>> Major funding for "When We Were Shuttle" is provided by Howmet Aerospace Foundation, investing in STEM education in communities where Howmet operates.

Additional funding is provided by the Jo Asmundsson Production Fund.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

[ Dog barking ] [ Birds chirping ] [ Bird cawing ] >> This is Shuttle Launch Control.

T-minus three hours and holding.

The astronauts, of course, are in the orange pressure suits.

The closeout crew are in the white coveralls, and the closeout crew will be assisting the astronauts with their helmets and other equipment as they enter the orbiter.

There I am on TV.

How about that?

This is an incredibly experienced and dedicated team that gets the people on the orbiter.

And Travis is in charge of the whole thing.

And not only is he in charge of this one, but he's in charge of the whole closeout crew.

>> Seven, six, five... [ Whooshing ] >> All three engines up and burning.

Two, one.

I live in a little camping trailer now.

Used to have a beautiful house on the river on the St. Johns River.

Gorgeous place, beautiful wife.

Lost it all.

Got three acres, though.

It's kind of nice to be out in the middle of nowhere.

Florida.

That part I like.

I hear the train at night.

I go outside and watch the rocket launches.

[ Laughs ] Yeah.

Little different from when I grew up.

We used to climb a big pine tree to watch the Apollo launches, so...

But, yeah, I'm in the woods.

It's where I want to be.

I like it.

It's what I'm left with.

[ Laughs ] >> Dear God, we thank you for this opportunity again, for this beautiful day to be with you.

Direct our thoughts, direct our steps and direct our words.

We pray for unity, we pray for peace, and we pray for your love.

In your name, we ask it.

Amen.

>> Amen.

Okay, good.

That's good.

That's good.

>> Oh, another monumental day.

>> All right.

>> It's exciting.

You want a coffee to go?

In your little to-go cup?

>> No, I don't think so.

By the time I get there, I'll be fully awake.

>> Okay.

>> Okay.

I'll just get up to go.

When I look back on my life, I think I've had a good life.

And the shuttle program was a very exciting part of my overall career.

It played a crucial role in where I am today.

I'm always optimistic that the future is going to be better than the past.

Welcome to the Harry T. & Harriette V. Moore Memorial Park and Museum.

We're so very happy to have you here this morning.

My name is William Gary and I serve as president of the Harry T. & Harriette V. Moore Cultural Complex.

How many of you all want to be teachers?

Harry and Harriette Moore were teachers.

Harry was concerned about certain inequalities that he saw... >> As we all know, there's always a leader for the time.

And you two ended up being the leader for the time.

>> Oh, Bill.

>> Yeah.

Well, you guys did.

And these points don't mean anything to me now.

>> I know.

You get nothing.

>> I'm retired.

>> You get nothing.

>> Ten years ago, that might have been a call and she'd say, "Let's promote him."

>> You know, there's a couple things that I think about when being at the pad.

When I was involved, I was the pad leader for Pad B here.

I'd do a final walk-down early in the morning and it felt like the vehicle was alive.

The xenon lights are shining up, so even when you look out, the lights are shining.

But just how careful you had to be and how intimidating it was.

And the way the vehicle would talk to you.

I mean, just the creaking and high hissing.

And standing there and looking up and recognizing what you were a part of -- just that this thing's going to take seven people off the planet.

Not everybody gets to do that.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> The most historic step in the history of the space program, in that it gives man, for the first time, the capability of routinely and at a moment's notice, when necessary, of getting to and from space.

♪♪ The space shuttle is important and is the right step in the manned spaceflight and the U.S. space program.

♪♪ First, the shuttle is the only meaningful new space -- manned space program which can be accomplished on a modest budget.

Second, the space shuttle is needed to make space operations less complex and less costly.

♪♪ Third, the space shuttle is needed to do many useful things.

♪♪ And fourth, the shuttle will encourage greater international cooperation in spaceflight.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> You know, a lot of people can't say they did what they loved, and I did.

I never wanted to fly.

Didn't want to be that guy.

I wanted to be the worker, you know?

That's what my dad was, my mom.

That's what I wanted to be.

♪♪ >> Growing up around here, it was space.

It was just neat to ride your bicycle down along the river where everybody was parked for the Apollo launches.

My mother went to work for McDonnell Douglas.

She worked her way up to be in charge of human resources.

And at the end of the Apollo program, my dad got laid off, and my mother signed his layoff papers.

So it's in my blood.

[ Laughs ] I went to Brevard Community College, and I took blueprint and machine shop.

When I heard they were hiring at the Cape in 1979, I hired in with 352 people.

Two of us went to spacecraft.

And the only reason I got to go is 'cause I had blueprint reading and I was good with my hands.

I did a lot of this and a little bit of this.

You know?

I listened to the old Apollo guys, followed them around.

I got their coffee, I paid attention, and my boss, within two weeks, he said, "In five years, you're going to be sitting here running this."

And he was right.

♪♪ >> I grew up in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Typical poor Black family.

Segregated, of course.

My mother, she could read and write.

She loved to read.

When I was four, five years old, she was teaching my cousin, who was a few years older than I, and I would always stand behind and watch her.

So I learned to read before I ever went to school.

I'd always been fascinated with the stars and constellations in space.

My school, Tennessee State, had a cooperative education agreement.

The guy who was the coordinator, he would come around to the engineering classes in particular and try to recruit students to sign up for co-op.

I finally told him, "If I can work at a space center, I will join the co-op program."

So he said, "Well, you know, we have an agreement with Kennedy.

We have an agreement with Huntsville."

And I didn't want to go to Alabama because in my mind it was worse than Mississippi.

>> Segregation forever.

[ Crowd whooping and cheering ] >> But Florida appealed to me even as a younger person.

My friends and I, we had often talking about going and jumping on the train and riding all the way to Florida and pick oranges and make some money -- which, you know, it was a dumb idea, but at that time, that seemed like a great adventure there.

They had a co-op coordinator there at Kennedy who matched us up with other students who had a car so we could get back and forth to the space center after work.

>> You know, I see people that say, you know, early on they saw, you know, the moon landing and, "I knew that's what I wanted to do."

No, I wasn't sure where I was headed, to be honest with you.

♪♪ My uncle was an electrical engineer for Chrysler, so he started sending pictures home.

He got the first seven astronauts' autographs, sent them, you know, to little Billy.

He brought us down.

We got to see the crawler when it was first manufactured.

It started to make me realize that this is just incredibly interesting, and it was cutting-edge.

You know, just like in my generation, my dad's listening to Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra, and the next thing you know, you got a Led Zeppelin album on, and your dad's like, "What the hell is that you're listening to?"

I went to technical school in Pennsylvania, worked for the U.S. Department of Energy on a coal gasification plant that turned coal to natural gas.

And that was during the big gas shortage.

Prices were going crazy, lines to get your car filled up.

And then Mom's flying to L.A. She meets a guy that works at the Astronaut Office.

Next thing you know, he said, "We're looking to hire people into the space program.

So if your son has a technical background, get me his résumé."

I'm 22 years old, I come down, I'm sitting in his house, all glass on the water.

He's got his boat lifted out back.

And I'm seeing these fish jump out of the water.

[ Laughs ] I said, "What are those?"

He said, "Those are dolphins."

So I went from bundled up and, you know, hands freezing, to sunshine, sunglasses, watching girls playing tennis on the tennis court.

I thought, you know, "I could live here."

It was less money than I was making in Pennsylvania.

But you could see that the steel mills in Pittsburgh -- my dad saw where it was coming to a stall.

He said, "Take the less money.

Go into a program that's starting out like that and look at the opportunities to grow and finish your education."

♪♪ >> I first heard about the shuttle through the news, you know, just being here local.

It was a big deal because the Apollo program had ended.

So you just knew it was going to be big.

>> My first impression when I saw the configuration of the shuttle is, "Will this really fly?"

Was this really going to work?

>> It was hard to get my mind around.

They had artists' renditions.

It was explained to me as an airplane the size of a 727.

It would be strapped to a large fuel tank with two solid rocket motors, which are basically rockets themselves.

It's going to lift off, as a "space truck" perform work in low-Earth orbit.

And then it would land like an airplane.

And I thought it sounds exciting, but it also sounded far-fetched.

♪♪ >> Late '77, thereabouts, we started going out to Palmdale, where the vehicle was being put together.

When I first saw the cockpit, I was totally surprised at how small it was.

It's about the size of a DC-9.

Not a lot of stand-up room in there.

>> You don't really have a concept of what it looks like until you get right up to it.

But the first time I saw Columbia was in Palmdale, California.

I was loaned out there to learn the system and to work on it.

It was way behind schedule, and that's why NASA opted to get it from California and get it down here.

And that way we could continue to finish building the orbiter and start testing the systems.

>> All us young people didn't really know what we were signed up for or what this real work environment was going to look like.

So they kept delaying the delivery out of Palmdale.

Then finally it was close to Easter Sunday, the vehicle was coming.

So they told all of us to go out to the shuttle landing facility to watch the orbiter come in.

We looked up.

I mean, your jaw dropped.

747 was the largest commercial aircraft of its time.

And then it's got this 100 ton, you know, vehicle mounted on it.

It wasn't a lot of words, just looking up, trying to gather what we were seeing.

And then Deke Slayton, one of the original seven, flew his T-38, and he corkscrewed it down the runway, hit the afterburners and went straight up.

The 747 lands.

Deke Slayton comes in in front of it with the canopy open, and he's going like that to the crowd.

We just looked at each other and thought, "Oh, my God."

I think the magnitude of what we were going to be a part of just hit us.

It was like, "This is incredible."

♪♪ >> When I first saw Columbia, I was an awe.

You're looking at a spaceship.

And then, like that, it's time to go to work.

I was a vehicle test mechanic.

The first two years, we did a lot.

Seven days a week, 12-hour days.

Didn't know what a weekend was.

I remember one time I had to write what we called an AVO -- Avoid Verbal Orders -- just to take a Saturday off so that me and my buddy could go fishing.

I don't even think we threw the rod in the water.

We just wanted to go on a boat and be away from work.

♪♪ >> There were a lot of delays, which kind of helped me a little bit because I hadn't gotten out of the service yet.

The biggest one I remember was the tiles, of course.

♪♪ >> The orbiter sees up to 3,000 degrees on reentry.

Down on the underside and all the areas you see in black are made up of high-temperature, reusable surface insulation -- what everybody commonly refers to as the tile.

The tile vary in thickness.

It is extremely fragile, more fragile than an eggshell.

There are certain places on the underside of the vehicle you could lose one tile and have a catastrophic failure.

>> I think the company that built the shuttle itself, Rockwell, overestimated the simplicity of attaching those tiles and making them work.

The shuttle was actually shipped here to Kennedy before two tiles were complete on it.

Rockwell transferred a bunch of people from California to work on the tiles, and the idea was we're going to be working 24/7, seven days a week, pretty much.

Well, the big joke was, when they discovered Disney was about an hour and a half away, that went out the window.

[ Laughs ] >> We had like 700 tile technicians on first shift.

Everywhere there was an open space on that vehicle, you had a group of tile people.

You had people in the back shop making tile.

You had people logging, cataloging.

>> And this was a bunch of people who the year before had been in high school or college, and they didn't know anything about composites and bonding procedures.

And we had to teach them what they needed to know because it was not something that you could go outside and learn anywhere.

There wasn't a school in the country that was teaching these.

>> The tile was made out of silica.

So the bottom of that tile was sand.

So as you brushed the room-temperature vulcanizer -- it was a glue -- on, you actually deformed the tile.

And when you bonded the tile to the vehicle, you could actually just pull the tile off.

Didn't know that to start with.

>> The design engineers came up with a fix, but the fix required us to remove the tile off of the ship, harden the back of the tile, and reinstall the tile on the ship.

Well, Columbia had almost 32,000 tile.

>> This is a little humorous.

In the logistics, they all told us we're going to roll out in June.

They had a calendar and it said, "January, February, March, April, May, June, June, June, June."

You know, the anticipation was just -- Good Lord, you know, come on.

>> We worked two-and-a-half years on an orbiter that was supposed to be processed through a much shorter period of time.

But I remember when Columbia rolled out of the OPF, I mean, just my sheer feeling of pride, you know, my part, my small part in processing that vehicle and getting it ready to go, the VAB to be stacked with the tank and the boosters.

♪♪ And then going out finally to the launch pad.

>> All of our manned vehicles before Shuttle, we flew the rockets unmanned several times to make sure they were safe.

When we flew the very first space shuttle, Columbia, it had two astronauts in it.

John Young and Bob Crippen.

♪♪ >> John Young was legendary.

Bob Crippen, I mean, he looked like a movie star.

Their energy and them coming out and interfacing a little bit with the workforce, providing a little bit of reality to the importance of what we did and how we prepared that spacecraft for them.

They stayed connected enough with the workforce to make us recognize the importance of what we were about to do and how to do it right.

>> One of my techs come down and he says, "The strangest thing just happened."

He said, "Some guy came up there.

He asked me to explain what I was doing.

He sat there and talked for over 30 minutes."

He said, "He looked down at me before he walked away and he said, "You're building this ship.

Would you fly in it?"

And he said, "I had to think for a minute."

He said, "I looked at him and told him, 'Yes, sir, I'd fly in it.'"

And he said, "Good, 'cause I am," and walked off.

And that's when he came down to me and he says, "Who was that?"

I said, "That was John Young.

He's the commander of this first flight."

He was like that.

He was a very knowledgeable man and he wanted to talk to anybody who would talk to him and answer his questions.

>> You do put yourself in their place.

Yeah, they're test pilots.

They're probably cool as cucumbers.

And we were, in the firing room, the ones that are a nervous wreck, just because it was such a complicated machine.

When you're in that crew module and you're looking at the thousands of switches, And then you go walking along the vehicle and you're looking at the wiring, miles and miles of wiring -- all this has got to come together.

>> I thought we had done everything we could do to make the vehicle as safe as possible, but it was an untried vehicle.

>> We set a schedule for launch and we kept slipping it out month after month after month after month.

And at one point it was almost like, "Are we ever going to get launched?"

And that was kind of in the midst of the Iranian crisis.

I don't know if you remember that or not.

But this country at that point probably, some would say, didn't have a lot of positive things to be upbeat about.

Space shuttle was something that the whole country could get behind and could feel good about as a country.

>> This is shuttle launch control at T-minus two hours, five minutes and holding.

The astronauts are in the process of putting on their boots, which they will wear during the flight.

They already have put on their pressure suits.

Astronaut John Young is having his boots adjusted at the present time.

Helping makes sure... >> Dead silence.

Dead-quiet environment.

To be at the C12 DPS console, We had all kinds of software displays that we were monitoring all the equipment on board.

You make sure they're within their limits.

White knuckles.

Counting down.

Ten, nine... "Oh, my gosh, this is gonna happen.

This is gonna happen."

And it was such a letdown when the very first day it didn't happen because we had a software issue.

The primary and the backup software weren't in synch.

>> That was part of my system.

We reached a point in the count where the computers failed to synch.

It was like, "Oh, my God.

We've never seen this before."

We were already kind of emotional and stomach in knots and that kind of thing.

But IBM did get it figured out.

And on the second attempt, we successfully launched.

>> T-minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four.

We've gone for main engine start.

We have main engine start.

♪♪ [ Engine roaring ] And we have liftoff for America's first space shuttle.

♪♪ And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

♪♪ >> The moment that it launched, and you're standing wherever you're standing, watching it and you realize, "I helped do that"... [ Chuckles ] I can't -- I can't describe that.

>> Seeing it take off, and the roar of the engines and stuff, it -- it's, um...

It makes you proud.

>> We were jumping up and down, and everybody high-fived back then.

We were all high-fiving each other and hugging and just -- just total elation.

that that's the product that we've been working on for two-and-a-half years, and it just cleared the tower.

>> I was a launch team member in the prime firing room, Firing Room 1.

If you ever see pictures of the post launch, there's me in a white jacket waving an American flag, I mean, just going crazy.

It was a special time.

>> Of course, we were glued to the monitors, we're watching the monitors, watching everything.

It's like, "Okay, there go the solid rocket boosters.

Good, good.

Everything's working.

There goes the tank.

Yes, yes!

Oh, my gosh."

It was the coolest experience, but it was very tenseful.

It was like, "Oh, my gosh, please, everything work."

>> And then you could see that same excitement then when STS-1 landed.

John Young came down the stair trot, and he was running around the orbiter like a little kid, pumping his hands up.

I think it took me longer as time went on to recognize the bold courage that those two guys had on a completely new system like that.

But I was hooked.

I mean, I was absolutely hooked.

♪♪ >> When I started coming down here as a co-op student, they had a co-op coordinator there at Kennedy who helped us find an apartment.

He had a list of apartments that we could rent at.

Even though this was '68, '69, they were all segregated.

A few years later, I met a young lady.

We got married, and then one of the things that we wanted to do is buy a house.

>> ♪ You can't stop me now ♪ >> It was on North Carpenter Road, which didn't have any other African-American families out there at that time.

We didn't give a lot of thought to it because there hadn't been any incidents that I could remember.

However, we endured quite a bit of harassment there.

♪♪ After we'd been there a couple of months, people would come by and throw fruit on our roof and against the house.

They would drive through the yard and mess up our grass and knock over our little decorative figures.

At that time I was traveling some as part of my job.

My wife called.

She was crying and upset because people had been throwing apples and oranges.

She didn't know, I don't believe, at the time, because it was at night, that they had spray-painted the N-word on the sides of the house.

So I called the newspaper, and they took pictures of the words and they wrote a big article which appeared in the Sunday paper there on the front page.

And that kind of led me into some other city civic activities there, being involved with some advisory boards, getting involved with campaign for mayor.

♪♪ >> When I see all the "stop hate," the focus that we, you know, have a dislike for each other, sometimes I don't understand that because I know most of the folks that I know and people in my family, we don't have that.

I didn't see it.

You know, it's a team out there.

Worked hand in hand with many African-Americans that are my friends today because they were solid people doing a great job.

They were competent and -- I didn't see much focus, even at that time, on making any of those determinations that we were different.

>> I had a good relationship.

Charlie Bolden, our first African-American NASA administrator.

We started together.

He just grew up to be the boss.

[ Laughs ] But, yeah, he'd knock you out on the way to hug me right now.

So, you know, we're good friends.

It might've went on, but I didn't notice it, and I damn sure wasn't a part of it.

♪♪ >> If you think the natural order of things is that you are always at the top, you are the leader, then, yeah, you won't see anything.

When I was appointed the facility manager of the operation, the checkout building, people would stick their head in the door.

I would be sitting behind a desk and they would ask, "Where's the facility manager?"

They totally -- it didn't occur to them that you might be that person.

♪♪ >> A lot of the employees, myself included, had a lot of issues with promotion potential, work assignments, receiving awards.

We had agreed as a group that we were going to file a lawsuit.

But when it got down to time to file a lawsuit, a lot of them backed out.

So it was just four of us that volunteered to go through with the lawsuit.

Some people weren't happy about it.

Even though it wasn't against them, you know?

They just didn't like the idea that they had to testify.

I managed to work through it.

I continued to do my job and didn't let it get me down.

I think the fact that we spoke out and made the agency aware of the fact that we were aware that there was a problem meant a lot.

Some people that I work with, especially some of the ones that came in after me and knew what I had to go through, told me that they were proud and happy that somebody stood up.

>> It took a while for opportunities to come.

It took a long while.

Do I think the playing field leveled off and things were kumbaya?

No, I don't.

Do I think that there were instances where people were precluded because they were African-American?

Yes, I do.

But I don't think that it was a harsh, overt effort.

Could more have been done?

Yes.

But there was a lot that was done.

♪♪ >> Bob Crippen, who I consider the best center director I ever worked for, was a person that was totally committed to diversity.

We went and visited the Black colleges with an engineering degrees.

Met with the engineering people, and we were able to hire quite a few people during that period.

I remember one situation that we was in.

The EEO office had gotten a lot of applications from Southern University, of engineers to come on co-op.

At the end of the day, none of the people was hired.

So Crippen said, "Why did none of these people get hired?"

And the head of personnel would say, "Well, the directors and the program managers didn't pick them."

And Crippen said, "Well, I think I can hire them."

So it's just commitment and leadership from the top to make it happen.

Fortunately, I was in a position to bring on a lot of people, and we did.

We brought on a lot of women, a lot of minorities.

And fortunately, a lot of those folks are at the top of the organization down at Kennedy now.

♪♪ >> I became a safety specialist through a specialty training for entry professionals.

And I came into NASA as a clerk typist and just worked myself, you know, right up through the ranks by going to college in the evenings.

>> I have a degree in mathematics and physics from the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, Philippines.

When I first started, I think the opportunities for women were not as well publicized then.

>> Any special problems?

I think the answer is yes, I mean, if you're going to be honest.

There are just not that many women in the professional or scientific field.

So you find yourself being a minority.

>> Women kind of had to -- we had to work a little harder.

The management would ask the males first.

And it's like, you know, "Excuse me.

I know that answer too."

But we'd go to a meeting and explain the problem, and, "Well, all right.

Well, come back with some more information."

It's like, "Ugh."

>> I think it depended on the man and the woman.

I myself am an A-type personality.

So when somebody threw something sexist at me, they got something back.

[ Laughs ] There were times when I would change a job function, and I did feel like, as a woman, that, "Okay, when I got to prove myself again that, you know, I have a brain and I know what I'm doing."

>> You know, we never got promoted as quick as our counterparts, although we gave 200% and then some.

You didn't have a lot of female directors.

JoAnn Morgan worked in the launch room.

She had her challenges, and she was white.

Can you imagine for us that was behind her?

>> JoAnn Morgan's a great mentor.

Her thing was, always rise above it.

Especially when you're female and a lot of tough challenges are thrown your way, she wouldn't let you come in and kind of cry on her shoulder.

>> When you're a little girl and you want to be an astronaut when you grow up, it's like wanting to be a doctor when you grow up.

You're told that's not an appropriate goal.

If I could give any advice to anybody -- and I hate people who give advice -- it would be not to let people tell you what you can't be.

You have to decide for yourself what it is that you want.

And if you want it, really want it badly enough, then you have to make it happen for yourself.

>> Dr. Sullivan leaves us to go to NASA, be one of the first women to enter the training course as an astronaut.

And we wish you good success.

[ Applause ] >> In my view, the space program's moving from really a test-flight stage to stage that will involve really all of mankind.

And I think it's just a natural expansion to include other segments of the population.

>> I certainly feel that women are here to stay as part of the space program.

You know, this time all the women selected were selected as mission specialists.

I certainly feel that in future selections with women training as pilots, that there will be women selected as pilots.

I think we're here to stay.

♪♪ >> Here you see Mae Jemison.

Mae Jemison will be making her first trip in space today.

Jemison is a medical doctor from Chicago.

>> When Mae became an astronaut, I felt like she was very willing to meet people and talk to people.

She even met my daughters, and they were very excited because it was somebody that looked like them.

♪♪ >> When we finally did get a person of color chosen as one of the astronauts, you begin to think that, you know, we're on the right road here, you know, this is finally beginning to reflect the population of the country and the people of the country.

>> Just to see Black person getting on that shuttle and flying, it kind of inspired me that, you know, I could do anything I wanted to do.

I remember the first astronauts that was Fred Gregory and Guy Bluford.

I remember Fred coming here to Huntsville for one of our outreach days when they would go around and talk to the different schools about being an astronaut.

That's when I really got to know Fred and, you know, fortunately, Fred and I are frat brothers too, so the Omegas kind of was flying in space, you know?

[ Laughs ] >> I was one of the first Blacks in integrated schools in Washington, D.C., in 1955.

I thought that if I really wanted to do it and I worked hard to do it and prepared myself, that if there were a barrier, it would have to be a big one to stop me.

[ Laughs ] >> When the shuttle made it possible for scientists to be a part of the program as astronauts, then that was my break.

I was interested in just about every subject that came along, but science was the one that gave -- and mathematics were the most challenging, gave me the most difficulty.

And I had to work a little harder to sort of understand and master the techniques.

Identify what you want to do and go straight forward and sort of be willing to sacrifice and ignore these forces that try to limit you and divert your efforts.

>> McNair.

He was a good friend of mine.

You think that people that's brilliant, PhDs, would be nerds, but these guys was really outgoing, everyday people, you know?

You just hate to lose people like that, you know, because they have so much to offer.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> You know, I think when you look at the shuttle, it is an amazing, complex piece of equipment.

When NASA was selling this to Congress, I realized that they had to have, you know, some vision of its usage, its cost, and so on and so forth.

But there was no way to really know until they got it into the environment and actually started doing flights.

♪♪ >> The space shuttle program was sold to President Nixon, the Congress, and the American people back then as our routine access to low-Earth orbit.

Economical, safe.

We were gonna fly every two weeks.

And everything America was going to launch was going to fly on the shuttle.

And so there was almost a feeling of the shuttle has to succeed because this is the way the country is headed.

>> There were a lot of things that, in the early days, that went wrong.

A lot of equipment that didn't quite work the way you expected it to.

It reached the point to where most of us in the space program recognized that that quick turnaround, it just wasn't going to happen because it was such a complex vehicle.

♪♪ >> The shuttle required too much work on the ground before its next mission, which was not truly anticipated when it was designed.

The feeling when it was designed was that we wouldn't need to to test every system every time and inspect every tile.

Well, we ended up doing that because it was the right thing to do, and that just slowed everything down.

And so the promise made of every two weeks just was never going to be.

♪♪ >> I think the best year we had, we had nine flights in a year.

And I can't overemphasize the amount of work and the daunting task it takes to get an orbiter ready to go fly, from all the systems that have to be, you know, tested and checked out.

It got real.

This schedules got tighter.

The manifests grew.

Those launch dates are very critical.

You might have a special short window to be able to get that mission up into space.

It's not, hey, you almost made it or you got close enough.

I mean, you have a specific launch time frame.

♪♪ >> We were working some pretty long hours because there were some rules that have been put into place, like maximum work time.

I can remember working double shifts.

I can remember testing the vehicle on one shift and testing my software on the next shift.

>> I remember one time there was a special bond job.

I was there 22 hours on double time.

That's like a whole paycheck in one day.

You know?

That was satisfying, but I busted my tail.

And people all around were doing that.

It wasn't just me.

I don't want it to sound like that.

Everybody around was doing that.

>> The need to meet a schedule was true.

I mean, we had different commitments to customers on board the shuttle.

There was pressure from certain elements within the shuttle program to launch that vehicle.

And people that had a say-so didn't want to be the one to scrub a launch.

>> My boss was an astronaut.

He talked about, as he went through Top Gun school that there's a certain level -- he drew a line -- where you can go, you know, just over the line where performance can be just awesome.

And then there's a further point where it could become detrimental.

>> I was never directed and I never directed anybody to do anything that was overly risky.

That did not happen with me.

And I certainly didn't do that with my people.

But I set a high expectation.

"Get it done."

>> I think our safety was compromised several times, and it was being pushed by the schedule.

And corners were cut.

We lost two guys in the aft section, two workers.

It was the dress rehearsal day for the astronauts.

The aft section of the vehicle, where the engines are, was purged was gaseous nitrogen.

You cannot breathe.

They were waiting on pad safety to come up and do a O2 check to make sure that it was okay to enter the aft.

Management kept calling from the telephone in the shop telling them, "Get your butts in there.

Let's go, let's go."

So they broke the barrier and crawled in, and two breaths, fell over.

♪♪ >> I mean, safety was always built into our culture.

Everybody made sure that we knew the importance of what we did and the impact if we didn't do it right.

>> We practiced worst-case scenario, seven people incapacitated.

So we could clear the pad in three-and-a-half minutes if we had to.

That's a lot of responsibility.

You got people's lives in your hands.

That's something that you need to take a deep breath and think about, you know?

>> I always thought at the processing level that we were delivering the best vehicle.

And we treated the crew like, would you put your mother on there?

Would you fly your sister?

You know, would you put your wife on there?

You think about people boarding that -- seven people and getting ready to leave the planet -- and you believe that you didn't do the best you could, or that we did it okay and we hope everything works out -- That was never the case.

>> Good afternoon.

I'd like to introduce to you the commander of STS-51-L, Commander Dick Scobee.

>> As usual, it's a real pleasure to be at the Cape to come down here and participate in something that the Cape does better than anybody in the world, and that's launching space vehicles.

>> I am hoping that the -- the affliction that Steve Hawley had from the 41-day mission, mission specialist, of the delays hasn't rubbed off on me.

And I think the guys behind me are hoping that it hasn't also.

Otherwise they might throw me off the flight.

>> The mission is a great mission.

We're looking forward to it.

And I think we're ready to go fly.

>> It's good to be down here and to be flying a vehicle that we know a lot of folks down here have worked very hard on.

>> A great pleasure finally to get this far.

I'm very proud to be part of the program and NASA.

>> We look forward to returning -- launching from the Cape, first of all, and returning here a few days later.

>> I don't think any teacher has ever been more ready to have two lessons in my life.

I've been preparing these since September, and I just hope everybody tunes in on day four now to watch the teacher teaching from space.

♪♪ >> You know, this may sound shallow, but when I look at astronauts, I think they understand the inherent risk in manned spaceflight.

And I think they and their families sign up for that risk.

>> This is a risky business.

And while the accolades and benefits are great, the way it was configured, there was just no easy, simple way to escape from it.

>> Columbia was designed with an escape system for the two astronauts, just the commander and the pilot.

The first four missions had escape capability.

Then it was declared operational.

The escape capability was removed from Columbia because it weighed a lot.

All the other shuttles that were in design and build at the time weren't even built with that system.

So it was predetermined that it was going to turn operational very quickly.

Well, "operational" is a funny word.

Operational can mean something to you, can mean something different to me.

I will tell you that the shuttle system never turned operational like a Boeing 737 is operational.

>> You always keep in the back of your mind that, yeah, there's no parachutes, there's no ejection system.

We got to do our job, and we got to do it right.

We got to make sure every component is working, working well, to launch and land safely.

>> Probably the downside of it is there was so many successful launches there.

It can be easy to be lulled into, "This is routine."

And there's nothing routine about it, really.

>> It was always an experimental vehicle.

It was always living on the edge of failure every time we launched.

[ Cheers and applause ] >> Unfortunately, I had a real front-row seat to Challenger.

As you would have it, we scrubbed the day before because we couldn't get the piece of GSE off of the hatch.

Then they recycled to a launch day where the weather was just incredibly bad.

I came in at 3:00 in the morning.

I was supposed to do the final walk-down.

As I start walking down the pad, I'm freezing.

I mean, I grew up in Pennsylvania.

I've never seen a day like that in Florida.

The handrails were all covered in ice.

The serrated gradient that the crew would walk up to the orbiter access arm was all iced over.

So I did what I thought was right.

I went over to a point-to-point phone on the 195-foot level, and I picked up -- and that rings directly into the control room -- and described what I was seeing.

He said, "Okay, let me make a note of that and I'll make sure that the crew gets briefed that they need to be extra careful."

I said, "That wasn't the desired result.

I mean, are we really going to launch?"

I had a schedule with me.

We always carried schedules with us, rolled up in our back pocket.

He said, "We'll get to this point in the count, and we'll probably recycle."

>> At T-minus 7 minutes and 40 seconds.

>> It was a very, very smooth countdown, if you will.

>> T-minus 15 seconds.

>> At that time, I was the supervisor of the DPS system, the onboard computers.

Management sat in Firing Room 2.

The launch team sat in Firing Room 1.

>> Sonny Carter was an ASP, that's an astronaut support person.

He strapped everyone in, and we went back to the launch danger area.

Sonny stood next to me, and we watched it lift off.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> It was just quiet.

It was just quiet.

And the engineering director said, "Did anybody see anything?"

What does your data look like?

And there was no data.

And he said, "Well, don't move anything.

You know, leave everything intact.

Leave everything right where it is."

And, you know, they they let us go home after a bit.

And I remember going home and... turned all the lights out.

I had a VCR.

And I put an extended tape in the VCR machine and started recording.

I haven't looked at that recording.

That was a bad day.

That was a very bad day.

>> Major funding for "When We Were Shuttle" is provided by Howmet Aerospace Foundation, investing in STEM education in communities where Howmet operates.

Additional funding is provided by the Jo Asmundsson Production Fund.

And viewers like you.

Thank you.

>> I just never worked on anything that had caused such destruction and killed people.

And I never thought in my wildest dreams that I'd be part of something that that could happen.

You know, maybe I wish I'd have been more profound, done something different.

But I played a role, and it was a very difficult time.

>> One of the hardest things was knowing... knowing the people.

I was friends with Ellison Onizuka.

You know, I spent a lot of time with him.

I guess I can say we drank beer together.

So, you know, these are real people, and you get to know them and they're your friends.

They end up trusting you.

And you have to earn that and you have to live up to it and you have to live with that.

>> I remember I took a couple of days off.

I couldn't go back to work right away.

We'd just sit out on the back porch and think, "All right, this is what I want to do?

Is this what I want to continue to do?

Are we even going to have a job?"

We didn't know if there was going to be a future or not.

>> There was talk at that time that that might be the end of the shuttle program.

This is not safe.

You can't make it safe.

It was that kind of talk coming from some politicians, some media.

Morale was at a low point then.

>> I knew several people that just did not want to continue in that business.

They thought it was too risky.

They didn't want to take the chance of it happening again.

They just did not want to be put in that pressure situation again where they had to launch people in this machine.

>> Ladies and gentlemen, I now would like to call this first meeting of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger accident to order.

The commission shall investigate the accident to the Space Shuttle Challenger, which occurred on January 28, 1986.

The commission shall, one, review the circumstances surrounding the accident to establish the probable cause or causes of the accident.

And, two, to develop recommendations for corrective or other action based upon the commission's findings and determinations.

>> There was a top-to-bottom review of every system related to the shuttle.

>> All the debris that they collected, they put in a hangar and they tried to kind of piece it together like a puzzle.

Each of the separate departments had to identify that.

If they found an engine, the guys in the engine department would say, "Yep, that's the left engine."

Tile.

That was a biggie too.

All the tile.

You know, the tile folks got to identify where that tile came from and...

It really was hard.

You know, before, it was like, "Yeah, I'm going to work!

I'm working on the shuttle!

This is so cool."

But that wasn't the attitude after that accident.

It's like, "Oh, my gosh, we got to figure out what happened, make sure this never happens again."

Because it was going be a long time before Congress was going to let us fly.

>> This morning, we will start the meeting with officials from NASA, particularly dealing with the matter of seals on the booster rockets.

>> We're particularly concerned for pitting where the O-ring, which are these two black 0.280-diameter devices you see in these grooves here, because a pit, obviously, can provide a path for hot gas to get by the O-ring.

>> When we went through the monthly briefings over at the Office of Space Flight, every month the O-ring problem or O-ring charring problem was on that list.

>> If this material weren't resilient for, say, a second or two, that would be enough to just be a very dangerous situation?

>> Yes, sir.

>> Thank you.

>> The accident had just happened an hour before.

And I remember one of my friends in my group said, "Those damn O-rings."

I didn't know what an O-ring was.

I said, "What are you talking about?"

He said, "Well, we've had problems with these O-rings, and now it finally got us."

And I thought that was very strange.

And now, looking back on that, it just jives so clearly with the failings at the management level.

We knew that there were problems with the O-rings inside the solid rocket booster.

About half of the missions prior to Challenger had a little bit of scorching on the O-ring from the combustion inside.

Should have zero.

There was a meeting the night before at the engineering level that said, "We should not launch tomorrow."

The fact that the meeting even had occurred never made it to the launch director, certainly not the results of it.

>> People didn't listen.

And we've seen some of that, where people will speak up and because of schedules cost, management says, "Oh, it'll be all right.

It's never happened before.

It'll be all right."

>> I think a lot of that got documented in the Rodgers report.

I think they did a really good job of bringing some of the program management aspects to bear.

And out of that, a lot of very good changes came.

There's a big shift in culture.

>> They definitely instilled in us to speak up and not hesitate.

Nothing will happen to us.

"You will not be criticized if you speak up.

You will not lose your job if you speak up.

If you think something's not right, if you think there's a problem, if you think we're moving too fast, speak up."

>> If that engineer wasn't comfortable with the decision that was made, then they had an appeal route that was put in to the program, an official appeal route to voice their opinion outside of their direct management chain of command.

Might not be acted on the way that engineer wants, but at least it would be heard.

And that's something we carried on throughout the remainder of the program.

>> Sometimes what worries me is that, as time goes on, the younger workforce, they haven't experienced this, and the people that learned from those mistakes are no longer with us.

So my biggest concern is how that stays current in current programs, that people understand the sheer devastation of when you don't get it right.

>> The way it was handled, too, you know, they buried everything in a silo, you know, and they acted like it didn't happen, kind of.

>> It's buried in an old Minuteman missile silo in the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

100 feet down in the ground, pieces are laid on top of each other.

There's a concrete cap on top, welded down.

Never to be seen again.

And that was because management at that time felt like the shuttle had to succeed.

"That accident was one of a kind, will never happen again.

Let's just put that debris away and move on and try to live up to our promise of frequent flight rate and low cost access to space."

♪♪ >> When we looked at flying Discovery for her return to flight, there wasn't a day of processing that wasn't extremely painful.

And when I say "extremely painful" -- majority of the workforce was nervous that you could have another one happen, and then everything's over.

So everything was treated you had to get it to the maximum level of perfection.

So nothing came easy.

>> Once life was lost, that put a whole different perspective on your little job.

>> I kind of think what was probably going on at that time was an admission that maybe we overstated the safety and reliability of this vehicle.

We still think it's safe to fly, but we admit it's never going to be the airline operational concept that we originally sold us on that.

>> It took two-and-a-half years.

Every system engineer looked at their system in detail.

All the flight system guys looked at their particular systems.

>> Training.

We had a lot, a lot of training.

Just like the astronauts do.

They put their trust in us.

And so we wanted to make darn sure that we didn't make a mistake.

>> T-minus 90 seconds and counting.

Less than two minutes away from the launch event.

STS-26 and its crew of five.

>> There's just so many people lined up along the causeways.

I mean, it took forever to get to work.

You know, you could just see the excitement and the concern at the same time on their faces.

But I just remember tears coming out of my eyes, thinking, "Oh, my gosh, you know, I'm going to get to be a part of something that so many people care about."

Not a lot of people can say that.

From that day on, I didn't want to ever do anything else.

>> I can tell you the week we were at the pad, and she's gonna launch in a couple of days, it was the first time you just started to breathe.

But when it took off, it's right there on the edge of your throat.

You were -- there wasn't anybody that wasn't tense.

>> Six... Three...two...one.

And liftoff.

Liftoff.

A gorgeous first stage as Discovery clears the tower.

[ Indistinct chatter ] [ Engines roaring ] ♪♪ >> We weren't totally relieved until it lands.

Yeah, that's when you -- it's like, "Phew, okay.

Came home safely."

♪♪ It was good.

Once we got a couple launches under our belt after that, we're sending up all these satellites, and we're getting all this fantastic information back.

It's kind of like a jab at everybody.

It's like, "See?

We told you we could do it."

♪♪ ♪♪ >> So many highs.

You know, as a young person in your career, you do certain things, you work hard.

On STS-4 it was the 4th of July.

Ronald Reagan's going to come out, meet the crew.

And I got picked as a young person to go out and be part of the safing team that would safe the vehicle and give the go for the presidential motorcade.

You hear the sonic boom.

[ Sonic boom pops ] The orbiter is reflecting coming in.

The president and Nancy get out.

It was Henry Hartsfield and T.K.

Mattingly.

They came down and they saluted, and Nancy gave them a hug.

And so from a young guy growing up in Pennsylvania, I just wanted to at least lift up my hand and break into a version of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

♪♪ >> One of the highlights of my life involved the RMS, the Remote Manipulator System.

I was the lead engineer on that from day one.

It was built in Canada.

So I was going back and forth to Toronto, Montreal, working with the Canadians.

It had basically the same movements that your arm would have.

The only difference is the wrist and the fact it could actually rotate around.

And it had snare rings that, when you close those rings, it would grapple.

It was all done in Earth's gravity.

So you don't know what's going to happen when you get it on orbit.

It was perfect.

>> I think one of the biggest high points I remember was the Hubble, the Hubble Space Telescope -- watching them use the arm, take that thing out of the payload bay.

Just watch it spin up and just go do its thing, and gosh.

[ Laughs ] >> I don't know if you remember, but it had op problems.

And so they had to redo the lens.

And astronaut Bruce Melnick, who ended up being my boss, went up and captured the Hubble, brought it into the cargo bay, and they changed out the lens.

And the rest is history.

I mean, Hubble has just given an enormous amount of data.

>> There's just so many other things, like John Glenn's launch.

Oh, my gosh.

It was an honor to send that brilliant man up in space again.

And we know so much about physical aspects of the human body.

>> John Glenn came into my white room.

I'm used to dealing with astronauts, and that's cool, but John Glenn?

That was the highlight of my career.

When they suited him up, they already had defibrillator tabs on his chest.

You know, a 77-year-old on launch day, they thought he might get a little excited.

He kept calling me "sir."

I'd turn around and look for my dad, thinking in my head, "You're the only 'sir' in the room."

Yeah, highlight.

[ Laughs ] >> But there's a lot of things that the space shuttle program never got credit for.

One of them was assisting in stopping the Cold War.

We were flying flights to the Russian space station Mir.

American and Russian astronauts were getting to know each other in space.

>> It was kind of a fascinating time.

We had Russian people in the orbiter processing facilities.

They had real dry, funny humor, and it made processing even more fun.

Their lunches were always a sandwich and two beers.

And then they were told, "Hey, you can't have beers on the space center."

Their response back to us was, "How do you expect us to work this afternoon?"

>> One single thing would probably be the International Space Station.

>> When the station came on the horizon, the thought of it and what they had on paper, what they were gonna do, almost seemed unachievable.

But if you had the pleasure of processing the hard work, it was just so, so, so pristine, just as gorgeous as it could get.

You didn't understand how all the pieces were going to fit.

It was the ownership of, this is where we're going.

>> The space shuttle carried up the majority of the components built by 15 different countries.

And then the astronauts, working together, assembled all those parts in space and is still continuing to operate today.

Matter of fact, I understand it just got an extension of its life.

A lot of people didn't understand the space shuttle, what it was capable of.

Part of that is NASA did a poor job of explaining what you get out of the space program, why it's important.

>> Even now, when you look at the space station, the average person has no idea about the benefits being derived from the station being up there and the research that's going on.

And that's sad.

Because I think if the average American recognized how their life is better through the space program, you would have more public acceptance of, it's going to cost and it's going to be risk.

If I'm a farmer and I recognize how farming has improved simply from photographs that's taken from outer space, when they can tell me things about my farm that I can't see with my bare eyes, yeah, I can buy into that.

>> Everything in your day-to-day life now is a spin-off.

All the different things NASA does to produce space vehicles, to produce the food for the astronauts, the clothing for the astronauts.

There's not a dime in space unless an astronaut carries it with them as a souvenir.

All of that money was spent for salaries and materials here on Earth.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Working in the space program, it was more than just work, work, work.

It was a lot of fun involved in it, too.

I remember we would celebrate birthdays, we would celebrate promotions.

We'd go to Carr's Park after work sometimes and just let off a little steam.

It was outside of the Cape so you could have some brewski.

[ Laughs ] No alcohol is allowed on center.

>> We're all young, so if we've got this amount of work done, someone says, "Hey, I'll buy a bushel of oysters and a keg of beer, and we'll do a little party out on the beach."

>> We started out as twentysomethings.

We got married, we had children.

It's quite a few people that are husband and wives.

There's quite a few people that got divorced because they met people out there.

It's real life.

[ Laughs ] I met my husband out there.

Actually, we almost got married in the orbiter.

It was great and it was horrible at the same -- I shouldn't say horrible.

It was a great thing that we had the commonality that when we wanted to come home and complain about our jobs, we knew exactly what the other one was talking.

And then again, having your husband at your same workplace and then you go home, would see your husband after you've seen him all day at the workplace all day.

We tried driving into work together, and let's just say he's a morning person, and I am not.

So we quit doing that.

[ Laughs ] For the safety of our marriage.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> Yes, stress in the household, and we both worked out there.

We found ourselves early on having conversations about work.

I'd be sharing what I was dealing with.

I'd get up at 4:30 in the morning, be at work at 5:00, 5:15.

By 5:30, going 100 miles an hour.

And that took its toll on me.

I wanted to be a good father.

I'd been working 10 hours, and then when I'd get home, there'd be five messages on my answering machine.

And she's like, "My God, you've been working all day long."

I said, "Well, they're processing that orbiter around the clock."

It was a job that probably wasn't conducive to being in the midst of small kids.

So we talked and decided that maybe I would, you know, look to do something different.

>> I was a single mom raising two kids, and luckily I had a very good support system.

When I had to work third shift or we had a night launch, their friends' parents let them spend the night.

We did a lot of homework in the car, eating a lot of fast food in the car.

Now that I'm retired, I look back and ask like, "How did I do that?"

I don't know how I did it.

>> There were a few folks that considered working out there as a job.

They wanted an eight-hour day and that.

Then there were people that came out there, and when I told them, "We need to be back here tomorrow to do this," they showed up.

There were times when the government was being shut down, and we weren't going to get paid.

And H.R.

couldn't understand when I said the technicians will come to work.

They said, "No, they won't."

I said, "Go ask them."

And they would go 'round, and they'd say, "I have a family.

I have a house.

I can't work for a long time.

But if Terry wants me back here tomorrow to work and tells me I'm not going to get paid, I'll show up tomorrow."

And that was the mentality that a lot of them had.

They were very proud of what they were doing and the fact that they were part of the world's greatest launch team.

Everybody says we'll never see another team like the one we had with Shuttle.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> I was at home.

I wasn't going to go for the landing.

In fact, I was still in bed.

And my son called and said, "Hey, Dad, the shuttle is late."

And I'm saying, "The shuttle can't be late.

It doesn't work that way."

>> Enabled for the landing.

>> Thank you.

>> I remember it like it was yesterday.

We were home.

It was not a regular workday.

We always had NASA Select on.

>> This is amazing.

It's really getting fairly bright out there.

>> And we kind of knew through the count what was going on because we knew the jargon.

>> I don't see anything out of the ordinary.

>> Okay.

[ Static crackling ] >> We kept hearing them calling for Columbia.

And no answer.

>> Columbia, Houston.

We see your tire pressure messages, and we did not copy your last.

>> Is it instrumentation, Max?

[ Static crackling ] >> And then all of a sudden we kind of both stopped and we were looking at LeRoy Cain.

♪♪ >> G.C., Flight G.C., Flight.

>> Flight, G.C.

>> Lock the doors.

>> Copy.

>> And I was like, "Whoa, that's not good."

>> You know what time it comes in and you know it lands, like, within the second.

It's like, "Okay, something's not right."

So I happened to call the firing room, and I said, "Hey, did we land somewhere else?

Did we not land at Kennedy Space Center?"

And they said, "We don't know what's going on."

So I said, "All right, I won't keep you guys because you're busy."

>> FDO, Flight.

>> Flight.

>> We didn't know what to do.

We were like the rest of the country.

We were glued to our TVs trying to glean anything.

>> We're going to suspend our normal format right now because we've got some breaking news.

We can confirm that the shuttle is behind schedule.

You'll notice here, it looks like you can see pieces of the shuttle coming off.

Pieces of the shuttle coming off.

♪♪ >> Hardest day for me was Columbia.

I was on the runway to open the hatch and they didn't come home.

The only words I remember was, "Men, go home and kiss your wives and pack your bags and be back here on the runway in four hours."

So I did what I was told.

I didn't really have time to process what I was about to do or what had just happened.

All I knew is I got crap to do and I got to do it now.

♪♪ ♪♪ >> As part of the recovery effort, they decided to search with helicopters.

So they brought in the forestry helicopters, the same ones that fight forest fires and do the water drops.

They were looking for people to go fly on the helicopters.

Since I had previous experience flying air rescue, I said, "Sure, I'll go do that."

Day two, I show up and they said, "By the way, you're in charge.

>> I flew 57 days when I was there.

And it was something that we were not trained for.

The debris field for Columbia was 250 miles long, roughly, and ten miles wide.

I remember the first tile that I found, seeing that.

Here's a piece of my spaceship.

I don't have the vocabulary to describe it.

Loss of life is hard in any job.

You had to do soul searching.

You had to see who you really were, you know?

I remember we flew over a pair of underwear.

Flight underwear.

♪♪ >> [ Laughs ] >> I'm so excited.

♪♪ >> Here comes the Superman entry of the astronauts.

>> None of them wanted to find human remains, and two of them did.

And they weren't happy they did.

They knew it was part of the job.

I started checking on everybody.

We'd taken all these people and sent them out there.

No one asked them how they felt about it.

There were a few of them that said, "We need to walk out back."

They needed a shoulder to cry on.

And when they were done crying, they said, "This never happened, and we're going back to work."

And they did.

♪♪ >> That was the hardest job I've ever done.

And I think it was treated with reverence.

I don't look back and dwell on it anymore.

You can't let that eat you up.

You just got to know that you went and did something that needed to be done.

♪♪ I was there for a bad reason.

But the people actually came together and made it a good thing.

♪♪ >> We had fantastic help from everybody, from the communities to all the people that were helping us search.

The Native Americans.

They were phenomenal.

There was one six-feet section of pipe that was completely buried in the ground, yet those people, because they know the land in the middle of the woods, he saw a puddle.

And he said, "There's no other water around.

Something's wrong."

They dug in that puddle and they found that beam and they could find just little, little specks of anything -- tile, a piece of metal.

Without the community and these searchers, we could not have done and collected as much as we did.

>> Those people in East Texas and West Louisiana went out of their way to take care of us.

They offered to open up their homes if people needed a place to stay.

The command center, you'd come in there and there's all these cakes and cookies and things donated by schoolchildren.

And they all came with a poster where the kids were sorry for the loss of the vehicle and the astronauts.

♪♪ >> One day we were in the hangar wiping down the helicopters and stuff, and I hear a horn blow and I go out there and there's three guys with a cooker and a trailer and a keg of beer and a whole pig.

They brought us barbecue.

I said, "Bring it on in.

Let's go."

>> No one asked them to do that.

They saw the need and they volunteered to do it.

>> People try to always find something good out of the bad.

And I'm proud of all the people that went.

>> I got to close the site down, once everybody had packed up and gone and everything was closed up.

I kind of just sat in my car and just kind of looked.

You to kind of sit there and reflect on, "What the heck just happened?"

♪♪ >> The intense on-the-ground field searching in Texas and Louisiana is complete now, as you know.

Right now, we've cataloged in 84,124 pieces of debris here in the hangar.

And our weight count to date is 84,900 pounds, or about 38% of the orbiter.

We've taken the last four months to recover the debris from the field.

1.6 million acres have been searched.

30,000 have been people involved.

And now we're looking forward to receiving the report from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and their recommendations.

>> I was asked to be part of the team that received parts of Columbia at the runway.

We had to catalog everything, no matter what it was.

Most all of the personal belongings went straight to Houston.

We didn't see any of that.

But experiments, seats, suit rings for their wrists.

Helmets.

How can it not affect you?

If it doesn't affect you, then you have no heart.

It's the oddest thing that that was the most tragic part, but it was also the best part of me ever working out there because...sorry.

[ Laughs ] [ Voice breaking ] Um, because we were all a family.

>> This is our 3-D reconstruction of pieces of the left-hand wing.

Those are actual pieces of Columbia, and we have them pieced back together so that we can see them in their logical orientation.

And of course, we can get behind it and look inside and see what may have been deposited on the inside.

>> T-minus five minutes and counting.

>> Launch director, the launch team is ready to proceed at this time.

>> Copy all.

Okay, Rick, if there was ever a time to use the phrase, "All good things come to people who wait," this is one time.

And for you and your crew, best of luck on this mission, and to the many, many people who put this mission together, good luck and Godspeed.

>> We appreciate it, Mike.

The Lord has blessed us with a beautiful day here.

And we're going to have a great mission.

We appreciate all the great hard work everybody's put into this, and we're ready to go.

>> Five, four, three, two, one.

We have booster ignition and liftoff of Space Shuttle Columbia, with a multitude of national and international space research experiments.

>> Roger, roll, Columbia.

>> Columbia now rolling on to... >> I was one of the flow managers for Space Shuttle Columbia.

Front-table guy that provides the leadership and integration to get that mission ready.

I was there for launch, of course, saw videos where the foam had hit the wing.

And, you know, we kept looking at that, played it over and over again, didn't look good.

But talked to subsystem managers and engineers that said it'd be like taking a snowball and throwing it up against the side of the house.

That energy will dissipate.

>> It's a good shot of the external tank just shortly after we pitched up.

You can see every once in a while some ice particles that are floating across the screen.

>> I'd been complaining about it since STS-1.

The picking pieces of foam out of the tiles.

They had been doing modifications, trying to make the foam on the tank more robust.

But there were certain areas that they just couldn't get it.

And then, this flight of Columbia, a piece of foam came off.

It was about 500 miles an hour when it hit the leading edge of the wing.

Well, the leading edge of the wing is reinforced carbon/carbon.

The experts said you can't damage carbon/carbon.

And it was easy to believe because there was some times we'd actually hit it with mallets and had not damaged them then.

We found out after the incident that the reinforced carbon/carbon was getting weaker and weaker the more we flew it.

We just didn't totally understand it.

When the rest of the communities agreed that we needed to go test that theory, we got reinforced carbon/carbon panels that had flown the same number of flights that Columbia's panels had, put them on, sent them out to the high speed lab in Texas.

>> I don't know if you want to call it ignorance or complacency or wishful thinking, but logically, your mind is thinking, "It's foam."

And look what foam does.

>> Five, four, three, two, one, zero.

>> Whoa!

>> Everything dead silent except the one guy saying, "Oh, ó_ó_ó_ó_."

The experts still hadn't believed it happened till it happened right in front of their face.

>> The result of getting the data from both of these tests, I believe that we have found the smoking gun.

I believe that we've established that the foam block fell off of the external tank.

It was in fact the direct cause of the Columbia accident.

>> 3,000-degree plasma got inside the wing and melted the wing from the inside out.

Ultimately, that caused the vehicle to turn sideways.

And it's not designed to fly sideways at those speeds.

So it literally tore it apart.

Then, a lot of technicians got mad at me 'cause I have a history of challenging what I don't think are the right decisions, and they went, "Why didn't you say more?"

I said, "I made phone calls.

I trusted the people who answered my questions.

I even called the program manager in Houston and I said, "Calvin, this does not look good."

But the experts said all their computer models said it's a non-critical issue.

[ Radio chatter ] >> Sorry.

[ Static ] >> I don't know.

It was just weird.

It just wasn't the same.

I didn't have the same enthusiasm anymore.

It's like, okay, this is a second tragedy I've been through.

It's like, I don't know, is this all worth it?

>> Since it was the second accident, will they let us fly again?

You know, all of those things are going through your mind.

>> Personally, I thought we could make it safer and fly it again.

I was a proponent of reducing the flight rate.

The concept was keep two shuttles, fly each one only once a year.

Because, remember, we had astronauts on board the Space Station.

We had to get crews back and forth and supplies back and forth.

If we were to shut down the shuttle program, we'd be relying on the Russians, which is what happened.

Another part of the reason I thought we should fly the shuttle, not just the technical side, was the workforce here.

>> The board has been extremely forthcoming all the way through the investigation.

>> Our administrator at the time of the recommendation, Sean O'Keefe, good friend of mine, his position was, essentially, whatever the Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommended, we're going to do.

>> NASA had conflicting goals of cost, schedule, and safety.

And unfortunately, safety lost out in a lot of areas to the mandates of operational requirements.

>> There was a mischaracterization, maybe even a misunderstanding of what the shuttle was as a mature and reliable system.

>> All levels of leadership are going to have to actively drive the bad cultural traits out of the organization, and it's something they're going to have to buy into personally.

They're going to have to accept it in their gut, and then, their daily reactions, they're going to have to look for these traits that we have carefully enumerated in our report, like stifling communications and stomping on engineers and things like that.

And they're going to have to drive it out.

It is not simple.

It'll take a long time.

♪♪ >> Well, it's not for me to agree or disagree at the level I was at.

I think, in the CAIB report, it found failure in some of the ways that we were doing business.

It showed that we were able to kind of slip from the Challenger accident back into maybe some less than stellar behavior or decision making that made the program much riskier.

>> The independent investigation board that studied us declared it inherently unsafe.

And that was it.

♪♪ >> I understand that, hey, it's a risk.

You've got an orbiter sitting next to a bomb, basically.

So, hey, maybe that's not the best design.

Maybe you should have the crew module on top of the rocket so it's safer for the astronauts.

>> Disagreed with it because we knew, since day one, that it was an extremely fragile vehicle.

You can't beat on it.

It was never designed to be impacted.

If that's the way they felt, we never should have flown the first flight because you can't guarantee nothing is going to hit it.

>> The independent board came out with three major recommendations.

One was to finish the International Space Station.

All the components were built to fly on the shuttle only.

Couldn't fly on any other machine.

When you're done doing that, retire the shuttle because it's inherently unsafe.

While you're doing those two, you design and build America's next launch system, and we were in the process of doing that.

It was called the Constellation program.

We had a test launch off, everything was going fine.

In comes a new presidential administration and cancels that program.

That set us back.

Technically, schedule-wise, and emotionally, too.

It was like a punch in the gut.

>> The saddest part out of all of it -- again, this is strictly my opinion -- you paid the Russians the same amount as what it cost us to process orders.

That'll never sit well with me.

I loved the shuttle program.

The idea that it costs the same money, and you're handing it to a different country?

I have serious problems with that.

♪♪ >> Those particular spacecrafts were completely ready to go fly for many, many more missions.

I mean, they were outfitted with glass cockpits.

They had major modifications.

It wasn't your dad's Buick anymore.

You know what I mean?

It really had evolved.

A completely automated space program.

But, unfortunately, the loss of life put a chink in the confidence.

And, so, I understood where they were coming from, but it was very sad that it truly was coming to an end.

>> In 2010, the space shuttle, after nearly 30 years of duty, will be retired from service.

♪♪ [ Laughter ] >> Okay, fellow teammates, I want you to say a few words with the orbiter in the background about what the shuttle program means to you.

Who wants to go first?

Come on, Frank.

You've been here forever.

Oh, did I say that?

[ Laughter ] Did I just say that on camera?

>> Yeah, you did.

I remember watching the Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon from my bed when I was a kid.

And from there on, I wanted to work on the space program, and I made it.

I was here for STS-1, standing just about here, taking pictures with a bunch of other colleagues from school.

And here I am, you know, next to the fourth to the last launch again, and hopefully I'll be here for the last.

And it's been a lifetime of experiences with this program.

>> Yeah.

Awesome.

♪♪ The end of the program was a challenge for Mark Nappi, Patty Stratton, who was his deputy, and then myself.

We were kind of the leadership team that had to get us to the end.

Patty and I, we got together and we said, "What are the things you can do when you're closing down a program to be successful at it?"

So we started brainstorming.

We're all about the people.

She was kind of similar to me in terms of her management goals that she strived for.

And I said, "Well, to me, you know, people need to be treated with respect."

And we never let 'em walk out the door without shaking their hand and thanking them for everything that they did for the program.

Yeah.

Just talk about the day and the symbolism of it and how you feel about it.

>> It's okay!

♪♪ >> I'd like to say that there's always the right leader for the right time.

And I credit Patty Stratton and Rita Willcoxon.

They got the people.

They got the emotional side of what people were going through and how hard it might be to recognize that this is the end.

>> Patty and I always emphasized that they made history.

And that nobody can take that away.

The program may be ending.

Not your fault.

The textbooks that your grandchildren are reading about will talk about Shuttle.

And you were a part of that.

Let's start -- Let's sing the song.

Come on, say a little part for me.

Wait a minute, I got to have Endeavor in the background.

>> "God Bless America"?

>> ♪ We all do what we can do ♪ ♪ To make this bird fly on wings ♪ ♪ And spirits soar ♪ ♪ Yes, they soar ♪ ♪ When three main engines sing ♪ ♪ And I see you ♪ ♪ Yes, I see ♪ ♪ You feel the same ♪ >> The voice is dead.

>> Beautiful.

'Cause that's -- >> Oh, God, I don't know that one.

♪♪ >> Could the layoffs have been handled better?

I don't think so.

We learned a lot from the layoffs at the end of the Apollo program.

You know, it's a government program.

Government programs hire contractors to do the work for the government.

And without a contract, those people go away.

That's just a fact of American life.

And Shuttle, we knew it was coming.

The recommendation came out in 2004.

Shuttle ended up being retired in 2011.

And, so, the workforce had time to prepare knowing they would probably get laid off.

But nevertheless, on those days, when you get your pink slip, it doesn't matter that you had 11 years to prepare for it.

You are not going to come to work the next day.

You don't have that paycheck.

It was very difficult to see my friends get laid off.

>> As far as I'm concerned, the American public could not be prouder of that shuttle team.

Knowing that they were going to lose their jobs, it was still focus 110%.

They were pure professionals up until the very bitter end.

It was incredible to see.

>> It was sad.

I've seen people with technical degrees, engineering degrees sitting in front of my desk with tears in their eyes.

Some folks went off and bought large trucks, became truckers, and worked at big box stores.

>> There was moments of frustration, anger, uncertainty.

Not so much that you lost the job, but you lost part of yourself.

>> People lost their homes left and right.

They couldn't find another job or they had to walk away because during all those layoffs was also 2009, which, you know, the economy tanked, and being the end of the shuttle program didn't help matters.

Nobody blinked an eye and were selfish.

We all did what we had to do.

Everybody should be really proud of what we accomplished.

>> All three engines up and burning.

Two, one, zero, and liftoff.

The final liftoff of Atlantis.

On the shoulders of the space shuttle, America will continue the dream.

>> Houston now controlling.

the flight of Atlantis.

Space shuttle spreads its wings one final time for the start of a sentimental journey into history.

♪♪ >> You know, the day the last shuttle launched, when it cleared the stack, I knew my life as I knew it was over.

Honestly, I felt like my family walked out on me a little bit.

I lost everything, I trusted people I shouldn't have trusted.

I got to find something now to make ends meet.

That's all.

That's just life.

[ Bell chimes ] Honey, I'm home.

Good morning.

>> Morning, Travis.

Welcome.

>> How we doing today?

>> We're doing good.

How about you?

>> I'm ready to go to work.

>> I hear you.

>> I think that's just way cool.

>> Yeah.

>> And he was here today.

They'd sewed the blankets by hand -- I'll show you one.

I volunteer at the museum.

I don't get anything out of it.

It costs me money I don't have just to drive there.

But I do it because I found out that there's people that are interested in what we did.

For a long time, I didn't even tell people what I did 'cause I didn't want people to think I was bragging.

But, damn, what a cool job.

We were not special.

There was thousands of people that did thousands of things.

You had people's lives in your hands.

You had this vehicle that was just awesome.

[ Chuckles ] We put our hearts and souls into it, you know?

>> I was always involved in other things outside of work.

So, once I left work, I put on a completely different kind of hat.

I do think NASA put forth an effort to provide access to equality in terms of employment to African-Americans.

Many of the school children kind of grew up with the shuttle program and being able to see Black astronauts.

It broadened their horizon into what's possible.

We have a myriad of issues that need addressing today.

But I think national programs can help unite us as a nation and as a people.

>> When I think of the space shuttle, the technical accomplishments, bar none.

But there's a humanistic side to the shuttle program.

It didn't really hit me until I turned my badge in.

I had had unrestricted access to Kennedy Space Center from April 1967 until July 2011.

That was hard.

That was very difficult.

>> I was very, very lucky to work on a new program from start to finish.

Job security, raising a family in that environment, be a part of all its highs and Lows, unfortunately.

It's cool that they have a time capsule over there in the visitor center.

When they sealed that thing up, they had people write down their kids' names.

And they're going to notify them when they open it.

So I'm hoping my daughter will get to go there.

I think it'll bring back a lot of memories for her.

And maybe for her kids, my granddaughters, they'll say, "You know what?

I want to do that, too.

I want to be like Grandma did and do that, too."

>> It's highly emotional.

You know, we'd fuss at each other, have arguments, sometimes raise our voices.

But when you'd see that vehicle roll out, if you'd just look over and make eye contact with people, you'd see tears in people's eyes.

We did this.

I get emotional even thinking about it.

But great people, great team.

You know, my memories are... Just glad to be a part of it.

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♪♪