The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut’s Journey by Fred Haise, Bill Moore

Episode Date: October 8, 2022

Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey by Fred Haise, Bill Moore The extraordinary autobiography of astronaut Fred Haise, one of only 24 men to fly to the moon In the gripping Never Panic Early, Fred Haise,Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 13, offers a detailed firsthand account of when disaster struck three days into his mission to the moon. An oxygen tank exploded, a crewmate uttered the now iconic words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and the world anxiously watched as one of history’s most incredible rescue missions unfolded. Haise brings readers into the heart of his experience on the challenging mission--considered NASA’s finest hour--and reflects on his life and career as an Apollo astronaut. In this personal and illuminating memoir, illustrated with black-and-white photographs, Haise takes an introspective look at the thrills and triumphs, regrets and disappointments, and lessons that defined his career, including his years as a military fighter pilot and his successful 20-year NASA career that would have made him the sixth man on the moon had Apollo 13 gone right. Many of his stories navigate fear, hope, and resilience, like when he crashed while ferrying a World War II air show aircraft and suffered second and third-degree burns over 65 percent of his body, putting him in critical condition for ten days before making a heroic recovery. In Never Panic Early, Haise explores what it was like to work for NASA in its glory years and demonstrates a true ability to deal with the unexpected.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com.

Hey, we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Thanks for being here. We've got an amazing author and guest on the show and an astronaut, I should say. You're really excited to hear his story. He's written his first book memoir that's come out on April 5th, 2022. In the meantime, go subscribe to all the channels on The Chris Voss Show. Go to Goodreads.com for just Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there in my books.

Go to YouTube.com, 4Chess, Chris Voss, to see the video version of this. Our group's on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram as well. The new book that just came out, as I mentioned, April 5th, 2022, Never Panic Early, an Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey by Fred Hayes. He's going to be on the show today talking with us about what he did. And unless you've been living under a rock somewhere for the past 52 years, you haven't seen the Tom Hanks movies, the different Apollo 13 movies and documentaries and just all the wonderful stuff that NASA has been doing all these years,

you should have heard about him. He is a former U.S. Air Force and Marines Corps pilot and NASA astronaut, most famous for his role in the Lunar Module pilot for the nearly catastrophic Apollo 13 mission. He is an ex-fighter pilot and selected for NASA's astronaut program in 1966, served as backup for Lunar Module for Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 missions, and then he played a key role in NASA's space shuttle program after Apollo 13. Welcome to the show, Fred. How are you doing, sir?

I'm doing fine. I'm over here in Houston. It's probably a little warmer here than where you are. Yeah, we had snow yesterday. Can you believe that? In Utah. We get snow about every 14 years, I think. I'm moving to Houston next. Well, welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you coming. I mean, it's an honor. I grew up, and I was born in 1968.

I grew up looking at the black and white pictures of Neil Armstrong landing on the moon and just trying to figure it all out. I remember watching old people watching the old black and whites. Of course, I grew up on a black and white TV. So it's an honor to have you here. Thank you for coming. Glad to join you and hope we can talk a little bit. As you mentioned, so much has been done and written and movies about Apollo 13. The book, obviously, is not focused entirely on that. In fact, I think a couple of chapters about all I spend on Apollo 13 and try to work in a few things that maybe hadn't been covered before. There you go.

Is there any dot-coms or places you want people to follow you on the interwebs? No, not at the time. Okay, so people can pick up the book wherever fine books are sold, pre-order it, or order it now. So would you call this a memoir, then, of your life and experience? Yes, yeah. It starts with my growing up and born in Bucks, Mississippi. And in that period, I didn't just want to talk about my experiences during that period,

but also to give a flavor of what life was like at those times and what the economy was like with the, I talked to, uh, pricing of things. Uh, and, uh, it's a, so it gives, gives a picture of how things have changed over the years. And you, you did, I mean, you've lived a life of historic precedence. You've, you've done a lot of things in your life. Yeah. We'll, we'll even get into some of the, you had a plane crash at one point, uh, where you were burned over 65% of your body, I believe. You've been on a couple of adventures, sir. Yes, I have, and I've been very fortunate because I'm now 88 years old, and I'm still here.

Well, that's good. That's good. We're happy for that. So how did your life begin? How did you begin this journey, if you want to touch on that? Well, as I said, I was born in a small town, Biloxi, Mississippi, on the Gulf Coast. About 14,000 people when I was born and raised, at least through elementary school. Along came World War II.

That was the first dramatic change in that particular area when two airfields, Keesler Air Force Base and Gulfport Base, was opened during World War II. And all at once, there was over 100,000 Army Air Corps airmen now flooding the Gulf Coast, including Biloxi, which dramatically changed the climate there. The thing changed again later in life with the growth of casinos. There's a very large number of casinos all along

the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I think the square footage of the total number of those casinos probably equals what you'd find in New Jersey with the casinos there for at least the square footage. That obviously has also changed the climate. It's no longer a sleepy little 14,000 population town anymore. Yeah, yeah.

And so what shapes your life to where you got interested in working with NASA? What led you up to those sort of roads? Well, what started me down that trail was the Korean War. I had wanted to serve my country, and my dad had recommended that I join something that would lead to a commission, officer's commission. And at the time, with two years of college ahead and 18 years old, the only program that fit was the Naval Aviation Cadet Program. I had never flown in an airplane, never been even sitting in an airplane on the ground. So it wasn't like many in the astronaut program I know talk about their youth, and they were so interested in flying, and I was not. And so I was off on a different tangent.

But it was one of these things where the first time Hank Chenard, my first flight instructor, took me up in an airplane, it just hit me right then that, boy, this is something. And now my life has changed. I'm no longer a journalist, which I was majoring in the first two years of college. It's going to be something in aviation. Now, you have to realize at the time we're talking about is 1952. I went in and there was no NASA. It was then NAC, which was doing a lot of testing,

but strictly on aircraft at the time at various NASA centers. So there was no NASA and there's no space program. And, but that, that started me thinking about what next from being a Marine fighter pilot into Marine fighter squadrons. I served to become a test pilot, mainly from reading books. And I talked to a squadron commander, ops officer, and thought that would be something to head toward next, and looking at the requirements for the resume, I decided I needed to go back to school and finish, although with a degree in engineering. And that's what I did next to the University of Oklahoma.

Flew in the Air Guard, Oklahoma Guard, while I was there. And next, decided to start applying. I applied to some companies, but also my squadron commander recommended, well, the first talk to NACA, N-A-C-A. But by then it had become, in 58, I think it was, it became NASA. And the first seven astronauts were chosen. So I did apply at several NASA centers and was accepted at Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, which is now named after John Glenn, Glenn Research Center.

Yeah. So was there something that appealed to you about, you know, flying, flight, or being a test pilot? Was there something that really captured your interest? Well, it was mainly being above and looking down at things and clouds. I mean, even from low altitudes I was flying at that time, although some of the jets I flew, you'd be at 40,000 feet or so. But it was magical.

And the test flying, well, the military flying was interesting. The task I had as a fighter squadron and did a lot of training, air-ground support, deploying weapons, bombs, rockets, strafing,

etc. And I enjoyed that. And testing was, as I looked forward to it, would be interesting because, particularly with NACA or NASA as a research pilot, you would be using airplanes

and not necessarily brand new airplanes, but airplanes modified to test some new feature that would add to increased performance of a particular aircraft or safety. And so to me it was going to be rewarding in that sense as well. I always love when you're flying an airplane, that first moment that the airplane gets taken up by the wind. You feel that movement and you're like, we're off the ground now. And then like you said, you're over the clouds and you get an impact that if only the Wright brothers could see what everything had become that they were dreaming of.

It's incredible how far, really how far we've gone since those days you mentioned the Wright brothers. You know, in less than a century, we were on the moon. Yeah, spinning around. Yeah, who would have ever thought that? So did you get a thrill from the experimental, doing the experimental planes? I know that there's the danger there. Sometimes there's a lot of wrecks.

Well, there's danger, obviously, in any flying. Even airliners have troubles occasionally. But maybe statistically a little more, because we were dealing with some cases of modifications and trying out things that had not been tried out before. But it's like just as I did in the astronaut program, even in the aircraft test, we planned with the development of a test plan ahead of time, not just myself or the pilots, but with the test engineers and those that were sponsoring the program

to figure out how we were going to approach it and take it in, say, smaller bites. So we didn't try to go too far too fast like Hollywood does in movies, but to approach it from that aspect. And if available, look at the data after each flight to see what should we continue and how much further, and what we're planning to do to be safe, not just for ourselves, but for the aircraft, which themselves, in a way, were precious, because most of them, for that kind of a program and modifications done, was kind of a one-of-a-kind. You obviously didn't want to avoid it.

You didn't want to lose the aircraft either. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a second. I'd like to invite you to come to my coaching, speaking, and training courses website. You can also see our new podcast over there at chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com.

Over there, you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements, if you'd like to hire me, training courses that we offer, and coaching for leadership, management, entrepreneurism, podcasting, corporate stuff. With over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as a CEO, I think I can offer a wonderful breadth of information and knowledge to you

or anyone that you want to invite me to for your company. Thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you listening to the show. And be sure to check out chrisvossleadershipinstitute.com now back to the show yeah and and this is at a time where there's a lot of stuff going on chuck yeager i think before you had had uh broken the speed of sound i think is that correct oh yes yeah chuck chuck in fact when i arrived uh transferred i left Lewis Research Center, Glenn, and went to Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, where NASA had, I call it their Mecca flight test. X-15 program was going on.

Unfortunately, I didn't ever get to fly it. And I did go off for a year to a school, the ARPS School, Aerospace Research Pilot School, Air Force Program. And Chuck Yeager was the commandant. He was the boss of that school at the time. And that was a very good experience in my career. And then how do you transition into getting with NASA and, of course, preparing to become an astronaut? That's a whole new level of flying through the air. Well, for me, see, I was already a NASA employee, so it was just another transfer to another center.

In that case, it was Mayan Spacecraft Center, which is now Johnson Spacecraft Center. I'm named after President Johnson. Mm-hmm. which is now Johnson Space Aircraft Center, named after President Johnson. I had to apply just like any of those who applied. NASA put out a notice for new applicants and I filled out a form that you listed references

and described work you were into and what you were doing and applied. Now the military had a little different process. They would apply within their services, be it the Air Force or Marine Corps and Navy. And the services themselves would choose from those that applied who they would give to NASA to pick. So they kind of went through a first filter to get to NASA to have an option of being selected. So that was kind of the process.

You went through a pretty extensive physical down at the Brook Air Force facility in San Antonio, and there was a few days of, call it writing x-rays, essay-type things about space, and you went before a board of people at Houston for the final selection, and then NASA made their choices, and that was announced at a later time. This is just amazing what was going on during that time. You know, Kennedy prior had announced the space race. We're doing all these, you know, we're doing all this stuff to get more and more people up on the moon. And at some time during this, I mean, are you under the understanding that when you transfer over that, yeah, I want to go into space, I could be an astronaut, or did you have that vision yet?

You were just kind of like, well, let's see how this turns out. No, no. The reason I applied for the astronaut program, frankly, I thought about it quite a bit and didn't apply it about a month before I could apply because I was really enjoying what I was doing at Flight Research Center. I was flying almost every day, flying quite a different variety of aircraft involved at any given time, maybe

in three test programs, one where I'll be as a primary pilot. Others, I might be just one of the support pilots, like on the X-15 program, chasing or checking the weather for their launch, checking up-range lake beds the day before or so before the launch, that they were all okay, that they had to make an emergency landing and maybe be a subject pilot on a different kind of a test program where they needed people to do evaluations. So that was very interesting. It was, like I said, a lot of flying, good flying. In fact, I put this in the book. Neil Armstrong was ahead of me about three years.

He joined NASA at Lewis, and Neil went to Edwards Air Force Base. Now, he got to fly the X-15. And then he went into the astronaut program, and he came back to visit the Flight Research Center, which now is named Armstrong, incidentally, after Neil. And Don Malek and I, another research pilot there, talked to Neil. And he asked him, well, what's it like, Neil, being down there in Houston in the astronaut program? And he said, well, he said, you sit in a lot of meetings. You sit in the simulator a lot. and you don't get much good flying.

Of course, he was addressing the kind of flying I was doing and he had done when he was at Flight Research Center with a variety of aircraft, a variety of programs. And it kind of set us back or set me back saying, well, do I really want to go down there to Houston? But the more I thought about it on two accounts, one is the premier program at the time for us at Flight Research Center was the X-15 program. And in our pilot's office, when you might work your way to fly the X-15 depended on your seniority. And I had about three people ahead of me in seniority.

So I figured I'd probably never get to fly the X-15 before the program ended. And then I looked on the other hand at the Evolving Apollo program, and it was going to take people to the moon. And I thought, well, that would be a pretty exciting adventure.

Oh, yeah. So I decided that's what it was to me. You were just going to go a little higher, a little faster. And so I said, well, I think I'll sign up. So I did and was chosen. That would make a great name for a book, A Little Higher, A Little Faster. Just A Little Higher, Just A Little Faster. Why did you choose the name of the title on your book?

I mean, I think I know, might know why, but I'd love to hear it from you, Never Panic Early. What made you choose that title? Well, it's kind of a thing that you come to when you have problems. And even before I was flying, I mean, it's something people deal with in everyday life with circumstances where they have a car wreck or they have an injury in their family. If you have something bad happen, you got choices of what to do. You can maybe act too quickly and do the wrong thing and make things a lot worse. Or you can hesitate and look at the situation. In the case of an aircraft or a spacecraft,

look at the data you have available on the instrument panel or otherwise and uh logically think about what next to do to uh help the situation or solve the situation and so that's it's kind of a thing uh people should address more and not like i say not panic and in a haste do something that's bad and actually worsens the situation. But stop a few seconds or a minute or so and think about what should I really do to better this situation. You know, and that's the interesting thing about the field that you were in and pilots and astronauts. And, you know, they're trained to deal with the emergency situations or when things go bad and how not to lose your cool and how to, you know, process, okay, what are the steps that we need to do?

And, you know, that enables people like the Sully thing in New York where, you know, you had to land the plane very quickly and go through the process. And a lot of times where you probably needed that sort of training in the Apollo 13 issue that took place. Yeah, we got a lot of that kind of training in a thing called sessions called integrated simulations. This is where we would be in our primary simulators,

which at the time were located at Kennedy Space Center. The capsule command module and the landing craft geometrically were exactly like the real vehicles. You laid in the couches and the command module trainer, although if we weren't wearing spacesuits, we cheated and used some cushions. Couches were hard.

And stood up in the lunar module and they functioned through computer emulation. All systems, just like they would in reality, if the vehicle was operating you had all the right meter readings for whatever you were doing at the time you had a good reasonable visual out the window to see uh earth horizon starfield very accurate uh that sort of thing but also within the capability was the capability of simulating failures.

And a large number. And the command module simulator, I think, had a repertoire of over 500. Wow. Holy crap. It was called credible system failures. And the lunar module upwards of like 300 yeah now what the way these things were run was there was a behind the scenes a group called sim soup uh who was a group of people that knew the vehicles well the systems and they spent a lot of

time thinking about for each of the runs we made, be they launches or entries or landing on the moon or going in and out of lunar orbit, those sorts of things. They dreamt up the best suite of fares to input, and they selected the timing of when they would be input by the simulator operators during our runs. And they took great glee and felt they had success if they made us look bad. And I say us, the crew, our mission control, and handling these problems that were set up. Wow.

And we went through thousands of hours of this kind of training. Wow. So you were pretty well steeped in feeling by the time you got to fly that, well, I probably can't handle anything that's going to come up. There you go. Going through all this training. And, of course, on board we had what we call malfunction procedures, that for a given warning light coming on,

you could grab the book and it was kind of like a yes-no logic trail you would follow in this diagram that could eventually, if you didn't have it off the top of your head, could lead you to the resulting problem of the cause of the light and what to do. And I imagine these were super important after the loss of the crew of Apollo 1. Had they predicted what ended up happening on the flight of Apollo 13? They had in terms of the design. And through the whole design phase, particularly led by reliability engineering, they do what's called FEMA's, FMEA's, failure mean effects analysis,

on every valve failed to open, failed to close, every wire shorted or open. Wow. And every component like that. And that influences the design along the way. The manifestation that's written as the result of the failure is too bad. It might result in adding redundancy. I'm talking about very early in the design or adding a little later on. It gets harder to start adding redundancy when you're getting ready to build it. But telemetry are procedures that we say well we can work around it

so that's done and explosions were considered primarily i think the major culprit was thought to be probably rocket engines which had had that occasion to happen a few times yeah and uh of course the cryogenics the same way the the oxygen, hydrogen. And the manifestation of that kind of a failure happening, if you read the failure of the immune effects analysis, it would say you're going to lose the vehicle and you'll lose the crew. So Apollo 13, we had an explosion just in one oxygen tank, tank two. And the situation now was we were still alive. They didn't lose the crew.

So we gave them a problem to deal with. If it had gone by the femurs, they would have not had the problem. So they had anticipated that you guys would have been lost by that happening. Right. Wow. Well, I'm glad you survived. You know, we should probably note that, as we talked in the green room, right now, 52 years ago, you would be flying through the air under that mission. Do you often think about how surreal that mission do you do you often think or

about how surreal that is when you go back do you go back and go holy crap like i can't like i can't believe you know just think about that of what you know i don't feel about it that way what i feel about it is uh how much is still being uh talked about and how much is still being talked about and how much many talks I give, I give to schools, give it to conventions, you name it, any number of types, and how interested people still are in that. It's almost like a folk tale, I guess, that is in people's minds, an interesting story. And, of course, it had the virtue of a happy ending.

And so that's what's surprising to me. That's 52 years, a long time ago. Yeah. People love a comeback story. So I think in the book, you know, there's been lots of movies and stuff written about it. And, of course, Hollywood has to take, you know, they always take some bridge to different things. Do you get to correct some of the things in the maybe that the movies maybe got wrong? No, I had nothing to do with the filming of the movie, actually, the making of the movie.

I did meet one day. I brought in lunch. I was running a subsidiary company, a government corporation at the time. I had a visit from Ron Howard, and he brought his young daughter. And Tom Hanks came and the producer. And I hosted them in an office I had down by Kennedy Space Center off-site. And they had a book, and they sort of flipped the pages and went through. By that time, they had reviewed all the data NASA had given them, I guess a mission report.

And I found out later that it actually gave them all the air to ground that Ron claimed he listened to for the whole flight. And they had a list of questions to ask me about things. I think kind of getting maybe my reading a little bit between the lines, because they also had Jim Lovell's book that had been published at that time, initially called Lost Moon. And I think on a reprint they labeled it Apollo 13. But at any rate, I went through those questions with him. The second visit was made by Ron with

photographers to look at locations out at Kennedy. They sort of had planned for certain shoots. He brought along Bill Paxton, who was going to play my role. I took Bill on kind of a tour of Kennedy, a blue ribbon tour that day.

But this was months before they ever started filming. But once that happened, I was not involved. Now, Jim attended, I think, the set once or even twice. And they actually had him in the movie. He was the captain, Navy captain on the ship when the movie actors were covered at the end of Apollo 13 story. Did they get it right in the movies? Was there anything maybe you covered in the book that maybe they didn't get right? Well, the things they did was, I call it some exaggerations or drama that really didn't happen.

They had, well, I was space sick. I got too big a hurry after I got first on orbit. I had to gather film and cameras, both movie camera, video cameras, the stills, and all of that, and brackets to put in the windows to mount stuff. And they were all under the couch on the floor. And I had to rotate, and I was rapidly doing that to gather all that equipment because I was anxious to be looking out the window three times. People warned me that you should not move too fast for a while

until you get into gravity. And I upchucked, but it was like a spit-up. I had a bag in the pocket we always carried, and I captured it so I didn't mess up anything. And, of course, they had Bill Paxton hack it up. It looked like a whole thing of chocolate pudding in the movie. It's all an exaggeration. But nevertheless, they had a crew argument that did not happen. Yeah.

Jack and I about stirring the cryos. If I had not been still putting away things from the TV show we had just staged, I would have been in the right couch position, and I would have been the one to throw the switches Jack and so there was no way of knowing that electric short was going to happen you know they had to add that in

and they grossly exaggerated the manual maneuvers we did, we did two maneuvers without a computer on the way home to change the trajectory a little bit, tweak it and we didn't move more than a degree or two without a computer on the way home to change the trajectory a little bit, tweak it. And we didn't move more than a degree or two.

Wow. And of course, in the one scene they had the earth going up and down in the window, like we're about to lose control. I questioned Ron about that, some of that. And it was funny, his answer, he said,

and that's how I know he listened he said i listened to all the air to ground uh transmissions and he said it never seemed to me like you ever had a problem wow so i said i said to humanize you in some way and uh why why some of that was put in. Yeah. It sounds like it's really hit some... Overall, I think the movie obviously told a great story of that. We were in trouble. There's no question about it. Deep trouble. And it showed a team, that's another drawback,

there was not as big a team as really worked the problems, much more than one shift of mission control, Gene Kranz's white team. And to work the problems, many got less sleep on the ground talking to him afterwards than I got in flight and came up with solutions that got us home. Yeah. Yeah. Did ever during the whole experience you get worried, like, I don't think we're going to get out of this? It sounds like you guys were probably in more control of what was going on than what was on the ground.

We're like, we're fine up here. We'll make it. Well, we were fine in stages. Yeah. Nobody, including Mission Control, knew the end yet. It's the same kind of work in increments trying to just stay ahead and get to a better posture. That's what they initially did. First of all, get us pointed in the right direction to even get back to Earth.

Then they did a second maneuver they figured out after passing the moon to cut some time off. So they cut the corner, so to speak, and bought 10 hours off the return, mainly to enable better to have the power left in the batteries and the water supply in the LEM, which were both critical. Oxygen was not, incidentally. That was, I think, later I saw a newscast that they were really worried about oxygen. We had two full backpacks that we were going to use when we landed on the moon.

Oh. Full up, and they both had emergency bottles on them with very high-pressure oxygen to take care of the hole in the suit. Possibly 6,000 PSI. Each of those was about a day's worth. Oh, so. Yeah, that we could have used through purge valve. So we had lots of, I didn't even ever calculate that even when Jim asked me to look at consumables at one point. Did you ever, I mean, did it ever cross your mind thinking about maybe your life?

I don't know if you were married or had kids at the time or, you know, just thinking about it, just even a blip where you're like, well, what if this doesn't work out? No, I, you know, you think about that normally before you leave it. It's kind of a practice. When I was in military squadrons, you normally had a designee, not necessarily designated, but it was obvious your best friend or who you were with in the squad. And I was going to take care of the family and the wife of the administrative part of things if you didn't make it back one day.

And before Apollo 13, Jerry Carr lived around the corner from where I lived in the community. And he was a fellow Marine, active duty Marine at the time. And I asked Jerry to, as really a designee, he said, you're the point person to watch after the family if I don't get back. Wow. I had him at the house even to show him where things might be he'd need to get at. But again, morally administrative because obviously when that happened, as it happened on Apollo 1, the family said a lot of support of other astronauts,

of other astronaut wives, NASA protocol people. So he was kind of the lead person to make sure things got taken care of. So you prepare ahead of time that you might not get back. It's interesting the whole mental stoicism that you guys have and the preparedness, I guess, a lot of it went into. Do you guys know how glued America or the world was to their TV sets and cheering for you guys' return? And what was it like to come back and be a hero?

Well, I'll tell you, that was the one shocker that I never thought about when joining the astronaut program was that the public attention really came to me. I was a backup on Apollo 8. The first time we went to the moon, I was backed up by Bill Anders. And I was just amazed that when they got back and I read, sort of reading newspapers and looking at news and then looking at the trip they had planned, sort of around, not around the world, but a long, long set of visitations at different countries. I said, wow. I said, you know, when I flew test airplanes, I didn't get this kind of attention, even with the X-15. I mean, it wasn't anywhere near the degree it was in Apollo days.

So that was a real shocker of sort of a part of the job being an astronaut that I had not thought of before I signed up and became one. Was it fairly easy to adapt to the hero role when you came back? Where people were, you know, really, I mean, everybody knew your name. Everyone was watching the TVs. Everyone was like, you know, hoping that you guys would get back safely. Well, it was easy because, you know, you were really telling the story you were living. Yeah. It was easy in that respect. I frankly, upon public speaking, was limited to a class I did of that in junior college, community college.

And then we did get what was called the week in the barrel, where you became a rookie rookie astronaut where you're at the hands of headquarters NASA. They had prearranged a week full of events, sometimes two a day, three, three a day, even all kinds of events. Visit schools, have dinner, banquet type events, whatever. So they wanted to get you exposed rapid fire into being in the public and to speaking. And of course, speaking again was subject was easy. It was in my case was tell about the Apollo

program that I was hoping to join and be a part of and fly. You know, it wasn't as tough as a politician might have it been. What they might have to think about talking about.

They gave you at least that conditioning before later you ended up with some of your own different kinds, but later public events. What made you finally get around to writing a book about your memoir? Everybody seems to have written a book. Well, I finally got what I called maybe more free time than I had.

Because I followed my 20 years in NASA. I was 17 years with aerospace companies, Grumman Corporation, and then later Northrop Grumman. I ran space programs for Grumman for four years. Then I went off and formed a service company that wanted to get in the service business. And when Northrop and Grumman emerged, I inherited their service company, which is doing similar type of government contracting. And so I ended up running for 17 years.

That was during those 17 years, two service companies. And I got retired then in 1996 and almost immediately went to work on the board of directors to build Infinity Science Center, a museum in Mississippi where I grew up, actually right at the exit off of Interstate 10 that adjoins the museum on the south side and the Mississippi State Welcome Center with Stennis Space Center, which is the place where all the rocket engines are tested. So that was, we obviously had a challenge. which is the place where all the rocket engines are tested. So that was, we obviously had a challenge. It was a not-for-profit board formed that I joined with the goal of raising initially $40 million.

Wow. Because this was a museum built from scratch. NASA gave us 18 acres of land on the 30-year land use agreement, and from there on, it was up to us. So I spent a lot, a lot of time, and still do, in fundraising for the museum, because it's suffered, as most museums have, badly through the COVID. Yeah, yeah. The air drop and the attendance that's happened across the country. All museums, for the most part, are not-for-profits, which, as you know, are always hunting for money. And then you eventually went on and played a key role in the space shuttle program.

Well, yeah, that was still with Grumman. We won a contract. Actually, it was the first major contract for the service company that we had formed. And I was teamed with Lockheed, who was the prime contractor, and Thiokol and Grumman were the subs. And so that contract I was involved with for 12 years, turning around space shuttles after they land from space and getting them ready for the next launch. The other major contract I was on for four years

and actually left the company because it was set up as a separate entity for that contract. I had to move to Washington and led the system engineering integration contract on Space Station. In this case, it was called Space Station Freedom before it became later the ISS. And those were tough years that was probably the hardest uh job and contract i had and and label at the end of that uh segment of the chapter i call it my time in purgatory and mainly not the not the job itself which was interesting and fun even the restructuring we had to do, but it was mainly the frustration with achieving and keeping congressional funding. It was a struggle every year through those four years.

In fact, one year, if one vote had changed in the House of Representatives, we would have no space station today. Wow. Wow. Of course, it was a big morale issue with the workforce I had reading that in the Washington Post and the periodicals that

integration offices I had at four NASA centers on that contract. I was afraid I was going to be losing the workers that just, in some cases, going all around the country to recruit. So that was a tough contract from a job from that standpoint, more than the actual hands-on work trying to get the space station ready to get to eventually to build it.

Yeah. I grew up building Estes rockets and built the space shuttle, you know, the little rocket versions of it. And I used to love shooting those off with my friends when I was 11. And, you know, the whole dream of astronaut travel and space, you know, the ability for the space shuttle to return, you know, and land like a plane was really innovative to changing what was going on. I was really honored years ago that NASA brought me and a bunch of people to the California base there up in the desert, and we got to see the Endeavor land and go tour the 747 that carries it around. And we were literally within, I don't know, eight feet of being able to reach out and touch the space shuttle. It was just extraordinary just to think about the journeys that thing had been on. What do you think about how the space shuttle program has evolved where we now have these easily return landable things

that can come back and forth like SpaceX and stuff? Well, obviously SpaceX has had tremendous success. They had some hard early years, the first several launches. In fact, I think they were about ready to throw in the towel when they finally got funding to continue and got a successful launch. It's been very great ever since. And they've had a methodology of return of the booster that has lessened the cost considerably and reused. I think the two crews that have flown in the capsule equivalent, the Dragon,

they reused it. It was the same vehicle they used again for the next flight so that added something the shuttle didn't have was the promise of let's say not cheap but certainly a lot cheaper capability of getting things up and down the shuttle that was the one promise it failed it was uh uh really never never made it to uh sort of being being the low low cost way of getting things up and down there's a very uh uh innovative vehicle low and in a sense you mentioned that they could carry things up uh it could retrieve them if you wanted to bring them back home it could get things things and repair them like they did Space Telescope.

So it has certain capabilities that we don't have with anything else we have yet today. Yeah. And so that's lost, that kind of capability. But it was a very expensive system to operate.

It took a lot of manpower, which was probably the biggest recurring cost for shuttle was the payroll, the labor force. Yeah, they just delivered two days ago the first SpaceX delivered the first all-private astronaut crew to the ISS station. Exactly, yeah. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, and that's, well and it's been so perfect.

Hopefully, they're not going to change anything. It's sort of a singular mission. It's to go up, rendezvous, and dock with the space station and come back and do an Earth orbital reentry. If they don't mess with anything and try to make it better, like better

software or something, mess something up, obviously, the reliability has been tremendous. Again, the only thing they face is failures potentially, like, again, rocket engines. Although when it gets you on a recurring thing like they're doing is complacency. Complacency and the preparation and that sort of thing. It happens in squadrons. If you get complacent, somewhere you'll have an accident, a pilot error, whatever be the cause, that you can trace it back to that factor.

And in your book, you talk about another challenge that you go through where you end up, I guess, faring a World War II aircraft. Do you want to touch on that a little bit, tease that out? Yes. I was involved with an operation that did air shows, and the opening act was the semblance of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We had some pyrotechnics in the center of the field that got set off, that kind of thing. And used airplanes that had been acquired very cheaply from 20th century Fox.

They had converted a number of aircraft to resemble Japanese aircraft and making their movie 20 Toro Toro Toro. The attack on Pearl Harbor. Very good movie, in fact. Yeah. And so we just used them to stage that air show. And I really picked up the Val, which was the code, the name for the Japanese bag bummer which had a nice fancy pants on the wheels and different Colleen on it to give that resemblance and a good paint job so it's like the Japanese valve and we kept it at a crop

dressers feel and I was picked picked it up to ferry it to Shoals feel at Galveston Texas where we had a wash rack to clean it up because we had an air show coming up the following weekend at Dallas-Fort Worth area. And I was too close on another airplane I was flying formation on. In fact, Ted Mendenhall, he was one of our shuttle training aircraft pilots. And I got too close on him, and I was afraid of running over him on the runway and getting too close. And I did a go around, and about 300 foot in the air, the engine quit. Boom.

And by rapidly changing tanks to the other fuel tank, and I had a hand wobble pump I could pump to get fuel pressure I could get it to sputter which enabled me to make a 180 degree turn away from the water because I was headed landing south into the Gulf of Mexico and I knew it was shallow water you don't want to land this was a fixed gear airplane I couldn't raise the the gear. I knew I'd probably flip over and I'd end up upside-down trapped in shallow water. So I whelped it around 180 degrees but landed, and it did not have any shock absorbing except the

tires, because the fancy pants they put on, they also bolted plates on the oleos so they could not strut a move to give you some uh landing uh support and uh it one one one landing gear came off on impact it flipped the wing dug in and ended up going upside down backwards and trapped for a little while with it on fire fortunately a nice blue flame, not yet a lot of smoke with oil, which would be bad for breathing.

I managed to kick a hole through the clumsy canopy that was on those World War II airplanes and got out. But in the meantime, I had fire burn legs and arms and part of my rear end where I had to stick it in the fire. And it had burns over about 60, 65 percent, half second, half third, and ended up three months in the one week short of three months. And the Galveston University of Texas Hospital, and treated for at least a grafting by shrine doctors. Right next door was the Shrine Burn Institute for children. And they also serviced the adult ward and did mentoring for doctors,

the University of Texas doctors who were budding to be maybe plastic surgeons. So I got that support during my stay in the Galon, UT. University of Texas Hospital. And I was careful not to let any of the people know I went to the University of Oklahoma. That's hilarious. That's hilarious. And you have a miraculous discovery from that.

I mean, that's 65% of your body. Geez. Yeah, that was, at that day and age, this was 73, that was quite a high number for an adult of my age anyway. And the children, at that time, they were surviving at a little over 90%. But at any rate, I met with the doctors early on after the first critical phase. They worry about if you breathe any hot gases, that might have damaged your respiratory system. Because if you've done that, there's no recovery. And we got past that, and I talked to the internist and Dr. Larson who was the prime doctor from the

Shrine Institute that was going to do the grafting work and told him I wanted to get back to flight status and so we talked over the what protocol was going to be and one thing that looked like we should do something different was because i had burns all the way around the legs got the grafting they don't want pressure on the graphs for five days and so they're going to put a pins through the ankles and hoist my legs up in the air so there'd be no pressure on the legs during that period and And we were worried, thought about, well, it might leave holes in the bones, that gap

of some kind that might cause the problem flying again with pressure differential. Oh, yeah. Flying up and down. So what I had, the wife bought a pair of sandals that could be easily strapped on my feet and took them to, delivered them to

crew systems division at Johnson Space Center and the suit techs actually fixed the board with Velcro and glued on the bottom of the sandals matching Velcro. That enabled me to clamp my feet into that board at the end of the bed and avoid the use of the pins. Wow. And so that's one workaround we did.

Otherwise, other things done during that period were pretty much the standard that was done. The worst of all was getting dunked in a diluted Clorox tank every day. Oh, wow. Instead of preventing infection. Yeah. And you had to stay in there 17 minutes. They had a clock that sat on the wall. You could watch the 17 minutes go by. It seemed like pain got worse as the longer you were in there. Yeah, I can imagine.

I burn when I put a little hydrogen peroxide on a hangnail. That's the end of the world for me right there. You're a tough man. And have you ever thought that maybe you got a little cat nine lives sort of thing going on there? Well, I hadn't quite used all that. Well, you've got seven left. But, you know, you've had a couple close calls there, probably more than most people. Yes, I have, and I just feel very blessed to have survived and been able to continue

the career. And I've been lucky. I mean, it's lucky and blessed to have been able to do what I've done through my life. Like I said, the only job that was unpleasant, as I mentioned, was that four years on the early

space station. And mainly it wasn't the job itself. It was the dealing with the congressional committees. And they weren't about the funding. In fact, Proxmire at one time, I think, zeroed NASA funding. It quickly got turned around. Yeah.

Those were not good years. It seemed like Congress didn't hear Reagan's message when he was the one that kicked off Space Station and gave a nice talk about the wonders of what this laboratory was going to do, but Congress wasn't listening. Yeah. Have you booked any flights for Mars? You know, Elon Musk wants to go to Mars. No, that's too long a trip.

That's a long, long trip. That's going to be a tough, tough thing to do from that aspect. And I know Elon's interested in having a permanent establishment in the city. Logistics support, unless you can get through the early time to actually figure out how to live off of Mars itself, that's going to be the difficult part, that transition. Now, that's one thing about going back to the moon and a moon base. There will be a lot of

learning curve on that aspect. What's the right architecture to provide the logistics support to set up and maintain an operation on the moon, which will be obviously from just the distance away, a lot easier uh task

challenge to contemplate yeah and and you guys never you were never able to land on the moon in the subsequent missions you went on you were supposed to be on the moon on apollo 13 do you ever does that ever bug you you ever hear any regrets about that like Like, gosh darn it. Well, not today. It did for a number of years afterwards. I lost the chance on 19. I had flown as a backup commander on 16 to John Young and that put me in the lineup

to then probably fly 19 with Jerry Carr and Bill Pogue who were assigned to me early on as the backup crew on 16 and of course they cancelled it after about 4 or 5 months into that training cycle

and I lost that chance so it bothered me for a couple of years that I never got the chance to try it again yeah well you've lived a hell of a life anything more you want to tease out on the book for people to go out and buy it well it's a good story I hope You've lived a hell of a life. Anything more you want to tease out on the book for people to go out and buy it? Well, no, it's a good story. I hope beyond the book that people that are currently involved in the program,

I mentioned several things that I hope they've bothered looking up in the archives, like telling Bill Tindall, did a lot of the what we call data priority sessions to figure out how to do the Apollo lunar mission and what are some of the challenges. And it's a lot of that data. I don't know that because I've not been involved technically with NASA. Some of that has been reviewed and what they're putting together for Artemis going back to the moon.

Well, it'll be pretty interesting. So thank you for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, Fred. It's been an honor to have you on. Like I said, I grew up just with the whole space race and this whole space age, and so it was really fun to have you on the show. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me.

I enjoyed it. Thank you. Don't talk about the old days. Thank you very much. You're an American treasure, my friend. To my audience, go pick up the book. You can order it wherever fine books are sold. Never panic early in Apollo 13's extraordinary astronaut's

journey. Extraordinary is one thing I added to that title. Go pick up the book and check it out today and read more about Fred's extraordinary life. Thanks so much for tuning in. Go to youtube.com. For us, that's Chris Voss. Go to goodreads.com. For us, that's Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there as well.

Thanks for being here. Stay safe. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time. All right. Take care.