the national off hope is the university and political papers of this era of drake university. she manages the processing of all items.

it was a great surprise and excitement to have dr. berry come. so previously hope served. please welcome our team member and fellow lady nerd. >> it's not every day they ask us to get up to talk to a room full of people. in preparing if our lecture tonight, i looked in the archives to see what we might

have related to nasa and space. i found a lot of great photographs and a few files but i wanted to share a few lines from a letter that i found addressed to a nasa administrator from a young navy pilot in 1965. he write, "i have no romantic dreams of fortune. i have loved flying and hope for the opportunity to try out for the astronaut program since the day sputnik went into orbit." that letter was written by lieutenant tom harkin. [ applause ] dr. bill berry served as the chief historian since 2010.

berry joined nasa in 2001 after 22 years in the u.s. air force where he served on the faculty of the u.s. air force academy. he received i had doctrine. dr. bill berry. [ applause ] thank you for your warm hospitality that i've enjoyed in

my visit to des moines so far. i'm stunned how friendly and happy people are to talk about space and space exploration because that's what i love to do. i've been a space nerd since i was 4 years old. it's a great pleasure to share my enthoousiasm with you tonigh. on october 1st, 1958, nasa opened for business. so 60 years ago, a month ago. and we're celebrating our 60th birthday this fall. so we're doing a double dip and my office has been extremely busy dealing with all the

interests in both the origins of nasa and also the start of the apollo program. i'm excited ton here. now my friends at nasa television, the guys who do the videos and things you'll find online made a nice summary video. i think this does a nice job in summarizing 60 years of nasa.

60 years of nasa history in 60 seconds. i thought they did a pretty good job. and very happy to have a chance to show it to you.

it gives you a clue about where we're going in the future. the voice that you hear, some people were reading the closed captions you may have seen -- the person. anyone know who he was? the first administrator of nasa in 1958 during the eisenhower administration. and the audio, as a historian, i love this. it was a film. back in those days when dr. glennon took over nasa, they department have the internet to communicate on. they made a film of him speaking to the employees of nasa telling them what the job was. amazingly the 60 years ago is much the same as these days.

the exciting things that happened and not so exciting things that happened. i thought the 60th anniversary if you want to know that sort of stuff, go to www.nasa.gov/60. we have a whole website out there for you to look at that has those videos and other things you want to see. it has given interesting perspectives. rather than recapping nasa's 60

anniversary, i thought what we talk about is things you probably don't know about nasa history. where do we start? well, in honor of six decades i thought i would take six things about nasa's history one for each decade. they don't line up with the decades but six things from nasa history you probably don't know. the story starts before nasa was created in 1958 and it isn't quite done yet. in fact, the story goes back to 1957 when the british an arctic survey start the making measurements of ozone and other things over antarctica.

these were troubling because over the next 20 years, they discovered out zone level was decreasing every year. so right in the middle up there. measured over the previous

decades. the findings were troubling because ozone protects us from ultra violent light. unfortunately, the problem was they only had data from that region of antarctica. they weren't sure about the hole. people would be getting more sunburns and more skin cancer. they were concerned about that issue. and they wanted to know more about the ozone. fortunately for everybody, nasa happened to have a satellite in orbit one of the weather satellites and it happened to have an ozone measuring device on it. put it up there to do something else but you can use it to measure the hole in the ozone. the totet to spectrum. they do everything with the

acronym. nay discovered it was much worse than we thought. it was one the first pictures that came back from the data from the tom's restaurant in 1983. it got everybody's attention. particularly people who live in australia. as you might imagine. so scientists studying the chemistry of the ozone layer is think abouting how is it happening? is it possible for you? cfc and nasa -- so cfc might be causing the ozone and the chemistry these chemicals were widely used at the time as coolant in air-conditioning

systems and your house. it pushes the spray paint out of your spray can or hay spray out of your hair spray can. there's a lot of that stuff in the mid 20th century being pushed out in the atmosphere because people were using spray cans and air-conditioning systems. it was concerned that stuff was getting up into the ozone layer and making the ozone go away and turn to other chemicals. and as the evidence from both space and the ground became more convincing and more troubling, it was evidence from nasa that actually proved that the culprit, in this case was -- this is an ert 2.

in 1987 as it was flying over antarctica found carbon molecules interacting with the ozone turning to a base we didn't want to be turned into. many organizations continue to monitor the ozone levels over antarctica and this busy graph is a measure of how big the hole is on the top and the average level of ozone over antarctica in a whole region. and i'm happy to report that in january of this year, the scientists confirmed there is

actually a consistent trend the minimal level of the ozone is trending upward and it's trending downward over the years. so studies of this data suggests that we have avoided over 2 million cases of skin cancer that would have happened between 2010 and 2030. just because of these improving numbers. so you may not have known it, but nasa data helped save the plan el planet. number five is that nasa, as we know it, almost didn't happen. i'm happy to be working for you at nasa and thank you for your tax dollars. but things didn't have to turn out that way. as a historian, things don't -- the casualty isn't always clear. the united states plans to build a scientific satellite. that's been announced in 1955

and the horizeisenhower administration -- doing that kind of work. and meanwhile president eisenhower didn't tell anybody this but one of the things happening is the air force is working on building spy satellites so we can find out did have the bombers and strategic missiles they might have. but after the world was surprised by the launching of two sputniks. one in october and one in november, the second one in november having a live dog on board, which was kind of scary, the pressure was do something. the naval research laboratory was not quite ready to launch it

yet. and unfortunately this is it didn't turn out so well. interesting enough the satellite has to survive the explosion and rolled off into the bushes and they found him. and if you go to the national air and space museum in washington, d.c., you can find -- but it survived. but nonetheless, this kind of thing put a lot of pressure on the u.s. government to act quickly and to catch up in the space race. unfortunately the u.s. army is the one who delivered the goods. there is an iowan in the picture. anybody recognize who it is? james van allen, the guy in the middle. but so the army successful and the navy is trying to launch things and the air force is part

of things. and as you know the navy they didn't -- but the secretary of defense kneel mcilroy because he had the competing program and they wanted to do their own thing. he sorted the problem out by saying you get to do this space thing. i'm going create the organization called the advanced research project agency. but anyway he assigned all responsibility for all space projects in the department of defense. it happened in february of 1958 and eisenhower administration said good idea and put their thumbprint on it. and we may well have wound up with a space program that was run by the department of defense except folks in congress and lots of other folks had other ideas about what was supposed to

happen. this guy. anybody know who this is? you ought to know! dr. hugh latimore. he had been the head of the naca since after the war in the 1957 he was leading that organization. and since taking over the naca in the late '40s bending the research agenda. it was supposed to be -- but he was doing more and more research on high speed flight and space research. this is in part a result of the fact that at the end of world war ii he had been drafted to be the secretary of army air force scientific advisory group. these the guys that went around

in europe and studied the weapons technology of our enemies during world war ii and produced a big report at the end. dryden was one of the authors of multiple chapters on rocket research in that report. he also is the editor who is familiar with all the material. and so when he shortly after that report was completed, is named to be the head of the naca. he immediately says this report had some good ideas about what we should be doing in aerospace research and i'll make it happen. and naca agreement didn't include space but he was basically making it to a space agency. now they're workingen high speed flight. most you probably recognize this flight. we know that chuck yeager was the first person -- [ inaudible ] i'll point out to your attention, the tail on this airplane has the naca logo on it

because the x 1 was a joint program between the naca and nasa. so the naca was working on high speed flight and dryden was building on that toward higher speed research. dryden is an interesting guy. one of the reasons why none of you know who is because he's a soft spoken guy who didn't credit for anything. he is a shrewd negotiator and knew all the people and had good relations with the folks in the military. he was able to pull off some amazing things. he wound up being the deputy director of nasa after it became nasa. he planned on leaving, actually. but he said i'll take the job of the administrator of nasa on as one condition, if hugh stays as my deputy. jim webb comes in under kennedy and said i'll take the job under one condition. that this guy stays on as my

deputy. dryden stayed on as deputy. he continued to work and died on the job in 1965. so a lot of reason why i think we don't know about it, because he wasn't there when we actually succeeded. he was shrewd and able to pull off some amazing things. if you believe this, having worked in the bureaucracy for a long time, i find it hard to imagine how they did it. one of the most successful research programs at nasa has done a high speed flight. dryden convinced the air force and the navy. and let the naca and eventually nasa run the program. how do you do that? i don't know. i don't know anybody that has done anything like that.

shortly after sputnik happens, dryden said this is happening and he puts a team together and they produce the report called a national research program for space technology. and two days later the committee there was a committee that ran the naca national advisory committee and the committee got together and said that this is a good idea and that based on this report the u.s. should create a program that integrates the department of defense, the naca, national academy of sciences, national science foundation, universities and research and institutions and industry to create a cooperative program of civil space exploration. sound kind of familiar? one of the things that helped push this idea through was the fact that the chairman of that committee was the guy in the middle of this picture. this is jimmy dolittle, famous aviator, who was being sworn in as the chairman of the naca two years before it happened. you have a guy like that in your

court. so the details on how the change happened are clear. as a historian, i can tell you this. within a month of this report coming out and the naca and jimmy pushing this idea, eisenhower administration changed courses and having the dod in charge of our space program isn't a good idea. by the start of april, the president sent a draft proposing we have a national scientific program. and the defense would be in charge of some things that were primarily military but the bulk of the visible program to be run by the space agency. later on with congress and the administration. but that's how nasa got started. now, of course, it's never as easy as you think in congress. i'm sure some people can tell us

this story. but sorting out who was in charge of what was interesting. i found the memo in the archives. it was a memo to president eisenhower and from may of 1958 the president had directed that, quote, nasa be given responsibility for all programs except those peculiar to associated with military weapons or operations. this memo is from his staff saying guess what, boss. d.o.d. is not doing what you told them to do. they're trying to take over the whole thing. they're insisting on being in charge of human space flight and in charge of the big project. the lines are a little blurry at times and the president said you won't get with that. not only did they handle over the space projects at nasa but key organizations like the naval research laboratory working on vanguard, they were handle over to nasa.

part of the army ballistic missile agency in alabama, that was handed over to nasa. and the jet propulsion laboratory, we think of as a great place in pasadena that does interesting planetary work, they were part of the army at the time. that got handed over to nasa, as well this this key decision in the spring of 1958 had big impacts, both in terms of international relations, technology, and lots of other. but as a civilian agency, nasa, has, become in some situations a world agency. the nasa meatball, which is what we call the logo, i'll be happy to explain in the q & a if you want to know the back story. it's one of the most recognized brands in the world. i was walking through a target in rhode island, we were up there for a family wedding and

my wife goes look at that. and there was a pair of pajama pants with the equations all over it. it was a big meatball on there. it's the big thing these days. everybody loves nasa. we do, too. in fact, i actually get notes all the time as chief historian from people from around the world. i have one in my inbox now from a young girl in saudi arabia who appear to believe that nasa is not part of the u.s. government but some other organization. she can't understand why i can't hire her as an intern. because you're paying for the interns we have there and we ought to have, you know, your kids have a chance. and another key aspect of having nasa as a civilian agency in charge of the space research is that new technologies that nasa develops are almost immediately available to the public. and that leads me to number four

on the list. nasa is serial creator of new industries. nasa with a small investment of your tax dollars we have a little bit less than one-half of the federal budget. that works out to $20 billion a year. that's a lot of money. we take our responsibility seriously. but still it's only half of 1% of the federal budget. nasa takes that money and break the trail of technology so that things can be created and we make that material instantly available. so those things go to industry and industry can turn those things into products and services. one of the space technologies developed by nasa was the weather satellite. this picture shows technicians working on the television

infrared satellite. this was actually being developed by the army. it was handed over when nasa was created in 1958 and launched in 1960. we quickly figured out pictures from space of the weather were valuable. all right. and work on weather satellites developed quite quickly. i think you can probably imagine if you didn't have all the pictures from space. now u.s. weather satellites are under the operational control of noaa. but nasa works with noaa and we build most of the satellites and launch them for noaa and they take them over when they're on orbit. communicate by satellite. that came out of science fiction

but nasa and the military got to work on it right away. and nasa's first communication satellite project was a giant reflective balloon. all right. you get an idea of the scale of this thing, those are people. that's a big balloon. they packed it small in a rocket and the idea you could bounce radio signals off this. and it actually worked! not the most efficient way, though. they're floating around and you have to figure out where they are and you can't get it. it was better to build satellites that sat in one space. and that's what we did. within a couple of years, nasa was helping two companies to build communications satellites for private industry and, you know, tens of thousands of signals through the satellites.

but the satellite at the back of the picture is nasa's application technology satellite number three. there's another one. and we used that satellite to test out technologies that went into the satellite communication industry. nowadays instant worldwide communication has -- i can pull a phone out and call somebody in bo bots wanna, if we wanted to. it's a $200 billion a year industry. and it came from our investment in space. so you probably think to yourself, yeah, well, of course back in the '60s nasa did the great stuff. they had a white external tank.

and the paint weighed like 500 pounds. it saved a lot of weight by not painting it. they got in the business of launchingstarted, but we almost killed it off. in the early 1970s we created the space shuttle to replace all expendable launch vehicles. you seen the missions where the number sts standing for. space transportation system. we will get rid of other rockets and launch everything into space on the space shuttle and launch every week and do all these great things and it didn't work out that way. after the challenger accident the united states realized that was not a good decision, but we were in a bad spot at that point. the shuttle hadn't lived up to expectations. by the time we went back to expendable launch vehicles, the soviet union was coming apart and they were selling all their

extra as space launch vehicles on the cheap and the u.s. launch industry found itself in a hole. everybody was buying a launch system from somebody else and not from the u.s. industry and the only customers, the u.s. satellite and launch providers had, is like lockheed martin and things like that had, were the u.s. military and they could change our intelligence services charge high prices because the market they had was small and they had to charge for all that stuff. it was expensive and costly thing for the united states. all the commercial business was going overseas. in the 2000s the nasa administrator started a program called the commercial orbital transportation system. it's an acronym. cots. the idea of the cots program, american companies were offered contracts to deliver cargo to the space station. we had to get cargo to the space station and that was something that we -- if you lose a cargo vehicle, that's not good, but

it's, you know, something we could take. wei we had been building rockets to launch into space since 1957. not like cutting-edge rocket science. the cots program was created and we set up milestones with payments and breadcrumbs to allow companies to reduce the risk. it was hard to find investors to say i like your rocket design and, you know, here's a million dollars to spend figuring out how to make it work. nasa funding a little bits of money and various places they reached these milestones, allowed them to get there. there are two companies that wound up in the cots program at the beginning and one was a company called rocket plane kisler. they didn't make it through the milestone process and they weren't able to meet the milestones and fell off. the other company you probably heard of, spacex. this is the spacex falcon 9

lifting off in may 2012 on the second mission to the international space station to deliver cargo. another company stepped up when rocket plane fell out and that was orbital science corporation and they built the rocket shown here. this one actually launches on a flight facility on the coast of virginia. when these go off i can see them from my house which is cool. the company has been so successful, it's been bought up a couple times and now owned by northrop grumman. they're about to launch later this month. this is the picture of the first launch to the space station. by the way, nasa has decided this has worked pretty well on the cargo thing we will apply the same approach to getting humans to the international space station, back and forth to space. this is the spacex capsule delivered to the kennedy space center in july. they are unpacking it from the cargo crate. this will be used for a demonstration flight early next year. i think they're currently

planning january or february to fly without a crew on board. check out their spacecraft. and some time later next year, later in the spring, they plan to have a mission with a crew on board to go up to the space station. we'll be using this to get back and forth to space from launching people from florida. spacex isn't alone in doing that. we decided it's a good idea to diversify and have two alternatives. another company is developing a way to get people to the space station and that's the boeing corporation. more traditional aerospace contracting company, but nonetheless, boeing is building this thing and this is a picture of checks -- fit checks of the guys in the boeing space suits in the mock-up of the starliner cockpit. boeing is planning to do its test flight early next spring and fly its first flight. i think the current plan is the first flight to the space station in august of next year. so bottom line, we expect that

in the next year there will be two companies using two new spacecraft to get astronauts to and from low earth orbit. weather satellites, communication satellites, launch vehicles, human orbital spacecraft, these are some of the big and potentially big industries that have benefited all of us and they got a jump start from nasa research. this doesn't include the industries and companies spun out by nasa research. you hey have heard of gopro. they use a chip to make cameras that was invented by a guy at the jet propulsion laboratory and licensed it to gopro and that's why your cell phone takes good pictures these days. you're carrying half the technology in your pocket. now, i don't think that this is probably an unknown fact about nasa history. you probably understood nasa has changed the universe but i don't think people appreciate how much things have changed in the last

60 years. the changes have been incremental and when you think about it it's mind boggling. let's step back a little bit and be boggled. we all know jason allen discovered the van allen radiation belts. the first scientific discovery with the space probe. radiation belts around the earth. explore ones and i have to admit that wasn't a nasa discovery because that happened before nasa was created in 1958. at the time, the idea that the sun did anything other than create light that there were particles coming off the sun, most didn't believe the sun emitted particles. if it emitted particles the sun would disappear eventually, right. there were people who proved this idea the sun was emitting particles. there were a couple scientists, there was something called what they called the solar wind and one of those guys was a guy named eugene parker. it turns out with the radiation

belts we figured out there was a solar wind hitting the radiation belt. you look up in the winter evenings and see the aurora in the sky that's particles from the sun, forced on to the poles and causes light to be emitted as the things are accelerating and decelerating through the atmosphere. anyways, parker had his -- got his reward because we just recently launched a probe to touch the sun, you may have heard about it, in august, named the parker solar probe after mr. parker. now, the solar wind interacts with the magnetic winds around the earth, but the magnetic field protects us from the atmosphere or being stripped away by the solar wind. part of the reason why we have the atmosphere to breathe is because of the radiation belts. we never knew they existed. in the late 1950s, hang on, i'll explain this, in the late 1950s there with was a with widely held theory that the planets had

formed from the outside in, the big gas giant planets in the distance, had been formed first. the planets were older than the inner planets because as they shrank the inner planets formed later. this meant that venus was younger than the earth, right, and we didn't know much about venus because it's covered with clouds but about the same size and we knew it might be warmer from, you know, ground telescope told us that venus was probably warmer than the earth. this theory led to a belief that venus might be like a warm, swampy primitive earth and might even have dinosaurs. i remember seeing pictures of stuff like this when i was a kid, right. our first probe to venus proved that venus was, in fact, warm, the surface temperature of venus is about 900 degrees fahrenheit, hot enough to melt led and dinosaurs. so we found out in the early years of the space age our sister planet venus was

suffering from a runway greenhouse effect and that prompted interesting discussions by folks like professor about climate change and nuclear winter and other topics that became a big issue in the 1980s. to mars, our understanding of mars 60 years ago when the space age started was more sophisticated than this article from the "new york times" from december 1906 which talks about the canals on mars. by the late 1950s there may not have been canals on mars. our views of mars in the early 1960s and late 1950s echoed the believe that mars was an old planet, drying up and dying, which led to edgar rice burr's novel and other things you may have read if you're a science fiction fan. more scientifically informed view of what venus was like is reflected by other things that came out. this is a screenshot from one of those disney individuals that came out, films in the 1950s, about life in the universe and

nano space and a whole series and this is what they thought mars might look like. what mars plant life might look like. they were pretty sure there may not be animal life on mars, but they were pretty sure there was plant life on mars and this is what they speculated it looked like. we now know that, in fact, mars long ago did have oceans and an atmosphere. this is an artist depiction of what mars looks like now and 30 billion years ago when it had oceans and an atmosphere. we know from our satellites that have studied and probed around on mars, mars did look like that, it was a wet planet much like earth and if it was wet and had an atmosphere the conditions for life probably existed and the question is did life develop on mars before it became a dry, dead planet. that's one of the questions that our robot missions to mars are trying to answer as they probe around mars these days. what about the rest of the solar system?

when i was -- [ no audio ] textbooks about the outer solar system we knew that there were big planets out there and some had moons and the expectation was that those moons were kind of cold and frozen. it's far away from the sun and cold out there and boring and dull and not much to look out out there and we expected those big gas giant planets might be interesting because there's something going on why they are so big. the moons around them must be dull and boring. these ice balls floating around. until we sent the pioneer and voyager probes out to take a look. this is what we found. jupiter and saturn, the moons are interesting. there are volcanos on some of the moons, flowing liquids on the moons, some cold like not water. some have an icy crust, icy water crust, and underneath is a liquid water because the gravity effects of these giant planets

squeezes these moons enough it warms up the inside the water underneath the ice is liquid. liquid water, warmth, chemicals. we know we've flown the cassini probe through some of the materials out of the ice cracks and organic molecules are in that stuff. water and organic molecules. it doesn't mean life, just carbon based molecules. those are things life gets based on. is there life on some of these things? we don't know. that's what we're hoping to find out. looking outside our solar system in the last couple decades we've proven our solar system isn't unique. when i was a kid you look in the sky and there were billions of stars in space. are there other planets up there and is our solar system unique? we found out in the last few years with the space telescope almost every star that telescope looked at had planets around it. we look at the sky, it's not just billions of stars, but billions of stars and planets

around them. what does that mean about the possibility there might be other life in the universe? it improves the odds dramatically. the kepler space telescope ran out of fuel and lasted beyond its design life and we did decommission it on tuesday but the follow on telescope test is already in orbit and working and the kepler telescope, it will look over the entire sky looking for planets. we'll have all kinds of information about that. it will help us answer those questions that we've been asking for years, are we alone? i haven't touched on the other big and most mind numbing question yet, where did the universe come from? this picture tells us. we have the proof and it comes from this picture. anybody know what satellite came up with this picture?

probably one you never heard of. yeah. the willconskinson probe. we flew that in early 2000s and it confirmed based on the data from that probe which created this picture that this is a picture of the universe as you see it from here in microwave radiation, which is really the way you can look back in time effectively, this picture effectively proves -- tell me this, i don't know this for a fact, the universe originated in a big bang 13.7 billion years ago. we have scientific proof that's the case. and it was proof that john matter the scientist that work on this won the nobel prize in physics in 2006 for this. all right. moving on to number two, there are some people out there who don't believe we went to the moon. i don't know what to tell those folks. the question i would like to ask you is, why did we go to the

moon in the first place? anybody know? why? because it's there. that's a good reason. all right. but we need to get there within the decade, you probably remember that speech, we'll talk about it in a bit. looking for -- well that's one of the reasons to go back to the moon is to find oxygen. kind of handy stuff. what's that? competition with the soviet union. all right. that's the usual answer, right. people think we went to the moon because this guy flew in space in april of 1961. that the u.s. was embarrassed by the soviets beating us to space. while the flight certainly prompted the president to go to congress in may of 1961 it's clear that's one of the big prompts for him. the decision was really made for other reasons. right. not because president kennedy was a believer we should find oxygen on the moon or because it's there or because he was a

visionary and thought we ought to have civilization that spans the solar system and flying around between mars and venus and the earth, not really. when kennedy began his term, both in his speech at his inauguration and first state of the union address a few days later, he actually tried to diffuse the space race. he offered to the soviet union we should cooperate in space rather han compete with each other and offered a big space reset. let's be friends and cooperate in space. vooe even after making this speech in may of 1961 the next month he went to vienna and met the soviet premier in private conversation said, hey, why don't we go to the moon together. he actually made that offer several other times during his time as president including the last big time happened at the u.n. general assembly speech in december 1963, two months before he was assassinated.

we really didn't know for certain, in fact as a kid i was confused, why does president kennedy keep saying -- aren't we trying to beat the russians to the moon? we didn't know until some materials were declassified, president kennedy had a recording system as well in part of the white house, there are tapes and this is a transcript of one of those tapes of a meeting between president kennedy and some nasa officials including jim web, the administrator of nasa and made his position on space clear. you look at the six lines from the bottom here, for those of you who -- that's not an eye test. i will read the important part. this is kennedy speaking, i am not that interested in space, but we're talking about these fantastic expenditures that will work our budget and these other domestic programs and the only justification in my opinion because we hope to beat them, the russians, and demonstrate that starting behind as we did by a couple years, by god we

passed them. that's the line president kennedy in november 1962. going to the moon wasn't just about advancing science and technology or investment in the u.s. economy. it was about proving that u.s. economic and political system was better than the soviet's communist system. now some of you here in 2018 might look and go, but what? seriously? is that what they thought. it's hard to imagine now. between communist and the west was a critical issue in the early 1960s and why was it worth this fantastic set of expenditures? in a word, decolonization. think about this for a minute. after world war ii and 1950s and '60s dozens of new countries appeared that had been european colonies and they weren't really keen on the europeans in the west. they looked at what happened with the soviet union. the soviet union devastated by

world war ii, demolished by war going back and forth, yet 12 years later after the war, 1957, they beat the united states by launching the first satellite. they must know something about how to get from zero to 60 really fast. that's what was appearing to many of the leaders of the countries. this advantage was a huge threat to the west. kennedy realized we needed allies and friends in the world and he had traveled extensively in his time in congress in the senate around the developing world. he knew this was a big issue that these countries were being duped by soviet propaganda pulled into the soviet orbit because of the successes in space. kennedy's political solution was brilliant. very clever guy, right. one up by the soviets every few months in space, so he moved the goal post. we're not going to fight about what happens next, who the first person to do x, y or z is. you launched the first woman in

space, so what. let's go to the moon. prove that your system is better than others by going to the moon. this is a text of a memo that president kennedy sent to vice president johnson between the flight in april and his announcement in may that we were going to go to the moon. note the part in bold here in paragraph one, is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we would win? all right. going to the moon was the answer to that question because both the united states and the soviet union we knew based on what we knew about their rocket technology, which wasn't that much, but we knew they would have to build a new booster because what they were using wasn't good enough to get to the moon and back. kennedy and his advisors thought that's a fair fight, starting from zero we think we can beat them to the moon. it wasn't the next mission that mattered, it's who gets to the moon first. okay. speaking of racing to the moon, the final item on my list of

things you probably don't know about nasa history is this, there really was a race to the moon and it was a whole lot closer than you think. most people assume that the race to the moon started in may 1961 when president kennedy threw down the gauntlet let's go to the moon by the end of the decade and the soviets at some point dropped out of the race. they weren't contenders in the end, right. that's the theory most people have that i talk with. so in fact, by the end of the 1960s as we're landing on the moon in 1969, we're only racing ourselves. the soviets, we're not proving anything. that's exactly what the soviets said in public too. that was a lie. let's go back to may 1961 speech where president kennedy tells us we're going to the moon in a decade. a race needs a competitor. in the summer of 1961 we didn't have one. from the soviet perspective, kennedy's challenge was laughable. sent a man around the earth and

orbited the earth, took alan shepard put him in a capsule and plopds him from florida and dropped him in the atlantic ocean. suborbital flight. no big deal to the soviets if you already sent somebody around the earth in earth orbit. they were getting mixed messages. they keep offering space cooperation and -- are you serious about this? they don't know. the soviets were more worried about pressing defense issues. they were trying to spend more money on defending their country against the u.s. missile gap they were looking at on their side. when does the moon race actually start? anyone take a guess? on our side it starts here. on the soviet side it starts in august of 1964. long after president kennedy was gone from the scene. now this is part of the list of successful space launches, historical record. nasa submits a report to

congress every year on behalf of the president on what the u.s. government is doing in space exploration. this is this year's report. look here, soviet union, two flights in 1957, beat the united states clearly. every other year after that, for the next few years, from 1958 to 1968, the u.s. launched more things into space than the soviet union. we had a wider variety in this rebuilding communication and weather satellites and we had a very aggressive and active program of all sorts. the soviet union continued to one up us and say we launched three people into space, the first ones to do a spacewalk. that's because they were watching what we were doing and then figuring out what they could do with what they had that could beat us and it would be a good propaganda victory. i spent three years doing my research on what was going on in this, there wasn't a program in

the soviet space program. it was a bunch of one off political things. the author skaization to spend y came authorizing to do various things that were politically astute and they thought would pay off for propaganda reasons. which is why they never had weather or communication satellites until much later. now that -- i don't want to dismiss the soviet engineers. they were brilliant and had an incredible team and nimble and did great work and they did amazing stuff with limited resources they had on hand. it wasn't the program like we had. by 1964, that strategy wasn't starting to work because the united states had been building up so much material, so much technology, we had -- particularly the first test of the saturn rocket bigger than their big rocket and they got nervous and so the other thing i realized now president kennedy is out of the way and president johnson wasn't offering to cooperate on going to the moon. going to the moon for him was a

tribute to the dead president kennedy and we were going to do it. politically there's no question about it anymore, the united states is moving ahead and in august 1964 the soviets said we have to coudo something. they would send two cosmonauts around the moon and circle and come back, go around and come back, slingshot around the moon and come back. they would dos this by the 50th anniversary of the revolution which meant it was three years later in november 1967. the program was known as the zahn program and that actually went well. this is a list of launches in that program. notice there are eight launches in 1968 that carried out five test flights in 1968. the september and november flights in 1968 appeared to be successful from our perspective. what we didn't know was that one of the -- the heat shield burned

through on one of them and depressurized. in september it skipped off the atmosphere when it came back at lunar velocity and plunged into the atmosphere in the indian ocean. that was an alternative site they knew was there. they didn't want to fish their cosmonauts out of the indian ocean. they were failures and they weren't ready to fly anybody. we flew the apollo 8 mission, sent guys to the moon and orbited on christmas eve in 1968. we basically beat them for a change in this program. nobody knew about it at the time. the program was a band-aid. a few more flights but they never flew people on that mission. that wasn't all. not only set up a lunar program but they decided to build a rocket like the saturn 5. these are pictures in the soviet union at the time. these rockets are the same size

of the saturn 5 rockets. about the size of the statute of liberty. they're huge. unfortunately the rocket engine technology wasn't for them. their rocket technology wasn't as good as ours. they could lift two cosmonauts, one would drop down to the moon on a lunar lander and come back up again and bring the sample back. the rocket known as the n-1. the lunar program actually made pretty remarkable progress since it's considered they started in 1965 with design approval and said the program is a go approved the design in 1965 and in less than four years they had a rocket ready to test launch. the first launch didn't come until february 1969 and the rocket exploded 69 seconds after it lifted off. we had success with the saturn 5 launches we did. largely because we could afford to have a huge testing program that tested before we lifted them off the ground. our saturn test went largely,

you know, quick and didn't any big problems. they were testing their rockets as they were trying to build it which is hard to do. they were in a big hurry. the second time they tried to launch, july 3rd, 1969, the picture of a film of that. you can see the emergency escape system from the space capsule. the escape -- the escape system is firing to take it away from the top and the bottom is exploding. blew up on the pad and two launch pads next to each other close and wiped out the launch complex. that was a pretty big blow on their program. the n-1 program continued on. they did two more test launches, none of which were successful and wasn't until 1974, two years after our last mission to the moon they pulled the plug on the program and carved up what was left of the rocket and if you're very -- ever get a chance to go and wander around there are a lot of funny shaped buildings

shaped like cones, they're halves of the rockets they repurposed for storage facilities. so did the race to the moon end with apollo 8 and clearly they weren't going to catch us with this program because it was far behind. the race to the moon must have ended, right? you know what the answer is. no, it didn't. right. the reputation of the soviet union as a space power was important to the leadership. it was important both domestically and internationally. i mean the brilliance of the communist party leadership was hinged on successes in space in beating the united states. it was critically internally and externally to prove that soviet communist model would have been to bury capitalism. in desperation in january 1969, the soviet leadership commissioned the guys who did

interplanetary probes and they had success sending probes, not so much success going to mars, but those guys, they commissioned to create a robot probe to go to the moon, grab a sam is. and bring it back to earth before the americans could get there. this is that spacecraft called lunar. astonishingly, they start the program in january 1969. in june of 1969 they launched the first one. unfortunately for them the rocket that they launched blew up before it got to orbit. that failed. the next one, they launched on july 13th, 1969. three days before apollo 11 launched to go to the moon. that mission was named luna 15 and this is the report that appeared in "the washington post" on the day that we landed on the moon july 20th, 1969. so people knew that the lunar program was happening. this is like page 27 of the "washington post" or something. it wasn't on the front page. we were talking about armstrong and aldrin on the moon.

we knew about this. that probe was in orbit around the moon when a polo 11 crew arrived at the moon and buzz and neal get in the lunar module eagle land on the moon, did a walk on the moon, they get back in the rear module, supposed to have a nap before they launch again the next morning, they didn't sleep very well. i wouldn't have either. but while they were theoretically sleeping, the soviets fired the retro rockets on lunar 15 and made its approach to land on the moon and hit a mountain and crashed. if luna 15 had been successful it would have gotten back to earth about the same time the apollo 11 crew had gotten back and they would have said we went to the moon and brought back a sample and we didn't endanger anybody's life. we're a real space power. it was that close. the race ended july 21st 1969, after we had walked on the moon.

so, now you know at least six things about nasa that most people probably don't know and you can amaze your friends. thanks for your attention and i think they will come up and take some questions here. right. thank you very much. [ applause ] >> thank you very much. we're excited to be able to spend time with dr. barry here for a little while. we're still going to do the same amount of questions hopefully. we recognize some of you may have a reason to leave a little sooner so please be courteous to everyone as you walk out during the next 20 to 25 minutes as we go through questions. we're going to get ready for that. there are members of the harken institute staff in the audience accepting notecards from you to

take your questions to make sure they're read allowoud and get i recorded well. i have a few questions to start with. >> shall we. >> what seat do you want? thank you. joseph made the mistake of letting me have a microphone without having a time with a guy with a hook. sorry for running late. i like this stuff. >> we've had a good couple days and lots of venues, talking about your career, your interest in space and talking about some policy, talking about fun things. it's been great to have you and be a part of this. one of the things we do at the institute every week is the students create a question of the week and sometimes they're really serious and sometimes we're talking about differences in the office. this week in honor of dr. barry coming in, what's your favorite space movie? a whole range with "first man"

with apollo 13 and space jam in there. and some other things. >> "guardians of the galaxy". >> that's good. >> and that prompted several discussions with dr. barry in different venues over the last couple days and that is, you worked a lot with hollywood in terms of helping tell the story of nasa and you know there's, you know, going to be some sincelization there but there's also history you want to preserve. can you talk about briefly about your work on "hidden figures" and "first man" and what that's meant for nasa? >> sure. people will make big budget movies, lots of people who make documentary movies come to nasa all the time and we share with them what they want. all that film and video and scientific result you paid for that. that's public information. that's -- we're happy to hand that to people. big budget feature films are kind of a different story.

what happens with those, somebody in hollywood has an idea to do a space movie and they may want to film at nasa. for example, "transformers 3" they formed at kennedy space center. we signed an agreement with them. "transformers 3" is not serious science stuff but reaches an audience we might not otherwise reach and gets a young audience which is good for some of you. i was kind of surprised. i didn't realize that nasa historian got to do cool stuff like hollywood stars and movie people. our guy who does hollywood things, the scripts, came to me in about 2011 with the script "hidden figures" and they want to make sure to get this right and can you review the script. i reviewed the script and that set up a relationship where i spent a lot of time on the phone with the director ted and got to do -- i got to go out to the on

location where they were filming in georgia and tripped over kevin costner. that was embarrassing. and i got to do other fun stuff. mainly what we do is we recognize that, you know, those movies are not documentaries and we don't hold them to a standard of things. we want to make sure that when they deal with nasa issues they deal with them with some degree of respect specifically for the reputations of the people alive and also as much as possible we help them get the facts right, and, you know, normally those movies, for a lot of people, they become the history because they see them. that's a double-edge sword for me because "hidden figures," for the purposes of the movie, they basically compressed the story into 1961 into 1962, and civil rights changes in that part of virginia particularly at langley research center, started in like

1943 during world war ii. for those women working there. to some extent were still working the issue today. that's a long story. but you can't tell that story in a movie. people will sit and watch for 90 minutes, right. that was the big thing they did in that movie. but that was okay. i think they told a truth that's an important set of truths about what happened. that was good. >> " first man" was fun. the cool thing about doing these sort of movie things, there's stuff i would never get to do. i'm the nasa chief historian. if i went to folks in our receiving laboratory where all the rocks are that were brought by the moon that aren't being studied by somebody around the world, if i would like to say i would like to look at rocks, they would go, go away. we got better things to do. we're studying these rocks, go away. if ryan gosling says, can i go

see those rocks, they'll let him in there and i can go hey, he needs a historian to advise him. it was cool. it's fun personally, but it's also, like i said, we're weighing these things of how much truth is truth and when do we, you know -- and ultimately they're going to make the movie they want to make anyway. it's a question of whether we cooperate with them a lot or a little. >> one of the things that we've done in the last couple weeks was read books about space and space policy directives. that's what we do. >> it's important. >> we read lots of policy. can you tell us about space force and what that means for reorganization at the pentagon and if nasa has any involvement in that. >> yeah. actually, when i went to that wedding in rhode island that's the question i got most from people. you're going to be in space

force now. the current -- our current nasa administrator formerly a congressman from oklahoma, when he was in congress he thought creating a space force would be a good idea. he's been talking about it a lot. that has led some people to believe that, in fact, nasa is going to be merged into the space force or something. when talking about space force, what they're talking about doing is creating a branch of the military service, all right. much like when the air force was created in 1947 they took things from the army and created an air force. what they're talking about is taking bits of space stuff and creating an organization within the pentagon. from my perspective, as i look at that, i think that largely what will happen is nasa will still be where we are and relate with people at the pentagon which we have to coordinate on which we do from time to time on things, but that really doesn't have a lot of bearing on nasa. yeah. it's an interesting topic. you have to understand how the

u.s. military is structured and all this stuff, which most people don't know and/or need to know, frankly. it's not like we have a big impact immediately on nasa. >> because it's not useful information for everyone? >> well, no, because is they're creating a new version of the air force for space. they will do military space. nasa will continue with the space mission. >> are there other common or everyday use products for nasa's work. for example, tang. >> we have a litany at nasa about the products everybody thinks were created by the space program. tang, velcro and teflon. isn't it great that nasa was around to create tang, velco and teflon. actually none of the three things were created by nasa. they were created by people

doing interesting stuff and the space program used them. we've done all kinds of interesting things. one of the chips that becomes the camera in your cell phone so your cell phone camera is so good you don't need to carry around a separate camera, i don't even see -- i see a camera over there, but most everybody is taking pictures, people are taking pictures with me today are all using their cell phones. we don't carry a camera around anymore. what a cool thing. the guy invented that, trying to create a camera for the space probe, turns out the chip in our cell phone isn't great for space, but it's a great cell phone camera. that's pretty cool. they invented a type ultraviolet laser to measure ozone of the atmosphere in other planets and most lasers are pretty hot but ultraviolet is actually less warm and they found medal doctors looked at that and said

wait a minute, we love using lasers to do medical procedures, but we can't do them around people's hearts because they're too hot but this ultraviolet laser meant to measure ozone in the atmosphere you put one of those in there and you can actually drill out the plaque in somebody's heart without damaging the heart. people alive today who have bett better functions hearts are alive today because of lasers. if you want a real eye-opening experience, nasa puts out a publication called spinoff, if you type into google spinoff you would find it, that summarizes the key inventions we had that spun off from the space program. that's not all of them from every year, but every year we publish. if we printed it it would be this thick of all kinds of stuff.

>> you mentioned spacex earlier and does origin exist up there. a lot of conversation about private investment and commercial flight going to space and looking back, there's even been private investment with the -- >> yeah. >> the observatory in california. can you talk a little bit about the partnership, if there is one, between the government and the private sector and kind of what those investments have been and what that's meant for space exploration? >> yeah. nasa, even in the 1960s, when 202-628-0205 w nasa was pretty big, 40 or 50,000 people in the height, we're about 18,000 civil servants that work for nasa now, so a lot of what we do, we can't do all that stuff ourselves, and so a lot of your tax dollars that come to nasa, we don't load them on rockets and launch them into space, we spent that money on earth and we usually pay other companies doing interesting work for us to help

us. there's been a long-term relationship. for example, the first stage of the rocket that got us to the poon was built by chrysler corporation. a car company. all kinds of parts of the space program come from industries. that's a long-standing situation there. in the 1960s effort was focused on government work. we're going back to where we were in space and in aeronautics before that and actually in space research, this -- believe it or not there's an economist who works at nasa headquarters, alex mcdonald, not just historians -- >> he's the person i keep hearing talk about the lick. >> he's with oxford and wrote his dissertation on space. i'll probably do damage here,

but space exploration has been funded by wealthy people that decided they want to leave a legacy behind and they fund spa space projects including giant telescopes in the 20th century. those projects, those were space exploration. we couldn't get into space but you could explore space from the earth. his view is that, you know, that was kind of the standard mode that most money spent on space exploration was money that came from people who had money they wanted to leave that legacy behind. we had a period in the '60s and '70s where the government becomes the big spender and his thesis, we're returning back to normal to a period where you have lots of people spending money on space exploration, now wealthy people will leave a legacy to launch their car into space or whatever. but, you know, most folks at nasa, i get this question a lot

today, almost every audience i talked to today, what do you think about spacex. kind of like implied thing that we don't like spacex at snas. everybody at nasa loves spacex. the quietest time at nasa headquarters is when there's a spacex launch. everybody is watching it going, go, go, go. they bot slick about how to present their launch and our guys who do that are like man, we got to copy this. we have to up our game here. yeah. we think that, you know, it's really a healthy thing that it's not just the government leading the charge but that there will be a broad space economy. that's the only way to make great progress in space, if it's not just a government led adventure. nasa is happy to be part of that, but we have just a part of that to play.

>> one of the projects nasa is with working on is the space launch. >> one of the best named rockets ever. maybe not. okay. >> summarize the timeline in developing that compared to the apollo program? >> well, of course, in space things are expensive. you need a lot of money. the reason why we were able to develop multiple spacecraft and rockets from the 1960s because nasa's budget at one point was 4% of the national budget. we are now half of 1%. nasa had a huge budget in the '60s and we could afford to move on a timeline much faster. developing a rocket or space equipment these days, it still takes a lot of time and actually become more complex, we found things we shouldn't do, and that take more time and you want to do a better job at these things, so, you know, it's become more complicated and more complex to do things.

the big issue is the money. if we had a huge budget and they said build this and here's a gazillion dollars, we could do it in a couple years because you apply more manpower and force to it. it's a project stretching out for a long time. i sure hope we come up with a better name. it's basically uses heritage shuttle material. we use the power of the space shuttle and we're putting more of those on the bottom of this big rocket, the solid rocket boosters used for the shuttle was bigger and taken technology from that and the apollo program and merging it together to make a really big rocket to allow us to go not just through earth orbit but to the moon and mars. the idea is with the space launch system and the orion capsule we're building to go with it, those systems will be around for 30, 40 years from now and using those to get back and forth to mars and, you know, the moon first and then on to mars.

>> you mentioned the reduction in budget and that sparked a question as a former senate staffer. let's say this is from tom from iowa. >> okay. >> what are you not doing you should or could be doing at nasa? >> that's a hard question to answer. there's so many we could or should do. i think the nasa budget has been 1% or less of the federal budget since about 1970. if you look at the nasa budget it's a big spike and then pretty much the same. that's the level that the american public is willing to support. nasa has learned that that's kind of what we have to work with and most -- there are lots of people who are like we could get to mars a lot faster if we had more money or send a probe to find out what's underneath the icy crust and is there life

underneath the water there. there are lots of things we could do. a lot of it is driven by what the american public is willing to support in both as voters and also as, you know, our elected leaders in washington gives nasa its marching orders. sometimes they say you can do this ant can't do that or you ought to do this. those decisions are made at a high level and they're often not made by one person who says this is what we ought to do in space. congressmen and senators who have their opinion about it and the president and other people and the nasa administrator and science and technology says you can't do that. >> this is actually something that came up earlier -- >> is it from tom in. >> no, it's not. >> what is nasa's perspective on the paperclip program and origins of germany? >> that's a really interesting

question. we all know now that the key to the rocket program, the u.s. isn't the whole guy who has built rockets in the united states. we wouldn't have gotten into space without ron braun. there were five companies building rockets in the 1950s. he wasn't the only game in town. but they were good at what they did. he was driven by space exploration. that was an important factor. braun came to the united states courtesy of the u.s. government and his record was wiped and it wasn't until after he was -- the center director for the marshall space center, senior official at nasa, highly decorated, he had been a member are of the s.s. he clearly could not have failed to notice that prisoners, jews and gays and all kinds of people working in labor camps dying,

were the people building the v-2 rockets he launched to land on london and other places. lots of should things have happened, should things have not happened. it's an interesting character. good historical research about braun and what a conflicted character he was. one of the interesting things about him was he was, of course, head of the marshall space center in huntsville, alabama. the u.s. government was keen on all this money being space on sent, particularly the kennedy administration, that nasa would set an example in terms of civil rights policy in hiring african-americans. they had a really hard time getting african-american engineers to come to huntsville, alabama, because nobody wanted to live there because you couldn't eat out at a restaurant or buy a house. there were lots of problems with

that. braun was the guy who went to george wall lashace, the govern alabama, told him, governor wallace, if you don't do something to desegregate huntsville, i can't get african-american engineers in here and if i can't, nasa is going to close this down and move us to texas or california or some other place. that was the kind of pressure that actually changed the environment there. huntsville still had problems but they actually -- the mayor of huntsville went out and found somebody, purposely desegregated restaurant and housing in the huntsville area. braun, for all we know, the marks on his record and the positive things for the space program, he was a big advocate for civil rights in the united states. you would never imagine that to be the case for a guy that was in the s.s. interesting character. >> how much of -- >> i wish i had an easy answer

for that one. >> how much is nasa involved in joint development projects with the military in systems or other examples of that? >> clearly a lot of overlap of what we do in space and the military is interested in similar sorts of things. largely the programs are mostly separate to a great extent, but there is a lot of overlap and there are regular meetings between the nasa administrator and leaders in the department of defense where they talk about issues and programs and what things they're going to collaborate on and they're not going to collaborate on. that issue has had ups and downs. in the early '60s nasa depended on the air force. the air force has really been the organization that perfected program management and nasa desperately needed program management experience in the early '60s. the air force loaned a bunch of air force officers and people to nasa in the 1960s.

tight relationship. during the building of the shuttle program, nasa was leaning on the department of defense to help them fund the shuttle program. the department of defense wasn't that interested in the shuttle program. the relationship was not very good at that point. it ebbs and flows over time. it's pretty good. there are a lot of people who work at nasa who, you know, have worked at the department of defense, me included, and so there's a firm understanding on those sorts of things, department of defense wish they had a job at nasa. we generally have a reasonably good relationship. the specific of the programs i don't really know about and if i did i probably couldn't tell you anyway. >> one of the audience members asked how accurate was tom ha hanks' apollo 13 is. >> it's the best. >> this is his answer to the question on the wall. >> my favorite space movie. as a government employee i'm not supposed to endorse movies.

i'm not telling you to go out and buy a copy of apollo 13 -- but it's -- everybody -- everybody at nasa will tell you that apollo 13 was the space movie that most accurately depicted what happened. the only person i've ever heard complain about apollo 13 the movie was gene, and his one complaint was that there's a scene where things are going bad and he kicks a trash can. gene said this, i would never have kicked a trash can. i believe him. but other than that -- it's a game at nasa because people are always trying to find things that were wrong in apollo 13. it's a hard game. scenes where they scan across mission control and it's supposed to be happening in 1972 or whatever and there are shuttle mission patches hanging on the wall. there are a couple things like that. you have to be quick to see

those things. it's the most accurate movie. the series that tom hanks did after that was also really great in terms of historical content. there are a lot of great space movies out there, some of which are good on history and some which are pretty bad on history. but yeah. apollo 13 is probably the one that i think you would get an easy consensus opinion that's the most well done in terms of historical accuracy. >> well, there are scores of people watching on facebook live, including about 50 in the library. >> oh, hi. >> one of the questions is -- >> sorry you couldn't get a seat in here. >> what do you think the future of nasa will be with respect to future missions to mars and what preparations for human survival in that environment? >> i'll answer the mars question first. for many years nasa was pushing the idea that we should go to mars. in fact, as the apollo program was, you know, putting people on

the moon, president nixon came in and said i want to study about what we're going to do next and all the answers from nasa and vice president agnew in charge of the study were we go to mars in 10 years, 15 years, or 20 years. that was the idea. president nixon said no, we're not going to do that. that's too expensive. and for good reason. there were other issues the united states had to deal with at the time. the budget goes down. nasa still is trying to sell this idea we need to -- eventually for humans to, you know, populate the solar system if we're going to travel if other places other than planet earth, mars is kind of the logical destination. venus is too hot. mars has got its problems too, but it's the closest destination you can reasonably get to. you build a base on a planet, that's the place to go. it wasn't until 2004, several attempts to change the policy, you're a policy guy, right, several attempts to change the

policy, but wasn't until president bush got in 2004, a year after the columbia disaster and said, the policy of the united states government is that we're going to send humans to mars. that had never been said in that kind of definitive terms by a president and then accepted by. his father had tried to say something like that a decade before and it flopped in congress. congress in 2004 said, yep, we're in there and passed a law that said that's nasa's goal to send humans to mars. it didn't say when. that's always -- mars is always 20 or 30 years away. that is the stated policy of the u.s. government waefrm send a human expedition to mars. i believe we will get there. >> this one is -- >> the other part of the question. >> preparation for arrival in that. >> that's a complicated thing. mars is a very harsh environment. there's no atmosphere you can breathe. there's a lot of radiation on

the surface of mars. if we live on mars we will probably build things underground mars mostly. the movie "the martian" is a good space movie. i didn't recommend martians", i actually a pretty good representation scientifically. the author of the book. spent a lot of time talking to guys tr the jet propulsion laboratory. so it's prth accurate. but it down plays some of the challenges of living on the surface of mars. it's not going to be really easy. and nasa is spending a lot of time ask energy on how to get people to adapt to space. a lot of the work we're doing on the international space station we're study iing the human body and how it adapts to space and how we can make it easier for the human body to adapt so you can land again. and do things. it used to be we have big problems coming back from the space station after six months

and they had a hard time standing up. their muscle mass was much low er and the bone density was a problem. it took awhile for it to come back again. your body says i don't need these bones anymore. why am uh-uh making them. so we have actually over the last few years the regimen with exercise lifting weights, it would be bungee cords and that and diet and things we're doing to have astronauts come back and done better on physical fitness it'ses after six months on the space station. we're getting there. >> this question is about the repurposing of buildings. particular etly the vab at the kennedy space center. repurposing of things that are no longer in direct use. >> the vab we're going to build a system there.

that rocket is going to be just like the center and that bulding is still in use. we used it for putting it together to get to the moon. and then we repurposed it to use for the shuttle program and the plan was to be doing the big launches. is so that particular building is i expect that to be used for many years to come. if you get a chance to go to the space center and don't do this often, but if you take the tour of the place and they let you into the vab, it's being used all the time. it is amazing. it's like walking into a cathedral. i have had people describe it as a religious experience. but it is amazing. and it is really a testament to the things. and in terms of enough, it you

go on the roof, which you probably won't ever have a chance to do. i only got a chance because the cast from "hidden figures" wanted to go up there. so i got to follow them up. but i was up on the roof and i said, why is the building look kind of unfinished? when they designed the building, they were expecting they were going to build a bigger rocket to get to the moon. so they built the building so they could raise the roof. so the plan was it was going to be even bigger. it already has weather. the clouds have a way to keep this from happening now, but if you're not careful, clouds will form ask it could rain inside the vab. it's huge. >> you've been such a great sport all day.

so i'm going to end on one of those serious notes, which is we all recognize that iowa is the future birthplace of james. >> i so lute you. >> so what intrigues you more. the discovery of e woks or volkans. >> when i was a kid watching "star trek" i thought spock was the coolst thing. i was a space geek. but ewoks are really cute. but i'm going to have to say ewoks because i have a tibeten terrier at home. so ewoks it is. >> thank you. [ applause ]

>> i have to say it's been a very enlightening lecture. >> i surprised you with that answer. >> thank you for being here. thank you for r your support of the institute. check out our website for future events. and let me let you know that on november 29th is our evening with charlie cook. you can register for that online starting tonight. thank you and have a good evening. you're watching "american

history tv," only on c-span 3. >> you're watching "american history tv" where every weekend we explore our nation's past. all of the programs we air are archived on our website. this holiday weekend we're featuring our most watch ed programs of 2018. one of those is coming up next. next on american history tv, three former white house photographers on their work with presidents bill clinton, george w. bush and barack obama. they share photos showing presidents in their public and private moments and the stories behind each scene. et we see first families. the annenberg space for photography hosted this discussion. it is an hour and 40 minutes.