me tell you a little bit about what he's done. He was a Colonel in the Air Force, he was a test pilot for 7200 hours, he had 7200 hours of flight time under his belt, he was support crew for three Apollo missions, and he was the pilot for Skylab IV, the third and final manned mission to the orbital workshop. And he has spent 84 days in space. So ladies and gentlemen I'd like you to put your hands together for astronaut Bill Pogue! [applause]

Bill Pogue: Thank you Anna and it's a pleasure to be here, good morning everyone.

Anna: Thank you very much for being here today Astronaut Pogue.

Bill: My pleasure.

Anna: So maybe you could start things off by telling us a little bit about what Skylab was all about.

Bill: Okay. Skylab was our first space station. It was made from Apollo hardware. The third stage of a moon rocket was converted into the structural base. We used a liquid hydrogen tank fitted out with floors, partitions, lockers and so forth as our orbital workshop.

And below it, about a fourth of the size of the liquid hydrogen tank was a liquid oxygen tank, and we used that for our dumpster. Above the workshop was our hydrogen tank, we had an airlock to permit us to go out on spacewalks without dumping all of the air out of the lab.

And in front of that was a multiple docking adapter. For the first time in space we had a spare docking port for rescue if it was needed. It was not. And on the outside we had attached a solar observatory, and it was used to study the Sun. There were three main areas of investigation for the Skylab program, the Sun, I just mentioned, the Earth below us, we had a large number of instruments for studying the Earth, and also every third day, one of us served as a lab rat, or a test subject, for the medical experiments. In addition to those three main areas of investigation, we had over [60 numbered, or 1600] experiments and they kept us very busy. Skylab was visited by three crews in 1973 and '74, each using Apollo-type command service module for our taxi up and back. And there were crews of three, so nine people worked on Skylab during 73-74. The lab was launched unmanned in mid-May of 1973. The first crew went up shortly after that and they stayed for 28 days. The second crew went up in July; they stayed for 59 days, and I was on the third and final visit. We went up on the 16th of November and returned on the 8th of February. We fully intended to reuse Skylab later on, but that meant we had to get to it with the shuttle, by '79 or '78 and reboost it, as they reboosted the International Space Station. We were unable to do that because the shuttle slipped to 1981. Skylab slipped too - it slipped right out of orbit and on the 11th of July in 1979 it re-entered, burned up and hit in the Indian Ocean, with a few light pieces sailing on into Western Australia near the city of Perth. That in a nutshell is the story of Skylab, Anna. Now can we have some questions?

Anna: Well if you're just joining us via the Internet, we are talking with Astronaut Bill Pogue and now is the chance for everybody to ask questions. If there's anything you'd like to say, just raise your hand. We're going to ask that you give your first name and where you're from, and I'd like to make a quick shout out to St. Albans City Elementary School, my old elementary school, I think they're watching today in Vermont. So let's get things started! Anybody have something they'd like to start with? Okay great! Right on over here.

Q: My name's Vernon from Savannah, Georgia, and I was wondering if, have we made any significant advancements in medicine, I know the medical field, different drugs react differently in weightless environments, and I wondered if we made any advances in that technology.

Bill: Actually we have several on the International Space Station that are being worked now. And one of them is as simple as, does Tylenol work in space, to help the crew members. And they administer it in tablet form and syrup form to contrast. I tell you, the protein crystal growth which is supposed to support medical research has not really had the result that we wanted yet, and mainly because we can't grow the crystals large enough. With the International Space Station, we should be able to do that, and that will help us create the magic bullets for attacking diseases.

Anna: Excellent. We've got a question right here.

Q: Bernice from Almira, New York, home of Eileen Collins the first woman astronaut commander. And I wondered if Eileen was around here today? Or what she's doing now?

Bill: Well, she's training for the next shuttle flight. Not the one that's just coming up Monday, we hope, she's training for the next one.

Anna: All right, great, we have one from the Internet. And it says, "Is there an age when you have to retire from NASA and why did you retire at the age of 45?"

Bill: There is no age, because of the way the laws are written. So they can't state a minimum age or a maximum age. Because it's age discrimination. So it's not stated, but people usually stop sooner or later, usually after they've made a lot of flights. Some leave earlier than that. I retired when I was 45, mainly because it looked like there was nothing to do! But there was a lot to do. I actually came back for a year and a half and worked in the Earth Resources Program Office. But there is no maximum age stated.

Anna: Great, another question right here.

Q: My name is Gavin McCline and I’m from Seneca Falls, New York. I was wondering, how big is Skylab?

A: Skylab was 120 feet long, weighed about 100 tons. It had an internal volume of 12,000 cubic feet which is roughly equivalent to a three bedroom house. So it was quite large. We had the largest open volume ever launched into space before or since. The forward compartment of the workshop was 21 feet in diameter and 25 feet high. We actually flew a spacecraft inside a spacecraft for the first time. It was an experiment with an automatically stabilized maneuvering unit. We evaluated the control systems and the results of this test were worked into the manned maneuvering unit which was used in the '80s on the shuttle.

Anna: And one right here.

Q: I'm Robin Larsen from Sandy, Utah. What's your favorite food to eat in space?

Bill: My favorite food was steak. We had frozen food for the first time in Skylab. We had frozen entrée steak, prime rib, lobster Newburg, pork loin and dressing. A large number, a wide variety of re-hydrateable foods in addition to about seven or eight different beverages; coffee, tea, and various flavored drinks. Canned puddings, everything came in flip-top cans. It was very easy to use and when we opened a flip-top can, say, for meat, we had a plastic cover on top of the meat and then we would make a cut in that. We used normal tableware - knives, forks, and spoons. And our food trays had magnets in them to hold the utensils down.

Anna: And a question right here in front.

Q: My name is John Novisky, I'm from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. And my question is, how is our relationship with the Russians up in the current Skylab?

A: I've seen that this International Space Station is very good. Of course, we rotate, we switch, one flight the crew that will be coming down will have two Russians, one commander and one science officer. And a lady from one of our people. The crew that's going up there will be commanded by the U.S. and there will be one more American and then there will be a Russian. So we flip-flop like that and we take turns having the commander.

Anna: All right, we have another one from the Internet, it's an unknown person, but the question is, "Which mission was the most significant to you and why?"

Bill: For all ? I don’t know how much that encompasses. I think the most significant one probably in the early days was John Glenn, we finally got somebody into orbit. And then the Apollo program, Apollo XI, or VIII, you could pick either one of those as being most significant. Apollo VIII was the first circumlunar mission. And Apollo XI was the first lunar landing mission. And the shuttle flight are really all outstanding. It's really an amazing piece of equipment - the space shuttle is. And so I couldn't pick any one of them as being better than the other.

Anna: Excellent. We've got a question over here now.

Q: Daryl from Nebraska. What's the most fun and what's the hardest part of being weightless?

Bill: Ah, that's a good question! The fun part is floating around - you can handle a 150 pound camera with two fingers. And when you want to go from, like, that 21 foot diameter compartment, you can just go over to, if you're by the wall you can just shove yourself and you float all the way across there. I did this lots of times carrying a big camera between my legs. But you could carry it with your hands too. But that's fun.

The hardest part is working with very small items. I had to do a camera repair one day, and I had to get smart in a hurry. I had taken the screws out and let them float out in the air, and then the air would move them, and also when I would try to pick them up, if I touched them with the end of my finger they would float all the way across the compartment, and I'd have to hunt them down. So I got a piece of duct tape, turned it sticky side up, and stuck it on a locker, and I stuck all screws and the small parts onto the adhesive portion of the duct tape, and that works quite well. It's the small items that give you the most trouble.

Anna: Okay, another one from the Internet, again, an unknown questioner, "Did your children follow in your footsteps? Are they astronauts?"

Bill: No. They, when the kids see the work pace that the astronauts have to keep, they decide on other career fields. The training cycle is really hellacious. Well, it's fun too! But it takes so much time, you're away from the family a lot.

Anna: Great, and we've got one right here for you.

Q: I’m Mary from Seneca Falls, New York. What was the most exciting moment in space for you and what was the scariest moment?

Bill: I think the most exciting is either the launch or the entry. The launch is really, because it takes a little bit longer, except the shuttle re-entry is about 25 minutes, and it's launch is 8 and a half. We launched just under 11 minutes, it took us to get to orbit. And then the scariest moment that we had was probably right before re-entry. We had lost one redundant, we had lost one set of thrusters in our command module, which is the small conical piece that comes back in. And what we did, we did a re-entry, a de-orbit burn with the big service module engine. And that put us in a trajectory to intercept the air, the atmosphere, which was not going to take too long. And we did this in the dark. Then after you do that burn you jettison the service module, and a guillotine cuts all the wires going from the command module to the service module to keep short circuits from occurring. So, what you do is you pull all the circuit breakers from the service module thrusters, because they could be commanded to fire. So, I saw that we had jettisoned the service module, we were clear, and then I looked over and [Jerry Carr] was moving the hand controller and nothing was happening. And what he had done, he had inadvertently pulled the wrong circuit breakers and he had essentially de-activated from the black boxes, the auto-electronics, he had pulled all the circuit breakers to the only one we had - we had already lost one set, and then the other one wouldn't work. But he used another procedure. You squeeze the hand controller a little harder and it sends juice, electricity, straight to the solenoid drivers on the engine, and they fired. But for about 2 or 3 seconds, there, we were wondering what was going to happen because we weren't in entry attidude - you had to maneuver back to entry attitude. Once we got back close to entry attitude Jerry threw a switch and the autopilot took over and flew the rest of the re-entry.

Anna: Great. We've got a question over here.

Q: I’m John from Cleveland, Ohio. A question about, plans for re-visiting the Moon or possibly doing that in conjunction with a Mars mission.

Bill: Both of those, I think everybody heard that. There have been ongoing studies ever since we finished the Apollo program. About returning to the moon and about Mars missions. One thought is, as you mentioned, you could, it might be the easiest to launch a Mars mission from the Moon, rather than assemble it in Earth orbit. One thing is, it doesn't take as much propellant to get that initial burn. So you could sort of put it in a savings bank up there and then design your vehicle around the Moon. Although I think assembly in Earth orbit would still be a lot easier, and it's easier to go up and correct problems. But those are the two options, Earth orbital assembly before making your initial thrusting towards Mars, or to assemble it perhaps, assemble it in Earth orbit and take it to the Moon and refuel or whatever, and then fire from the Moon.

Anna: Well, I've got a very exciting question for you! This one actually comes from my father, Ken Wade, in St. Albans, Vermont. He's actually in Burlington today. And he writes, "Dear Colonel Pogue, how many astronauts have there been since the program began? I'd be interested in how many are retired and how many are still active. Thank you, Ken Wade."

Bill: I do not have an encyclopedic knowledge of that subject! [laughter] I think there are over 400. I think about two years ago, I did a count. There are over 400. And as far as the ones who have retired, I just have to take a guess at around 200.

Anna: Excellent, great. Do we have anyone else here? Great, right in the back.

Q: Chrissy Burkel, and Narrowsburg, New York. Have the space suits changed over the years?

Bill: What has changed?

Anna: Have the space suits changed?

Bill: That's a very good question! Not much. They have improved them to the extent that it's a lot easier to get them on. The two-piece suit that the shuttle astronauts use is very good. And it's also similar in a way to the Lunar suit, the suit that the people used on the surface of the Moon, in that it has a backpack. The shuttle suit is self-contained, and the old suits that we wore, except for the ones that went to the Moon, had a long umbilical that attached to the spacecraft inside. And they supplied oxygen, communications data, for medical data, water, cold water for our water-cooled long johns, because you generate an awful lot of heat when you do work outside with 15 layers of insulation. And what else was I going to say… That's about it. But the glove is still the limiting factor in the space suits. Getting a good glove… Several NASA centers have worked on the space suits but now the Johnson Center is working on a new suit that they think will be much better.

Anna: Another question right here.

Q: I’m Bert Burkle from Narrowsburg, New York. How heavy are the space suits?

Bill: How big?

Anna: How heavy are they.

Bill: How heavy. Ours weighed about 45 pounds without the backpack. With that thing I think it's about 250 pounds not including the crew member. And on the Moon, of course, it was only 1/6 gravity, which the shuttle suit with the backpack and the Lunar suit weigh just about the same.

Anna: Great, and a quick question up here.

Q: My name is Megan and I’m from Pennsylvania. Did you ever walk on the Moon?

Bill: No, I didn't. I only flew in Skylab, which was an Earth orbital mission, and I was darn glad to get that one.

Anna: A question back here.

Q: Sue, from Seattle. How do you recycle water in space?

Bill: There are two ways you can do it. One is, you take the water directly out of the air that comes from perspiration and your breathing, respiration. That's fairly easy to do. We actually did that on Skylab but we didn't reuse it. The Russians have used that. You can all take all the water waste and recycle that. There are several levels of recycling that you can use. For a Mars mission we will have to recycle all water. And you go down, as you, you can imagine, to recycle urine you have to be careful how you do that. And you get to, there are about three level of decontaminated water. One is potable, not contaminated, you can drink that. And as you keep doing this you get more and more concentration of waste in it and eventually you throw that all away.

Anna: Another one from the Internet. Sarah from Illinois asks, "What do you think of the ISS compared to Skylab?"

Bill: Bigger! A lot bigger, a lot better, because it's got better equipment on board, with state of the art technology on board the International Space Station, we flew in '73-74, so you know how many changes have taken place, how much science and technology have changed since then. They'll be able to do a lot more. They have glove boxes to work with and a lot of things we didn't have.

Anna: And right here?

Q: I’m Gavin from New York. How long does it take to gather all the equipment to make space shuttles and space stations?

Bill: The space shuttle, they started working on the space shuttle in 1970. The first flight was in '81. So you could say roughly 10 years. The International Space Station started, we started working on that in '84, and we didn't really start launching the pieces until late in the century, so that was 15 years. And the International Space Station is a very complex job. The assembly of it is quite a complex job. And of course 113, which we hope they'll launch next Monday, we'll take up one more piece. And it's not quite half assembled.

Anna: We've got one way over here on this side.

Q: Hello, my name is Andy, I’m from Chelton, England. I just want to know who was the biggest joker out of all the Apollo astronauts during the entire Apollo program? What was the funniest practical joke you ever saw them play?

Bill: Well, for Apollo it would have to be Pete Conrad. He was always… And well, [Wally Sheraw] was also a joker. He's famous for his "gotchas". I'll give you an example of one of his gotchas. He was always figuring out tricks to pull on somebody. It was shortly before Apollo XII, he said, "Bill, let's go play tennis." I said "I haven't played tennis since college." "Oh, it's no problem." So we went down to Melbourne. And he started serving bullets at me. Well, after about 30 minutes it dawned on me, he didn't want me to play tennis with him, he wanted me to retrieve his serves! So that's a gotcha!

Anna: Great, right here.

Q: Vernon from Savannah Georgia again. My question is, since you're on the Apollo subject, Apollo I, Grisholm, Chapy and White. There's a big memorial established for the Challenger accident, and I was wondering if there's anything established for the Apollo I.

Bill: There is, out at the launch pad that they used.

Anna: Another over here.

Q: John, again, from Pennsylvania. On the mission to go to go to the International Space Station, what is the weight per man that is allowed when you have to take off, to go?

Bill: You mean body weight?

Q: Minimum or maximum weight, yes.

Bill: There are none listed. There are weight limits on the Soyuz, on height and stature limits. And we've gone to a new Soyuz, before we had about 50%, because you could be too short or too tall, it disqualified half of the Astronaut Corps. And the introduction of the Soyuz TMA now, 90%, it accommodates 90% of the astronaut population.

Anna: And again from the Internet: "What is it like to float in space?"

Bill: It's fun. Yeah. You really miss it when you get back. You know, there was one, I've always been asked, did I dream about being weightless after I get back? It's a good question and I have only dreamed about being weightless I guess once or twice. Maybe three times, in my dreams. You would think something which was so impressive would have had an effect on you, but it, it's really strange.

Anna: We've got time for about two more questions.

Q: How many space stations are floating out in space?

Bill: Right now just the International Space Station. Of course the Russians had Mir up for 15 or 20 years. And they brought it down a year and a half ago. But the International Space Station is the only one we have now.

Anna: And another one from Sarah in Illinois, "Were you a Boy Scout when you were a boy?"

Bill: Yes. I only made it to Second Class though.

Anna: Well, we have a number of young people in our audience here and we probably have a number of young people watching on the web. Do you have any advice that you'd like to give to them, should they ever want to become astronauts themselves?

Bill: Yeah, if they want to become astronauts they have to start studying math and science early in their careers. In elementary school, don't hold it off to secondary. Right on through secondary and college of course, you need to work hard on your subjects. You don’t have to have perfect grades, but they should be reasonably good. NASA's qualification for Mission Specialist and Pilots are a Bachelors' Degree in the Physical Sciences, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field like Astronomy. Or, medicine. Most of the Mission Specialists have doctorate level degrees, so the competition is pretty tough. However, people with Bachelors' Degrees have been selected because they have extraordinary performance records in the workplace, in their labs or whatever. The pilots are almost all test pilots from the various military services, and so those give you an idea. I'm often asked about, "What should I study?" And thinking that I can give suggestions to them, something to study to give them a leg up or an advantage. And I said, "No, I can't do that. You select your own field, the one that interests you from those categories that I described a moment ago. And if you select something that you like, you're going to do a better job at it, and your record in the workplace is going to be better. And just another couple of things, one is they don't want eggheads. So don't, you should have a fairly good academic record, but it doesn't have to be perfect. And they want somebody who, they'll look at that workplace record and they also like people to be well-rounded, they find that the astronauts have a wide variety of avocations and hobbies. Some of the Mission Specialists who are not pilot astronauts are accomplished general aviation pilots, a lot of them have their CFI. They have, they sail, they water ski, they snow ski, they play all sorts of sports. One of the astronauts was a pro soccer player before he was selected back in the early '80s. So, give it your best shot and go for it. The probability of being selected to be an astronaut is about the same as getting struck by lightning. But I say, you can always fly a kite. You can improve those odds by proper preparation.

Anna: Thank you very much. Astronaut Bill Pogue, everyone! [applause]

Now for those of you who are with us here at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, we do have a little bit of time for photographs, unfortunately we don't have time for autographs. And for those of you who joined us on the web, thank you very much. We have another show at 2:30 and one more at 4:15 if you'd like to tune back in. Hi to my Mom and Dad, I love you and take care! Thank you all very much for coming to the Kennedy Space Center Visitors' Complex.