tukufu: this week on history detectives: man over radio: roger, we're underway. how did is sliver of material give the united states a much needed boost during the space race? elyse: what did this odd-looking boot have to do with america's first steps in space? gwendolyn: and, in our final story, was work by major artists, including andy warhol, smuggled to the moon? "a.o.k., all systems are go." elvis costello: ♪ watchin' the detectives ♪ i get so angry when the teardrops start ♪ ♪ but he can't be wounded 'cause he's got no heart ♪ ♪ watchin' the detectives

♪ it's just like watchin' the detectives ♪ ♪ watchin' the detectives announcer: explore new worlds through programs like this, made available for everyone through contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. hi, i'm wes cowan. we're here at the hayden planetarium at the american museum of natural history in new york city to welcome you to an exciting special hour of history detectives. our investigations tonight involve mysteries from three different chapters of american space exploration. it's all here: sputnik, space walks, and a truly astonishing claim that andy warhol artwork was smuggled onto the moon. and we'll need your help solving one of these mysteries, so stick around and see how you can pitch in. tukufu: our first story takes us to the dawn of the space race

and a peaceful satellite project that may have secretly helped fight the cold war. october 1957: the soviet union makes history with the launch ofsputnik... radio announcer: a new moon is in the sky... the world's first man-made satellite. [ electronic beeping ] you are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the earth-circling satellite. for many scientists in the united states, the sound ofsputnik is the sound of their own failure in the space race. nasa vows to strike back with a first of its own. on august 12, 1960, the world's first communication satellite is dispatched into space to bounce radio signals from earth back down again. eisenhower over radio: this is president eisenhower speaking. it is a great personal satisfaction to participate in this first experiment in communication known as echo.

now one man thinks he has an artifact from this turning point in the space race. i never thought i'd get a piece of space history in the mail. i'm tukufu zuberi, and i'm making my way to beverly hills, florida, to meet chuck roedel. chuck is a longtime amateur radio operator... this is wa2mxr, whiskey alpha two mike x-ray romeo. and he's held on to the contents of a letter that has intrigued him for years. tukufu zuberi. come on in. what do you got for me? i have what i think is a piece of nasa satellite. there is the piece. okay. [ chuckles ] and i also received a letter that came with it. hmm, interesting. now, where did you get all this stuff from? well, i had a contact with a gentleman in maryland whose name was doc; that's what i knew him on the air as.

doc was also a ham radio operator. they met on the air in october 1978. i took some notes while i was talking to him. doc told him he had worked on a communication satellite program for nasa in the early 1960s... "echo 2 satellite," interesting. and that the satellite was made from an experimental material. i really couldn't understand what it was made out of, so he said if i sent him an envelope, he would send me back a piece of the satellite. and he did. i would think a satellite would be made of a harder material than this. well, he explained this was the beginning of communication satellites, and they were attempting to launch a balloon. a balloon in space, is that right? a satellite is any object in space that orbits a larger one, but chuck didn't know if a balloon could be a satellite or how it might have worked as a communications device. what do you want me to find out for you? i'd like to know if --

first of all, if this is a piece of nasa satellite and, if you could, i'd like to know a little bit more about doc. do you mind if i just sit here and take a look at everything for a moment? no, that'd be okay. all right, great. so here this guy is, he's having a conversation with somebody, he doesn't know the guy's name, he just knows him as "doc." "w3hnt." could be anybody. and then they tell you they work for nasa and they're going to send you some material. the material's about 4 x 4 inches. it's pretty light and very thin. if this was some kind of satellite, i would expect this material to be more durable. and it has this weird pink powder on one side. this pink jazz, huh, who knows what that stuff is. let's look at what the letter says. "echo ii sataloon," i mean, what is that? is that the name of this satellite thing, or is this the name of a project at nasa?

it says this thing was 135 feet tall. now, that's a big satellite or balloon or whatever inflatable object we're talking about. [ ♪ ] i'm going to type in "echo ii sataloon" and see what i come up with. "echo satellites were nasa's first passive communication satellite experiment." this is interesting. on january 31, 1958, almost four months after sputnik'slaunch, nasa joined the space age by launching its own man-made satellite, explorer-i. but having lost the first leg of the space race tosputnik, the united states really wanted a first, fast. nasa responded with three in 1960, launching the first weather satellite, the first navigation satellite, and the first communication satellite,echo.

so basically this was a big thing. nasa successfully launched the first echo sataloon into space onboard a delta rocket in august of 1960. tv announcer: echo i foreshadows a new era in global communications. when the rocket arrived in space, theecho balloon somehow inflated. it then operated like a giant mirror, bouncing radio waves back to earth. the radio mirror satellite as bright in the northern sky as the brightest star... so the echowas a major publicity event for the united states, something which is putting the u.s. in direct competition with the soviet union. but this is interesting. the u.s. shared the echo technology with other countries, and it seems the soviets actually participated in experiments withecho ii, launched in 1964.

eisenhower: the satellite balloon, which has reflected these words, may be used freely by any nation for similar experiments in its own interests. the soviets calledecho ii "the friendlysputnik." is chuck's material a part of some thaw in the cold war space race? maybe this mysterious "doc" can help me. here we have the address of the guy who sent the letter, but he lists as his name his call sign, w3hnt. that's cool. let's see if we can use that to track down his name. [ ♪ ] i find old ham radio records online, organized by call number.

so i get his name. here we are, we have dwight saxmann. the address is a match. nice. but when i do a little more digging, it looks like dwight saxmann died in 1983. maybe i can find some relatives. yes, my name is tukufu zuberi, and i'm trying to locate a relative of a dwight saxmann. oh, okay. well, thank you very much. i leave messages. let's see if i can get some information from nasa on dwight saxmann and how he may have been involved in the echo program. so you're not able to find any record of this person's name in your database? so the man who sent chuck this material didn't even work for nasa? before i attempt to solve that mystery, i want to figure out if i even have a piece of nasa satellite. hi, how you doing? i'm tukufu zuberi. ron mueller is a former satellite engineer who worked on the echo program.

he meets me at the goddard space flight center in maryland in front of a delta rocket. so this kind of rocket would've actually launched one of our balloons. the first launch of this rocket was echo i. i show ron the letter and fragment of material. look at that. can you say definitively that this was part of the sataloon? not without actually making detailed measurements. [ ♪ ] echo i was just a thin layer of mylar with an aluminum coat. and mylar at that time was very new. mylar, ron explains, was invented by dupont in the 1950s. announcer: it's a remarkable new polyester film called mylar. can you tear it? [ crinkling ] it's almost impossible. echo ii had a mylar structure, but it had actual aluminum on the inside and the outside.

the aluminum was an effort to reinforce the mylar to withstand the rigors of space. ron's not certain if that's what we have, but he explains how nasa's special fabric was glued together in panels for a 100-foot balloon. and then it gets all folded up very carefully in a z-shaped kind of a thing. and then the whole works gets stuffed into this -- into this canister very carefully. once it was in orbit, it would inflate to full size. and that's the balloon inflating. look at how fast that happened. the aluminum would give it a structure, and you can see, it's virtually a perfect sphere. anybody could use it. it's just flying up there, and it's just a passive thing. it's just like a mirror. butecho's role in space wasn't entirely altruistic.

the u.s. army map service was secretly very interested in a satellite flying over america's cold war enemy. satellites go over everywhere, so they couldn't really complain. up until then, it was impossible to calculate precise distances to missile targets across the atlantic. echo iisolved that problem. each of these xs is a place in the world where we could place a portable telescope. each telescope photographed echo as it passed overhead, then the distance between the two points was precisely measured. if you wanted to hit a target in russia, you had to know where that target was relative to where you started out from. now u.s. war planners aiming ballistic missiles could pinpoint strategic targets with even greater accuracy. how can i find out if my piece of mylar was part of the echo iiproject? i'd take it to our experts here at the goddard space flight center.

thank you very much. you've been a great help. ron puts me in touch with material analyst marjorie sovinski. her colleague, debbie thomas, is the operator of the lab's scanning electron microscope. is there any way that you can tell me if this was part of the echo iiproject? i'd have to take a cross-section of it. with our contributor's permission, she takes a small sample of the material and prepares it for scanning. it's basically like a microscope, except that we're going to use an electron beam, and that goes in and excites the atoms on the surface of the sample and you can get x-rays that will give you composition. okay. okay, so there's our sample. so this is inside of the machine. this is inside the machine, yeah. it looks like maybe two metallic layers here. let's see, i'm going to take a spot on here. i'm going to measure the x-rays now, and it's going to tell me what i've got. okay, it looks like aluminum.

so we've got aluminum here. and this is mylar here. so we know that we've got an aluminum sandwich essentially. your total thickness of your aluminum is about 0.3 mils, thereabouts. thank you very much. nice meeting you. i take the lab results to marjorie, who compares the measurements to the officialecho ii specs. if you go down the list, the total thickness for the material is very similar to what the report indicated it should be. all right. so we have confirmed that it's very likely that the sample that you have here could've been used for the echo iiproject. does she have any idea what the pink powder is? they added a fluorescent tracer to the material so that if there was a leak, we'd be able to see it. marjorie says the powder was bright enough that mission control could see it if theecho balloon exploded in orbit. if our powder glows under ultraviolet light, marjorie says it's almost certainly echo ii'sfluorescent tracer.

yes, it glows under ultraviolet light. is chuck's mylar the fallout debris from a violent explosion of anecho ii balloon? but if there had been such an explosion, how would dwight saxmann have gotten a piece of it? i catch a break. one of my earlier phone calls pays off. i get a call back from a man named milton saxmann. he's dwight saxmann's son, and he wants to meet at the former naval air station at lakehurst, new jersey. hello. hello. i'm tukufu zuberi. how do you do? i'm milt saxmann. yeah, it's a kind of a big building. the navy station at lakehurst has a long history of working with giant balloons. this was once the hangar for the hindenburg. milt says this is where his father dwight worked on theecho ii balloon. the balloon was right there. milt tells me that his father

worked for a nasa subcontractor. that's why the space agency had no record of dwight. okay, so he worked for westinghouse. yes, uh-huh. look at this letter. tell me if it looks like your dad's handwriting, something he would've written? oh, yeah, he always printed. he always printed? always printed. and do you remember what his call number was? w3hnt. that was william three husky nasty tiger. milt shows me his father's knife with the call sign burnished into the side. well, he was known as "antenna doc." antenna doc? yeah. milt explains that nasa contracted westinghouse to conduct a series of tests on theecho ii balloons here at lakehurst. one of the final tests was the burst test. there had been an explosion, but it hadn't been in space. the technical term is a static inflation test. a balloon is literally filled with gas until it bursts.

milt can still recall how his father described it. and it was like just a real loud, dull thunk. the most serious of scientists had then behaved as children. it's a story i want to tell chuck. so you wanted to know if your object was part of an echo project by nasa. i show chuck a report prepared by our goddard scientists. his fragment was aluminum-coated mylar, designed to bounce radio signals off theecho ii satellite. that is really something. i tell him about my meeting with milt saxmann. your particular piece of the balloon was taken from one of the final tests where they inserted too much gas for the balloon to handle and it exploded. milt had explained exactly how his father, doc,

had gotten hold of this scrap of material. it split open and everybody just dived in, you know, like kids with leaves, they just dove into this balloon. [ tukufu chuckling ] and your father dove in as well. he dove in as well, yeah. because it was all over the place. and this looks or appears to be one of those pieces that he brought home? oh, yeah, absolutely. yeah, yeah, yeah. boy, that takes me back. so a conversation over 30 years ago led to you having a piece of history in your closet. i never understood why he would send me this. i was just a voice on the air. now i have this story. this is really nice. nice to know. echo was the public face of the u.s. cold war satellite strategy, but just days after sputnik, president eisenhower authorized the cia to develop

a top-secret satellite program. the goal: photo reconnaissance. the code name: corona. the cia successfully launched its first corona satellite in august 1960. cameras were mounted on satellites that raced around the planet. it took hundreds of pictures. each image recorded an area roughly 10 x 120 miles. the satellites would remain in orbit for a few days and then re-enter the atmosphere. as it passed over the pacific ocean, it would eject the film capsule. an air force plane would snatch it up, and the film was sent to the cia. the risks of being detected were high, but the rewards were too valuable to pass up. these are images of an air base, a rocket production facility, an intercontinental ballistic missile launch site; all top-secret facilities in the soviet union. when the program ended in 1972, 145 coronas had been deployed. thirty-nine thousand capsules were developed;

that's 2.1 million feet of film and 800,000 images, giving u.s. military planners a photographic catalog of the soviets' nuclear facilities and nearly every icbm complex. so as president kennedy publicly complained about a missile gap, corona secretly proved him wrong: the u.s. had more missiles than the soviets. elyse: our next story takes us to the moment when humankind first slipped free of earth's gravity. i believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. 1961: u.s. scientists are in a no-holds-barred race to beat the soviet union to the moon. first, they must break free of earth's gravity. in april of 1961, the soviets launched a man into space, marking the first time that humankind has experienced complete weightlessness.

but no one knows what prolonged exposure to weightlessness will do to the human body. president kennedy's promise means there's no time to lose. engineers must invent ways to overcome the challenges of living in zero-g. fifty years later, chris radus of lucas, kentucky, thinks he owns a prototype of one of the space-age inventions that helped man travel to the moon. when my dad brought this boot home from work and i asked him what it was, he told me he couldn't tell me but we'd find out later. i'm elyse luray, and i've come to meet chris to check out his father's invention. hi. hi, elyse, come on in. so what's in the box? this is the boot my father, raymond radus, brought home from westinghouse electric where he worked as an engineer. and what year did he bring this home? it was probably 1963, i think. well, it's kind of a strange-looking boot.

wow, and it's heavy. what are these things? these are magnets, look. oh, neat. from what i understand, it was invented for astronauts to use outside the spaceship during the gemini missions. so these magnets would stick the astronauts to the spacecraft in zero-g? that's what i understand, yeah. that was what our family lore is. chris tells me that nasa's project gemini's purpose was to test equipment for future apollo moon missions, and his father had always been secretive about his work. what exactly do you want me to find out? was this used by nasa for a zero-gravity boot, and how did it work? do you have anything else for me to go on? my sister has a box of files and paperwork that we can't make heads or tails of. chris hasn't seen the documents in years but says he'll speak to his sister and ask her to send them to me. this is my first history detectives story on space, so it should be a lot of fun. and here's your spoon. thank you. okay, as an appraiser and auctioneer,

i've actually sold space memorabilia before. i've sold flags that have gone to the moon, moon dust, spacesuits, and i've never seen anything like this before. this looks like an old hiking boot or skiing boot and it's attached to this crazy concoction down here. it has these strange-looking coils on the side. there's actually a plug here in the back. it's really heavy. i think it weighs about 15 pounds. chris thinks this was a prototype. it certainly seems handmade. hi, it's elyse. i call the history detectives office to see if they can find anything in the westinghouse archives. meanwhile, i want to look for anything resembling chris's gravity boots in the history of space flight. before we could go to the moon, scientists needed to know how weightlessness would affect an astronaut. they started their test with animals. the soviet union launched laika the dog into orbit on november 3, 1957.

the soviet rockets were experiencing a 50% failure rate in 1961, when they launched the world's first manned mission into orbit. cosmonaut yuri gagarin beat the odds. he said he loved the feeling of zero-g. "everything is floating. everything is floating! beautiful. interesting." kennedy requested congress set aside a staggering $7 to $9 billion to fund the race to the moon. that set off a frenzy of invention as engineering firms like ibm, the martin company, later known as lockheed martin, and westinghouse electric sold their inventions to nasa. on february 20, 1962, 10 months after yuri gagarin made history, an american, john glenn, orbited the earth. glenn over radio: roger, zero-g, and i feel fine. the successes kept coming. the first manned gemini launch was in early 1965. in june 1965, ed white exited his capsule

135 miles above earth to become the first american to walk in space. the pictures from the gemini missions are breathtaking, but the boots white wore certainly look very different from chris's father's. white floated around for about 20 minutes, and when mission control called him inside, his only response was, "this is fun." white reluctantly ended his space walk, saying, "it's the saddest moment of my life." i received an e-mail from the history detectives office, and they're telling me that the westinghouse archives were partially lost in the mid-1990s. i'm not even sure how this contraption might have worked, so i'm headed to carnegie mellon engineering school to meet with dr. edward furlani, a research professor from the university at buffalo. ed has written a textbook on magnetic materials and devices. hi, ed. hi, elyse. nice to meet you. come on, follow me.

ed's unfamiliar with our boot. i've never heard of this, and i've worked with magnets for many years. but now that i'm looking at it, i can see that there are some permanent magnets attached to the bottom of it and there are also some coils of wire. what's a permanent magnet? a permanent magnet is like a household magnet or a refrigerator magnet, and when you stick it to metal, it stays stuck. ed thinks the presence of the copper coils indicates the boot operated on something called flux transfer. what i'm going to do is sprinkle the iron filings on top of the magnet. the iron filings align with the magnetic field, and those are called flux lines, or lines of force. but what exactly is a flux transfer? flux transfer is a way of turning the pull of a magnet on and off. was this a new invention in the 1960s? no, but the application to the boot, especially the use of the coils, if that's how it works, was totally unique. ed asked me to put on the boot and see if it still works. all right, let's do it. ooh, i'm excited. i feel like cinderella.

all right, here goes. it fits! okay, now what do i do? you're going to step on the front of this iron bar and you'll see that it clamps right on it. this is really heavy. i'm definitely stuck to this. okay, just a second while i hook up these leads to apply current to the coils. oh, that's what the plug is for. yeah, and now what i want you to do is just lift your foot up and hold it at an angle. wow, this is so heavy. and now i'm just going to apply the current to see if we can get the boot to release. cool! so you can see that it does work on the principle of flux transfer. yeah, wow, so it works. to show me how an astronaut might use the boot, ed sets up another demonstration. i shoot a video for chris. whoo, all right! okay, so now i get it. now i see how a man could walk on a spacecraft. when the boot was off, the magnet would stick him to the craft. when it was on, the magnet would release his foot so he could walk. but i don't understand how a man could hang from these magnets.

they don't seem that strong to me. well, if the boots were built in the 1960s, say, then the magnets on them would have aged over time and they'd be much weaker now. the boot does work, but did it work for nasa? the box of documents chris's sister had held onto all these years has finally arrived. my office has forwarded them to me. there's a lot of files in here. let's see. [ ♪ ] ah, this is someone actually wearing the boots. this looks like chris's father, raymond radus. looks like he earned some design award, so he must have been pretty good at what he did. this is a picture of a guy wearing the boots, hanging upside down. so this shows that the boots really did work and they could support the weight of a man. here's a newspaper article.

it's from thepittsburgh press, february 5, 1963. "new space footwear 'shoos' human flies. "magnetic brogans by westinghouse will 'tie down' rambling astronauts." the article goes on: "this simple system, westinghouse engineers believe, "may provide the answer for men walking around, in, and on "the outside of spacecraft in the weightlessness of outer space." so radus' shoes were made to help astronauts walk in zero-g. but i find no mention of nasa in his files. this box is full of contacts of westinghouse employees that radus might have known. maybe i can contact one of them and they can help me sort this thing out. hi, this is elyse luray calling from history detectives. i make several calls before i can find someone ray radus worked with at westinghouse. yes. i find former lab technician pat boccardi in monroeville, pennsylvania.

howdy, elyse, nice to see you. hello, nice to meet you. okay, thank you. have a seat. tell me, how'd you know ray radus? well, we happened to work in the same department. ray was an electrical engineer. now, have you ever seen this boot before? yeah, i think so; i think i worked on that. you worked on it? yeah. and he designed it; it was his idea. it was my job to get it all together. i did the coils, i cut the magnets. i took it all down to a local shoemaker shop and had them sew it to the bottom of the ski boot. i haven't seen it for 51 years. pat says it was a thrilling time to work at westinghouse, developing radar to help gemini capsules dock in orbit, and, later, the camera that shot the first footage of neil armstrong walking on the moon. they gave the engineers assigned projects, but they also gave them the freedom to work 10% or 15% of their own time on anything they wanted to do, any idea, as long as it was on behalf of westinghouse.

it had to be something that westinghouse would end up with. pat tells me that radus's magnetic boots were born out of this so-called free inventing time. radus's job at westinghouse had nothing to do with the space program, but he used this free time to get caught up in the race to the moon. i asked pat what happened to the boots: were they sold to nasa? he doesn't know. they folded the department up, so ray went to another department and i went to a television department. i still don't know if the boots found a home at nasa or if some version of his technology made it into space, so i'm heading to space center houston next to the site of nasa's legendary mission control. it was here that anxious flight controllers tracked the gemini space walk missions. the astronaut gallery lds the world's largest collection of spacesuits. hi, joe. hi, elyse, how are you?

good, nice to meet you. nice to meet you as well. joe kosmo has been a nasa spacesuit engineer since 1961. he shows me a flight suit and boots once worn by ed white. they are just like the pictures i saw. he illustrates how white used a gas jet to move around outside the capsule. white: i had very good control with it, i just needed more air. i tell joe about the boot's magnetic properties and explain that chris's family thinks it may have been used in project gemini. oh, well, i've been working with nasa for 49 years and all the spacesuits, and the fact is that i've never personally seen anything like this, never encountered it. do you think nasa ever considered using magnetic boots for the outside of the spacecraft? the suits back at that point in time didn't have a high degree of mobility, so you really couldn't walk, and it was much easier just to do the free-body floating and tethering. a space walk, joe tells me, isn't quite the right phrase. tethering meant ed white floated outside the capsule attached by nothing other than that thin umbilical cord.

but there was another more elemental reason chris's father's boots never stepped into space. it's time to report back to chris. okay, first of all, thank you, because what a fun trip to space that was. i explain how a magnet expert had shown me how the boot was intended to work. your father developed a unique application for this boot. you can turn the boot on and off again and walk upside down on metal surfaces. you see how it's attached here and then it falls? it still works, cool. it still works. i tell chris his father invented the magnetic boots for the space program, but it wasn't until i'd gone to the control center for the gemini mission that i understood why the boots had never made it into space. if it does work on a magnetic principle that produces a magnetic flux, then that could seriously affect some of the guidance and navigation systems or some of the -- perhaps the scientific instrumentation. i wouldn't want to be around a magnetic field.

i asked joe why chris's father wouldn't have taken this into account when he designed the boots. how much information he would have had available to him, i'm not quite sure. you've got to remember, we were still in the cold war era. a lot of the aspects of the program itself were classified, confidential, or even at a higher level. it's still, you know, impressive to me. i tell chris that his father was a product of his era, when the nation invented technologies for nasa at a furious pace. some made it into space; others did not. people like ray radus were given the resources and the opportunity to try anything and sometimes to fail, all in the pursuit of one day putting a man on the moon. your father obviously thought of a very original way to use these boots, and it put him right smack in the middle of the space race. it keeps getting more and more interesting, and i'm more and more impressed with his work now. dad did that. thanks for figuring out the mystery for us.

in its 40-year history, nasa has received more than 6,300 patents. the number of commercial products that have been spun off from these patents is more than the right stuff; it's the stuff of everyday life. you hopefully have smoke detectors in your home. they were first used in 1973 in the skylab space stations. cordless power tools can also be traced back to nasa. apollo astronauts used these power tools to drill for samples on the moon. and teenagers can smile without embarrassment thanks to the space program. the technology behind invisible braces was developed by nasa because of its interest in advanced ceramic materials. some nasa innovations have literally saved lives. apollo's water purification technology would eventually be adapted for kidney dialysis, and the space shuttle programs featured devices that would pave the way for lighter and stronger prosthetic limbs. but one of the most popular inventions linked to nasa

was in fact patented elsewhere: tang. general foods invented the powdered fruit drink in 1957 and tried unsuccessfully to market it as a breakfast beverage. nasa engineers thought tang improved the flavor of the water used in its life support systems. then john glenn drank the stuff onboard in 1962, and with a little madison avenue p.r., the drink of the astronauts was born. gwendolyn: our final story takes us high into the stars and deep into the provocative art movements of the 1960s. july 20, 1969: a nation ruptured by assassinations, war, and cultural upheaval pauses to marvel as neil armstrong takes one small step onto the moon. armstrong over radio: that's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

the moon missions were a massive undertaking, the culmination of years of research, money, experiments, and fatal accidents. every step, screw, boot, and button is accounted for. every second, sequence, and section is planned. there can be no surprises. now, over 40 years later, a man from tampa, florida, believes he may hold something amazing, the first piece of art to land on the moon. for years, i've wondered if i'm holding the world's first moon museum. i'm gwendolyn wright, and i'm starting my investigation with a visit to jade dellinger. nice to meet you. very nice to meet you. please come in. so, jade, you have an unusual piece of art to show me? i do; it's in this small box. it's -- i believe to be a ceramic chip that was a collaborative artwork with drawings by six artists that intended to have this sent to the moon

with the apollo 12 mission. who were the artists? my understanding is that andy warhol contributed, robert rauschenberg contributed, and four other artists that are quite well known. so these were major art figures. where did you find it? i found this in an online auction, and there wasn't a tremendous amount of information. who was selling it? i believe it came from a relative of an engineer that had worked at bell laboratories in the 1960s. the seller told jade the details about the artists whose work is etched onto the ceramic mini-canvas and confirmed the idea that it was made for a specific purpose: getting it on the moon. the seller also said that more than one chip was made. what's the main thing you'd like for me to find out? well, i'd like to know if this chip or one like it made its way to the moon. i have to say, i tend not to believe "went to the moon," but it's an intriguing concept. i'll take it with me and take very good care of it. i'm heading back to my hotel to take a closer look. it is tiny,

exactly three-quarters of an inch by half an inch, and there are six small drawings. there are no signatures, and they're clearly very different. there's certainly nothing here that proves these drawings were made by world-renowned artists. robert rauschenberg was known for creating works with found objects. and in the late 1960s, warhol was making films and pop art lithographs. i vividly remember watching apollo 11 on television. we were transfixed. but i don't really remember much about apollo 12. was this artwork smuggled onboard or did nasa greenlight the project? these were highly rational men of science, and people's lives were at stake. well, let me see if i can get any background information online. apollo 12 was the second mission to land a man on the lunar surface. it launched on november 14, 1969, just four months after neil armstrong

took his famous steps. they were up there from november 14 to 24, 1969. ten days. at the end of their 10 days, the astronauts returned the lunar module to the command module, leaving the legs of the descent module on the moon, where they remain today. this is interesting. not long after its creation in 1958, nasa began commissioning artists to celebrate space flight, but no mention of our chip or of putting art on the moon. here's a story. it's from the new york times on november 22, 1969, just eight days after apollo 12 lifted off. "a new york sculptor named forrest myers "has yearned to plant a work of art on the moon. "now he believes he has done so via the apollo 12 mission. "a tiny ceramic wafer bearing drawings by six new york artists."

andy warhol, claes oldenburg, robert rauschenberg, david novros, john chamberlain, and forrest myers himself all contributed works to this so-called moon museum. myers claims one chip was clandestinely affixed to a leg of the lunar module. but an official of the space agency is not so sure. he said that he knew nothing about the purported project. ha! well, i've got to get hold of this forrest myers. a renowned artist with sculptures and collections around the world, forrest "frosty" myers has been creating influential works for over 40 years. back in 1969, he was at the center of new york's vibrant art scene. so here's the chip that i told you about, frosty. now, you did make this, right? oh, yes, this is one of the chips. how many were there? i think there were 16 of them; there might have been 20. here's mine.

tell me, what inspired you to create this? well, going to the moon was the biggest thing in our generation. it's hard to explain that to the kids today. i mean, we were stepping off the planet. my idea was to get six great artists together and make it a tiny little museum that would be on the moon. frosty explains that david novros and john chamberlain did drawings that looked like circuitry, claes oldenburg contributed his signature mickey mouse, and robert rauschenberg, a single minimalist line. andy warhol decided that he would do his signature, which was an "a" and a "w." but frosty says that from a certain angle, the letters could also look like a rocket or a piece of anatomy. and he was being, oh, the terrible bad boy. frosty's own contribution was a linked symbol he called"interconnection." how did you get the work reduced to something this small? just standard sheets of paper, maybe 8 1/2" x 11".

frosty explains how a group called e.a.t., experiments in art and technology, was creating exciting partnerships between artists and engineers. they put him in touch with some scientists at bell labs. using a novel process similar to the one used to create telephone circuits, an engineer named fred waldhauer reduced the sketches and imprinted them onto a thin ceramic wafer. they just -- they ran with it; it was great. at the time, this was state-of-the-art engineering. well, what happened when you approached the people at nasa? at first it seemed promising, and then we realized that we were just getting the runaround. they never said no; i just couldn't get them to say anything. well, fred waldhauer knew an engineer at grumman aircraft that was working on the lunar lander. and this guy immediately said, "yeah, i can do this." and i said, "well, how will we know when he's doing to do this?" because now the time is approaching; we're getting close. frosty tells me the secret agent at grumman

had agreed to send a telegram when the deed was done. my doorbell rang and it was western union, and there was a telegram, and of course i was dying. it could say yes or no; i didn't know. what did it say? well, i actually have it. it says, "cape canaveral, florida, 3:35 eastern standard time." and it just simply says, "you're on. a.o.k., all systems are go. john f." then it was cause for celebration. then we went to the bars and opened some champagne. it was very exciting. i haven't thought of the moon the same since. but the question remains: who sent the telegram? fred said, "look, this guy made a promise that i'm not going to expose who this guy is," and i just took it at that; it was okay. frosty tells me only fred and john f. himself know his identity. well, can i talk to fred? well, fred's passed away. so many of the engineers and a couple of the artists -- you know, this was 40 years ago.

i will try my very best to put all these pieces together. thank you so much. maybe one of the astronauts from the mission can help me. one of only a dozen human beings to walk on the moon, astronaut alan bean soared into outer space with the apollo 12 mission. welcome. captain bean, it's so nice to meet you. nice of you to visit. thank you. here's the studio, right this way. in the years since his outer space adventures, captain bean has devoted himself to painting. as both an artist and an apollo 12 astronaut, he may be uniquely qualified to answer our questions. and when the sun's bright on earth, of course, you either see blue sky or kind of gray clouds, but on the moon there's nothing like that. you're looking out into the blackness of space. there's been something like 54 billion modern humans.

we were 12 that got to go somewhere else besides this earth. i feel like maybe i won the lottery two or three times in a row. as i told you, i'm trying to find out if this little chip went with you. have you ever seen this before? this is news to me. i'm not aware of this chip going with us. you were allowed to bring some personal objects aboard, right? we had a little thing called a personal preference kit that was a little cloth bag, and so i would ask my friends and relatives, "is there anything you'd like me to take to the moon?" it was very official. we laid it out on a table, it was photographed, it was numbered, and everything else, so everything that i took for personal reasons, nasa knew about. i show captain bean frosty's telegram from the mysterious grumman employee. it's just before you're launching, saying, "you're on, a.o.k., all systems are go," signed john f. now, as best as you can recall,

did you know anyone named john f.? most of the several hundred that worked around the lunar module, both from grumman and from nasa, i didn't know their names that well. i would say that john f., if this is a truthful thing, would be risking his whole career, what he's worked for all his life. captain bean, it has been a great honor to meet you. thank you so much. thank you, gwen. thanks for coming by. my best chance for finding this mysterious john f. probably lies with the scientists and engineers who built the moon lander. in 1962, grumman, a leading producer of military aircraft, was awarded a prestigious contract: they were going to build the lunar modules. richard kupczyk was the launch pad foreman at grumman. his team was responsible for the final assembly, testing, and launch of the lunar module. he agrees to meet me at the cradle of aviation museum.

if anyone can help me track down john f., it might be richard. well, hello, gwen. hello, richard. very nice to meet you. how are you doing? i'm doing very well and i'm excited to be here. this museum houses a real lunar module almost exactly like the one used for the apollo 12 mission. i share the telegram and tell richard we've heard that someone at grumman snuck the chip onboard apollo 12. now, did you know anyone named john f.? it's been 40 years. i brought the yearbook with me that we had of all of the people that worked at the cape during the apollo missions. and all of the technicians are in here, and their names are in the back. so if we go to f, there are a number of f's. we discover two men with the initials j. and f. i wonder if one of these two is our guy. no, i don't think so, because they weren't part of the spacecraft team, and the access, you would really have to have a reason to go there, and those names aren't familiar to me.

so they didn't have access. i don't think so. i wonder, given the tight security, was john f. the engineer's real name? when i read the telegraph and i saw the way it was written, the first thing that jumped into my mind was the fellow who started it all, j.f.k. so john f. kennedy jumped into my mind as a pseudonym maybe. the tight security, the long hours, and the dedication to nasa's moon missions were unlike anything he had experienced before or since. everybody wanted the same thing, to go to the moon. so you were creating new rules. did you break any rules, too? let me show you something, gwen. okay. come with me. be careful now, you're on a lunar surface. it's been 40 years since we've even talked about this, and i feel comfortable talking to you about it now. this is a blanket, and there are 16 layers of this. what richard shows me next means that, like frosty myers,

i will never think of the moon in the same way again. well, jade, in many ways this is perhaps the most fainating and the most frustrating story i've ever worked on. wow. i tell jade that frosty confirmed making the chip and about the telegram he received from cape canaveral. but the only person frosty knew who could have revealed the identity of john f. was fred waldhauer, and fred's passed on. ah, okay. now, i have another lead. i spoke with richard kupczyk, who was there on the launch pad overseeing things, and he told me something that he's never told anybody. there are small personal items that the fellows put in between the blankets of the spacecraft. richard tells me that the engineers buried photos of their children and wives within the multiple layers of the blankets. on apollo 12, there are some things that are on that spacecraft that are laying on the lunar surface right now, and never, ever was there anything

that was done to the spacecraft that would be a safety issue. was it wrong? yes. but we were caught up into this thing, and we were good and we knew it, and we left our mark. so it's possible that a chip like this is on the moon. it's not only possible, but at this point in time, i'd say it's -- well, my gut feel is it's there. really? oh, great; that's amazing. i tell jade that in this effort to place art on the moon, it seems to me that for a shining moment, we had bridged one divide in our culture back then. our astronaut had turned to painting when he returned to earth. scientists at bell labs had conspired to help get the work of radical artists to the moon. and the hardworking team at grumman who had built the moon lander had shown a playful willingness to bend some rules, making the space project more profoundly human than i had ever realized.

i still want to find out who this john f. was, so we're going to do something we've never before done on this program. we're going directly to the viewers. so if you were john f. or if you know someone who you think could have been john f., please let us know. we'll post updates on the history detectives web site. this is real history; it's an ongoing process. to see an exclusive interview about alan bean's journey from astronaut to artist, go to history detectives on the web at pbs.org. neil armstrong's first walk on the moon was the last act of the space race of the 1960s. the next chapter of the superpower space story had a new name: detente. july 15, 1975: two spacecrafts launched into the same sky but from worlds apart. the mission was called the apollo-soyuz test project.

it was the first joint space flight between the united states and the soviet union. the plan was for the two crafts, the soviet-made soyuz capsule and the american-made apollo, to dock together in orbit. but a bit like the two countries' political systems, the docking mechanisms and atmospheres were incompatible. so apollo carried a special 10-foot-long cylinder to serve as both an adapter and an airlock. on july 17th, american commander tom stafford shook hands with soviet cosmonaut alexei leonov through the open hatch of the soyuz space capsule, the first international handshake in space. for the next two days, the three americans and two russians conducted experiments, exchanged gifts, visited each other's spacecrafts, and shared meals. the apollo and the soyuz capsules then separated. when the maneuvers were completed, commander leonov radioed the apollo crew with a farewell: "thank you for your very big job.

it was a very good show." ted kennedy: the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die. announcer: this is our experience-- "the american experience." announcer: owhat role did this map playes, in one of world war ii's fiercest battles? what we didn't expect was tremendous firepower. did this cane inspire a political movement that threatened lincoln's presidency? and how did this strange instrument help spark a rock-and-roll revolution?

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