Chantal Forde: Introducer

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!

Chantal: Thank you, good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Kennedy Space Center's Astronaut Encounter. Today you are not our only audience. We also have an audience around the world on our live webcast. So we'll be taking questions from them as well as you and they'll be watching from all over the world. All right now, has anybody every met a real astronaut before? Nobody! Well, after today, you can all say that you have. Now, becoming an astronaut involves very rigorous training and you have to study more than you ever have before. Astronauts these days are doctors, they're pilots and scientists and engineers. They have to be prepared to deal with very complicated tasks while working in a zero gravity environment. And now I will introduce you to our very special guest astronaut. He was a Colonel in the Air Force and he was a test pilots. He has accumulated 7200 hours of flight time. As an astronaut, he was part of three support crews for the Apollo missions, and he was a pilot on the Skylab IV, which was the third and final manned visit to the Skylab orbital workshop. At this time it was the longest mission. It lasted 84 days. Ladies and gentlemen, please help me in welcoming guest astronaut, Bill Pogue!

Bill: Thank you Chantal, good afternoon everyone!

Chantal: It's a pleasure to have you here again.

Bill: Well, it's a great day. Skylab.

Chantal: Maybe you could tell us a little bit about Skylab and your mission.

Bill: A boss of mine once said, Skylab was the best kept secret in the space program. Skylab was built from Apollo hardware. We took the third stage of a moon rocket and converted the liquid hydrogen tank to our workshop, which had floors, partitions, ceilings, rooms, etc. And we used the liquid oxygen tank as our dumpster. It was about, it had the volume of a one-car garage. Above the workshop we had an airlock for conduction extra-vehicular activities, spacewalks. And on top of that we had a multiple docking adapter, which housed our instruments for studying the Earth. And it also had a spare docking port, a rescue port, in case we needed that. The Apollo-type Command Service Module was designed for two weeks in space and we would be staying up there for about 12 weeks. We had very few problems with it. On the outside, we had a solar observatory, and that observatory contained six telescopes for making pictures and images of the Sun. One, we had an ultraviolet telescope, and also an X-ray telescope, to image the Sun in those frequencies. And that was because you could not do that from the surface of the Earth. The atmosphere filters that all out. Skylab was launched unmanned in May of 1973. It was visited by three 3-man crews using modified Apollo-type command service modules. And the first crew launched shortly after the lab was launched in late May of '73. They stayed for 28 days. The second crew launched in July and they stayed for 59 days. I was on the last one. We launched on the 16th of November '73, and were up until the 8th of February. When we left it on the 8th of February, we fully intended to go back and use Skylab as sort of a space research facility. But that wasn't to be, because that would require the shuttle to go up and reboost it by 1978. It wasn’t able to do that because it didn't launch until '81 and so Skylab also slipped. It slipped right out of orbit and re-entered the Earth's atmosphere on the 11th of July 1979. And landed in the Indian Ocean. That's very briefly the story of Skylab. How it fitted in, it fitted in right after the last Apollo flight, which was Apollo XVII, December '72. The year before, the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. After that mission, it was 6 years before we had another manned space flight.

Chantal: Are you ready to take some questions?

Bill: Chantal, go ahead.

Chantal: If anyone has a question, you can just raise your hand and if you could say your name and where you're from first that would be great. Do we have a question to start us off today? Oh, we may have one right from the web. Let's see, our first web question, an unknown asker, but "What was your role in Apollo XI and did you like it?"

Bill: Yes, I liked it. My role was writing procedures for the lunar landing, right after the lunar landing and the procedures for the ascent back from the lunar surface to rendezvous with the command module. Being flown by [inaudible]. So I worked directly with Buzz Aldrin and Fred Hayes, who would fly later on Apollo XIII. But Fred was Buzz's backup. So I worked directly with him refining the procedures. We were making changes pretty well up to the last minute.

Chantal: We've got a question right here in front.

Q: Harrison from Australia. Are you allowed to take photos?

Bill: Yes, I would prefer you didn't use a video camera because that's sort of lasting information. Stills are fine.

Chantal: We've got another question on the web here. "Did the food in space taste good?"

Bill: Yes. It did. We had excellent food on Skylab. It's considered to be the best space food ever provided to a crew in space. We had food freezers. We had frozen entrees, steak, prime rib, lobster Newburg, pork loin and dressing, a wide variety of water-rehydrateable foods, spaghetti in meat sauce, canned chili, a large number of beverages, tea, coffee, grapefruit juice and orange juice and that sort of thing. We fared very well.

Chantal: We've got another question for you right here.

Q: Hi, I'm Samson here from Syracuse, New York. In your career as a flying astronaut what was the most difficult aspect of your job? What was the most memorable besides the view?

Bill: The most demanding part of it was the training cycle. They're long hours. A lot of times you have to train on weekends too, so you're away from your family a lot. That's the downside of it. But as far as the most enjoyable part, I think it was the satisfaction of having done a job right. But you mentioned the view of the Earth. That was sort of a bonus. It's spectacular!

Chantal: Another question for you.

Q: My name's Jim from Minnesota. I understand that you work as a consultant for Boeing on design issues for the International Space Station. I was wondering what lessons you've applied from you experience on Skylab to the new Space Station.

Bill: Okay, I work as a subcontractor, not as a consultant, because Boeing doesn’t have consultants. They only have technical services subcontractors. But that's the same thing. What I did was, try to use the experience that we had on Skylab and Jerry Carr, the commander of my flight, and I, work together with Boeing. The main thing we were trying to do is give them, the engineers who were essentially aeronautical engineers, airplane designers, give them some maturity in the sort of thought processes that have to take place in order to prepare something for work in orbit or in weightlessness, the zero-gravity environment. And that's what you were trying to do. In so doing, we spend a lot of time with engineers. We also perform some of the tests in the water tank down at the Marshall Space Flight Center. And generally kept very busy and it was very interesting work.

Chantal: We've got another question from Tanya, she's at home on the web, she says, "First of all, Happy Veterans' Day. What did you enjoy most about your career as an astronaut?"

Bill: What I enjoyed most was the fact that it was interesting work. It was hard work, but it was always interesting and a lot of time you were doing things for the first time, so you sort of felt like a pioneer.

Chantal: And we've got another question over here.

Q: Hello, Paul, from London. Given options of climbing Everest, reaching Antarctica, and or the Mars and Moon, which would you prefer?

Bill: I would prefer Mars! But I don't think I'm going to make it! But that would be my preference. Those are fairly good options. One of my friends died trying to climb Mount Everest. [Karl Hanna], one of the shuttle Mission Specialists. Incidentally he's the only astronaut buried in China.

Chantal: We've got another question coming from Brett in Florida. "What kind of work did you perform on your EVAs during Skylab IV?"

Bill: On Skylab IV on our first EVA, in addition to changing film in the cameras and retrieving samples exposed to the space environment, we repaired a radar antenna which was used to scan the surface of the ocean. And on the second EVA, Jerry Carr and I went out, and again we replaced and removed the film canisters, magazines, from the solar telescopes, which were quite large. On Earth they weighed 75 pounds. And for the first time we -- of course they're weightless there -- we used an extendable ribbon boom that came off a reel. It moved these magazines 40 feet out to the sun end of the telescope, so that it would be very convenient to both send the magazines out to the person changing out the film and then retrieving the exposed canisters.

Chantal: We've got a question at the back for you.

Q: Hi, I'm from Toronto, Canada. I was in nursing. And I’m just wondering, basically, what kind of education nursing would play in this field in the future?

Bill: Of course we have a lot of support nurses at NASA. I don't know that they've ever selected an RN for instance, as a Mission Specialist. They could have. Usually they require doctorate level degrees. The minimum is the Bachelors' level so it's possible if a nurse had experience in a certain field like bed rest patients, or something like that, that NASA might be interested in getting them as a Mission Specialist.

Chantal: We've got another question right over here.

Q: I am Jose Luis Frias from San Francisco, California. I would like to ask you if after launch you feel sick, or all the astronauts have sickness, and how about, what are the side effects after launch?

Bill: That's a good question. It had to do with space sickness. About half the people who go up get nauseated. NASA's still working on the problem. And they're trying, they're going to be evaluating promethezine on this particular mission coming up, to see if that will somehow help. I don't think it will because I took promethezine, a combination of promethezine and ephedrine, before our flight, and it didn't keep me from getting sick. I got sick about 8 hours into the flight and threw up. But it was mainly an upchuck because I had a bad headache. I really wasn't nauseated so much as, the only food I had left, I couldn't get to the medical kit, so Jerry said, eat something. But the only thing I had left were stewed tomatoes. They didn't last very long in my tummy, the tummy didn't like that very much!

Chantal: We've got another question for you right here.

Q: How long did you stay in space?

Bill: We were up for 84 days, 12 weeks. And it seemed like it. Actually they wanted to extend our flight, but they didn't ask us until about three or four days before we were due to come back. And I think if they had asked us earlier we would have been more responsive. But we told them we didn't have enough food left. Which was true, technically, but we probably could have scraped together enough to last a couple of weeks.

Chantal: We've got another web question from Candace in Ohio. She would like to know what advancements in flight do you expect over the next 50 years?

Bill: Oh, boy! I don't know too much about predicting things. Every time I predict something, it's wrong! But the advancement that I hope we get are more efficient boosters reducing the cost per pound of launch into Earth orbit, more efficient engines for use in space, for doing, say, burns towards Mars or the Moon, even. And I think that probably we will, over the next 50 years, solve a lot of these physiological problems that have been bugging us, like the bone mass loss, and one of the things that we really have to learn how to do is to cope with the radiation environment. The ionizing radiation can cause a lot of problems. And on trips to Mars you'll be 9 months possibly en route and 9 months on the way back. Once you get on the surface of Mars, you're fairly well protected, even though the Mars atmosphere is very thin, almost all the radiation that you encounter comes almost straight down on you because of the properties of the radiation. So you can have an umbrella-type structure to protect you from that. But that plus we need to have components in the systems that have very high reliability for long periods of time. Those are some of the things that I expect to see improved.

Chantal: Another question for you right here.

Q: I'm curious to know about what kind of noise you experienced as you experienced lift-off and whether that's changed over the years.

Bill: It hasn't changed over the years. It's still noisy. There's a lot of noise, there's a lot of vibration. Once you go supersonic, a lot of the air noise quiets down because it can't make it through the shock wave. Then you, in our case, you can't do this in the shuttle, because of the way it's configured. But when the shock wave attacked, we lost all the air noise and you could hear all the noises deep down in the booster. You could hear the structural beams creaking and groaning as the engines gimbled to steer the rockets. And you encountered shear winds and that sort of thing. So, that part was kind of interesting. The loudest part of the launch however, occurs at the end of first stage, when you shut down the engines in order to stage the booster, to get rid of the spent stage. And this is very noisy. It's done with explosive devices, explosive bolts, linear shaped charges and so forth. And it sounds like you're in the middle of a train wreck. Once you recover from that one, and you're looking out the window, you see bolts and insulation blankets flying around, big long metal straps, and then the next booster lights up and you're off and on your way. In our case, the second stage -- and by the way, the rocket we used is just like the one that's lying horizontally above the rocket park -- it's a pretty soft booster, a gentle ride from there on in.

Chantal: Okay, another question right here.

Q: I have two questions. I'm Ron from Fremont, California. And first of all, how long did it take you adjust to coming back to Earth, basically, standing and such, and secondly, how do you control the heating and cooling of a spacecraft in the vacuum of space?

Bill: I didn't get the last part of that?

Q: How do you control the heating and cooling of a spacecraft in the vacuum of outer space?

Bill: Okay. The way you control the heating and cooling of the spacecraft in outer space is with radiators. You have to have, and we will have large radiators on the International Space Station. We didn't have to have too much on Skylab. But what you do is you actually circulate a fluid through a radiator that rejects heat. Your big problem in space is usually not heating up, even though they had a problem with this on Apollo XIII, it's getting rid of heat. Rejecting heat out into space. And you have to do this by radiation. I forget what your first question was. Oh, how long did it take us to re-adapt when we got back. About five weeks. We were scheduled for 8 weeks of post-flight testing. After 5 weeks they terminated the tests because they said we had recovered to pre-flight baseline. When we first came back, of course, our legs were thin and spindly. We called it bird legs. Our knees hurt. Your spine tingled when you ran. Sort of like hitting your crazy bone, your funny bone. But we recovered very quickly, restored the muscle mass, again, bone mass loss is a problem. I lost about 3% bone mass. And you, everything pretty well reverses. I had a balance problem for a while, but that's all been corrected. And the only thing we don't know about is, for sure, is the bone mass loss and the consequences of exposure to the ionizing radiation at higher level than you experience on the surface of the earth.

Chantal: Okay, we have a message not a question, from Sarah in Illinois. And she wanted to say that you are a great guy and you did a great job as an astronaut.

Bill: Well thank you very much Sarah.

Chantal: And we also have a question from Kashif in Philadelphia. He wants to know, "What do you think is the most necessary characteristic to become an astronaut?"

Bill: Being able to do a lot of hard work, and have persistence, because the hours are long. It's a lot of fun, and it's very satisfying, but you really have to hang in there.

Chantal: We've got a question for you here at the back.

Q: Hi, Jim, from England. I've been through the Apollo capsules, etcetera, and one thing that intrigues me, following your comments about eating very well on the missions. What happens to the aftermath of eating? What sanitary requirements did you have on the capsules?

Bill: I didn't get the first part. What is the general subject:

Chantal: If you're eating very well in space he'd like to know what happens after you eat? What are the sanitary needs that you have? How do you go to the bathroom!

Bill: Oh! How do you go to the bathroom in space. Okay, I'll tell you. [laughter] There's an old medieval, primitive technique that we used on Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. And in the early days when we were on Skylab, until we go the toilet cranked up. This is indeed primitive. We had a container, which attached to the body, and you urinated directly into that. For number 2 we had a plastic bag, you pull the release ring off the top of it, it exposed a ring of adhesive material and you hope your aim is good for that. After you get through with that, you put tablets in it, to neutralize it. But for the first time in space, Skylab had a sit-down toilet, or float-on, or whatever you want to call it. You had to use a seatbelt to hold us down. We used air entrainment or airflow to settle the solids. This thing worked quite well. After you got through, you had to change out the bag. You took the bag, put a new bag in, took the old bag and put your name on it, you put the date, the number of tissues you used, they sealed it all up and they put it in a specimen mass measurement device which jiggled it, oscillated it, a computer timed the period of the oscillations and that gave you the mass of the object. Then based upon the object, we would set an oven timer, and we baked it dry. This is to support an experiment by the National Institutes of Health. They were the ones that provided all that good food. So we, this was the price we paid for the frozen entrees and steak and all that. And that was all brought back. It's going through another analysis now with better analytical techniques. For number one, it just had a funnel, airflow in the funnel, it worked great. The shuttle system is very similar, except it looks more like a commode. They don't have a seatbelt - they have thigh restraints, L-shaped levers that pull up and pull your thighs down so that you sit on the commode. And they're still using, they use a funnel-type device which is unisex, men or women can use that, and they still use the airflow for making everything go the right way.

Chantal: We've got another question for you right back here.

Q: A couple of quick questions, what inspired you to become an astronaut, what year did you get in the program, and do you think we'll ever go back to the Moon, and do you think we'll put a man on Mars?

Bill: Let's take them one at a time. I'm 72 years old and I can't remember that long ago.

Q: What inspired you to become an astronaut?

Bill: The first seven astronauts. I thought they were really neat and that was my inspiration.

Q: And what year did you enter the program?

Bill: I entered the program in '66, took the tests in '65, mostly. And I was 36 years old when I reported in.

Q: When I was small I remember when man landed on the Moon. Do you think we'll go back to the Moon?

Bill: Oh, absolutely. I can't give you a date, but I’m sure we will. Unless we kill each other.

Q: And are we going to Mars?

Bill: Yes, we will, eventually. We, collectively, the people of planet Earth.

Chantal: We've got another question here from the web. It's from Jasmine in Philadelphia. "Did you ever have a bad experience in space, and if so, what was it?"

Bill: A bad experience. The worst one was when I threw up. [laughter] After that, it was all downhill, if you'll pardon the expression!

Chantal: A couple of questions right here.

Q: When you get a rock off the Moon what do you do with it?

Bill: I didn't get that?

Chantal: When you take a rock off the Moon, what did they do with it?

Bill: That's a really good question! The rocks, I think there's over 600 pounds, that were brought back by all of the Apollo crewmembers, the rocks are put in a special container and it is sealed. It is brought out and put in a special carrier, brought back to the Johnson Space Center, in Houston, Texas, and was put into special storage at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. There was great concern that we would be contaminated, back-contaminated by this material and so the Lunar Receiving Laboratory also contained a quarantine area for the crewmembers. And so those things are still in storage. Pieces of the lunar materials are sent all over the world to people who are reputable scientists, for investigation. They have to submit a plan for, to explain what it is they want to do with the material, and then a special board will review their request, and if they approve it, they will be sent the materials and then what they don’t use is returned to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. So it's all kept there in Houston, except what has been loaned out.

Q: How many astronauts went with you?

Chantal: How many astronauts went with you on your mission?

Bill: Two others went with me. Crews of three, it was an Apollo type command service module, which has a capacity of three crew members, except for rescue, you can actually carry five.

Chantal: Another question on the web here. "When you were in space, did it feel different than you expected it to?"

Bill: You can't quite prepare for it, although the zero-g aircraft gave us a pretty good idea. The thing that puzzled me the most, or caused the most discomfort, was nasal congestion. Which lasted for several weeks.

Chantal: We've got a question here in front.

Q: Paul Bonniger, Jacksonville, Florida. Approximately how many astronauts are active in the space program today?

Bill: About 150, last time that I checked. 154 was the exact count when I checked. We may have lost a few of them, a few of them may have retired. That was about a year ago.

Chantal: And this is going to be our last question, actually. It's from Diane in England. "What did you use the Apollo Space telescope for?"

Bill: The Apollo telescope mount was the official name of it. And that had, this was the solar observatory. So we used it look at the Sun. To make images of the Sun. And that was its only function. We did not use it to make astronomical observations, that is, look at the stars, or novas, or anything like that. We were just studying the Sun.

Chantal: Well, you have shared some really great information and stories with us today, and I was wondering if you had any words of advice for the younger audience members and the audience members around the world?

Bill: Well, you have to start studying math and science early in your schooling. You can't wait until, say, high school. You have to start early in your elementary grades and do a good job, continue that study, through your high school and your university level work. The minimum requirement for astronauts, is a Bachelors' level degree, in the physical sciences, engineering, mathematics, or a related field. The truth of the matter is, that most of the Mission Specialists have Doctorate level degrees. Now, some have been selected who have Bachelors' level degrees, but they have substantive experience in a particular discipline, and maybe have written a lot of papers and so forth, made a contribution. NASA's not only looking for academic qualifications, and they don’t expect you to have perfect grades, either. But you have to have reasonable grades. And they will, they are just about as interested in what your performance is in the workplace, say, at a research lab where you worked, or whatever. And the references, the recommendations from those people, the heads of your lab or your office, is very important to NASA. And one other thing they never say, is that they're looking for a well-rounded person, they want somebody who's not, who doesn't have a narrow outlook on life, and so you find that most of the astronauts have a serious avocation or hobby, and all have sports, favorite sports. One of the astronauts selected sometime back was a professional soccer player before he was selected. They snow ski, they water ski, they skydive. One lady has over 2000 sky dives. They do, I would suggest that you stay away from Formula 1 or NASCAR racing, or motorcross racing, because it gives NASA headquarters people heartburn. Because they've invested millions of dollars in your training and they don't want to lose it due to some accident. But anyway, I would encourage anyone who wants to do it to take a shot at it! The probability of being selected as an astronaut is about the same as being struck by lightning, but I tell the kids you can always fly a kite. In other words, you can improve those odds by proper preparation.

Chantal: thank you very much. Thank you to the people joining us in our live webcast. Remember to reach for the stars. Ladies and gentlemen, Astronaut Bill Pogue.