the second stage here is the the giant Apollo ten taking off Saturn.

Even in retirement, it is difficult to catch general Tom Stafford.

Here is a flight to the moon Apollo ten that here was a third scale Mercury spacecraft here is.

Rares still is the chance to get a personally conducted tour of the museum that bears his name in his hometown of Weatherford.

The museum began humbly with a couple of model airplanes and small momentum.

There was a well, there was a launch.

Here was our launch here.

Wow.

It was their idea, you know.

To you have a museum.

I never thought about a museum out here.

And since all they wanted was just some of, you know, pieces of memorabilia and.

And then later, just don't ask, who can I get a special suit, or can we get a rocket engine or.

And they would keep coming up with these ideas.

And Stafford kept coming up with the goods.

The Stafford Museum at the Stafford Airport in Weatherford has grown beyond anyone's dreams.

It outgrew the little display years ago and now covers several thousand square feet.

An exact replica of the Wright Brothers 1903 flier with the Orville flying it boom.

You can see recreations of the first airplanes and the latest spaceships and photographs from out of this world.

Now, are those actual size or that this is actual size?

This is the actual size.

Sputnik.

This is actual size explorer.

Wow.

And on those occasions when General Stafford is here, you can see some living history.

The main thing about any museum is not just to show other the the history, but but to show the motivational and education for the younger people to motivate them to look at science and mathematics and see what the human mind can do and how it can evolve, the innovation.

Of what they can and.

Tom Stafford's mother came to Oklahoma in a covered wagon.

He wound up going to the moon.

His parents early struggles instilled something in him that would serve him well on his long journeys to come.

Hello, Houston.

We've got a beautiful view of the earth here, but it's absolutely fantastic.

The character of Oklahoma!

My mother arrived, out in northwestern Oklahoma in 1901, in a covered wagon, and they lived in a sort dug out.

So for about 4 or 5 years to get enough money build a old frame House.

So it was a lot of self-reliance.

And she taught me that.

And my father, he was an early dentist out in northwestern Oklahoma.

And so there had to be, you know, a lot of reliance and, and work hard and the ethic and, and plan ahead.

And so you just the work ethic, the and the planning was, was instilled in me.

Young Tom was solidly grounded, no question about that.

But his head always seemed to be in the clouds and his dreams reached toward the heavens.

And every afternoon as a little boy, five and six years old, I'd look up and he'd be this great big airplane, big airplane.

I thought I was a DC3, and that would fly over.

And big silver plane.

I look up and I said, I want to do that.

Tom Stafford wound up flying higher and faster than anyone ever has, all the way to the moon at a speed of almost 25,000 miles an hour.

He's flown more than 100 different types of air and spacecraft, many of them here in his museum now.

He's flown four space missions two Gemini and two Apollo.

Questions frequently asked what's it like in space and fly to the moon?

And I was very fortunate, and I just thank God I was, selected as a one of the pioneers to help develop the space program.

Yeah.

Know was a great time to be there.

Every mission I flew was a new mission that had never been done before, and each mission was building on top of the other.

One was we were really in a tight time frame to approach your goal of landing on the moon by the end of the decade.

In the 60s of President Kennedy had set forth while flying Apollo ten, Stafford helped map the moon's surface and scout a landing site for the mission to follow.

Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11.

He even named a mountain range on the lunar landscape, the Oklahoma Hills.

Very proud to be an Oklahoma and be from here and it, it's really great to grow up in a small little town like Weatherford.

Weatherford was 2500 when I grew up.

And, to do that and then go from there all the way, drive to the moon on television, it's an experience only 24 men have had.

If you have, a museum like this, it shows what the human mind can achieve.

And, how you can better yourself through science.

Because science and technology is provide us the environment that we live in today.

You know, nothing has affected the whole human race in this last century more than the invention of the powered flight in the airplane.

And it's changed.

Our concept of transportation has changed the concept of warfare.

And, it's changed the world.

It's certainly changed Tom Stafford's world and ours.