brute force mechanics to fix the space systems. so skylab to me was -- it started off in a tough fashion where again the flight control team literally fought, took over ground command of this thing and flew it by ground command, used half of all its propellant that was scheduled for a year in the first week because we were manually firing the thrusters, manually firing the jets. we couldn't see the sun. we used the most primitive rudimentary -- and i was one of the plotters for the flight directors called me back into action. i was sitting in mission control every day for a year, myself and pete frank. called me into action, we would plot external skin temperatures and from those temperatures we would deduce the location of the sun and figure out where to maneuver it so we could find the proper balance between keeping sun to generation power through the solar rays versus minimum temperature to keep the inside -- everything on the inside from frying and we flew the spacecraft using simple plots.

i mean just that way for the time until i guess in the spectacular engineering team of johnson and marshall, could come up with ways to replace the thermal shroud that we had lost and try to find ways to pop one of the stuck solar rays loose. and then they took pete conrad, paul weitz and joe kerwin and trot them to install all this stuff on an eva. and these were the most wild evas i think that we had ever, ever done since the gemini program. this was -- i looked forward -- pete frank and i, who was flight director, we basically sat 12-hour shifts in mission control every day for a year and we were absolutely delighted when a flight director would call for us to sit down at the console and maybe take a shift. there was one time that was really funny, anecdotal.

at the end of the first sky lab mission, several of the flight directors went over to receive awards from -- over at huntsville and they flew them over in the nasa airplane. obviously they needed a flight director on shift here. myself and pete frank carried the time frame while they were off getting their awards. and flight directors came back from the awards, took a look at what we had done from a standpoint of flight planning, threw it all out and started from scratch. the other thing that was neat -- really something -- chuck lewis had been suffering from stomach problems all through the final mission and until finally he required emergency surgery. so two weeks prior to the end of the mission i was recalled back to my flight director duties and sat his shift from the time he had the surgery until the mission was over. so basically i had covered the gemini, the apollo and the sky lab missions as a flight director.

so it was probably the longest span in history of any of the flight directors that were doing the business. >> couldn't keep the old war horse off the -- >> no. no. once you get into the -- into this business, i was a fighter pilot. when you left the cockpit, you really realized that you had lost this one thing in life you treasured most. but you also recognize that there's a thing in life called progress, you got to keep moving forward. it was the same thing with leaving the console as a flight director. there is no question, any flight director who's ever left has had the happiest times of his life on console. my job now was to continue building the teams and to continue the championship practices that, the production of the caliber of the teams for the sky lab, the soyuz, and then into the shuttle program spop. so that became my job. >> what do you remember of astp?

>> astp was to me the enigma of the entire program. i found it very difficult to believe that first of all, we were abandoning sky lab, a very functional, useful space station. and we were committing resources, a launch vehicle and a spacecraft, to go after a purely political objective. they made a big deal about working with the russians and learning to rendezvous and do fly-arounds. my god, we had done that as early as the gemini program. there wasn't any technical aspect of doing this and i could not believe that we were giving up and an extended mission in the sky lab for a purely political set of objectives. but again, i've never been a politician so i did not really focus -- maybe as well as i should -- upon this -- the broader set of political objectives.

because there has to be many constituencies in space. there are political, technical, they're what i would say is our keep america working. there is a variety. i look at the one as most important, however, as giving young people a place to go, young people a dream to have, to hold on to and to move into the future. that to me is most important legacy of space and if it takes a political set of objectives to do it, so be it. >> you are not too happy with the decision then to end our first space station, even that space station of course introduced a whole new philosophy, didn't it? now you are looking at the difference between a mission and this thing that stays up there day in and day out. >> the sky lab i believe was probably the most productive era of space science in the history of the program. we had four major classes of science. we had astronomy and we put astronomers on-board the

spacecraft outside the earth's atmosphere looking at the sun. we had marvelous relationships with major laboratories an scientific observatories that were interacting with the crew in realtime. as a control team when the crew wasn't there, we would take over these instruments, point them so that we continued the scientific process in an unmanned fashion with ground control. we had medical experimentation where we continued to learn about man in space, continued to probe the very unknowns about how long and how capable will man be over an extended period of time. we continued to press the envelope from a standpoint of crew performance. we found out a lot about the psychology of having a crew in space. and having the ability to communicate not only with themselves but with their families, to develop a camaraderie between the control team and the ground so that we feel what they feel and visa versa. the earth resources to me was probably one of the most

magnificent set of experiments. it was probably the most time critical activities other than lunar landing that we've ever performed in mission control because we had finite resources on-board the spacecraft and we had to compute these passes to a second by second basis, cameras on, off. but we would look at the major hotspots, the areas of geologic interest, areas where the ocean seemed to be doing things we didn't understand. then we had a series of core corollary experiments. we did such things as run furnaces and try to make everybody makes kidding about making various small what we call microspheres where you are making ball bearings in space but these had a reason also. we're trying to develop manufacturing process. we had to find out what happens when metals melt together in a zero g environment. we had this perfect vacuum to work in. so i really considered the abrupt termination of sky lab

after only three manned missions almost heretical in fashion. it was sort of like leaving the moon. and to give up this very rapid process of learning for a mission that was purely political made absolutely no sense to me. >> do you see a relationship however between the fact that now the russians and the united states are together and their objective is to build a space station, a modernized version, if you will, of what sky lab once was. >> i believe that the process of working together internationally is incredibly important. but i guess i'm an american firster. that i believe in america for americans. i don't believe that we've got a business-like relationship that is going to allow us to continue to work in space. you have to have a set of ground rules that are operational in nature, technology in nature.

you cannot set a game plan. that's totally political in nature. it isn't going to make sense to the participating countries, whether it be russia or america. i believe the problem that we have with the international space station is that nobody in america is really understanding what is going on there, why we are doing this, we have done a very poor job of selling this program. and i believe it is going to go the way of the lunar program. it's going to go the way of skylab. but the problem is, you can't just walk out after the mission's over because you have this massive device up in earth orbit that has to be brought down in a controlled fashion. and it is again, a horrible waste of financial resources within the united states, within russia, within the participating countries. the fact is that we have to come to a business-like set of agreements with the russians in the same fashion we have with

the other participating countries -- europe, japan and canada, and we have not yet established that kind of relationship. we continue to make excuses for the financial problems they've got. we continue to make excuses for the lack of deliveries. the fact is these were recognized in the early days of the program. the financial problems aren't going to go a away. the technological problems aren't going to go away. but we still want russia as a partner, but we also have to set up the game plan that is going to work for the next five, ten, 15 years. >> and do you think it is possible to establish such a game plan? >> i believe that there is enough in space for all participants that, yes, we can establish such a game plan. we have to move beyond what i would say are the national -- what i'd say almost ethnic relationships for building a relationship in space. russians versus americans. we have to look into it. what is good for our nation in a broader sense.

what is good for our industry. what is good for our scientists. we have to move beyond the boundaries we've got. but to do that we have to have a better framework and we don't have it. >> one thing we do have today is the workhorse. something called space shuttle. you worked on that and now the shuttle have flown in an immense number of flights very successfully. would you like to talk a little bit about shuttle? >> i love the shuttle. i think the shuttle is -- john young i think said it -- it is a magnificent flying machine. i look at the shuttle as the last hurrah of the mercury, gem gemini and apollo generation. it is the device that was founded on the principles that george low and robert gilreth established. it carries forward the strong leadership like chris kraft, deke slay on the, aaron cohen,

own morse. basically if you look at how this device came into being, it is probably the most advanced technological space system that has ever been built. interestingly enough it was built by a generation of people who today just really don't receive the recognition that they should have for the commitment they made to america's, in fact the world's capabilities. the belief that the shuttle was the instrument that was built by the most gifted technologists, leaders and managers that ever existed within the space program. and i think this gift that they gave to the american public, the space business, is never fully recognized. it's the most fundamentally reliable system, space system, that has ever been built. it is a space system that has a broad range of missions.

it's demonstrated itself fully capable by accomplishing every one of its design objectives. unfortunately it has not achieved the economies that were intended, but to a great extent these economies are not being achieved principally because of political limitations that have been put on the program. at the time of the "challenger" accidents we were one of the worrell's premier launchers of satellites from the shuttle. we had carried the majority of the department of defense payloads. we had done payload operations, carried laboratories for many of the countries in the world as well as providing a research laboratory for people in the united states. with the stroke of a pen it was decided that we were unwilling to risk human life to deploy satellites that could be as well deployed in an unmanned fashion. we sort of lost track of our objectives. what we are after was continuing

the operation of the premier launcher within all space systems of the world and we were also trying to make this launcher economically feasible. unfortunately, we lost sight of what our objectives were in the early phase of the program. we basically accepted a placebo for the loss of the "challenger" crew and i think if they were here today they'd say we went the wrong way. >> do you think perhaps that too much was asked of the space shuttle? because it originally was conceived as something that would be all things to all programs, and perhaps that was asking too much. >> well, i'd say yes and no. this is -- i'm not equivocating in this. i think it literally was everything technically that we asked it to do. it could deploy, it could retrieve, it was a platform for evas. it carried laboratories. it was a launcher for satellite

systems, you name it. anything that was asked of it technically, it got done. the one thing it did not become was the economic workhorse that we had expected it to be. i think this was part of this process within the nation we were using to sell programs to congress. you overstate their abilities. i don't think any operator ever looked at said, hey, we're going to launch one of these guys every week. no matter how good your space system is, really it wasn't that good. the technology wasn't quite there. it is not the dc-3 of the space program. it's back maybe a generation earlier than the dc-3. some of the earlier douglas transport prototypes. but i think you have to put this in the context of today and in the context of the future. i think it is essential to maintain many of these technologies as a nation so that

we're capable of protecting and providing for our own people before we start worrying about peoples of the world. in order to take care of the peoples of the world we need a strong economic base ourselves. i think we can see that today. as the economy in the world is sinking and rising, we are the stabilizing influence. we're providing the funds to keep those people going. to do this we need a stable and robust economy ourselves. to do this we need to continue to develop very new and very advanced technologies to do this we have to find difficult objectives to go after because this is the forcing function for tough technologies. i think space is truly the last frontier for the development of very new, advanced technologies. we've been living basically on the seed crop, the technologies of the '60s provided the digital systems of the '70s. the technologies that we developed in the shuttle and that were developed through "star wars" are the ones we're

using for this tremendous communications revolution that we got. so i think we have to figure out where is the research and development coming from that is going to allow us to stay on top of the job. and i have concerns that we're not investing well in r&d. >> you may just have answered my final question. but the final question is really one for you. because you've been responding wonderfully well to everything that i've asked for the last few hours. but it could just be that i haven't asked the one question that would elicit what gene kranz really wants to say. so with that in mind, this microphone, this camera is all yours, gene. >> i would like to -- i wish that as a nation that we could set our sights much higher. i believe it is essential to have a national purpose. it is essential to maintain the pioneering spirit that made this country great. it's the spirit that got us through this past century. it got us through world wars.

it allowed us to move into a leadership role and it was a compassionate leadership role throughout the world. and as a nation that allowed us to step up to the challenge of the cold war and win it, it is a challenge that took the country to the moon. it took us into space. it made us the preeminent force in space. and in the process of doing this, we rekindled the pioneering spirit of a generation of people that grew up in the depression and came to adulthood in the '60s and carried space from the '60s through to the early '90s. i would like to find some way to sufficiently challenge a new generation of people to get them out of the "i" mode into the "we" mode, to make them want to do something rather than be something. i would like to give young people the same dream that we had. i would like to find our nation unified, the world unified, in the achievement of a common goal.

i believe that space provides this. i believe difficult programs like mars would provide it. but unfortunately, we do not have the national leadership that we need. we do not have a united states congress that really recognizes the need for this country to continue to grow and invest in r&d. we don't have the national leaders capable of stepping up and taking a difficult position and articulating why we must do something. i'm not interested in something for gene kranz. i'm interesting in something for my children. i'm interested in something for my children's children, because we are in the only nation on the entire earth that is blessed with the types of freedom that we've had, that has the economic potential of a great nation composed of so many different ethnic groups and types of people that are capable of doing these types of things. so we must continue to force

leadership to grow. and i was privileged and proud to be part of the years when leadership flourished in this mission control. there's not one flight director who ever left here who was not inspired to do something else and to do better. and i think that is important for us to communicate, not only to people here at johnson, people are going to be looking at these tapes. but the people of the nation, this very magnificent era that we all lived in, and maybe didn't look closely enough and find its true meaning. 50 years ago on february 20th, 1962, john glenn became the first american astronaut to orbit the earth. next, a 1962 universal news reel about glenn's historic flight. john glenn orbited the earth three times in a spacecraft named friendship 7. the entire flight was just under five hours. this is six minutes.

>> five hours before he is destined to take a giant stride into history, colonel john h. glenn jr. squeezes into his space suit. this morning the weather over cape canaveral and in the pickup areas is better. and there is an air of optimism carrying his now familiar portable air conditioner. glenn prepares to go to the 11th deck as clocks point to 6:00 a.m. eastern standard time. the skies are beginning to lighten. the colonel's date with destiny comes 10 months after the

russians claimed an orbital flight and less than a year after alan shepard blazed a suborbital flight for the u.s. this is the moment when the eyes of the world turn to cape canaveral. russian orbitz were in a thick fog the secrecy. the united states stands or falls on the white-hot glare of worldwide publicity. in the capsule atop the atlas missile, the colonel will be strapped to a contoured couch. once in flight the mercury will be tilted so that the astronaut will ride backwards. second tick off as his rendezvous with space approaches. hatch cover causes a slight delay whether a defective bolt is discovered. then, millions are moved to silent prayer. everything is go. the take-off of the "atlas"

blastoff by 360,000 pounds of thrust carries the mergry gracely skyward. friendship 7 gracefully climbing out of the world's atmosphere exerts a pressure of six times the force of gravity on the astronaut. loud and clear he reports back to mercury control reading off his instruments, commenting on his reactions all as calmly and cooly as if he were commuting on the a-27. then control the yaw and pitch of the vehicle itself. now the vehicle is turned so glenn will be seated backwards. glenn checks with ground control. intercontinental zero g and i feel fine. capsule is turning around. the view is tremendous. >> capsule turning around and could i see the booster during turnaround just a couple of yards behind me. it was beautiful. >> roger 7. you have a go. >> roger. understand go for at least seven orbits.

>> actual pictures of glenn in the capsule will give scientists the opportunity to study his reactions as he passes over the canary islands, africa, the indian ocean, australia, back across the pacific, and over the united statesment he speeds at 17,500 miles an hour, reaching a high point of 160 miles and a low altitude of 99 miles. each of the the three orbits takes about 90 minutes. three times the colonel sees the sun rise within the period of 4:56. three times around the globe or a trip of 81,000 miles before he re-enters the earth's atmosphere, a shield protecting the astronaut from the intense heat. the carrier "randolph" is the command ship in the pick-up area. but glenn, instructed not to jettison the control of the

rocket lands clear of the area. glenn's heat shield was loose and he was asked to hold on to the rocket bank to hold the shield in place. right on hand, however, is the destroyer noah. she speeds to the capsule to take the pilot and vehicle aboard. despite a few shaky moments, glenn is down, hale and hearty. with support cables attached, a pincer-like crane will lift friendship 7 aboard. the end of a saga. a now-famous friendship 7 is safely latched to the deck of the destroyer and the crew prepares to help glenn from the capsule. first they attempt to help colonel from his complex prison through the upper exit in the mouth. they encounter difficulties, and so it is decided to blow off the escape hatch cover. first glimpse of the conquering hero, colonel john h. glenn.

he left hits footprints among the stars. he has a grin as wide as the path he blazed as he rests briefly before being flown to the carrier "randolph" by helicopter. he is lifted aboard in a maneuver that looks more dangerous than the flight itself. the helicopter takes him to the "randolph" for a debriefing and examination by a medical man. the helicopter no southeastern sooner touches down on deck than gets a preview of the congratulations that are still to come. on every hand there is jubilation. on every side, smiles and cheers. he signs over his precious log and instruments to the national space administration. from here he goes to grand turk island for further rest before the deluge, a deluge of honors a

proud country waits to bestow on a brave man. all weekend we're airing programs from american history tv. seen every weekend here on c-span 3. tomorrow night we look at the life of george washington. historian richard norton smith will talk about washington at mt. vernon at different times in his life. that's american history tv tomorrow night at 8:00 eastern. in a few moments, our american history tv coverage of the history of the space program continues with the congressional gold medal ceremony honoring astronauts john glenn, neil armstrong, michael collins, and buzz aldrin. in an hour, a 1963 nasa film

biography of john glenn, the first american to orbit the earth. and then an oral history interview with former nasa flight director gene kranz. there is a new website for american history tv, where you can find our schedules and preview our upcoming programs. watch featured video from our regular weekly series, as well as access ah tv's history tweets, history in the news and social media from facebook, youtube, twitter and four square. follow american history tv every weekend online. next, a ceremony honoring former astronauts john glenn, michael collins, neil armstrong and buzz aldrin with the congressional gold medal, the nation's highest honor. you'll hear from members of the u.s. house and the u.s. senate, including speaker of the house john boehner and senate majority

leader reid. as well as john glenn during this hour-long event, which was held in the capital rotunda. >> ladies and gentlemen, the speaker of the united states house of representatives, the honorable john boehner. >> ladies and gentlemen, good morning and welcome to the capitol rotunda. since the day of the american revolution, congress has commissioned gold medals to express appreciation for distinguished achievements and distributions to our country. the first recipient of a gold medal was general george washington. and today