Off-Nominal - 238 - KGB Guardian Angel (with Chuck Deiterich)

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Jake and Anthony are joined by Chuck Deiterich, a Retrofire Officer on many Apollo missions, including Apollo 8, 11, and 13. He went on to work on Skylab, the Apollo–Soyuz Test Project, the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Tests, among others. Topics Off-Nominal - YouTube Episode 238 - KGB Guardian Angel (with Chuck Deiterich) - YouTube Apollo 11 Landing (Timestamped to 6 plus 25) Follow Off-Nominal Subscribe to the show! - Off-Nominal Support the show, join the Discord Off-Nominal (@offnom) / Twitter Off-Nominal (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Jake Robins (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Main Engine Cut Off (@[e-mail]) - Spacey Space Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@[e-mail]) - jawns.club 🐘 Off-Nominal Merchandise Off-Nominal Logo Tee WeMartians Shop | MECO Shop

TLS and go for main engine, start. Jake, it's a special Thursday, man. It is special. Look how special this is. So special that I forgot to ask if you pronounce your name, Dietrich? Yes. Chuck Dietrich. Dietrich.

Boom. Dietrich. He's like Marlena. You are a man that I've been told many times would be an awesome guest for this show. So we are so thankful that you're hanging out with us. your list of things that you worked on is too long for me to remember them all and list them off in a good order. So I'll let you do it. Tell us the things that you worked on, and we could talk about that, we can talk about Artibus too.

We got so much stuff to cover. Well, I started out working as a retrofire officer in the Apollo section, and I worked all the Apollo launch missions, I mean, mooner missions. I was supposed to work Apollo 7 when I was called off to work on Apollo 8 because, it was a secret thing. I had never been a lead on a manned mission before, and they made me lead. My section chief was my other guy, the other team, and my branch chief was the other. So there's three guys on three teams, and I had to both my bosses working for me. But they were good at it.

They followed all right along. And so I worked Apollo 11, Apollo 8, Apollo 11, 10, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11, 11. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17. I worked all the Skylab stuff. I worked the Apollo Sawyer's thing with Russia. One of the most fun jobs I had was working approach and landing test. I got to designed free flight profiles. I got to design their racetrack that we flew around.

And I got to then in the controls there, I was a flight dynamics officer by that time, and I did the ground control. I told him when it turned and all that sort of stuff. It was really cool. And it was a pretty short program, maybe two or three years long. So I got from the beginning to the very end of it. It was really neat. I really enjoyed it.

And one of the things I got to do is I got to run the shuttle training airplane where you come down to glidesloop at 20 degrees, which is really steep, or 24 degrees, which is really steep. and it was kind of interesting during the approach there was a pilot the astronaut was sitting on the left side

there was a flight instructor on the right side and in the middle it was a sim engineer and he had a shoulder harness well he'd been used to fly in kale cone on flights which is not very steep

so he was sitting there without a shoulder straps on so I was holding the shoulder straps because I was just standing behind the astronaut and you couldn't see the horizon And all you can see is the ground coming up. And at 2,000 feet, you're going down 200 feet per second, which means in 10 seconds you're going to hit the ground if they don't do something. Of course, they always do.

And then we had two T-38 flying chase out the window. And actually, that Gulfstream, too, would actually accelerate those T-38s when they first went around. Well, we come back, went up to 20,000 feet. It was pressurized to sea level, so you couldn't feel any pressure in your eyes and all, for years at all. And it would take two and a half minutes to get from 20,000 feet, 25,000 feet down to the ground. But anyway, I went back for the next flight, and the Sim Engineer had a shoulder straps on. He cracked.

And so after that, then I became a manager, and I was with the JSC brain safety manager, why I'd integrate with the people of KSC, the range safety guys, the Air Force and all that sort of stuff. And then also, after the accident, I was charged with trying to go through the flight design process to see if it was anything, what we could do. And I also chaired the range safety review panel, we had both Air Force, KSC, Huntsville, and JSC,

and JSC involved. So that was kind of, that was all right, but it was not much fun to find a control center. Oh, I want to show you something. Oh, shit, look at this. Hold, I'm going full screen on this, baby. Yeah, you're doing our segue for us

because we usually talk about where we're drinking, but we got weight to down the rabbit hole. What is going on here? Please talk me through this. Here's my mug. And here's the other side. Wow, that's a killer mug. Dang, that thing's awesome.

Maybe the best drinking vessel that's ever been on the show. Oh, 100%. What's in it, though? What's in it, Chuck? Water. All right. H2O.

Jake, how's your mug? That's the first time ever drank out of that thing. Wow. I have a whole bunch of mugs and cups from all the missions, but I never drink out of them. Wow. It's just a collection. A closet for 50 years, and then you finally pulled it out for this? Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. We're honored. I told you I had something to show you. Incredible. Jake does not have, you got some shitty glass, Jake. What did you bring? I don't even have a glass.

This is how low class I end today. I got a Belgian blonde ale from Petito. That's all I'm doing today. I have similar just from my area. I have a Sunshine Pilsner. We are so low end. We don't have any cool mug. Yeah.

Jeez. I actually have a dupe. Oh, if you notice, the crew signed it. It's legitimate. That's a legitimate piece of merchant sheds. I don't know if you should be drinking out of that now that I'm thinking. I know. Now I feel bad.

I actually have one that was, we made on 25 years after we, you know, 25 years after we, you know, 25 years after I'm going to the mission. Well, anyway. Amazing. Well, where the hell do we start? There's about 16,000 topics. I do want to start with the fact that that was the most resounding endorsement of this shuttle approach and landing test I've ever heard in my entire life. I've never really heard anybody give me such a good review of that program. just because I'm young enough that people just don't really tend to talk to me about it.

We miss it. It was so much fun. It was so much fun. I got to work with the DFRC, or I guess I call it Armstrong or something. I don't know. And I got to work with the Edwards Air Force Base flight test people. I got to work with the FAA down of Los Angeles. It was really neat.

And I'll tell you a story about that. We went out there, and Don Putty was my. branch chief and Gene Kranz was my division chief and we went out there to Edwards, Estabian lost San Jose and went out to Edwards and came back and they had to stop and get some beer. They didn't realize you couldn't have an open beer can in California. I did not drink a beer while we were going back and I was driving, but anyway, he was at that mug in the car. No, I didn't have that mug. But along to make a store, we didn't get caught. Yeah.

drove really fast for the California. Yeah. Yeah. It was a cool. It was neat. Jake, you want to start modern or historic? You want to do... Let's do Artemis.

Let's do Artemis. I was very disappointed with a press kit that was given out by NASA. It had absolutely nothing in it. Now, as an old trajectory guy, I'm interested in when you do maneuvers or when you're not do maneuvers and that sort of stuff. And I couldn't... I had a hard time figuring it out, finding anything out about it. But I did watch the launch, and I did watch the recovery.

And I could not believe it took them two hours to get the crew back on the aircraft carrier. For example, on Apollo 8, the crew was on board in 45 minutes. In Apollo 11, where they had to put on biological garments, it took them. I looked this up on the internet. I don't remember these things. 63 minutes. And then Paul 13, they were on a crew on a boat on 30 minutes.

Now, why did it take him so long? And the other thing is, I saw the hatch open before they put the flotation collar on. That's crazy. I mean, remember Gersham? He sank his mercury spacecraft. Well, he didn't, but he did.

Oh, he took a stance. Was it Gus's fault? We're getting... Now we know what it really felt like back then, yeah? You're blaming on Gus? So I just couldn't believe that. It's just incredible.

And, you know, the service module on the Orion is really wimpy. I mean, the Apollo spacecraft had 10,000 feet per second in it. This thing had like 3,500 feet per second. Now, we could do a TLI from Earth orbit with the service module in Apollo. Well, they were in a 100 by 40,000 mile orbit. And so you're halfway to the moon. It only takes about 10,000. You've got about 1,000 feet per second to get on to the moon.

And they actually did that with the service module, which I didn't know at the time was actually made by the European Space Agency. Yep. I didn't pay that much attention. but anyway and I could not find out how they did any of their return to Earth orbits if they were going out

unless it got on the way out now on Apollo if you can see this or not you can't see that we got it we got it we're good that curve up there this curve here

shows you how much delta V it takes to get back from different places in the orbit when you were way out there almost to the Earth sphere you could get back with about 5,000 feet per second, just turn around straight back and it'd stop going out. After that, it's actually quicker to go around the moon. But I didn't see any of that kind of information anywhere in the thing.

But with that wimpy service module, they're not going to come back very fast, very fast. The WSM, yeah. Yeah. But anyway, this is great. You know, Wimpy's room. I'm sorry. Orion slash WSM.

That's good. In course, the other thing I didn't realize is that they had to stay in the sunlight as much as they could just because they got those solar panels on there. And their thrust can't be too big or they break them off when they try to try to thrust. So that's why it takes them so long to do maneuvers. More of a fuel cell guy? You're more of a fuel cell kind of dude? I don't think they have a fuel cell.

on there. No, I'm saying. That's your, I know, but you're a fuel cell fan. You don't like dealing with the solar panel situation. Oh, they're fine, but not if you're in a drag race. What did you make of the flight profile itself? Like, you know, I want to dig in more about what you thought they should have put out about the flight profile in advance, but what did you make of doing a free return on this

particular mission? Oh, I think it was a good idea. And going way out is probably good. They gave more time around the back of the moon. And it probably kept out in the sunlight. So that was probably cool. That was probably good. Just because they threw further than leveled it, I don't really care about that.

But they made a big deal about that. But that's who cares. All right. Wait, let's do it, Jake. Let's convince Chuck that we care about this. All right? I'll do it if you're not feeling the vibes, Jake. Well, I mean, I can take it from the Canadian angle.

right so so chuck i'm canadian it's a whole thing i'm canadian you do a canadian first and then i'll convince an american there's there is now a furthest distance from earth record that is shared by someone from my country so it's a big deal to me from that sense right for me i'm born in i'm born in 91 so my whole life we were doing things less cool than you were doing and finally we've done something a little further not that much but something a little further than the stuff that happened way before I was born. So it hit me different than I thought it would for sure. But remember, your cell phone has more memory than the Apollo command module guidance system. By a lot now. I mean, it was almost like brute force that we got to the moon and back. I mean, it was kind of like

Pathfinder stuff, like going out to that on the Oregon Trail. I mean, it was pretty primitive compared to what we have today. Are you saying then that breaking the record is no good because we should have broken it by much, much more way sooner? Is that what you mean? No, not really, not really. I just didn't think it was a record that was really required to be broken. If you had 250,000 miles, much 259,000 miles. That's true. It's a great point, especially on a wimpy service module, you know.

Now, let's talk about the, I have some cheat sheets. All the paper material. Let's go. Let's talk about the reentry. They did a mid-course at five hours out. And then they did another mid-course at three hours out. Why in the world were they doing that? clearly they had a better handle on the trajectory than we did.

In Apollo 8, we did one maneuver 15 hours after we left the moon and didn't do another one the rest of the way in. So we, the spacecraft was very stable in its orbit and we had good tracking all the way in. They did a maneuver. They did five foot per second at AI minus 21 hours. They did at five hours, they did 4.2 feet per second. at three hours out, 10 feet per second is a whole degree of flight path angle. Remember, you only got about two degrees of entry corner.

So they must have been doing some of these burns out a plane or something. I have no idea. But you couldn't find that out from other stuff to tell you. No way. And I have some contacts at NASA. I probably shouldn't say this. And I asked them what was going on, and they didn't want to tell me. we'll for you it we'll for you yeah yeah that'll work but anyway yes

we're gonna be chuck to fill the form for us I don't even know what to ask so right is a really good question we'll submit it and pay last time I tried to pay them $200 to find a picture of a tomato in the ISS so I think this time I'll probably up the budget a little bit you know it's a shirt I have on yeah you got a modern mission ops shirt here I'll give you the wide shot so you can there you go I'll get my hand. The same thing is slow.

It says, Ferrier is not an option. Oh, look at that. It was Kranz. When Kranz wrote his book, he gave out, he gave out shirts like this. So it does have mission control patch on it.

And it says, Ferrier is not an option at the bottom. You're wearing that so that your sources will talk to you at Johnson. You're trying to make good on giving them a little good press, so they'll tell you the info. You got. The TV is a little slow.

That's why, when I, look at, I can't tell what I'm doing. And it's mirror. There's about a two-second delay. Yeah. Anyway. So I was a little disturbed. I mean, not disturbed, but just as an old trajectory guy,

trying to forget what exactly what they were doing was not very easy. I went back and looked at the Apollo 8 press kit. It told you all the maneuvers and all that sort of stuff. What were going to do? And this one was not that way. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah, they don't make them like they used to when it comes to the media kits.

You know, even I used to go back and do research and look at old Apollo ones or even old shuttle ones. And you can see like the details they would give you. And that's been a very recent complaint, especially with Artemis and the SLS launch and stuff. They don't give you, they give you much more like fluffy pretty pictures but no hard numbers kind of thing, right, in the press kits, which is super frustrated. I thought Victor Glover made a good comment. everybody because he's the first black guy to go out to the moon and his comment was hey we're just people going out at the moon

and that's the right answer you don't have to convince this show that Victor Glover is the absolute boss what did you think about his manual piloting I want to review because everybody out here was all did you watch the piloting demo where they were going up to the ICPS and stuff I didn't see that now

all right you're going to need to pull that up late because it was it was awesome to have live video coverage of these kind of operations actually I'd be curious, I got a couple of notes about people saying it was weird that they were doing proxop demos with a stage that they couldn't be certain was a great anchor point, like it wasn't totally still or not rotating in terms of the reference frame. And I'm curious to hear, they're not really telling us much about that, but how they were confident enough that that was a stable enough platform to be a target.

Or if they were like, I don't know, I feel like there were a lot of upper stage targeting things happening back in the between all the agenas and then, you know, certainly the earlier Apollo missions when we're even trying to see, can we pull off this docking with the lunar module in the, you know, the interstage adapter? So I'm trying to figure out if that was more of a, well, we've done this before. We've used upper stages as good targets in these kind of tests, but was it actually a really good representation of what they would be going up against in the future? Well, I think that probably doing those kind of things with some of the vehicle that's out there, whether you're tumbling or not, at least you know how you can control what you're doing.

You know, it's like feeling how an airplane flies, you know. You get a sense of what you can and can't do, whether you over-control or under control or what have you. How the digital autopilot works, you know, those kind of things. It's important. And, you know, we've done that before on Apollo 7. and they chased the LESB. Of course, they didn't know much about all the cameras. We did that in Austin.

But anyway, it was just something out there to shoot for. And that's a good thing to do. And because they had no idea how the vehicle respond relative to something else with a man in control. So that's probably the smart thing. That's probably one of the smarter things they did. Yeah. It was really fun to watch.

Yeah, you do have to look it up after, Chuck, because it was really fun to watch, like, you know, watch an astronaut work. It was very joyful to me because he's, you know, he's got his hand on the stick and he's calling out what he's doing and going left and this degrees and this much thrust. And, okay, you know, check this. Okay, it feels good. It's tight. It's slow. You know, he was giving us all the kind of details about how it felt to drive it. And it was really fun to watch. I bet. I bet. I didn't see it. I didn't see it. I didn't see it. Yeah. So should we talk about some old stuff? What do you think, Anthony? We want to

Sure. What do you want to talk about? Maybe good for me. Can you just describe what retro means? Thank God, dude. I was like, can we talk about a retrofire officer? I have a loose idea of what that means, but I would love to hear it from the horse's mouth. Okay.

There's a flight dynamics team. There's a retrofire officer. There's a flight dynamics officer and a guidance officer. The guidance officer is worried about the onboard programs and the onboard computer. The flight dynamics officer is worried about going forward. He will compute some rendezvous maneuvers. He computes the lunar insertion orbit. He computes the descent stuff.

The retrofire officer worries about abortes. He worries about abortes from the launch phase until we get into orbit. He worries about emergency de-orbites. Then end-mission, he does all the end-of-mission design and computes all the data that passed the crew. and so if on the way out the moon, we would give them block data, which we give them maneuvers every so, every 10 hours or so.

If they lost come, they could do that maneuver to get back. And so, and when we're going into lunar orbit, if we did some abortes, if during the lunar insertion burn, if the engine shut down, we had ways to do maneuvers to get back.

It could either do with a lunar module, in later missions or what we could do with a service module. And we had a chart because we're in the backside of the moon, we could have computed for them. So we had a chart that we would update real time that says, if this engine stops here, you do this to get back. And then normal end the mission, the retro would compute the TTI, trans-Earth injection, that he would work from around the moon, and then compute all the mid-course corrections and compute the entries ejected, pick the targets, and all that sort of stuff. So the retro was kind of a, and the mission kind of guy.

The flighto was kind of a flag ahead of guy, and the guy's always worried about guys' computers and for all stuff. And so after Apollo, during Skylab, we didn't have a retro fire officer. I was a Fido then, flight dynamics officer, and so I did all the orbit maneuvers for Skylab, and I had a buddy, they call them my number two, who was kind of do certain kind of things for us, you know. And then in ASDP

I was a photo, but we did have a retro. And so in ALT, we just had a flight and hemorrhickshunders that did your constrictor control. But so that's kind of what a line of that works.

And actually a retro A retrofire officer actually started out back in Mercury. That's what I was wondering about was, did it come out of that because, I don't know, there's so much talk about the retro pack because that was what we were figuring out at the time. But beyond that, was it that it stayed around in the Apollodays because there was too much work to do that you needed that many people in charge of those different phases of flight? Yeah, because one thing the retro did is he kept track of the onboard clock.

and because we've got a minute a second and a half delay when you get out of the moon but you make sure the clock would dry you don't want to do a maneuver at the long time and you also worry about all the weights and CGs so we compute the weight and CG on the SPS the engine

the SPS engine had to point through the CG to the thrust correctly or otherwise the two don't cause it to tumble or spin anyway so the retro would keep track of all that stuff and put those numbers into the computer and come up with the engine trims that the FIDO would use for.

So we had a lot of hasking. We even computed, this is an interesting, we even computed telescope data for a lot of observatories around the world. And what John Rel Bank was one of them. And I happened to remember the guy I said was never Robert Pritchard. I sent stuff in back in the 60s,

her 60s and 70s. Well, in 19, 2015, I was invited to come over to Sheffield, England, then to give a talk. And I happened to mention that I knew this guy from John Brown Bank. And the people over there got a hold of John Brown Bank, and the guy was still there, and I actually met him. Some 40 years later, I met Robert Pritchard.

That's awesome. So anyway, but that's it. That's neither here nor there. So we did a lot of kinds of things, and the Fidos did, too. It's not about a housekeeping kind of things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it sounds like a reasonably important job considering that like every step of a lunar mission, like the abort scenario takes on a whole different kind of characteristic, right? Like from launch to Earth orbit to on the way to the moon, you know, a little bit towards the moon and a lot towards the moon and at the moon and landing and taking off. All sorts of different stages on there all require dramatically different abort scenarios, right? Yeah. We have what we call block data. and we had a board, well, I'll just read,

been aborted at 15 hours, 25 hours, 35 hours, 35 hours, 45 hours, and 55 hours, and 65 hours out from the earth. And they were all direct abortes to come back. And they came back sometime, it took two or three days depending on where you were. But then once we got out close to the moon, we would do what we call a fly-by maneuver. and we would actually have maneuver that would bring us back to a landing point in the Pacific Ocean somewhere.

And it was at L.O.I. minus hours. And also in L.O.I. minus five hours, the photos would compute a mid-course correction if they needed one to get into lunar orbit. And then if we just went around the moon, we did what we call it, PC plus two,

paracinthium plus two. We could do a maneuver there to speed the trajectory up. Because a free returns, Apollo was launched with a free return, like to go out, look around and move to come back. But who knew where the landing was not targeted? So we do it PC Plus 2 bird would target the thing back to the Atlantic Ocean or the Pacific Ocean. In fact, we knew about PC Plus 2. We knew about the flyby maneuver.

So we got the 13. It was no big deal to say, hey, we want to do both of those. Now on 13, if you remember right, we didn't what to call a hybrid maneuver. some 20-some hours out. We were in a free return. We had a paracentia of about 270 miles or so. And we brought it down to 60 miles, which would make the landing cost less propellant-wise, and they could do more stuff. They could land at different places. Well, when they had the accident, I said, we don't want to be on this non-free return because it had to miss the earth by 2,500 miles or so. So that's what we did, the fly-by maneuver. And then I said, well, we want to speed up.

coming back too. So we did the PC plus two. So it was no big train of thought, engineering thought-wise, hey, we're going to do these two maneuvers. From my point of where it wasn't, I don't know, maybe else somebody else did, but it wasn't my. I thought it was the right thing to do. Yeah.

So you did your homework ahead of time and so the emergency becomes more easy to deal with, right? Yeah, you're the abort guy and you're like, this is an abort mission? Great. I'm in. I'm here. I've got all the paperwork that you need. Well, you know, it's interesting.

we spend about probably 80% of our time figuring out what ifs. Yeah, what if that happened, what this happens. So we do a lot of pre-head thinking. Yeah. Yeah, it's one of those weird jobs where most of your work product never gets used, right? Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. What was the abort scenario that was the one that you were, that kept you up the most? like God, I hope we never have to use this one.

What's that one for you? There's probably a abort from a failed lunar insertion bird. Because some of those are weird. You know, depending on where they were, if they did one thing, they would be in a high lunar apathy. Aphyssinthian, what do you call? A high level room on the front side of the moon towards us. Well, the Earth would perturbate the orbit.

and you had to do a maneuver up there to keep them hitting on the backside of moon when you went around again to do that other bird to come on home. So that was kind of scary because it was out of sight and out of mind. We never did. I don't think we ever sent one of those either

because it would take two days to submit. You know, talking about sim it. You know, people say, we never land on the moon. We couldn't keep computers up long enough to fake it. God, the best defense. That's a great defense. That's hilarious. Oh, man, that's really funny.

We were just regrettably discussing the time that Charlie Duke got duped into doing some podcast recently with the guy that Buzz Aldrin punched in the face. And we're like, man, I wish he would just come on these other ones where he doesn't have to deal with that shit. Yeah, yeah. I was on the console I was one when we landed on the moon I touched down on the moon In fact, I have a picture I will send you usually they take a picture from the other end of the console

There's four consoles and then you take a picture from the other end But the guy in's officer was on the far right Then the flight out And then the retro fire officer was next And then to my left was a booster console Well, during D.Sett, the booster console was empty. So the lot of astronauts would shine up, show up there for descent.

Well, I got a picture taken right a touchdown from that end of the console, showing all the astronauts and me and the rest of the trench. I'll send it to you. So good. Love it. We know you were there. You have the mug. Can't fake that.

Can't fake that much. I was there when we did it. I was there what we did the touchdown. That's crazy. In fact, We, there was a director, there was a parameter that came down in telemetry from the lunar module that occurred one minute before the engine were throttling.

They came in full thrust and they throw the engine down to land. And my job was to tell them what time that throttle down was going to occur. So if you listen to the transcript about a minute before 640, you'll hear me say, flight throttle down, 6 plus 2.5, I think it was. That's me. That's so good. Wait, so in your role at that point, are you also the guy in charge of if they decide they're doing a mid-burn abort back up to the command module? Is that your role, too?

Is that different? That's the Fido's. That's the Fido's. Why? Sounds like an abort to me. Why'd the Fido get it? Well, because he would do the normal asset, and he would do the rendezvous. And so he did actually

there wasn't much to do they didn't do the abort and then they do the rendezvous it was about amounted to Yeah He was a little quick Yeah He didn't compute anything for that It was all done

But That one didn't stress you out It was it was the high lunar orbit Just because of the non-deterministic nature at the time of the lunar orbits Like you were not as stressed about Basically an Apollo 10 Flight Path

Not really back then we were so young we didn't know any better is that the excuse for the shuttle return to launch site abort mode as well they were just super young they didn't know any better that was scary I'm great we never had to do one of those you know that was really scary did anyone think it would work like truly they asked them they see they said I had the at that time, I had an assent entry procedure section

when we wrote the checklist for the shuttle launch and the asset and shuttle reentry. And so my guys did a lot of the work on those returned RTFS things. And so I was pretty familiar. It was, it would have been scary. Getting rid of that big tank when you're headed back to the Cape is scary in itself.

But, yeah. And I guess, I'm not sure what would happen on the challenger if they were just lost to SRVs when they tried that or not. I guess they might have it. But that was, that's probably more scary than even Apollo's abort maneuvers. Yeah. Everything was terrible abort maneuver was scary. So. Yikes.

I wanted to ask about, I read. Anthony told me, at least that he read somewhere, that you were involved with the, on 13, you had the separation maneuver between the command module and the lunar module on the way in and how tricky of a problem that was. And I wanted to hear a little bit about that because I think there's some of my Canadian compatriots that were involved with that too. That's the story they tell up here all the time, at least. That's right.

Well, it turns out I was on the launch team for Apollo 10. but I was not on any other shifts. But Retro's always worried about one and over other vehicles. And so I was in the control center when they were going to jettison the lunar module. And they, and I shouldn't pick on a crew, but we had what you call flight techniques meetings. And where are we, the trajectory guys and the crew, we get together and talk about how they got to do things. We said, well, we want you to do these things when you jettison the lunar module. And the commander said, I can handle that.

Don't worry about it. No, he didn't worry about it. Well, what did he do? He didn't realize that the sun was right behind a lunar module. When he separated the lunar module, they popped right off into the sun. Of course, they didn't pressurize the tunnel between the two. I'm not sure exactly why. I think it was stuck.

but so the pressure tunnel and the tunnel pressure blew the two vehicles apart he couldn't see what it was and he didn't know what it was going now I talked to Fred Hayes later on I said did the simulator show the sun that bright and he said no it did not

but anyway so I remembered that and I said we know we're on Apollo 13 we got where the service module but we still had the lunar module on that way we'd get where the service module was we thrust it out of it we weren't a good trajectory we thrust it out of the good

trajectory with a lunar module, RCS, and then we jettison the service module, and then we back right back in the good trajectory again. It's how we're going to get in the lunar module. Well, I said, hey, well, we used a tunnel fresher like they did on 12, I mean, on 10, and so that's what they did. And I never knew until very recently, I got a call from somebody in Canada who was writing a documentary on how, I guess, the University of Toronto worked with them. And they didn't know they're the only ones that did it. I didn't know they did it either. But evidently, somebody from Grumman or somebody talked to them and said,

hey, what happened to 10 was as soon as they popped it off, the pressure inside the lunar module went to zero, which means door hatched blue open. And so they didn't want that to happen again. And that's why they want to use less tunnel pressure. So that's historically. So the Canadians did good. I always hear it as like I guess for Apollo 13 NASA just tried to like you know like ask for help and they just sort of farmed out a lot of like math to different institutions and things that would they would help out when they were trying to like you know do things quickly and they would have all these kind of people on hand and that's that's how it ended up happening I guess there was someone at UFT that was you know loosely connected or whatever and had had some resources to you know put people in a room and figure out the hard stuff so that's that's

I guess that's what they did. I don't know. It seems like there's a lot of moving parts for all that whole scenario. I don't know if that documentary is coming ancient or not. I have to look for it. I can't think of the guy's name who did it. The name is Joe, something.

That'll narrow it down. Joe from Canada, yeah. But I talked to him for quite a while, and we discussed what went on. And then they, it was actually did a little video link. And I think I'm even in it. And they, so it should be coming out pretty soon. I don't know.

I thought it might be coming out about now with Apollo 13 anniversary. But I don't know. I will find out. I will give you the name of where he, who's writing it. And I'll send it to you when I find it. We got a lot of show notes to send back and forth. We ought to send the Victor Glover one. You got to send us that.

The picture view in Mission Control. A lot of action items out of this one, Jake. Productive meeting, yeah. Jake, I'm just, I'm dying to ask about Pete Conrad, who is, we've determined the patron saint of this podcast. I am from the Philadelphia area. He is my hometown, Moonwalker. He is chaotic and hilarious in the way that we like the channel. You had a couple of run-ins with them, I guess, through the Apollo.

program and Skylab. Is he what history says about him? Oh, he's good. He was a good guy. I didn't know him as well as I knew some of them. I didn't know him. Give us your top. Give us your top three. Give us a rundown.

Who was the best? Yeah. Pick your favorite. Let me tell you about Pete Conrad. We were in a flight techniques meeting. They were talking about this they had this plutonium thing and they put in their little solar nuclear generator

and he said that we'll keep them having kids, who it? But anyway, oh, I don't know. Fred Hayes, Jim Lovell,

Mike Coats, who's a show guy, John Creighton's a good friend of mine. It turns out that early on, on Apollo 7 you know they had a the crew got cold

and they had a lot of issues with the ground and after that I guess deep slate and red in the right act and they don't they were very nice

after that and they you know they really do depend they don't realize at the time but they do depend a lot on the whole thousands of people

that hold them up on their fingertips you know because they couldn't do it without all those people yeah I've been thinking about that a lot on the Artemis front because we had such access to the mission in real time

in terms of the live stream that was up. You could hear all the comms to and from, I mean, all except the protected meetings and stuff from the crew to the ground and all that. And there were so many times where they seem to be in such good sync, both as a crew, but also working with the ground where they were super deferential to each other of like, hey, we actually think this up here.

All right, yeah, go ahead, do that thing. there didn't seem to be a lot of tension points. And that wasn't necessarily the case back in the day, right? There was a lot more strong opinions, and we just also didn't have a lot of experience doing a lot of these operations. Was that something that, through your career, being down at JSC for so long,

that you saw that develop and get better over time as we flew more flights, or do you think it's dependent on the kind of mix of crew that you get? I think it was kind of a crew, some of the kind of crew. Some of the crews were more arrogant than others. But I'll tell you a story about Jim Lovell. Now, he wrote a book, and Jeff Cleaver was the co-writer. And I had just retired from NASA in 94, and I was 56.

And we moved up here to the Hill Country up in Boston. And I got to copy the book before when I got up here. and Jim Lovell lived about 20 miles away. And his next door neighbor had a gift shop. And he was going to sign autographs down there. Oh, good. I took my book down and didn't get me sell my honorcraft. Well, I went down there, stood in line.

And I got up here and he said, what are you doing here? He said, you sit down here sign an artgrass with me. Why did you have to stand in line? I don't understand. Amazing. Well, I just because of line was there. But, you know, that's the kind of guy he was. That's the kind of guy he was.

That's awesome. Oh, that's funny. Because the line was there. That's the quote about Paul 11. That's the quote from JFK. Why do we do the other things? Because the line was there, you know? I'll tell you know.

I'll tell you all right in our story about Paul 11. He had a parade downtown Houston. I didn't know the print. But my dad did. And when he was down there, he had a flag. And I was thinking he was old at the time. Hell, he wasn't. He was only 67.

And he took the flag out and gave it to Neil Armstrong. And evidently that made it in the Houston Chronicle newspaper. So I saw Neil a couple days later. I said, and that was my dad that gave you that flag. He said, do you want it? Like a fool, I said, no. But, you know, it was just kind of interesting. interesting it. That would close circuits just how tight things can be.

It's a commentary on how populated Houston was at the time. Yeah, I was going to say. It wouldn't happen in Houston today, no. Dad would be stuck in traffic. It wouldn't start one of the 19 lane highways in town. That's nuts. I hate to go to Houston. I don't go. I got that it's been about four years since I've been to Houston. and I don't even recognize it when I get there. Yeah, yeah. I, as I, you know, I'm not an American and I had, the first time I went to Houston, I was in the north side of the town and I wanted to go visit NASA and I just hopped in my car and said, oh, that'll be no problem.

I'm in the same city. That won't be very far at all. And then I had to do the whole drive around the entirety of Houston all the way down to where, you know, what JSC is. And it was like an hour and a half drive and I was so mad. I was late for everything. It's such a big city now. Los Angeles is that any better?

No, I don't agree. I mean, we used to go out to Downey and it was terrible. I like going up to Edwards. Edwards was cool. Edwards was a neat place to go to. Edwards Air Force Base. It was a neat place to go to.

And Los Angeles Angeles was not too neat. Big cities, man. Wow, geez. I don't know. I feel like we need another whole other thing to like, we haven't even touched on like most of the shuttle stuff, Anthony. We're going to have to figure out.

I mean, the, the end all of Apollo Soyuz, like the strangest mission that happened in American space industry gets blanced over so much. Yeah, yeah. I can tell you a little story about ISDP. Perfect. I went over Russia and their control center is bigger than our control center. It has to be because it's Russian. Of course, their equipment.

It was all bigger than ours. I mean, their tubes were bigger than ours. Their hardware was bigger. They couldn't miniaturize things very well. And I had to show it through. I was, oh, I'm going to go to the American Embassy, get some kind of selling, so I went over to the American Embassy. And you can't read the street signs over there because not very serenical.

Anyway, so anyway, I can go on that subway thinking I'm going to the right place. Nobody spoke English. nobody spoke in leash nobody talks to anybody on the shit on the ship

I was I think you're on the wrong subway I figured he was my KGB guardian angel absolutely

absolutely he's like where are you going you should not be going this way and the place was really clean

it was really was really clean well very clean that's why he wanted to stop you before you got

to the part where they left all the dirt they were you're exiting the clean part yeah well I understand

Bob Obermire was taking some pictures one time, and they made him, they had to take pictures, but you had to be careful what you took, and they took his camera away from him. We gave it right back to him recently. We had a cosmonaut getting in trouble. What happened to my lights here? I don't know. We're talking crap about Russia that turning my lights off.

Who was the cosmonaut that just got pulled off the flight? Oleg Artemiov? It could have been, yeah. And then the reports where he was taking photos in a SpaceX, where he was not supposed to be. Yeah, the falcon. Yeah, that was a, that's interesting stuff. What's old is new again, right?

The same kinds of stories that keep popping up between these kinds of things. So, yeah. Wow. All right, so the shuttle, you like the approach and landing tests because it was a unique problem to solve after all the time flying around the moon.

Like, what was so interesting and exciting about that? Well, I always wanted to be a pilot. And my dad actually worked as a mechanic during World War II in an airport. So I, you know, this was only airplanes when I was flying. Well, spacecrafts are not airplanes. There are something else. You know, or shuttles in airplane. And so you get to learn about bifton drag and all that sort of stuff.

And I wrote a little program when a desktop computer that would simulate to approach a landing test. and I would fly the test and write the little flight cards. I go over in a signal air and fly them. Then the crew go fly them in a training airplane, and then we go fly them for real. It's only a lot of fun. And it'll earn a lot.

And one of the guys, Tom McElberry, worked with Vic Slateon, who was running an ALT, said, hey, you were going to fly? I said, you bet. So back then, he talked me how to fly. Airplane, I could have been a Cessna 150 for $14 an hour, and Tom didn't charge me anything. So I got my license for not next to next next to nothing.

And when I had 40 hours, he said, go take a check ride. I did not. Somehow I passed it. So I've always been in a rush in airplanes and wings and stuff. So that's why the approach of landing was so much fun. Because I got the designed emissions, fly them in the simulator, and the crew fly them, you know, and got a GCA, the crew around the pattern. So that was kind of fun job.

Yeah. It must have been so like remarkably unique at the time, right? Like the first time that we have this, this merging of like spaceship and airplane and at a time, just the point in history where- The X-15 takes great offense to this, Jake. But I mean, it's different though, right? Because like that's not the same thing. Like this is this is a full, like this is so much closer to what people would imagine like a commercial airliner, right? You know, compared to X-15. I guess it was a fighter jet. All right. You're right. You're right. A special, you know, thing to only special people who got to everything. But shuttle was supposed to be very accessible, and it looked like an airplane that you would recognize. And just having all that merging must have been so interesting at the time. Oh, it was. Because, you know, I really thought of an airplane that it was a spacecraft, to be honest with you. It kind of was an airplane to orbit and then came back and landed like an airplane lens.

And, but, no, it was a lot. It was, I really enjoyed that. That whole scenario. But, and we had, the 747 would do touch and goes down at

Palmdale. And we could watch them, we could track them with our, you know, we had plot boards into control sign and we could track and watch them do a touch and goes with, not with a shuttle going, it was just 747. And in real time, we would track the whole

thing and we give the crew, 747 crew, where to turn and all that sort of stuff. And I had a program. And it turns out you couldn't back more than 12 degrees or you lose too much altitude. You just didn't have enough lift. So I wrote a program that was taking into consideration of winds. And depending on where the winds were, we'd fly further out. So we'd wait down to back more at 10 degrees. And so it was kind of fun.

I was that. story. How did you, like looking back, now knowing where the shuttle program ended, what its, you know, kind of results were then leading into SLS, what is your take on how it felt at the time at the outset of the shuttle program to then what you were kind of left with at the end? Like, what was the delta in your thoughts on shuttle as a spacecraft? To go, I'm going to quit finding a show. I know, but you're here.

You're still on this earth here. You got opinions on the space shuttle. Everyone has opinions on the space shuttle. Come on. Well, I think it was a very expensive machine. But I think it could have migrated to something more practical. I mean, because it was practical, but it was just kind of tedious to do. We're going to fly 50 missions a year.

Well, that never happened. But I think it's a, I think we could have done something more. I mean, obviously, heat shield techniques and stuff like that can be improved. And it certainly carried a lot of stuff up into orbit. I mean, it was really a heavy lifter. And we can't do that anymore. Maybe the SOMS can do that now, I don't know.

But I don't know. I guess we don't have to do that. We can launch stuff up on Falcons or whatever. and it's, you know, paylooms, what have you. But other than that, I think it's a shame we don't have a shuttle. Although it was expensive. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that seems to be like the prevailing shuttle opinion was like, man, it had a lot of flaws, but it was pretty and I miss it. Well, Starship is channeling a lot of the, a lot of the, you know, what a shuttle could have been, maybe to a fault almost. I think there's areas where I'm like, is this making the same mistakes that shuttle did? And I know a lot of the shuttle heat shield crew

was sought out by SpaceX in the early days to come out and work on Starship's Heat Shield. So I'm curious how much you're following along that, and you have any Starship takes for us, too. I just watch them. I don't, I haven't been much studying. I have a studied there. I mean, listen,

It's not a wimpy service module. No, it's not. No, it's not. No, it's not. That's the thing you hate the most. Yeah. I see Blue Origin flew another vehicle. Of course, they put it in the wrong orbit.

I got to understand it. I did some consulting for them back where there was only about nine guys working for them back in 2001, 2002. Wow. And now they've got thousands of people working for them. What thing were you consulting on? Oh, they're New Shepherd. Okay. I actually built the first trajectories for New Shepherd in Excel,

or not. That's a sentence I never thought I would hear in my life. That's like the most blue origin story you could have told. What did that even mean? Can you explain that more? We can't glance over that. What the hell does that mean? well I would

have Excel first thing would be on the ground first line and it'd fly up and it would use fuel and go up to altitude and then it'd come back down and land

and I get all that stuff with visual basic and Excel and now I could plot I have plots showing to altitude in fact I told them

don't go above 350,000 feet because you'll pull too many G's coming back if you go up 350,000 feet, you pull about six G's coming back. If you go much higher, you can pull too many. It doesn't matter what shape your vehicle is, that's what's going to pull.

And so it looks like you're still close from that, using that same number. Well, not anymore. Got canceled. I don't think it's coming back. Pause. It's paused. Two-year pause. Oh, yeah.

Two-year pause. Well, at least Cap Gert got to fly in it. A very memorable flight, indeed. Yeah. Very memorable flight. Oh, man. All right, what story did we not happen upon that we should have?

We've got time for one more story, probably. Maybe an era we didn't dig into enough. Late Apollo. Skylab. Skylab, obviously. All I have is funny stories. I'll tell you stories. When you walk into control center and from the back door,

there was lockers and you put your headset in there our combination was 396 believe it or not 396 is invisible by a bunch of numbers but anyway our number 36

we're in Houston probably haven't changed the code when the Ashernots took one of these label makers and put Capcom on it and put it on his on his on his locker

somebody else came on and put one Capcom, every one of them. And so he didn't which one of them said, Capcom. Now, do you mean to tell you who it was? It was Bruce McClans. Oh, yes. Bruce, man. That guy's good.

But he got to fly that thing. That was pretty cool. Yeah. Famous. I don't know if I don't know if I, if I were one. do that or not. Terrifying. It's got to be one of the coolest photos of all time.

Yeah. He was... Those astronauts are always so interesting to me, too. That kind of spanned the eras, right? That were... Because you see, you go back and you watch footage from the Apollo landings, right? And he's right up in there in all the shots in Michigan Control. There's always a Bruce McCanness floating around somewhere.

And then you smash cut to him, you know, 300 feet away from the shuttle, totally alone in space. I do wonder right now, like, we're kind of at that inflection point with this current astronaut corps that we have some astronauts that flew on shuttle, did some of these ISS flights, and are going to be in the first couple Artemis missions. We're sort of at another, you know, if things go well with, you know, let's build a moon base, we're kind of in that era again, where we have these astronauts that are like, whoa, they flew on all of the things?

But. Thoughts on moonbase. Did you follow these recent announcements of changing plans a little bit to focus more on the surface? Yeah, I think this new mass administrators is a little more, I guess, stronger. He's trying to do things. He's not worried about his career, that's for sure. Definitely not. Yeah.

Yeah. I've seen some of his comments about, we need to get back to basics and we need to get going. He's putting the work in. He's been out there in Congress as a week doing it. Yeah. Well, the problem is if you don't get money, you can't do something. That's always a problem.

And space kind of things, you can't just whip it out in 10 minutes, 20 minutes, it takes a long to think about it. Well, if it takes too long, you won't get the funding over a long period of time. you get started and then you don't have the fun and you can finish it and that's the problem. Yeah, it's tough. Or you started a little bit

and you end up at the wimpy service module and then here we are. You know? It's kind of how we got it. Service models are made by the Europeans. Chuck, this was awesome. Thank you so much for hanging out with us for telling stories.

For the mug, can you put the mug up one more time? We've got to see the mug one more time. I mean, this was like, come on. That is the best. Beautiful. Beautiful style. So good.

The best mug. No one shall ever have a drinking vessel like this on this show, Jake. The best one. We've got to find one on eBay or someone else. I don't know. You won't find one that said retrofire robbers on it. That one's not it in the market. We got to check Lori Garber's eBay account.

Yeah, she's in on that. That's right. Thanks again, Chuck. Jake, I have a toy that we can point to. Do you want to know who's coming up on the show soon, Jake? I do. Would you like to know? You could visually communicate that to me?

Let's see. Let's see. Well, it work. There it goes. I got a split flap to sleigh that will now show us the upcoming guests. Boom. Look at that. April 30th. We have the new, brand new, shiny CEO of the Planetary Society,

Jennifer Vaughn coming on to talk to us about some cool stuff they're working on. So that's going to be fun. We're getting more planetary society in our life. That'll be a good time. Yeah. Anything we're going to talk about with her or what? I think we're going to do very broad. We're going to talk about, we got to meet her and we've got to know what she wants to get done, right?

So we're going to see some science budget talk. I know. Yeah, probably. Nice. It's top of mind. All right. Thanks for hanging out, y'all. Thanks again, Chuck. We'll see you next week. Thank you. Thank Mike Lauchs for tying us up together.

Yes, Mike Lauchs of the space engineering, butchering their name, space exploration engineering crew. He's a future guest in this show, Jake. You just don't know it yet. Well, I, yeah, I, I, I, I ran into him about 2001 or two in a thing called blastoff.com or something like that. But he and I have been friends for a long time.

So we've had things together with Blue Origin and what have you. He's flown a lot of intermissions. Oh, he has released. He knows trajectory stuff a whole lot better than I do. And it turns out he was also texting me that he was mad NASA wasn't releasing the trajectory numbers. So that's good stuff.

All right, y'all. We'll see you next week. All right. Thanks, Chuck. Thank you, everybody. Bye. One, two, three, four, five, five, four, three, two, one, end of death.