Apollo 1 with Ryan Walters

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Welcome to the conversations that matter podcast.

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My name is John Harris. We have a guest with us today, Ryan Walters, who wrote a book that is fascinating about Apollo one.

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It was, it was a book I actually listened to on audio just because that's how

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I get through most of my books, but the narration was pretty good and it was just a fascinating story that I did not know.

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And so Ryan, I'm just really grateful that I can have you on to talk about this cause it's a really important American story.

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So thank you. Thank you for having me. Yeah, my pleasure. What made you want to write about this topic, especially during this political politically heated and charged season in the

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United States. I know you're a history guy and I'm sure you have opinions on some of those things, but you chose to write about something that's,

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I don't think at least is as it's not very controversial. It's not the hot topic right now. Maybe it will be tomorrow, but what made you think, okay, this is what

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I want to write about. Well, I think, I think we need a break from the, from the, from all of this going on.

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I know a lot of people are tired of it. I'm pretty tired of hearing about it, but well, of course

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I'm a historian and of course one of my fields of study is that the Vietnam Cold War era.

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And I've always been a fan of the space program going back to, you know, to being a little kid and following the space program and Apollo and all of those great things that we did in the 1960s.

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And I always wanted to do a book on the space program, but I never, I never really could figure out anything to do until one night a couple of years ago,

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I was driving in my car and I was thinking about it. I said, what could I do? And it just hit me to do Apollo one, which was slated to be the first, first mission, the first flight of the

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Apollo program, the moon landing program. And it was set to go in February of 1967.

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And of course there was a tragic fire inside the spacecraft on January the 27th, 1967.

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They were, they were not about to go into, into launch, into space, but they were doing a, a, a launch sequence, a test, it was called a plugs out test.

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And a fire broke out inside the capsule because they were locked in the capsule. Fire broke out, swept through pretty quickly because of the hundred percent oxygen environment inside the capsule and killed the crew within seconds and really set the, set this program back almost two years before we flew.

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But it's an important story. People say, well, what does that have to do with anything? Well, it was NASA's first tragedy.

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I mean, those of us in, in, in the modern and present time, we most of us know about Challenger and Columbia, but this was really

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NASA's first tragedy. This was the first tragedy that NASA had experienced. And the important part that the book is entitled

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Apollo one, the subtitle is the tragedy that put us on the moon because without this tragedy, we would not have, certainly would not have made

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Kennedy's deadline to land on the moon before the end of the 1960s. But my contention is

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I don't think we would have landed on the moon at all. The spacecraft was really not in good shape, had a lot of problems, but the fire exposed those problems and allowed engineers to redesign the spacecraft and they built a magnificent flying machine that flew to the moon nine times.

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Give us some of the names of the people who died in that particular tragedy, because we hear about Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, right?

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Those are household names, but we don't hear about these men. And I think that was one of the things I sensed you wanted to remember is, hey, these men actually said they sacrificed.

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Yeah. Everybody knows Neil Armstrong, John Glenn, Jim Lovell's pretty famous because of Apollo 13, the

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Tom Hanks movie made his name household, pretty common household name.

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But the crew was, the commander was Gus Grissom. Gus Grissom was one of America's first astronauts.

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He was one of the Mercury seven, one of the original seven astronauts. He was actually the second American in space in 1961.

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He also flew the first Gemini mission in 1965. He was a test pilot, a

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Korean war veteran, and a heck of an engineer. He was one of the best engineers and probably the best engineer in the astronaut corps.

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As a matter of fact, the Gemini program, he was the astronaut that really had the most to do with building that particular spacecraft.

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He really went to, it was built by McDonald, which is today McDonald Douglas, but the

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McDonald aircraft company is the one that built the Gemini spacecraft and the Mercury spacecraft. And Gus Grissom was instrumental in designing the

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Gemini spacecraft. As a matter of fact, they nicknamed it the Gusmobile because he had such a big part of it.

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And I actually have my Gusmobile shirt on. So he was one of America's original astronauts and one of the best.

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He was the commander of the mission. The senior pilot was Ed White. Ed White came in in the second group of American astronauts.

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He flew as the pilot on Gemini four. He was the first American to walk in space in 1965,

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Ed White. He had been an Air Force pilot, a West Point graduate. The third member of the crew was the rookie, the lone rookie.

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He was Roger Chaffee. He had not flown. He'd come from the Navy. He had flown reconnaissance missions.

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He had actually flown some reconnaissance missions over Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had not flown in space yet, but he was looking forward to his first space mission.

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So this was the crew and this is the crew that was lost. Nobody else was killed in the tragedy, although it could have been much worse.

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Now, I did not realize, I mean, I was born in 1989, so kind of,

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I think I was in that last group of people where I kind of, I remember as a kid, the sort of,

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I don't know, I don't know what you'd even call it, this kind of anti -Soviet sentiment that existed.

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I kind of remember that a little bit from the 90s. It was a different America at that point,

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I guess, and there was more, there was kind of a united, hey, Democrats or Republicans, we're still, we're together because we're, we've had this enemy for so long that we've had to face.

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And I started, some of that started to come back to me as I was reading your book. And I didn't,

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I just hadn't realized how much the Soviet threat impacted the conscience of Americans in the 1950s and 60s.

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Because today with some of the stuff going on, especially with critical race theory being such a controversial subject, you almost get the impression, well, like the only thing that mattered in the 1960s was integration.

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And it was just, it was just race riots and these kinds of things. And after I was reading your book,

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I was remembering again, wait a minute, actually, like the big thing back then was the Soviets and we're all going to die.

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And we're, you know, they're going to drop stuff on us from space and stuff. Could you paint the picture for us a little bit?

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Because this impacted the space program. This is why I think we went to the moon, why we tried to even just even get into space to begin with.

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This was, there was a military component to this, right? Oh, absolutely. I mean, everything was sort of filtered through that Cold War dynamic, the standoff between the

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United States and the Soviet Union and space was just one of those battlegrounds. And I go back, if people are interested in the book,

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I don't just start with Apollo 1. I go all the way back, really right after World War II.

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The Soviets, as I say in the book, kept their foot on the gas as far as military spending and developing missiles and things and rockets.

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We didn't really, we put a lot of our focus on bombers and things like that.

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So the Soviets were certainly ahead of us in rocketry. And this was, that came to fruition October the 4th, 1957 with the launch of Sputnik.

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They put the first man -made object in space. And we had the capabilities of doing that, but really did not.

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And I go into that story as why we didn't do that. We could have been in space first, but we didn't want to antagonize the

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Russians. But they didn't see it that way at all. And of course, obviously, then that's going to put a lot of fear, a lot of fear around the country after Sputnik, because as you said, if they're orbiting a satellite above us, can they orbit a bomb?

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Are they going to be, as Lyndon Johnson said, are they going to be dropping bombs down on us like rocks from a highway overpass?

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And a lot of people were afraid. So we began to ratchet up our spending on missiles and rockets.

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And of course, it didn't go very well. We were blowing them up right and left down at Cape Canaveral. But you have to understand, if you just look at it from the outside, if you don't really look at it in depth, until the conventional wisdom as the

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Soviets were successful, they were successful every time they tried to do something.

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We were stumbling out of the gates. That's really not true because of the nature of our country and the

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Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is a secretive society. They did things in secret. The only thing that was ever announced was every time they had a success, they were able to hide their failures.

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And we found out after the opening up of the Soviet archive that they were failing almost as much as we were. We just didn't know it at the time because of their secret totalitarian society.

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But we actually came up with a methodical approach. And once we had the goal of going to the moon, we had a step -by -step, baby -step approach.

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This is how we're going to go to the moon. Soviets didn't do that. So much of what they were doing were gimmickry.

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But again, we didn't know what they were actually doing. So there was that competition that we needed.

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That's why Kennedy set that deadline. And think about it. At the time, he set the deadline to go to the moon by the end of the 1960s.

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He did that May the 25th, 1961. Think about it. We had not even orbited the

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Earth yet. We didn't even have a booster that would put us into Earth orbit. He's talking about going to the moon.

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And the reason he did that is because he knew the Soviets couldn't do it. And the Soviets knew they couldn't do it.

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And they were kind of shocked as we were. Oh, gosh, they're going to the moon. But our thinking was they had a moon program all along.

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And maybe they did. That's a possibility. But when you really study the program in depth, the

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Soviet program in depth, they weren't going anywhere near the moon. They didn't have the technology to do it. But again, we believe they were.

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We had that competition. And that helped boost us forward in Kennedy's deadline.

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If he hadn't have done that, if the Soviets hadn't been, we'd probably still be playing around trying to get to the moon.

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And it was not anything to push us. It was no boost. It seems like it was a uniting effort in a way.

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I mean, you had Republicans and Democrats actually trying to work together. And you get into some of the corruption as well.

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It seems like there was a lot of corruption in who's getting into contracts, that kind of thing.

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It's a big part of the book. Because you think about our noble space program. I mean, that's something that all

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Americans are proud of. Hey, we went to the moon. That's one of our great moments, landing on the moon, July 20, 1969.

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Everybody's proud of that. And you don't want to think about NASA and the moon program being corrupted by politics.

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But I actually make this statement in the book that politics killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee.

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That's a pretty big thing to say. And it has to do with the awarding of these contracts.

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Now, we had three programs. Mercury, which was to get a man in space, orbit the Earth. That's the only thing Mercury was doing.

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Gemini, they called the bridge, which is a bridge between Mercury and Apollo. But we sort of perfected everything we needed to do to go to the moon.

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Long duration missions, spacewalking, rendezvous and docking, things like that. These are skills we had to perfect in order to fly to the moon.

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Of course, Apollo is the moon program. And I always tell my students in class, I'm probably one of the only professors in the country that teaches a lecture on the space program, is that don't think about it as we accomplished

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Mercury. OK, now we're going to figure out Gemini, then Apollo. That's not the case. We actually had the funding and were awarding contracts for Apollo way back in 1961.

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And they gave the Apollo spacecraft contract to North American Aviation.

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They're the ones that built the spacecraft, the one that caught on fire. And it was sloppy and a lot of shoddy work that was revealed in the investigations.

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But I have to go into the politics of that because of the way it was awarded. Now, it's typical for people to joke around today and say,

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I think there's a line in the movie Armageddon, you know, when they're in the space shuttle and they're about to launch, to go and land on the asteroid.

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And the guy says, you know, this thing has millions of moving parts built by the lowest bidder. And that's things that people, you know, we joke about.

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But that's not the case when you're dealing with something like this. I mean, you know, government fixing potholes, they might do that for the lowest bidder.

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Something like this, the way it works is aerospace companies submit bids to a

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NASA evaluation board. And this board's filled with scores of aerospace engineers, technicians, people like that know what they're doing.

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Now, I don't mean just a few pages of a submission. I'm talking about a stack of paper that's two or three feet high on their proposal.

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And these evaluators rate those companies and their proposals. And they grade them, you know, and they put them in order.

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And whoever has the highest grade gets the contract. Well, when the contracts for Apollo came out, the Apollo spacecraft, the highest score was the

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Martin Company, which is today Lockheed Martin. Number two was North American Aviation.

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Well, Martin should have got the contract, right? Well, NASA administrators, led by Jim Webb, he was the main

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NASA administrator, asked that those be re -evaluated, to re -evaluate those scores and to take into consideration a company's past experience with experimental aircraft.

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North American had built the X -15 rocket plane, which NASA had flown to the edge of space.

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Neil Armstrong was actually a civilian test pilot doing that. So that's going to obviously boost

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North American Aviation above Martin. And that's what they did. After they re -evaluated it,

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North American had the top score and won the contract, which is a huge contract.

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It was probably the biggest plum. And of course, then you have the accident. And then people start digging into it.

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There was a few journalists that did, Congress did. Jim Webb actually went before Congress and lied to him about that because Congress, those senators asked him, was

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North American Aviation the top rated company? And he said, yeah. And of course, Congress found out later that was not the case that Martin had actually won the contract.

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And he had to go back and revise that statement about three weeks later. So there was an element of corruption and people think, well, that's not, you know, that kind of stuff probably happens all the time.

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But when you understand who Jim Webb was, the NASA administrator, he was a good administrator. Let me say that from the outset.

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He was a top notch guy. He knew how Congress worked. He knew how to get the funding. Remember, NASA at the time consumed about 5 % of the federal budget on the

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Moon program. And he was able to secure that funding to go to the Moon. But he was an executive with the

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Kerr -McGee Oil Company in Oklahoma. Senator Robert Kerr was the United States Senator in 1961.

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And he chaired the Senate Space Program. He had gone to North American Aviation already and secured, said, hey, look, what are you going to do for me in Oklahoma if I get you this contract?

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And they said, hey, we'll put a plant in Tulsa. We'll hire 20 ,000 Oklahomans. And so he put his weight behind North America.

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Well, when Kennedy needed an administrator, he turned that over to Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Lyndon Johnson went to Kerr and said, who do

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I need as an administrator? He said, I'll tell you who you need, Jim Webb, who had been an executive for Kerr. So you see the connections in there.

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And Kerr had already secured or had basically promised

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North America the contract. Now, that's very in -depth. And I don't want to go into all of that. But there's a whole chapter on it.

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But you see the connections and how bad it looked. North America, for example, another example is when they put everything in Tulsa, their plant, all their banking business.

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They put all their money that they needed for their banking business in Oklahoma. They put it in banks where Webb and Kerr had stock.

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I mean, there was a lot of web of intrigue is what I call it. Yeah, it did make me feel like I needed a shower afterward.

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It's very dirty. It is. I mean, that's government. That's just kind of doesn't matter what issue you're talking about.

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There's if someone can get a cut, they try to get one. Kind of moving forward, though,

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I mean, I know Donald Trump had his I was curious to ask you this. Donald Trump had his space, what they call it,

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Space Force. He wanted to kind of reinvigorate, I think, for military purposes, but also maybe to unite the country, because that was something that united the country, a space program of some kind.

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And that doesn't I don't know whether that's actually going anywhere now or not. But it you know, that seemed to be what he wanted to do.

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But you have also people today like Elon Musk, who, you know, they're shooting off their own rockets and they're more in the in the private sphere.

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He wants to populate, you know, the planets. And he's talking about these kind of things that were deemed crazy, are deemed crazy kind of now, but so was going to the moon.

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And so I just would like to hear your kind of predictions. What do you think is going to happen with with NASA and just with space exploration in general?

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Over the next few years? Actually, I think actually, I like SpaceX and what they're doing.

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I think it's good because it's competition. And there are some other private companies that are looking at doing the same thing.

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They're out here in Texas. Some of you are looking at space tourism, you know, putting regular people in orbit, or at least these suborbital flights and I've heard they're pretty high priced, a couple hundred thousand a ticket, which knocks me out of it.

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Unfortunately, maybe they'll get cheaper. Well, if people buy your book, you know, you never know. I mean, I need a thing.

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I need a couple hundred thousand people to buy a copy so I can send Ryan to space. Yeah, I was happy that Trump did that.

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I think that was part of the reason it was a unifying effort. You know, you see a lot of people, I see it out here a lot in Texas, just regular people with NASA shirts on and things like that.

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And I think that's really good. You go to these little stores, these novelty stores, there's a lot of NASA stuff.

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There's a lot of excitement. Of course, that goes back, you know, Bush actually pushed for a new space program because the shuttle was retiring and we had a new program called

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Constellation. And of course, when Obama came along, he cut that program. Right, I remember that.

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And then, of course, Trump brought it back and said, we're going to go to the moon and actually set a goal.

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We want to go to the moon by 2024, which doesn't look like that's going to happen. We hadn't even tested the capsule, but we've gone back to that.

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We've gone back to that Apollo way of doing things, which is what Elon Musk has done.

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The rocket and the capsule on top of the rocket rather than the space shuttle. And there's a couple of different spacecraft that they have.

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Boeing built one. Lockheed Martin's built one. Again, we hadn't even flown them yet.

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But look at what Elon Musk doing in some of these other companies, which shows you how much better private enterprise can do things.

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I mean, the government and people say, why is it NASA taking so long? Well, there's no hurry. I mean, there's no deadline out there.

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Well, we're not trying to beat the Russians. Right, there's nobody to beat. The Russians, their programs actually fall apart.

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I mean, the International Space Station is due to retire in 2024. The Russians don't know what they're going to do because they don't have anywhere to fly to.

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And of course, they're part of the space stations in really, really bad shape. So yeah, the

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International Space Station is due to be finished in 2024. And of course, we've got to figure out something to do ourselves.

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But there's other nations. China's doing some things. Even the United Arab Emirates have just named a second group of astronauts.

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So there's other countries doing things. But right now, the private companies seem to have a leg up on everybody, which

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I think is a good thing. I'm excited about it. I mean, I'm going to go down this later this summer and catch a

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SpaceX launch. Hopefully, I can. I got to go down to the Cape and visit.

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But I'm glad that we're doing this. And I don't know what, of course, Biden's a new budget. You've probably heard, $6 trillion.

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I mean, we ought to have a few dollars in there for NASA. I don't know what we're spending $6 trillion on. Yeah, you'd think.

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But of course, like I said, during the days of Apollo, NASA was about 5 % of the budget. Today, it's just minuscule.

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Yeah. Well, we have a lot of other things we're spending money on. Where can people go?

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Where do you want them to go to get your book? Probably the best place is

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Amazon. That's where I do all my shopping. You can get it at Barnes & Noble. I'm sure it'll probably be in some bookstores as well.

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I know they've got the printing presses running. And I know they're sending them out to everybody around the country.

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At least that's what they told me. And so probably the best and the cheapest place is just to go to Amazon.

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Okay. Or Audible. I know if you want to listen on tape, it's already there. Let me tell you one thing real quick.

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Yeah. The point I'm trying to make is, again, without Apollo 1 tragedy,

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I don't think we'd land on the moon at all. I think without that fire revealing the problems with the spacecraft, we would have had another accident down the road.

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There was one coming at some point. If Apollo 1 had been successful, there was another one coming. And if we had lost a crew in space with the way public opinion was looking at the time, it might have been enough to shut down the program.

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There were liberals in Congress that wanted to spend the money on the great society and education and that kind of thing.

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One of the main protagonists was Walter Mondale, who died just a few weeks ago. So the point is, we were successful.

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Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969. But it was the shoulders of Grissom, White, and Chaffee who they were standing on.

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Their sacrifice was not in vain. Without that sacrifice, we wouldn't have made the deadline and may not have made it at all.

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I noticed you snuck a John MacArthur quote in the book as well. I caught that. I was kind of like,

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I was like, what? And I was like, oh, that's kind of cool. So his definition of what a hero was.

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Yeah, I was looking for a perfect definition. And I looked at John MacArthur and I said, you know, that really says everything.

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Which that means something to probably a number of people in this audience. So I figured I'd throw that out there.

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But Ryan, I appreciate it. I should send a copy to John MacArthur, I think. You should actually. You should send a copy to John MacArthur.

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A couple of years ago, I was at the Shepard's Conference. And I don't remember the name of the guy now.

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I probably should. But there was a session that they had done with an astronaut who had been at the space station. And he had all these pictures that he had taken from the space station.

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And it was one of the things that they were showing at the Shepard's Conference. These space station pictures.

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So I'm not saying that you'll get that gig. But I know he's interested in the topic, at least.

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So yeah, you should do that. I need to get out there to that Shepard's Conference one day. Yeah. Well, yeah, when they're allowed to have it in the state of California again.

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Well, I appreciate it, Ryan. God bless you.

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I hope the book sells well. And hopefully we'll talk again at some point. Thank you very much. I appreciate it.