throw it across the room 10 feet or 12 feet into a waste basket. if you threw it at the waste basket it arced off this way so you got used to throwing it this way so it would come down. the objective was not just to play games. it was to give you as many fouled up cues, cross cues as you could possibly get. your vision was one. deep proprioceptive, body senses were another. your feel was another. every time you moved your head you got a different sensation in this thing. we trained that -- they don't use that for training anymore. we didn't know what the human body could take on the centrifuge. how many gs could you take? how long did you -- where did you stop operating if you were going up and this thing ran away and went to high gs or you made a tough, steeper re-entry because of some error, what would happen?

so we went up to the naval air development center at johnsville where they had a 50-foot human centrifuge up there. they could mount the capsule, mount a similar thing with a cockpit on it at the end of this 50-foot arm. if you went out there and you were out at that 50-foot arm at the end of it and you're lying down like this in the bottom of this thing and it's going to turn and go around like this, as it went around then, it turned up like that so that your body was taking the gs out here and we got up, we rode that thing at lower levels first, but finally got up to 16 gs, and that's a gut-buster. i never want to do that again. but al shepard and cooper and i, i think, were the three that did that. worked it up slowly. and at 16, even in that position where the gs are being taken in this direction, you had to just tense every muscle as hard as you could to keep enough blood up in your head to keep from

passing out. and we got, at that point it was getting tenuous enough, we didn't push it any further because we'd probably have just blacked out at that point. but those were runs that i -- and we sort of set the parameters, i think, on that on what people could do and not do. now, another variation of that was one that was very, very interesting, and that was, somebody had come up with the idea that if you were on a -- if you're on a mission and you come down and you're on the parachute hanging up here and your spacecraft comes down and you hit on land, and when you hit, the parachute will detach. now, when it detaches, if you're hitting, if you're coming down and it happens to be a high wind here and you hit and this thing skips and comes down on the small end, obviously, you're going to come out of the couch and hit the shoulder, hit the straps that are keeping you in the seat. so they decided we should go up and make some runs on that to see whether we could take that or not or whether we needed better body restraint up here in that situation than just the two straps down over your shoulders.

so, we went up and made what we called the tumble runs, or better known as eieo, eye balls in to eye balls out. and we got out on the end of that, and what we would do is start the machine, you'd be going around, you would get your high gs out here as you went around. and then as you went around, they would in three seconds, you would reverse this capsule out on the end so that your gs went from in to out to on the straps. and so, we started this out low at about 2 gs and worked it up slowly. most of the tests we did all through the whole program were not ones where the doctors did them ahead of us, but on that one, for some reason, bill augerson, one of the doctors, was working ahead of us on that and we went up to 5 gs, i think. he was trying that run. al and i and gordo had done the 4 to 4. a delve of 8 gs in to out in about eight seconds was a tough

run and he was doing this 5 to 5. and he came out of it at the end of the run when it stopped. he was breathless, he was coughing. couldn't get his breath, coughing, coughing, coughing. and so, we decided we'd stop and find out what happened. well, the doctors went down and they had one of these large they had one of these large anthropormorphic dummies where you can peel off and see the internal organs, to see what happened to the internal organs. they kept turning the dummies getting the g vectors that bill got inside, and what they determined was that the heart was moving around like this, coming up behind one lung and was hitting one lung hard enough to force the air out of it. we terminated the test at that point, yeah. anyway, those were some great experiences to look back on, not ahead to. and talking about the 16 gs, though, on the back, you'd have these small ruptures under the skin that leaves little purple

points all over. and on the eieo runs, on the tumble runs, when we came out and hit the straps on those, you could just see where the straps were down here when you took your suit off by the same petikia, a purple thing where you made ruptures under the skin. another one, that they didn't know if we had a runaway spacecraft. we had a sticking and it was getting faster and faster. where does it phase out? designed it at nasa laboratory in cleveland, called a multiaccess space training facility and it had three axis to it. it had about 15 feet across, it had one gimble. each gimble was a different either role pitch or yaw. role, next one in, pitch, then yaw, and the cockpit with the astronaut in it in the middle of this. they could run this rig up and turn it loose. they could turn it, run it up and let it coast in whatever axis they wanted to test you in, and then you had your hand controller in there with enough

compressed air that would simulate what you would have as that same force in space on the real spacecraft. so you'd try yaw and you'd be able to control yaw back with the little rate instruments that you had right in front of you here, little instrument panel, like you'd have in the spacecraft and like you can see on the one on "friendship 7" out there on the floor. they then would combine two axis and then the graduation exercise was 30 rpm and roll, pitch and yaw at the same time. now, you figure how you're going roll, pitch and yaw at the same time. you would understand why the thing became known as the barf machine. but they don't do those tests now because they didn't prove too useful. we also went through scuba training at little creek, virginia, underwater, inverted escape in the capsule upside down under water, sink it and get out from it under there. we did training at the planetarium at north carolina at chapel hill. did some 0-g training.

i'm sure you've seen in an airplane where you go down, come up and push over and just enough so that you free float in the cabin and come up over the top and down until you have to pull out again. that way, you can get about 30 seconds of weightlessness, as long as they hold that exact parabolic flight. and we did a number of those runs, also. well, those are just some of the things we did on training, most of which we don't do anymore because they didn't prove any value. but we were trying to cover every base. now, if you had to make an emergency re-entry, that was going to be an interesting situation because we did not have emergency crews everywhere to pick you up, so what they did was station them so that anywhere in the world you could be picked up by a crew within 72 hours. so, we were supposed to have training, then whether you're coming down over in the desert or in the jungle or at sea, we were supposed -- we got training

as to what you would do in that particular situation. now remember, we're going to go across sub sahara and central africa, going across the australian outback, which 40 years ago still had aborigines. and going right up across the spine of new guinea and the highlands where there were aborigines there. let me skip forward a few years as to why this really was of some importance, i guess, back at that time that we get all this kind of training. andy and i in 1978 were asked by president carter to take a delegation to the solomon islands when they were getting their independence, and we did, but we had a few days to spend in papua, new guinea, also, and used to take -- some of the people at the consulate area advised us to go up into the hills in the highlands where there was a missionary had come in and found this tribe that had never been contacted before, ever. found it 13 years before. and they had a plane where we could go in, land on a little strip going up a jungle hillside there, one of these high lift

airplanes, stalls, sort of takeoff and landing airplanes. so we rode up in there, went up there and went over to this place. we walked through a jungle and up a mountainside to get to this village. the missionary, when he had come there, the natives there had contacted them, never had any contact, but then went to the outside world and as near as they could tell, they had no written language and the missionary gradually got their conscience. -- confidence. he had been there i think seven years in addition to when we were there, but he had written out the new testament in their language phonetically and they liked him and we came into the village then. he had mistakenly told them that i had been to the moon. and that was an error, because when i got into the village, it turns out that in their old animistic religion they had had in olden days, they looked at the moon and they thought that

all the spirits of the dead whatever -- animals, people, plants, everything -- all the spirits went to the moon, the spirits were white, that's the reason the moon was white and nobody had ever come back. and he told them i had been to the moon and come back. well, you can imagine the reception andy and i had in that particular village. it was phenomenal. but there was another aspect of it, also, that was interesting, and that is that when the -- this was shortly after our bicentennial. and i had taken one of the golden medallions from the bicentennial with a red ribbon on it. i presented this to him as a gift. he took his feathered neck dress off and some beads that he had had carved out of little rocks, stones. he gave that to me. i thought it was just to use while i was in the village, but it was not. he wanted it to be something i took with me. i headed back to my senate office -- we have it in columbus there now, and i still have it

to this day, one of my most prized possessions. but as i gave him these remarks that the missionary translated, he gave me this back and he said that when he was a young man, they used to fight all the time with other tribes. and he pointed to his arms and he had scar tissue and scars on his legs, and he said, and sometimes when we would stop, we would eat parts of each other. i was standing there talking to a really honest to goodness live cannibal in his younger days. and he said, but we don't do that now and it's much better. so i didn't know whether to laugh along with him or to cry because it was something that the missionary had brought there and it was a whole new way of life to them and it was really a moving time.

anyway, we did survival training and jungle training. we did that in, down in the desert -- or, i'm sorry, down in the jungles of southern panama, northern colombia. they put us into those jungles after receiving our training. we went down there, led down through the jungle canopy. the helicopter put us down by twos, neil armstrong and i camped out for three days in there in this wet rain forest. very difficult to have -- very difficult to deal with that. now, another thing about emergency re-entry, and this one i've found interesting, too. imagine you're coming down, you're making an emergency re-entry. now you've come down and here you are, anybody down there below you has heard probably a boom, like that, a sonic boom, as you went subsonic. now, here comes the big parachute, here's this little thing hanging under it, comes down, hits the ground, and any people there, if you're off in the middle of the congo or the aborigines out back or in that area of new guinea that i just spoke of, and bang, there's another bang and you blow the hatch off this thing and out steps this thing in a silver suit. now, there's a good chance that you're going to be either dead or elected chief very, very,

very fast. so, i thought it'd be a good idea to be able to communicate with these people. so i drew up a little message and we sent it to some of the linguists. i think they farmed it out of the library of congress. to pick the most likely dialects of some of these remote languages along the track and put it down phonetically so that i would have a little message if i had to make an emergency re-entry and came down in one of those places. and you can imagine the message basically was me friend, take me to your leader, big reward, you know, things like that. [ laughter ] but one of the more interesting things that came out of that was a more serious note. and i think it's a message bigger than that piece of paper i carried with me. many of those languages, the word for stranger and the word for enemy was the same word.

yeah. if you don't know somebody, haven't gotten acquainted with them, they're an enemy. they're going to be an enemy. when actually, if you just got to know them a bit, they're a friend. so, stranger and enemy, i think there's a big message there for all of us. we went -- the doctors had some ideas about what we might run into, thought the eyeballs might change shape in weightlessness, and if you look down there, look up on the upper part of the instrument panel in "friendship 7," you'll see a tiny vision chart, a miniaturized version of the one in the doctor's office that i was to read every 20 minutes during flight. we had heart checks up there, had an ekg, and we had put that on so many times during training, one day i told big -- bill douglas, our flight surgeon, i thought we should have some marking on the skin so we always put it on the same spot so you got better, more reliable, repeatable information. he thought that was a good idea, so he took his scalpel and roughed up the skin a little bit, put a drop of india ink on it, and to this day, i have a

little black spot here, here, here and down here. so we had the reliability of having the same spot every time, anyway. i actually got to the flight and we had the flight went on the 11th, scheduled date. actually suited up four times. once it was canceled while i was going down in the van. but launched and got the go for seven -- or they said at that time, even though we only intended to go for three, but that was the lingo we used out of the control center at that time. and so, we're up there and i get the control system checks and ready to go to work. now, many of you probably remember bill dana, the comedian who back in the old days had this character that he portrayed as being the reluctant astronaut. it was jose jimenez. remember bill dana and jose jimenez. well, bill had this -- and that became quite popular among the astronauts back at that time and we used to kid each other.

and bill had this one routine about because there had been some animals sent up and mice and so on on different tests, bill had this whole routine where he felt so sorry for the little mouse and why don't we just let the little mouse out of the snows cone, and he went on with that. and every time when we would have a tough test we were doing, somebody would come up with the thing, let me out. i just feel like the little mouse in the nose cone. there i was in space, just east of bermuda, going and had the system checked. i thought it was time to get to work. great, we're following the timeline here exactly. reached over to my right, pulled up the velcro flap over here, and floating up out of there came the little mouse. the tail was tied on down here so it couldn't get loose and do any harm, but it had al shepard written all over it. i can guarantee you that.

and al had gotten this someplace, and i guess we all needed a little tension breaker once in a while, and that was a good one, because that was a very perfect thing. so that's one of my more prized possession is the little mouse. we had some problems, as you saw in the pictures here a little while ago. i won't go into those, but we had automatic control system problems, the heat shield problem coming back in, and came back in okay on that. anyway, fast-forward to '96. 1996, we were preparing for some debates in the senate on nasa budgeting. i had noted in some of my reading that nasa had in all this interim 120-some manned space flights over those -- since the 1962 that they had noted about 52 different changes that occur in the human body in space for a lengthy period of time. now, there were nine of those in particular that stood out to me because there are things that

also happened to the elderly as you age right here on earth, and there were things such as osteoporosis sets in. for the young people up in space, cardiovascular changes, orthostatic tolerance, balance changes, muscle system, protein turnover, protein replacement in the muscles, coordination changes. the body's immune system changes. you get less resistant to disease and infection. sleep patterns change, obviously, but drug nutrient absorption becomes different. all those things happen, you recover. when those things happen to you just by aging here on earth, you don't get any better. and so the idea -- i approached the nasa doctors if they had ever thought of sending someone older up there to see what the reaction would be and aging people were also interested in this. and the idea was, could we find out by looking, patterning the differences between the elderly and those younger people, maybe learn what within the human body turns these systems on and off.

if we could, then we could make it possible for the younger astronauts to make longer flights and the elderly right here on earth maybe relieve the elderly of some of the frailties of old age right here on earth. now, they put that out for study for over a year and came back and decided, yes, it would be good to go. fortunately, i was able to qualify physically, so i was very glad to be able to get that flight. the national institute of aging interest in this is obvious, because in the year 2000 we had some 34 million americans over 65. that's due to go to over 100 million by the year 2050. so, and that pattern is going on all over the world. so if we can make some breakthroughs in that particular area, not only can we keep the younger people up in space longer without having some of these harmful effects and maybe erase the frailties of old age right here on earth. it's a toe in the door, it's a start. right now we have a database of

one, but hopefully, down the road four, five or six years from now, i would hope we would have sent more people in this age bracket up there so we have a database that is much more meaningful to the scientists who want to look into this. you compare these flights, they're very different. i won't go through all the differences here, but sts 95, when we lifted off on "discovery," it doesn't get above about 3 gs, and that's by design. it's a longer entry period, takes about 8 1/2 minutes instead of just over 5, as "mercury" did. but the scientific equipment you're taking up there now couldn't take 9 gs without being built much heavier and probably with less accuracy than it is now. so you had a longer period going up but very low g level. same thing coming back in. you don't get above 2 gs now coming back in, but you start your entry, instead of 3,000 miles, you start it about 9,000 miles away, right over the edge of the indian ocean. food has improved measurably, i can tell you that from the tube

food back in the old days to 42 choices now. the cubic square feet that are in the "friendship 7" down here, about 50 cubic square feet. shuttle has about 2,500 square feet, and that does not include the tunnel and the space hub back there where we ran a lot of the experiments. i'm always asked when i give a talk at a school about body functions, and the kids always want to know about that. and from the old days, we just didn't have that problem because three days before the mission you went on a low residue diet and that took care of that. and so when anything for that and any urine, you just had that, that went into a plastic bag strapped to the inside of the suit. now you have in the shuttle now you have a system that's almost like what you have at home, not quite. you have to remember that you're still weightless while you're in there, so you have little

spring-loaded handles come up and come out over your thighs to hold you down on this, and when you get ready to take care of your business there, why, you pull a handle and it slides a thing out from under you and starts air flow down into the toilet. otherwise things would float around, and you don't want that. and then you reverse that process coming out. anyway, how many computers, i've been asked many times, did i have on the "mercury" flight? i had zero. there were none on that flight. on the last flight, we had not only the big main computers that control the altitude of the spacecraft and its functions, but we had 18 laptops, because on the last flight, the mission of the whole space program had changed through the years. we now are interested mainly in basic fundamental research. it's not just going up to see if we could do it, which was the mission of "friendship 7." it was now going up with 83 different research projects that varied all the way from putting a satellite out of our pay load

bay that would make some special measurements on the sun, the "spartan" spacecraft, clear down to some biomicromolecular studies of biology and rice samples and some things like that. so it went the whole gamut things. so, america's been a curious questing nation. we've learned the new and the unknown first. we've pushed back the frontiers of knowledge more than any nation in history. and in our democratic system, we've put it to work. we've created jobs, new industries, new standards of health and living and become the envy of the world. if there's one thing we've learned that's a basic research usually has a way of paying off in the future more than anything we can see at the outset. and that's been true throughout history, whether it's sir alexander fleming, curious about mold, of all things, mold in the bottom of a petri dish, and out of his curiosity comes penicillin and the beginning of

the whole antibiotics industry and changing of life expectancy around the world. curiosity. jefferson sends lewis and clark off, columbus comes to america. franklin's curious about electricity. desraeli finds sparks jump from one bottle to another and they say what good is it? and he says what good is a baby? and i guess that's true about most research. sometimes it's a fact that's learned that doesn't have immediate use, but it fits a pattern later on that helps with a quantum leap forward in whatever it is. now protein crystal growth is being done with a purity and size you can't do here on earth, and that's useful in the study of pharmaceuticals and the medical people. and there are always doubters. but if there's one thing i think

we've learned, it's that we are well served by money spent on research. obviously, we're not going to turn all our money over to research, but we can certainly put enough of it in to make use of that space station up there now, i think, better than we're doing, because it's been cut back now, and i know we have to get our finances under control and things like that, but it was designed for six or seven people, and right now we're able to maintain three people up there. so the amount of research, until we can get the other three people up there doing research, is going to be curtailed from what it could have been. and this is the first time we've ever had a chance to get into this kind of research in space, and i think that it's going to be one of the most valuable. so we said we'd have a time period for q&a here tonight, and jack, maybe we can get to that right now in what time we have left. thank you. [ applause ] >> we'll start with two questions for the theater here and then we'll go to the planetarium. yes. right up here.

[ inaudible question ] >> you were talking into a tape recorder at the time. i was wondering what your thoughts were as you were being launched into space for the second time? >> the question was, you said on your flight in "discovery," did you mean "mercury"? on "discovery" that you were talking into a tape recorder, and how did that compare to your most recent experience? >> well, it was a very different type flight, and i must say a different confidence level, too. because the first time up, it was a little bit, you know, we hadn't had a perfect flight record on some of the boosters before that time. but this time around we had 120 manned flights and only one failure out of all those, which is an amazing safety record. is really is when you're dealing with speeds and complexities, and you know, you're going almost five miles per second when you're up there and coming back into the atmosphere with that and the high heat out ahead of a 9,000 degrees out three or four feet in front, the heat shield itself, about 3,000 degrees.

so you're dealing with things like that. so this time up, though, we had a much greater experience level than we did the first time up. my talking into the computer or into the tape recorder, i didn't into the tape of that as i had planned before. i was so interested in what was going on in each stage and each thing you hear and feel going up, and so i have that tape, but it's not particularly valuable, i don't think, or anything that hasn't been told a hundred times before. >> yes. >> in "the right stuff," you're depicted in re-entry as humming "the battle hymn of the republic" -- >> a bunch of garbage. no, the last -- >> "the right stuff," you were depicted on re-entry humming "the battle hymn of the republic." can you comment?

>> yeah, comment, yeah. tom wolfe in the book i thought did a good job in the book. i enjoyed the book. i hope we don't have any movie producers here. if we do, that's too bad, because i just thought when they got hooked up with it, and they sort of hammed it up badly enough that it didn't bear a whole lot of relationship to reality. and the problem was, they had advertised that movie as almost being a documentary of the early space days. but i was not singing. i was working my tail off coming back in, because the automatic system was out. i had flown -- went out at the end of the first orbit. i had gone manual. i was flying the thing manually, and during that time period coming back in, there were oscillations building up and i was trying to damp them out, and i was working very, very hard, and the last thing i was doing was sitting there singing to myself. so that -- they just made that one up, and another one in there, too -- they had the fireflies i saw the specs up there. in the movie, they made that out to be from a campfire in australia where the aborigines had a campfire and the sparks were coming clear up and they're going up into space. and they just -- any high school physics -- you know, that just doesn't happen.

these sparks are continuing on up above the atmosphere some way. and i appreciate the symbolism of all this, of aborigines to the latest scientific move and the connection of sparks, and that was what it was supposed to be, i guess, because even in hollywood, they know sparks can't get up that high, yeah. >> we'll go to the planetarium. >> this question i guess doesn't have a clear-cut answer, but your backup on "friendship 7" was scott carpenter, and he, of course, inherited deke slayton's flight following your flight. and i was wondering if, perhaps, one of the reasons that "aurora 7" might have gone less than perfect was that carpenter only had a six weeks to get ready for the flight, do specific training, and your flight had been delayed a couple months and maybe didn't really train so