>> well, actually, like a lot of people, you learn things later that you did not know whether it was critical. but it must have been about 10 years ago, i get an e-mail from a friend of mine, paul haney head of public affairs when nasa selected me in 1963. how many here were alive in 1963? a few of you. [laughter] but i met paul haney. he was the only person i knew with nasa. after i left nasa, i wrote a book called the “all-american boys.” a lot of people here have that book. and paul was a friend of mine. i gave paul a copy of that book. about 10 years ago, before paul

died, i get an e-mail from paul. he says just one sentence. i read the book. it is really good. i sent an e-mail back. paul, i gave you that book in 1977. and you are just reading it? >> he said, i went to the index and checked what you said about me. [laughter] >> very typical. >> he had one more sentence. he said, you know you are number 14, don't you? >> you are like, what does that mean? >> that is right. in our group, we were the third group of astronauts. they had 7, 9, and 14. i'm only one of the group of 30 that knew where he stood on the selection process. no one ever made it public or anything at all like that. so i got on the phone and called

and asked them. he told me. the day that they were announcing this they had a press conference. a week before that, deke slayton, who was in charge of the astronauts, arranged a meeting with the head of the space center. so paul haney was going to be there. paul was on the phone when he started this meeting. so he did not get there when they started. when he finally got off the call, this is the story is telling me. he went down there and went in. deke had just finished naming and giving a brief background of the people selected. the head of engineering -- i have your name problem too. i can't remember his name. but he was the guy that designed the spacecraft. best technical guy we had there.

as paul walked in, deke says you can't do that. that is 13. >> meaning they chose 13 astronauts. >> i could not believe that the technical guy was superstitious about 13. and deke says, i want this guy. so if i have to take another one. i am the only one to this day that knows he was number 14. >> had that not happened, who knows? >> had that not happened, i would not be here today. >> fate is the hunter. >> yes. good book. let's go back to something serious. apollo 1, the fire. where were you? that is just like the challenger for us.

>> challenger is probably much more memorable. challenger and columbia. both terrible disasters. but back in that timeframe -- and that was in 1967 -- in 1966, don eisley and i were assigned to the crew of what would be apollo 2. and we were living with contractors. i spent 270 days out there. there were some things wrong that had to be fixed. so many engineering things. not to mention the operational challenges. try to get changes in for operational uses that they did not want to put in because of

one thing. it was not the cost. it was the schedule. kennedy had said, i want a man on the moon this decade. 10 years, you try to do something today in 10 years. but to get there, they wanted to keep moving along. so they started making improvements. when they made a block 2 spacecraft, they canceled the second block 1 spacecraft. that was the one we were on. we became backup crew for about three months on apollo 1. that number got changed. >> more fate. >> that is exactly right. we were getting ready for liftoff. it was scheduled in february of 1967. we knew there were things wrong

with the spacecraft. i can just tell you that our guys, i guess you can call it an ego that they had today. but we were all fighter pilots for a dozen years. most of them test pilots. we had confidence in ourselves. that we needed to find a way to handle that. we knew that the spacecraft was not great. but we were going to fly it anyway. the afternoon of apollo 1 fire we had done that same test the night before, but it was plugs-in so the hatch was open using external power. we were all going to fly back together in a p38 back to houston. late afternoon, about 5:30 wally and don and i said we are

going to go home. so we left. they had been in the spacecraft all day long. when we landed at ellington air force base, the head of our flight operations walked out to meet us. we knew something was wrong. the fire had happened while we were in the air and heading back. so it was really a hell of a deal on it. nothing they could do. the whole crew was dead in about 19 seconds. i worked on the fire investigation for a while. about three weeks later, deke took us aside and said we're going to be on the first crew. but they renumbered it, and we ended up being apollo 7. it was the first manned flight. >> you guys are steely and never have any emotion. >> mostly. >> but emotionally, how did it hit you, when you heard that? did you expect something crazy running the programs so quickly?

how did it hit you? >> we were shocked it had happened. it was the first time that any astronaut had been killed in a spacecraft. what people do not realize is what was going on back in those days. our group of 14, in about three years, i think we lost four of them. airplane accidents. we lost roger chaffee. so we kind of understood that. and i do not recall anybody being terribly discouraged by the fire. we really wanted to get the first flight. we were very pleased. and wally was already kind of

looking forward to leaving nasa eventually. so his attitude kind of changed on that. he started getting more serious on-the-job. i just felt very fortunate. i do not remember ever really being frightened about flying. you fly airplanes and people get killed all the time. you usually find some reason to blame the pilot. because then it would not have happened to you. >> talk about fear. do you have any? [laughter] >> i think i have a little fear from time to time. but in those days, i was too stupid to be afraid. [laughter] there is an attitudinal thing. i am not a psychologist, i read about a lot of that stuff. i think there is a difference in mentality about how people feel about these things. recognizing it, being aware of

it intellectually, is an important step. i think a lot of people are afraid of things because they do not have the faintest idea what is going to go on. so they are afraid of it. and those that learn about things, they may be afraid of it because of what they know. and then there is some kind of a mental quirk that a lot of my friends and people out there today are aware of. brian, i know that he was aware of the things that could go wrong. and you have to have the kind of self-confidence that enables you to handle that. that self-confidence comes from the way you have lived. you faced a lot of lesser things along the way. and you have been able to overcome them. i am afraid we have a society that has been moving away from

that. we do not even let our kids have chances to take risks or anything like that. so they are not going to be able to handle the kind of fears going on in life. i feel very fortunate i grew up the way i did. i do not remember ever being afraid. >> the right stuff. this program partially is about putting the program, the manned program into the context of the cold war. i do not know if you guys know but apollo 7 was the first manned flight. they had sent some unmanned, and they worked perfectly. but it is a different deal with real guys out there. so your mission was pivotal. put that in context of the cold war. >> first up, all the other manned launches were not perfect. we had a problem. >> the press told us they were perfect. >> but we had good engineers.

astronauts got the glory because we were at the tip of the spear. but there were 400,000 people that worked on that program. government and civilian employees. those people, they had the guts. for example, today we do not think about it, but our management, the management at johnson space center and throughout nasa -- i was mostly familiar with jsc -- management had the nerve to make decisions and go over the results of it. today, it is all too frequently that we reduce those risks to zero. we were fortunate to have people of all fields in those days who owned the program. many of them were much more

emotional about the program than i think i was at the time. i was just doing my job. >> part of it was the urgency, right? because of the cold war, everyone believed we had to get the moon first. >> i do not know. but getting back to your question about the russians, we started off -- the russians, from the beginning -- it is a little different now. things have changed a lot. but the russians were very focused on the public relations aspect of it. they wanted -- for example, when they knew we were planning a second flight for ed white to go out and have an eda and test a maneuvering device, they did everything they could to get alexi leonov to do it. they did it with a spacecraft that was not built for it. that was really risky. they knew they were taking risks and willing to do that just to

be out in front. >> so alexi would be the first to walk in space. >> and he didn't really walk. i know alexi. he is like the buzz aldrin of the russian program. >> we get it. [laughter] >> i think it was 12 minutes. the whole effort was aimed at how to get him back in. the little port that they had there, it was a terrible event. but they beat us by more than a month. so they focused on those kinds of things. it is very dangerous, risky things. on the upside, they have been very fortunate. they have had very few accidents. they have had terrible accidents they had survived. i have been impressed by that. but in those days, by the time we had the gemini spacecraft -- and keep in mind you are getting

my personal opinion. not official statements on these things. the gemini program, that was a more capable spacecraft than i see today in the russian launches. it could maneuver. do more things. that was back 40 years ago. 50 years ago. in the meantime, the russians have converted more to what i consider more of an engineering aspect. exploration in the future. it is a lot cheaper for them and has been over the years. we were engaged in a real fight. it was like a fight to the finish to get there. the first time we met any of the russians, it might have been after ed white and -- i can't remember his name. i think is the first time we met

any of the cosmonauts. over the years, they have become very good friends. we have organizations that work together. association of space explorers. they get along very well. they're living together at the international space station. as a matter of fact, they have outmaneuvered us administratively and cost was. we are like beginners. >> after your flight, we said we are going to send these guys around the moon because we were worried the russians would do that or us? >> there was great concern about the russians beating us to the moon. we were not exposed to a lot of military intelligence they might

have had. government intelligence. so it was kind of what we knew and felt and heard. but there were people that knew what the russians were doing to push for it. they must have had some pictures. the russians were developing the m1 rocket. 10 million pounds of thrust. they were going to go to the moon. they were doing everything they could to do that. >> apollo 8 was originally not going to the moon. >> and the russians were shooting to go around the moon. they do not have any landings set for it. but before apollo 7, probably a month or so before apollo 7 flew, they started talking, the administration people at nasa, about apollo 8 going around the

moon. that was a brand-new thing. we had five giant steps to go to the moon. you are going to test the spacecraft in earth orbit. that is what we did. then we have to test the lunar module. didn't follow instructions. [laughter] >> houston, we have a problem. >> and then, we test the lunar module in earth orbit. then fly close to or around the moon. vendor the simulation and the landing. well, administrators did this. they said, instead of finding a high orbit, we could send it around the moon. they considered everything. it was based on the success of apollo 7. they decided if seven was successful, they would have

eight oh around the moon. it turns out that apollo 7 is the longest, most ambitious, most successful engineering test flight of any new machine ever. the reason it was so loaded was because we had lost 21 months after the apollo 1 fire. a year and a half, maybe a little less. to go to the moon. and we had to do it supposedly by the end of the decade. you're trying to make up for all that. when we went up for an 11 day mission, none of us thought we were going to go 11 days. you could not do that on the first mission. so we were surprised, a little irritated towards the end.

>> i want a shower. get me back. >> so that was critical. because it was successful, apollo 8 went around the moon. that is what everybody thinks. >> well, we have to find out from you. all the astronauts talk about it. tell us in your own words, when you first got that view from space. what was it like? >> i do not have a lot of useful things to say about that. >> you are an astronaut, and you are tough. >> it makes me think i was totally insensitive to those kinds of things. because we knew that, after one orbit, and we had never been around the world for. i knew a guy that went around the world 163 times before i

went to europe. [laughter] >> so, we knew we were going to have to separate. and come back and simulate a docking with the s4b stage. the laughing we wanted to do was screw up anything. on the second time around, we had separated. wally was flying. i was taking pictures from the right side. i was taking pictures of the s4b. i was just snapping these pictures. all across the southern united states, in this picture. later, only later, did i realize

it was taken over where we live. it was taken over the space center down there. to this day, that is my favorite picture that i took in orbit. at the time, i was not even looking at it. i was looking at the s4b. that's how we were focused on doing things. first time i started getting a thrill -- after that, we separated and went into different orbits. to see how that would work out. most of the time, people do not realize how difficult it is to see anything on the ground. did i mention this? >> no, keep going. >> because you look at the international space station, digital film, fabulous pictures.

in those days, we drifted. and you drifted because you did not want to use your fuel and your thrusters. because then you really would have come home early. we were just drifting. you think about it, we had five windows. about 150 degrees. they cover about 150 degrees. the biggest was in the hatch. round window, 10 inches in diameter. two panes. best glass you could get separated by a tiny gap. so in the window broke, you can still keep rusher in the

spacecraft. unless a window was pointing at the ground and you are drifting, and you see a tiny little bit out there. it is pointing out the ground and you have a camera and are not involved in some other thing, you might be able to take a picture. if you're looking at the ground keep in mind that, every 45 minutes, you're going into darkness. than 45 minutes daylight. the camera people did not want you to take pictures within five minutes of sunrise or sunset because, in those days, we had kodachrome film. you could not take photos like you do today. we had a limited amount of film on board. so it had to be pointed down. if you pointed down, 55% of the earth's services covered by clouds all the time. the part that is in the clear, that is usually the desert. saudi arabia. never saw a cloud over saudi arabia. [laughter]

you can take a picture and never even see a city down there in the desert. there was a lot of things like this. he did not want to take it more than 30 degrees off the vertical. it was hard to get pictures. >> we are going to ask some questions of the iss astronauts. one of your questions is, do we think that we should have a fighter pilot training or trading like that for today's astronauts? most of you guys were fighter pilots, right? >> if you were not a fighter pilot, you did not apply. there is a lot of changes that has gone on in the space program. today, you do not have to be a pilot. one of the reasons you do not have to be a pilot is because, in the space shuttle, the

greatest flying machine ever built and operated by man -- may be a minority opinion, but i feel strongly about that -- you always had a couple of pilots. and they did a fantastic job in my opinion. because of what went on 40 and 50 years ago, we were able to build hardware and a program where you could carry passengers up. you did not have to be a pilot. now, even with the new capsules coming up, going to be able to take people that are pilots. that in the days when they did not know what it was going to take, nasa decided to get the people that have the best chance of succeeding. the russians had taken a different attitude. their people in the spacecraft did virtually nothing. they were strapped in. they operated the spacecraft.

it has always been operated remotely. even today, it operates remotely. it is not a satisfying thing for an aviator. we did not do that. they made their best guess of what they thought was. and they took from the pilot field, all military. our group was the first group where you do not have to have been a test pilot. half of our group was test pilots. you had to have fighter pilot experiences. i have always felt that the advantage that gave us, every one of those people, myself included, we had spent at least 10 or 12 years, sometimes more than that, flying fighter aircraft. you develop the kind of

self-confidence it takes. you think you are the best whether you are the best or not. you have to have that kind of an attitude out there. plus we have flown with these people in all kinds of things. mine was at the end of the korean war. anybody here remember the korean war? what that does is give you the sense that you can depend on the other guy in the other airplane. in the spacecraft, the same way. we knew that we could bet our life on our associates. and that worked out very well. today, they are focused able lot more on the right kind of diversity in who they select. they just selected another group of astronauts. and the headline in houston was they had selected eight new astronauts. the big headline was that half women, half men. that was an accomplishment for somebody, someplace, some particular drive.

i, frankly, would not care if they were all women if that was the best get to do the job. but today, they are focusing on a different thing. it is the numbers of it. you have to have the right number of minorities caucasians, all that other stuff. i think it is nonsense, but i am an old guy. >> but they do not have to have the kind of skills you guys have. >> everything in the world is going that way. [laughter] i'm the only guy in his room that does not own a cell phone. [laughter] buzz aldrin has three or four of them. but that is because i do not want to be trapped with that kind of stuff. but today, it drives all things. some things it is improving. a lot of techniques and different things. but frankly, i have been fortunate enough -- not 10 years

ago, i got to fly an f16 and f18, but i had to tell the guy i was flying with i did not want to mess around with the computer screen to pick out what i was seeing. i like the old fashion way of flying. >> this guy is old-school. i like it. his cell phone is not going off. we rely on russia to take us to the space station. what do you think about the decision to abandon the shuttle before we had a replacement? >> it is kind of interesting because my attitude, and my contemporaries -- our attitude about the space shuttle is probably different and a lot of people i have talked to involved in the shuttle. keep in mind it is a small group of people in the shuttle. the pilots that flew it.

they were maybe 25 or 30%. i think they have 500 people now or something like that. you take all kinds of folks with you. but i always but i always bet on having these guys on that shuttle. that is my personal opinion. the space shuttle is the greatest flying machine ever built by man. i personally think the greatest mistake nasa made was canceling that space shuttle without something better. not just something else, something better. look what we are doing at nasa. we're going to outside contractors to develop capsules. some of them look like the apollo command module.

just slightly bigger. 30% bigger or something like that. doing the reentries. it took good aviators. a great airplane. i think the missions were absolutely fabulous. they lost two shuttles along the way due to management decisions that were made. the crew at the time, their particular position on the columbia and the challenger report was we probably ought to put this off. and management went ahead and lost the crews. >> i will open it up to the audience, but i know you have -- you must have a view about mars. was the best way to go there? do we go to the moon first? do we fly directly like buzz wants? >> i am not a technologist

anymore. i read about these things. other people's opinions. it has evolved. i was in a committee in 1971. we were talking about space shuttle development and mars. it was the extreme. another seven years after that like 1991, that would be more likely.

i doubt if there was an astronaut in the office that would not have bet we would have been to mars by 2000. 30 years from now, will we be on mars? i have no idea. i have been in favor of going to mars not because i think we will find life there, but we might. so what? there are others who want to go back to the moon. there is a ridiculous idea we're going to the moon and take pieces off. the japanese landed something on a meteorite to years ago and brought back a specimen from it. so we have to focus on mars. the reason why we have to focus

on mars is because society moves ahead by pushing the next frontier. i mentioned it at m.i.t. a couple of days ago. when magellan set out to go around the world 500 years ago that was 1519 or something like that. they were going to find the next frontier. sailing around the world for the first time. you have five ships, 270 crewmen. when they came back, one ship made it back. 17 of the 270 still alive. but they were willing to push the frontier. but what happened in the western world because they went out and

did this. sending was happening in the 1960's. in the 1960's, the next frontier was space. the moon was representative of getting away from the earth's gravitational field. escaping from it and getting to the moon. the frontier today is mars. during apollo, people were willing to accept the risk. we lost people in the apollo program to do it. and look what it is now. because of pushing a frontier, which is not an economic return, to go out and explore, the economic return comes from all of the things you have to develop to make that possible. we have been benefiting now -- you are all benefiting things that were spawned because technology got pushed in. some of that was political. >> the cell phones they all have.

>> i was up at m.i.t. i want to get back to this because of going to mars. by the way, i never graduated from m.i.t. i study there in 1964 and 1965 because they had a computer we used in the command module. it was very important. it was hardwired. i want you to know this. we had 48 kilobytes of memory in the computer. kilobytes. anybody remember a kilobyte? [laughter] that kind of development. you push the next frontier for different reasons. i do not believe you are going

to make money going out and doing this. the people doing this, they will be able to make money because of it. the next frontier is mars. i used to think, let's go to mars and land on it and return. we had the concepts and all that. printing we had to overcome was radiation. and then i finally came around to agree with people that we had something to gain if we went back to the moon. that is setting up a site where you learn how to actually live when there is no other way of surviving out there. it will take a lot of work. now, like you mentioned, buzz is making a big push that we make a one-way trip to mars. the more i think about it, the more i think that makes a lot of sense. here is why. the technology and the cost of

developing a system you are going to take out there, fly land, pickup, launch again, and stay alive to come back to the earth. and then you come back, terribly expensive. you hear these idiots talking about $5 billion to go to the moon and mars. it is outlandish. it cost us $25 billion in the old days to do the whole apollo program. today, if you like that, they'll be like $125 billion. going to mars is a lot tougher than going to the moon. if we can go there and send a couple things up first that might help people survive, you go out and you land, they are probably going to die. i understand that. big deal. but what i'm getting at is you send stuff out there, try to let

them live. and then try to resupply. you do the things you can't, but you have to be willing to push the boundaries. we no longer have that. we are risk averse. >> very well said. with that, i will open it up to the audience. can someone tell me what time it is? ok. >> i want to add one thought to that before i do that. that is because, when we talk about apollo 11, the first thing you think of is one small step for man. a story i like to tell is that they left on the surface of the moon a microfilm message from the leaders of the free nations of the world. microfilm used to be small. that was how we had things. i got a chance to look at those some weeks afterwards. and i carried it in my pocket

for 10 years, a message that the prime minister of australia left. i cannot remember his name now. >> his wife is reminding him. gordon. >> prime minister gordon. he had a couple sentences of platitudes. and this is what i think is what we need to be focusing on today, especially here at the explorers club. it says, made a high courage and technical genius which made this achievement possible be so useful in the future that mankind will live in a world in which peace, self-expression and the chance of dangerous adventure are available to all. we need to get back to that kind of thing. >> i would not disagree. anybody want to ask a question? this gentleman here.

you're going to have to talk into the mic. >> can you share who one of your personal heroes is and why? >> my personal -- i grew up admiring i always wanted to be a pilot. occasionally, i would get to go to a movie on saturday. they always had some fighter pilot that was the hero. my boyhood hero was charles lindbergh. at a very early age, he was willing to do that. stick his neck out. he also understood what i was just saying about prime minister gordon's statement. i do not remember the exact quote right now, but he said if he could live 10 more years

before dying, that he would rather do that than not fly. >> ok. yes. les guffman? >> i like to hear more about apollo 7. i assume the 32 kilobytes of memory do not put you on cruise control. did you have technical problems? tell us about the mission itself. >> in 7, we had very few technical problems. i remember the alarm going off twice in 11 days. we could not believe it. we were prepared for anything that could go wrong. and also in those days, we did not sleep at the same time. i remember wally and i were on the same sleeping pattern.

don was awake when we were asleep. i remember i was on one of the couches. i remember waking up. i heard an alarm go off. don was up there. but he was asleep. i bet it didn't take 10 seconds for us to reconfigure things. believe me, that spacecraft, after apollo 1 being a disaster, apollo csm101 was an amazingly good spacecraft. i remember that has flight when nothing really went wrong. >> any other questions? ok. wait a minute. who is this in the back? >> mr. cunningham, a pleasure to

meet you. you were selected as a pilot because of your ability to handle stress. i would assume most pilots have a natural ability to handle stress. can you remark on any training protocols that nasa, whether they be psychological, medical or nutritional, that would enhance your ability to deal with stress under difficult conditions? >> that is another thing that is a big difference today. maybe it is because of the attitudes of the guys at that time. we did not allow nasa to really turn you into a specimen often. i still get my annual physical at nasa every year. because they're keeping a history of people that have gone into space. and i like it because i get to do my physical. but today, astronauts are a whole lot more specimens in the

scientific field. then they used to be. heart of that is the reaction to what happened in those days with us ancient astronauts. i was not as obnoxious and outspoken as some of them could be. but i do know this. after the pilot program was over, management began to try to find ways to reduce astronaut influence on these things. back in those days, we could go to any of the meetings. involved in all the reviews, those kinds of things. but people and operations, mission control, those folks they try to push the leverage of astronauts down. secondly, nasa is a government

agency. as it has grown older, it has become more bureaucratic, very much like any government agency. you leave them alone enough, they get more money. it is one of the reasons that so-called commercial space industry is able to do these things today. because nasa has become very expensive. for example, i was at spacex. everything is in one hangar. they do not have to worry about nine centers open around the country so they can keep the congressman putting the money out to do it. it is a real change. >> that is it for now. i want to thank you guys. let's have a hand for walt cunningham. [applause]

>> gregory olsen flew to the international space station in 2005. in october, the entrepreneur spoke with the explorers club in new york city about his training in russian district to space and what it was like aboard the international's a station -- aboard the international space station. this is about 25 minutes. >> ok. >> ok. so for our next presenter today, it is going to be a straight up talk. i want to introduce greg olsen to you. he was the third paying person to fly to the international space station. greg went up in a rocket in 2005 or 2006. 2005. he reportedly paid $20 million

or more or less, more than my virgin galactic flight. but he did some real experiments. he started something called sensors unlimited. made a ton of money. but this guy's a real science geek as well as a businessman. i do want to say he is a ham radio operator. he has contacted earth from the space station himself. we are going to do the opposite of in about 40 minutes in the trophy room. i just want to say, greg is a nice guy. his capsule that came back from space, the tiny soyuz capsule is in the intrepid museum on the west side. if you want to see how small it was. greg olsen. [applause] >> thank you.