Speakers: Annemieka Wade

Bill Pogue

Questionable words/phrases in [brackets]

Moderator: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Astronaut Encounter. And now, please put your appendages together and welcome the host of today's show. [applause]

Anna: Hello, folks, thank you very much. Thank you very much for coming to this afternoon's Astronaut Encounter. My name is Annemieka and I'm your host for today.

Now, we have a very, very special Astronaut Encounter today. We are being joined live via Webcast and we've got people from all over the world joining us. In fact, my own family from [inaudible] Vermont is out there watching. So we'd like to welcome them as well.

Let me tell you a little bit about what we're going to do today. Now, we have a very special astronaut with us. He's name is astronaut Bill Pogue, and he's going to tell you a little bit about what it was like to live and work in space. You guys are going to get the opportunity to ask him questions. We'll also be taking questions from the website and we'll have him answer those, too.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about Bill Pogue. He was a Colonel in the Air Force. He has 7,200 hours of flight time under his belt. He was the support crew on three Apollo missions, I believe those were 7, 11 and 14. And he was the pilot for Skylab 4 on the third and final manned mission to the orbital workshop. He spent 84 days in space on one go.

So, ladies and gentlemen, please put your hands together for astronaut Bill Pogue. [applause]

Bill: Thank you. Good afternoon, Annemieka.

Anna: Thank you very much for being here with us today, astronaut Pogue. Maybe you can start things off by telling us a little bit about what Skylab did.

Bill: Right. Skylab was our first space station. Skylab was made from Apollo hardware. The lab itself, the workshop was consistent of the liquid hydrogen tank and the liquid oxygen tank of the [S4V] stage, that's the top stage of a Saturn 5.

The hydrogen tank was outfitted with partitions, ceilings, lockers, little rooms and so forth and that became our orbital workshop. The liquid oxygen tank became our dumpster. We put all of our trash in the liquid oxygen tank which had about the volume of a 1 car garage.

Atop the workshop, we had a four-way compartment which was 21 feet in diameter and 25 feet long, that was the largest open volume ever launched into space before since. And above the workshop, there was an airlock which allowed us to go out on a space walk that dump in the air in the space station. And above that was a multiple docking adapter which has a large number of our experiments for making observations of the earth.

At that point, it was where we have a radio docking port at the far end of the multiple docking adapter. And for the first time, we had a rescue port. We did not have to use it.

On the outside of the workshop, we had a solar observatory. This was designed to observe the sun in the ultraviolet and x-ray frequencies which can't be done from the surface of the earth. We also had telescopes that image the sun in the visual spectrum.

Skylab was watched unmanned on a Saturn 5 and mid-May of 1973, a few weeks later, the first crew launched, they stayed up for 28 days. They recovered the second crew launched in mid-July. They stayed up for 59 days. And I was on the last mission which launched on the 16th of November of '73 and we were up until the 8th of February of '74. 84 days in space.

Now the Skylab was visited by the [inaudible] crews of 3 people each and when we left on the 8th of February, we thought that we would be going back the Skylab and we would use the Skylab as a research facility in space.

Unfortunately, it depended upon the shuttle launch in 1978 which it did not do. It slipped to 81. Skylab slipped out of orbit and progressively lower, it was burned up in the earth's atmosphere on the 11th of July 1979 and that was the end of Skylab.

It hit in the Indian Ocean and a few pieces sailed as far as Western Australia, landing near the city of Perth but no one was injured. That's a brief story of Skylab and how it was made.

So I'd like now to try answer some questions, if we have them.

Anna: Excellent. Well, today just a couple of rules for the questions. We ask that you give us your first name and where you're from just before you ask the question.

And for those of you who are watching us on the Web, please make sure that you include your name and where you're from within the body of your text just because for some reason it's not working the other way. So, just tell us who you are.

And we're going to start right over here with our very first question.

Marty: My name is Marty from [Mancato], Minnesota. What vehicle was used to launch you guys into space?

Bill: That's a good question. We were launched by a small Saturn that's called a Saturn 1B and it is the same as the one that mounted horizontally in the rocket part. So we didn't need the big Saturn 5 just to launch us into [earth's] orbit.

Anna: Great. We've got a question from the Web that says, "Who or what inspired you to become an astronaut?"

Bill: Well, actually, I was watching the first 7 and all of them making their first flights in Mercury. Of course, [Dick Slayton] had to wait until the Apollo [cilius] flight but I was inspired by those people and I started actively trying to get into the program in 1960.

Anna: Great. Any one else here who has a question they'd like answered? Okay, right in front. Give us your first name and where you're from.

Lindsay: My name is Lindsay and I live in Canada from Ontario. Where did you launch the rocket?

Anna: Where did you launch the rocket?

Bill: We launched from pad 39-B right here at the Kennedy Space Center. That pad was made for a Saturn 5 so the white room where the crew enters the spacecraft was about 360 feet above the ground. And we were only about 235 feet tall in the Saturn 1 base so they mounted it on what was called a ["milk stool."] And that raised it up to the right level.

Anna: Great. And also from the Web again, "Would you like to fly again like John Glenn did?"

Bill: Oh sure, I would like to fly again but I wouldn't look forward to the training cycle. That's a lot of work.

Anna: Could you maybe tell us a little bit about the training cycle. What sort of things you have to do to prepare?

Bill: Yes. These astronauts train very hard before their missions. In our case because we were learning two spacecrafts, the Skylab as well as the command service module Apollo type, we train for about 3 years and over 3,200 hours of classroom, and that doesn't count the simulator time.

Anna: All right. And again, right over here.

Marty: Marty again, from [Mancato]. Kind of a historical question. Why are the rockets launched here at Cape Kennedy, why not Vandenburg.

Bill: Vandenburg is really for only polar launches. It works out better that way. In fact, there were plans and there was a pad built for the shuttle to launch at Vandenburg and that was to support military flight missions. But there actually was one built at Vandenburg.

Anna: Great. We actually have a question from Diane who comes from England. "What did you do on your space walks outside Skylab?"

Bill: Okay. With the first one, we went out and we recovered film or loaded film in the solar telescopes. These film magazines were weighed about 75 pounds on the earth and they were about a foot and a half long and about 15 inches wide and 6 inches deep so they were quite large.

And for the first time in space had a extendable boom to transfer those 40 feet at the end of the telescope where we needed to install them. So we removed and replaced the film magazines for the solar telescopes.

We recovered samples which were exposed to the space environment and we also performed repair tasks on our first one we repaired a radar antenna. On the second one with Jerry [Carr] we had over 7 hours and we were fixing one of the solar telescopes that had a filter wheel that had jammed and so we got that to working again.

Anna: All right. And we're going to take another one from the Web. This is Ms. Teal's class. They’re a 5th grade class from [Ed White Elementary], CCISG. "How does it feel to be up in space?

Bill: Well, when you first get a real sign, the first you get up there you feel a bit giddy when you're first exposed to the weightless environment of space. And so you get used to that very quickly.

The rest of the feelings you really have to do with getting the work done. You're moving around a lot. You have to find things. After about three days, you sort of forget you're even there other than the fact that you can find it easy to move large heavy objects, you can move 150 pound camera with two fingers. It's difficult to work with small things. But after about three or four days, you feel like it's just second nature.

Anna: Great. And Sam from Kansas has a question back here.

Sam: Yes. They monitor your heart rate, don't they? And on take off, does it go up significantly?

Bill: Well, a NASA doctor asked me that me that same question. He said, "Were you very, very excited at lift-off?" And I said, "No, I thought that was pretty cool." He said, "Well, that might be but your heart rate went from 47 resting to 120 at lift-off."

This is not a common heart rate and the alarm [inaudible] are outrageous before you made the first lunar landing was 150 which is comparable to heart rates for a race car drivers and test pilots.

Anna: All right. Right back here we have Sarah from Illinois on the Internet. And she asks, "Is the association of space explorers a group of astronauts?"

Bill: Yes. To join the association of space explorers, you have to make one orbit of the earth. That's the qualifications for joining that group and it is an association of a lot of astronauts and cosmonauts. It's international.

Anna: Okay. Well, we're going to go back to the Internet for one more. We've got, "Could you walk when you came back down from Skylab?"

Bill: Yes. We were up for 84 days. We were able to get up, stand up and walk and get out of the command module and walk about 15 feet to some chairs. We were a bit unsteady. Our sense of balance was somewhat distorted. But after a few days, you recover very quickly from that.

Now, if you've been up there for a lot longer period of time, you may not even be able to get out of your couch. So, actually these long space flights they are actually assisted.

Anna: Excellent. As a quick aside, that one came from my mother in St. [inaudible] Vermont. Okay. Now the next question we have, we're not sure who this one is from but it's a very interesting question.

"Do you have any hints for a girl who wants to be a vision specialist, wears glasses, and has a deaf ear?"

Bill: Right now, I don't know about the ear. You can wear glasses, vision specialists have to have vision correctable to 20/20. And I don't know what the ruling is on hearing, in so far as having one bad ear.

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

Tracy: Tracy, Ontario, Canada. I'd just like to know what your favorite thing about staying in space was and your least favorite.

Bill: My favorite thing about being in space was looking back at the earth. I never got tired of doing that and it was a better form of recreation.

We have books and tapes, audiotapes and music tapes and on our day off, most of us we just look out the window on the day side, even on the night side is quite a good view especially if you're over an industrialized country you can see all the roadways, the interstates, whatever because of the car lights.

Anna: Great. And there's a question right next to her.

Earl: Earl, from Smithville of Ontario. How does it feel to come back into the earth's atmosphere?

Bill: How did it feel to come back in the earth's atmosphere?

Earl: Yes.

Bill: Well, it's a pretty good deceleration. If you weighed 150 pounds at the peak part of the re-entry, you would be pressed back in the couch with a force of about 600 pounds. In other words you weigh 600 pounds. It doesn't hurt you because it's distributed along your back so it's not a bad vector for the acceleration forces.

During the shuttle re-entry, they only [expunge] 1.5 G but it's eyeballs down, they're kind of sitting in the chair and so blood tends to be pulled out of their head and that can cause you a problem.

Anna: All right. And also from the Internet, we have again, I'm not sure who this is from but the question is, "What kind of experiments did you do in the space lab?"

Bill: What kind of experiments did we do? It was Skylab. We had the solar physics I described earlier. We had the earth's studies. We had each every third day, one of us would serve as a lab rat for these medical experiments. And then we had about 60 numbered experiments and they range from flying a maneuvering unit around inside Skylab, first time a spacecraft was flown inside of another spacecraft and we were developing this, we were doing this for the man maneuvering unit which was later used in the shuttle program during the '80s.

We would have astro physics experiments in which we would set up a camera to take pictures of a specific star field. We had [high school] experiments for the first time. One day we rearranged from a simple can a spider spin a Web in space? Yes. Anita and Arabella were the names of the spiders when they were both able to spin a Web in space.

And they range from that to looking at the [liberation] points of the moon and the earth's orbit to see if there was trash there. These are stable points, 60 degrees to [inaudible] and behind the moon in this orbit around the earth. The theory is, if something drifted in slowly into those bodies, it gets trapped there. And so one of the students wanted us to use the cameras and take pictures of that area.

As it turned out, the pictures weren't good enough to resolve but the thought and the idea was good. So we had quite a large number of different kinds of experiments.

Anna: Excellent. And we've got a question right here.

Norma: I'm Norma from Scotland. Is there a time difference between take-off and arriving in space?

Anna: Is there a time zone difference between take-off and arriving in space? How do you deal with time?

Bill: That's a good question. You go through a time zone in about 3 minutes and 45 seconds. So that time is totally arbitrary. You have 16 sunrises and sunsets in a 24-hour period.

Now what we did was, I had this watch, my old trusty Seiko set at Central time U.S., and I had my NASA Omega issue watch set on Greenwich time, GMT, Greenwich mean time and that's the time in Greenwich, England. Anyway, that was used by all of the scientists and the technicians and the flight activities officers and mission control to schedule our activities.

So, we would look at our left watch, watch on our left wrist to see what the people are doing down in Houston. And when we got ready to do work, we would look at the wrist watch on our right wrist.

Anna: Great. And another question here.

Laura: I'm Laura from [Mystic], Connecticut. I'm wondering how they choose the experiments that are going to be going up in space. And secondly, do you follow up on those experiments? Who follows up to see what the results are years afterwards?

Bill: There is a NASA review board for these experiments. They're subjected to what is called peer review by people on the same discipline. And they decide whether or not this is a fruitful area for investigation. Then after, when they approved what you've built and whatever.

And also, private companies have financed experiments. Then after this is over, they get the data and so forth. It depends on who is actually in charge of the dissemination of the information regarding that experiment.

It usually, almost anybody should be able to get a hold of that. Sometimes privacy issues come into it and so sometimes that information is restricted.

Anna: All right. Now, we know that you were in space for 84 days and Sarah from Illinois on the Internet asks, "How do you wash your clothes in space?"

Bill: That's a good question. We didn't wash our clothes in space. When they got dirty, we throw them in this trash tank I was describing earlier. We actually developed a washer for this international space station. But because of the money problems, we never did build it but you have to use special type of materials to clean the clothes.

You can't use normal detergent or soap because you want to reclaim the water and that will prevent you from doing it. Instead we used enzymes which are good at removing the spots from the soil clothing, whatever in cleaning them up.

Anna: Great. And there's a question here.

Joe: I'm Joe from [inaudible], Florida. How does your body adjust to sleep requirements?

Bill: There's really not too much of a problem. You don't sleep as long. We had very little difficulty sleeping. We slept about 6 to 7 hours. From tests made on the science pilots of all 3 missions, it was determined that we spent less time at REM level of sleep which is rapid eye movement while when you're dreaming.

But other than that, the only two unusual things about sleeping was one, you'd wake up in the middle of the night with your head nodding like this and that's due to the surge of blood through the corroded arteries of the neck. And the other thing was there's a certain spot over the South Atlantic ocean which is called the South Atlantic anomaly and it's a low spot in the inner belt and outer belt and if you're asleep, when you go through that area you'll be awakened by all the fireworks. You see all kinds of light flashes and so forth even with your eyes closed. Those are caused by high energy electrons.

Anna: Great. And we have another question right here.

Carrie: Carrie from Chicago. And I was wondering if there were any specialists among your crew?

Bill: Any specialists?

Anna: Among the crew?

Bill: Yes. Well, we had one [inaudible] pilot on the crew. On the first crew he was a medical doctor. On the second crew and the third crew, they had doctorates in electrical engineering. However, Dr. Gibson on our flight had actually written one of the books on solar physics that were used in our training so both were highly competent that that was the area of their original academic specialization.

Anna: Great. And another unknown from the Internet. So someone asks, "How do you feel when you're in the space ship, ready to launch when the countdown from 10 has begun?"

Bill: You think you're standing - everything below you is built at the lowest [bidder]. [laughter] Actually everybody is very excited when this time comes. I've been waiting for 7 years so I wanted to go, I was ready.

Anna: All right, great. We've got time for about one more question here and we'll do one more from the Internet.

Q: How do you get to become an astronaut?

Anna: How do you get to become an astronaut?

Bill: Well, periodically, NASA opens applications for selections. I think I alluded to some of the qualifications. You have to have a Bachelor's degree in the physical science, engineering, mathematics or related field.

Then they open up for the applications, they usually receive somewhere around 3,000 to 4,000 applications. And this list is winnowed down until to about 100 or so. And these people are called in for physical, mental and psychological screening.

After this, they then [inaudible] the list again and these people are called in for interviews, professional type of interviews and then based upon the results of those, they will announce the actual selection which is about anywhere that can be from 15 to 20, 25 somewhere along in there. It depends on what NASA needs.

Anna: And to go along with that question, our Internet viewers ask, "Do you have to be between a certain height and weight range to be an astronaut?"

Bill: Yes. I got the list. It's varied over time. For Mercury it was 5'11" at maximum. No minimum stated because these were coming from military test pilots.

Jiminy and Apollo is 6'0", 6 feet, no minimum stated again. Almost everybody came from the military. In the shuttle, pilots 5'4" to 6'4", mission specialist 5 feet to 6.4 and that's sort of the range. It's a change with the various programs. My memory is getting so bad, you'll have to excuse me please.

Anna: Well, we think you're doing a great job. And one more question. We have a lot of young folks in the audience today and probably quite a number watching on the Internet.

Do you have any advice that you could give them should they want to become an astronauts? What path should they take?

Bill: We've already sort of discussed the academic qualifications. The truth of the matter is most of the mission specialists have much better than a Bachelor level, most of them have Doctorate's actually.

The pilot astronauts are selected almost all of them are test pilots. They're from one of military services: Navy, Marines or USAF. So that's sort of the backbone in the competition involved.

Now one of the things I'd like to advise kids is that they not only want people with academic qualifications but they want somebody who has performed in a work place. In other words, if you specialize in something you need to work in that area and establish a good track record there.

Another thing that NASA looks at in your application is what are your varied interests in life. Most of the astronauts have one substantive hobby almost all of them are active in one or more sports. Some of them skydive. One lady has over 2,000 skydives, they snow ski, they water ski, they sail.

I will discourage anybody from Formula 1 in car racing or motor cross racing because that gives the people in NASA headquarters heartburn because they have a lot of money invested in you but they do want somebody who is thoroughly involved in life and this is a well-rounded person.

I'm also often asked, what should I study? And within those disciplines I described, what should I say to give myself an edge and the answer is, I cannot tell you that. Choose something that is of interest to you, pursue that to the hilt, you'll do a better job and you'll establish a better record for the application.

Anna: All right. Thank you very much astronaut, Bill Pogue, everyone. [applause]

Here we'd like to thank you all for coming here today. We do have a little bit of time for those who are with us at the Kennedy Space Center visitors complex to take some pictures with Bill Pogue.

Unfortunately, we do not have the time for autographs, only pictures. And for those of you who joined us on the Internet, thank you very much for being with us today. We have another show at 4:15. If you'd like to tune back in, you can asks some more questions. Hello to all of those kids watching from Texas and Vermont and England and Illinois.

Thank you very much and keep reaching for the stars because you, too, might be the next mission in Mars. And thanks a lot you guys, have a great day. [music background]

[end of segment 2]