From Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars, explore the world of human spaceflight with NASA each week on the official podcast of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Listen to in-depth conversations with the astronauts, scientists and engineers who make it possible.
On episode 364, former NASA astronaut Fred Haise discusses his experiences from Apollo 13 and beyond. This episode was recorded on August 26, 2024.
Transcript
Host (Leah Cheshier): Houston, we have a podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, Episode 364, “Apollo Legend to Shuttle Trailblazer.” I’m Leah Cheshier and I’m your host today. On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, all to let you know what’s going on in the world of human spaceflight and more.
Today, we are honored to be joined by former NASA astronaut Fred Haise. Born in Biloxi, Mississippi in 1933, Haise graduated from Biloxi High School before attending Perkinston Junior College, and later received a Bachelor of Science degree with honors in aeronautical engineering from the University of Oklahoma as a marine fighter pilot and Naval Aviator Hayes accumulated 9,300 hours of flying time, including 6,200 hours in jets. Haise was also a research pilot at the NASA Flight Research Center at Edwards, California before coming to Johnson Space Center, as well as a research pilot at the NASA Lewis Research Center, now known as Glenn in Cleveland, Ohio. Haise was well suited to be an astronaut, being selected in 1966. Ultimately, he was assigned as the lunar module pilot on Apollo 13, logging 142 hours and 54 minutes in space on a mission that changed history, becoming one of the greatest rescues and displays of teamwork of all time. Today, we’re talking with him about that mission, his role in the space shuttle program, and his lessons for NASA’s future. Let’s go.
[Music]
Host: Fred, thank you so much for joining us here today on Houston We Have a Podcast.
Fred Haise: Yes. Happy to be here.
Host: And we are so excited. So tell me, we’re going to do some reminiscing. We’re going look back at all of the incredible things that you’ve done, but I want to know, what have you been up to lately?
Fred Haise: Well, I spend most of my time with Zooms. I’ve had neuropathy in my feet, have to use a walker, so I’ve kind of curbed any air or land travel. Which is a great inconvenience. And I still do Zooms with museums. Many of them are fundraising for those, you know, aviation, space, science museums. I’ve actually been 20 years to help build the one in Mississippi by Stennis, Infinity Science Center. So I’ve been 20 years on that project and still am active with helping to raise money for that museum. I do Zooms with schools, K-12, some college all around the country. I’ve done many overseas with Zoom. It’s really one good thing out of Covid. It developed. And so I’ve had, oh, in the last, probably about three months ago, I did a Zoom with an engineering university group of students, engineers there at Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Done with groups in South Africa, all over Europe. So it’s a very handy media to do that sort of thing. And of course, a couple with space hipster group, and they have regular people on that. I just tune in sometimes to Zooms they have with people that are, being interviewed, if you will, on Space Hipsters Group, which is now grown over 60,000.
Host: Yes. It’s really popular now.
Fred Haise: 60,000 people. I really don’t post much. I go online to get space information cause they do, some of them will post something that gives you a link to a space story somewhere in the world. And otherwise, you wouldn’t get to read that kind of thing.
Host: That’s a nice way to stay connected and keep up with everyone.
Fred Haise: Right. And then I have a lot of family things. Just Saturday I had a pool birthday party for an 8-year-old great-grandson. And all his friends and the family were there for that pool birthday party at my house. So I’m still, you know, into family things.
Host: That’s so sweet. There’s nothing like a summer birthday and a pool party, so, oh, I love that. Well, let’s talk a little bit about how you got here, but let’s start at the beginning. So one thing I read about you is that you initially attended school on a journalism degree.
Fred Haise: Well, it wasn’t a degree. I got interested in journalism in high school, working on the school, high school newspaper, the Biloxi Hi-Tide. I was a sports editor and part-time even into covering the junior high Peewee League games, things like that for the local newspaper, because I was a newsboy, I delivered papers, for then the Biloxi Gulfport Daily Herald. It’s now the Sun Herald. And then I continued when I went to a junior college, Perkinston Junior College, with that as a thought to be major. And again, was sports editor the first year. And I was editor of that paper, newspaper, the second year, the Bulldog Barks. And so I got my hand in the old timey newspaper where you had to work through Atlanta-type machine to get the lead slugs and actually manually make the pages up for the printer for the press, that kind of thing, which we did through a private individual’s shop in Wiggins, Mississippi, which wasn’t far from this junior college. And so I continued with that thought of journalism, hoping to go, if I could find the money, to go to the University of Missouri, which was a very noted university. And it still is for journalism as a major. Although now the bigger thing is not newspaper business anymore. It’s media of all sorts. But that didn’t come to pass because of the Korean War. And that’s when I got diverted, thinking I’d go serve my country. And that really got me into the flying business, which I loved immediately, and changed my career path.
Host: Yes. Because then you went and got an aeronautical engineering degree, is that right?
Fred Haise: That’s correct. I had four years in the military during that period. I did not see combat. About six months before I finished flight training. They had signed the Armes for the Korean War, and I did serve in two marine fighter squadrons. And before I got out, I started thinking about what I would do next, should I stay in the Marine Corps for a career or think about something else. And through talking to people and reading books, I got interested in being a test pilot. And I realized reading that one of the prerequisites was to have an engineering degree. Most people don’t realize that. They think a test pilot sits around while they’re building an airplane, and after five years they call you and say, “Come fly the airplane.” You’re really a part of the design effort to get in the airplane at least from the human factors operational side, how you going to fly the airplane. So it’s a long trail that way. And I got diverted at that time into a thought of, rather than the major aerospace company by my squadron commander, Stanley Newman, who had earlier in his career, had worked as an engineer at NASA Langley. And he told me I should think of applying to NASA. Which was before NASA, NACA rather. NACA. Cause he said, you go to a company, you’re going to spend a lot of years waiting around to fly that airplane that they’re going to build. Maybe you’ll get to fly. Whereas NACA is embodied in aircraft test to improve safety, to improve performance and use airplanes, normally surplus or bailed military aircraft to convert in some way to test a new thing. So, you know, fly, you’ll get a lot more flying and different kinds of airplanes and many different test programs. So when I finished school at the University of Oklahoma, I applied and was accepted at Lewis Research Center, which was Glenn, as a research pilot at $5,460 a year. So that was the going rate back then.
Host: Quite different now.
[Laughs]
Fred Haise: And actually that’s where Neil started. Neil Armstrong also started at Lewis. Neil had left just before I joined Lewis, I may have taken his desk. And he went to Edwards, which was really the big big, and still is, I call it premier aircraft test operation for NASA today is that Edwards Air Force Base, which is now known named after Neil Armstrong. And Neil had joined the astronaut program in the interim, had gotten to fly the X-15. And of course, I was hoping to eventually get there myself. And after three and a half years, there was an opportunity and I transferred to Flight Research Center.
Host: That’s right. And so at one point you were deployed during your time at Lewis, is that right?
Fred Haise: That’s correct.
Host: Did you feel like you were kind of being derailed on your career at that point?
Fred Haise: I was, because actually, I had a slot arranged, I think it was class 20 at the Naval Test Pilot School. And that got me off track from that, from Lewis as a NASA employee. And I had the one year of active duty then in ‘61. It was a very scary time. Most people don’t realize that’s when the missiles were in Cuba. And the country went to DEFCON 2 at that time. It’s the only time it’s ever gone. DEFCON 1 is where you launched a missiles. And well I was in a special weapons outfit, practicing to deliver nuclear weapon and this fighter squadron I was in. But any rate, it was just a one-year tour. Everything quieted down.
I went back to Lewis, had a great experience there of creating with Jack Enders, another pilot, a zero G program. It was a use of an AJ-2 bomber. The first aircraft the Navy had to carry an atomic weapon on off a carrier. And we got them surplus cause they had upgraded to the A-3 and had a nice Bombay to float things around then, which is what we needed. We were testing fluid systems, you know, so we were testing the tank configuration and screens for the Centaur rocket, which is still flying today. And where we tested a fairly large object, fairly heavy, was a bolt down test the cooling cycle for the SNAP-8 nuclear power generator that flew on some of the early satellite programs. And so we were not testing humans, although we learned off the Air Force program that was going on at Wright-Patterson in Ohio. They really had the first zero G program, the Air Force did, where their aerospace medicine people, even then were interested in zero G effects on humans. So that was most of their study. But we learned about their aircraft operations and what they had to modify on their aircraft to be able to safely do those trajectories and not deplete the engine of oil or, you know, and engine stopped from lack of gasoline. So we learned some learning curve from them and how to operate. But that was kind of the, I guess, one of the major programs I had while I was at the Lewis.
Host: When during any of this time did you realize that you wanted to be an astronaut? Was that dream there yet?
Fred Haise: No, no. Within the year I joined NACA and it became actually become NASA by then in ‘58 and ‘59 when I graduated. They had done, obviously had the original seven astronauts chosen in Mercury program. And most of us in the business thought, well, that’s it. They’re going to fly these seven people and they’ll figure out they can live in space and maybe eat something and go to sleep and get back down and that’s it. So, you know, there was no other bigger picture at that time of what the space program might evolve into, a manned space program. Then it was when the President Kennedy made his pronouncement about going to the Moon that it became more real that this thing might go on for a while with this lunar proposition and Apollo program. So I sort of became interested in the back of my mind, but I really at the time, my main goal was to get to fly the X-15 which one of my group did Joe Engle got to fly the X-15. But the way it worked and our off at pilot’s office at NASA was, it was by seniority. And there were two people ahead of me from there. And that was based on when you entered the office, your date of transfer, my case transfer from Lewis. So I figured the program would disappear. X-15 would be over before I could get my chance to move up to fly the vehicle.
And I had second thoughts. Neil had come back and Don Mallick and I, another pilot there, got Neil aside and asked him what’s it like being an astronaut? And Neil said, “Well, you sit in a lot of meetings, you sit in a simulator a lot and it’s not much good flying,” which is what we were doing at Edwards. I was, at the time, in fact, going back years later, they asked me to talk about the old days. And I picked one page out of my, I said one actually took two pages out of my log book, which is incidentally on my website to use. And it showed at that one in one month I’d flown nine different times kinds of aircraft. Three different test programs. And they actually were no X-15 flights that month, otherwise I’d have been flying chase or a weather flight the morning of the launch, or checking the upper range telemetry stations. So I’d have had something like that on that, in that same month. So it was a lot of good fun. So I had to think twice, but realized probably would never get to fly the X-15. I decided to fly very late in 1965 for the deadline, and did get accepted into the group five I guess it was. And I came. And for me it was just another transfer, just another transfer to another office to come down to Manned Spacecraft Center.
Host: So what was the culture like during that time? Did you feel like the astronaut office here at Johnson Space Center was, did you have like a mentor, or did you feel like it was a really close knit group?
Fred Haise: No, no. It was not like, I’d say the close group you had, like in a military squadron or in the pilot’s office, which is a fairly small group at either Lewis, was much tighter than quote the astronaut office. We were also scattered around. When I came in, we had that so-called rookie training program, which I think was supposed to be 11 months. It got curtailed at seven or eight months to get off on support crew assignments cause a need was so great. I did do a couple of more things along on that list of things to do. I think I did a couple of, during the next months, I got a geology trip or two, and I got checked out in helicopters at Navy Field in Pensacola cause I got assigned. And at the time we got split up. So we were split up. And geographically, most of us, we didn’t see the active crews cause they were off training.
See, everything we did in training was generally not in Houston. The simulators, primary simulators, were in Florida. If we had to do spacecraft testing, you were either at the plant where it was being built, or you were in Florida when it arrived there for testing geology field trips were somewhere out around the world. And so you just kind of hop through the office when you’re assigned to mission, you barely got back some weekends to change some underwear and head out again. Then normally that time they’d schedule meetings you’d have with data priority meetings under Bill Tindall or with mission control, unlike flight rules or whatever. So it was not a cohesive group in terms of like a squadron where you’re always in a ready room every day and you normally flew with everybody in the squadron, you know, once or twice a month. So it wasn’t like that at all. So you got very close with those you were signed with on missions. And my first assignment was for Jim McDivitt on Apollo. Actually, at the time it was Apollo 8. It was Apollo 8 and it was going to fly the first lunar module in orbit. So Jim called Ed Mitchell and I into his office. Ed was assigned with me and asked Jim, what do you want us to do, Jim? And he said, well, I said, I want you to go to Grumman and get me a good limb to fly. And that was it. So for the next year, Ed and I were mostly at Grumman in vehicle test on the lunar module. So we wasn’t in the office very much. Because of passing through. Again, we always assured one of us was at Grumman during that year, we’d often swap off, I’d fly back home and have a few days back with the family and then come back into leave and that kind of thing. But then I got assigned my first mission was Apollo 8. Now it turned out what had happened in the interim. And see at the time I joined Apollo 8, it was still going to be an Earth orbital mission. It was going to fly, I’m sorry. At the time it was Apollo 9. It was going to fly the second orbital mission, Earth orbital mission with a second lunar module. And that’s when they decided to shift to the lunar use of the Apollo 8, that capsule.
Now, Jim McDivitt, I think had probably the option of taking that mission, Apollo, it would’ve flow gone to the Moon. But decided he wanted to stick with the LM, the lunar, module cause he had so much invested. And the training and testing himself would come up to Grumman and test vehicles. And so he stayed with that mission for the first orbital flight. So his Apollo 8 became Apollo. And you can see in that cycle, if that had stayed, his backup crew was Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Al Bean. So if he had stayed with that original Apollo 8, see the first landing on the Moon would’ve been by Pete. And Dick Gordon and Al Bean. But as it was then the Apollo 9 became Apollo 8, which I was assigned to. I was on the crew, I was with was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. So we were the backup crew on 8. And, of course, obviously what happened then, Mike Collins. And what happened was a slot had been opened when Mike Collins had a medical problem, and he got pulled out of the group. And I filled really a slot Mike had left. Well, unfortunately, Mike got well.
Host: I mean, fortunately, but yeah.
Fred Haise: Right. And so he had seniority. He was in a group ahead of me. So he got slot back in Apollo 11, and I got to serve another backup. So I was Buzz Aldrin’s backup on 11 with Jim Lovell and initially Ken Manning. Oh, initially, who flew 8 actually was the command module pilot. He didn’t stay long because he realized he wanted to land on the Moon, and he realized to be too long a cycle and he may not get there. So he left the program, and Ken Manning Lee was put in his slot to serve that backup assignment.
Host: Well, you were also assigned to Apollo 14 originally, right?
Fred Haise: Well, way the normally mission cycled on a three mission cycle. So having backed up 11, yes, we would’ve, Jim Lovell and I, and Ken, as it turned out, it was Jack, we would’ve flown 14. But the crew that flew 10, that would’ve flown 13, two of them had left the program. Gordon Cooper and Donn Eisele and Ed Mitchell were on that crew. And he was the only one that had gone through a full training cycle. So I think Headquarters overruled and said they needed more training time, they should get more training time. So they will move to 14 after the asked to go a level man moving the flight ahead. And Jim said, of course we’ll fly earlier. So we got 13, actually, we only cycled two missions from 11 to 13. And Al Shepard, Ed, and Stu got the fly 14.
Host: Were you pretty excited initially to get that bump up?
Fred Haise: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Sooner you fly the better.
Host: Well, thinking about Apollo 13, you got sick on that mission, too. So not only is this, you’re in kind of a life or death situation, but you’re also not feeling well. How do you bring mind over matter when you’re in a situation like that and focus on the mission?
Fred Haise: Well, the time I got sick was really pretty late in the mission, probably about a day and a half out. I got a urinary tract infection and had chills and fever, burning when you urinate. And we had no medicine on board appropriate. We had, oh, I’ll call it a general purpose prescription kind of drug. But it was not suited for what I had. I had a pseudomonas type bug as it turned out, which ended up needing two shots a day for two weeks to get rid after I splashed down. But no, I was not incapacitated. I just felt lousy. And certainly, getting ready and doing entry, you get enough adrenaline flow, you’re fully alert. So there really wasn’t any performance concern about my condition.
Host: What was reentry like? I mean, you’re finally committed to being back on Earth.
Fred Haise: Well, entry was pretty, pretty exciting. Actually, the thing I worried about most on the flight and all the different things we did to get back was what Jack Swigert and I had to do approaching entry. They had to invent a power up for the capsule because it was never supposed to be powered down. Of course, we shut it down for four days. The water tanks froze in that vehicle. They were still found frozen on the ship oh my after entry. But they didn’t get the procedure that had been developed over several days by many people on the ground, tested in simulators by other astronauts, redlined, reworked. We didn’t get it up till 17 hours before entry. It was handwritten. We had no blank paper on board. So Jack had ripped off backs of books checklist and had wrote the procedures down, numbering the pages. So Jack and I were going to do that power up while Jim stayed in the LM to still control attitude, have communication, etc. And so we went, we read through it a few times. Jack and I, and got kind of got the flow of the task to get the power up done. We were not allowed to start the power up till two and a half hours before entry. So two and a half hours from hitting the air. And because they didn’t want to deplete the entry batteries, there were three small batteries to serve you get through entry. So we went into that dark vehicle. Water was everywhere covering all the instrument panel because, you know, it’d been dead for four days. And moisture built up, no water separator running. And Jack got out a couple of towels and we wiped off everything. And then Jack thought about the Apollo 1 fire and thinking there’s water behind the panel, probably on wiring and worrying about electric shorts. So the first thing he asked me, he said tell Fred, he said, when the first steps in the procedure was to push all the circuit breakers in that were on two panels on each side of the vehicle. So we’d each be at each panel pushing those in. And he said, I’ll give you a countdown and we’ll only push in six at a time and stop and see if we smell insulation burning. So we’d pull them back out and try to isolate, which was the bad one. So that’s the way he went through all that initial activation. But it was kind of another minor miracle of that program that we had obviously violated specifications on all the electronic equipment, shutting it down, freezing it for four days.
It came back to life. There were no errors in that procedure as well. So it powered right on up. We just followed the steps right on through. Jack managed to get a course alignment and then got to even shoot a couple of stars and get a final alignment on the platform. So we had good directional control. And so it reentered. We did not separate the LM till 45 minutes before entry, kicked it off to the side so it wouldn’t hit us coming in. And then got the blunt in first. And it’s a beautiful site through entry because in the couches you’re facing backwards. So the blunt side is into the airstream. And so you can see the initially, and in our case, in lunar flights, the velocity of coming back was the velocity you left, roughly 25,000 miles an hour. So it ionizes the first air you hit, which gives you a whitish glow in the spacecraft. Kinda like feeling you’re inside of a neon light bulb or something. And then that goes away as the red fiery red trail develops. And you got this hot red trail, occasionally little shiny piece parts in that trail, and a swirling pattern when the vehicle would rotate cause that’s the way you control left and right and up and down range with an offset center of gravity, which incidentally, the computer that meant another thing. The computer did it, this all automated, Jack let it go. He was able to, would take over if things went awry. But he let the computer take it all the way in that the little computer that had been had said, shut down for four days. And occasionally you would see those little particles. But then that red glow went to more orangeish, more shade, and eventually ended up on a white smoky trail. And then about the time you got the drogues out at 60,000 feet, and then that stabilized so it didn’t oscillate too much. And until the mains came out at 10,000. So the splashdown itself was fairly mild. Apollo 12 had had a hard splashdown. And we were briefed, of course, after each mission by those who flew the mission, the whole office would be briefed by the crew who had just flown. And apparently the wave state and wind conditions was such, they did get a hard smack at landing that broke up camera off a bracket above Al Bean’s head and actually hit him in the head. He got a slight head wound from the camera coming loose and going down to the bilge and hit him on the way by. So comparatively thinking about that our splashdown was fairly mild. We obviously less wind, a good breeze, but better sea state wave wise. And so we now went through the, you know, the shutdown. And you of course, you don’t try to, in fact, you don’t open the hatch. The divers open the hatch. They have a tool. So when they finish getting the flotation around the capsule, they’ll knock on the window and say they’re going to open the hatch and let you out.
Host: Wow. Well, I mean, all of this is recounted in the very famous movie, Apollo 13. So what’s it like to watch that after you are the person, you know, in the mission?
Fred Haise: Well, I have to say the first time I enjoyed the movie, I didn’t enjoy it as much cause I kept capturing eras. I had that trouble with any Hollywood movie that tries to tell a real story. I’d do good with Hollywood if it’s science fiction, you know, Star Wars. I don’t mind whatever they do there. But at any rate that that bothered me the first time. But as I sat back, and I’ve obviously seen it a number of times at events following that later I’d say that the big picture of people in trouble, which we were, and a team that had worked to get us home came through loud and strong, which was the case. I complained about the team not being big enough because, you know, mission control, they portrayed the Gene Kranz and a white team, and it had four teams during each flight, in fact. And they had some people that were consulted, at least back at the manufacturers or whatever, engineers, as well as NASA engineering involved in working through some of these problems and solutions. And they were not shown, of course. And I complained about that to Ron Howard. I met him and talked to things I didn’t like. And he said, well, he sheepishly. I said, oh, it’s an action movie. He said, you never want much more than a little over two hours. And he said, this one ended up being big, long bit longer than that even he said. But in any case, you can only develop so many characters in the time frame you have of a movie production. I complained about his extreme photo of Bill Paxton and my throw up, space sickness, which was a spit up. And I’m sorry, that Bill Paxton has passed away. He was a nice guy. But at any rate that I complained about, Jim Lovell hugging me at another point, he had Jack Swigert and I in the argument, overthrowing the switch to stir the Cryos. And actually at the time that happened, Jim and I were in the lunar module. We had done a live TV show. In fact, its explosion had happened. TV show had gone on 30 minutes longer. We would’ve been on live TV when explosion happened. So we were still putting away equipment that I had pulled out mostly in the lunar module that I knew had not been ever talked about before for the general public’s benefit. So we wouldn’t replicate previous TV shows. And so I was busily putting that stuff back where I had pulled it out of storage in the LM. Jack had already started to drift back up through the tunnel when that happened. And so Jack had made the first call of “Houston, we had a problem here.” And we briefly lost communication. And that’s when Jim had to repeat the call. When the panel quarter of the service module had blown off, it had hit the high gain antenna. And it took some time to reorient calm on the omni small four little omni antennas that were all the way around the service module to regain their communication. And we went on from there.
Host: Wow. Well, another thing in Apollo 13 that I thought was really interesting is it doesn’t seem like the public was very interested until something went wrong. Was that true?
Fred Haise: I think that’s like race cars, so people don’t get excited until there’s a crash. I don’t know why that human nature, but, you know, they thought they really didn’t appreciate the difficulty of landing on the Moon. And what it took with the make the spacecraft. Take care of anomaly. All missions had anomalies. We almost aborted two other flights, 14 and 16 almost did not land. They had to do workarounds to get them to be able to land. And of course, you’ve seen with the unmanned vehicles recently, one of them landed and ended up upside down. One ended up leaning over on side. It’s not easy.
Host: Right.
Fred Haise: And so I think the public did not. And to understand that, you’d have to know the vehicles and the systems and the number of failures that could be prevalent, what we call normal failures are reasonable failures. And so that was not, you know, it’s technical. And so it was not appreciated.
Host: Well, that always stuck with me. And when I started at NASA, this is probably about 10 years ago, and I wish I could remember who said it, but they said don’t wonder when NASA is going to do the next big thing. We’re already doing it. You know, we’ve kept people in space now for over 20 years on the space station.
Fred Haise: Since 2000.
Host: This is all a big thing, just because it feels normal to people, it’s not.
Fred Haise: Yeah. No. That space station suffers under some, it’s hard for them. A lot of the experiments that have done the knowledge from experimentation, again, is technical. And I think it’s been hard to get out to for the layperson at least to appreciate and understand what is being done, what is being accomplished. I mean, they like to see the human interest of people free floating around. And they’ve had some excellent tours of the facility, the space station by some of the astronauts that I’ve enjoyed actually looking at going through that, the vehicle from stimulus term that’s interesting. And it has public interest, but with the actual hands-on work that’s being done well, other than the human experimentation, but even the scientific type experiments that are being done are just not understood and appreciated.
Host: Yeah. I think that’s a huge goal of everyone’s here.
Fred Haise: What some of the things they’re doing. Over my head.
[Laughs]
Host: We can’t all understand it all. So when you look at the Moon now, do you think about your mission? Do you think about anything special?
Fred Haise: No, not really. I really look back and I feel blessed to have had the opportunities I had particularly be around age-wise and have the right resume to take part in Apollo. And I think many people I know, still know, that worked during that time feel the same way. It was a very unique program that was, thanks to what Kennedy set forth did get supported by Congress. And NASA enjoyed fully the funding they wanted, needed, through Apollo 11. It started backing off after that, but up till accomplishing that goal, NASA had fully funded to make it happen, which has not been the case for anything since.
Host: Right. Well, Apollo was also not your only NASA adventure. You were also working on the space shuttle program, and you worked on the approach and landing test on space shuttle Enterprise. So what was that like? Was there any nerves there? I mean, this is really figuring out if we can land a space shuttle.
Fred Haise: Well, I didn’t really worry about it landing, frankly. We’d done a lot of that through the X-15 program. And even before I left, we were into lifting bodies, these little bathtub looking vehicles that had no wings. And we had flown those. And I had flown a very lightweight one time. They gave Joe Engle and I a chance to fly it after we got accepted into the program to fly it before we left, fill it, fill out its handling qualities. So they were much worse gliders than the shuttle was approximately the X-15 as far as its glide performance about four and a half L over D, about the same as X-15. But no, that it was a, I call it from a test pile and standpoint, it was, I consider it the highlight of my career from, not from the standpoint of flying, approaching, landing test. But before that, I left the astronaut office at the time. We were going into the proposal evaluations, the four proposals that had been submitted by major aerospace companies to build the space shuttle. And I joined Bass Redd in the integration area with Joe Engle. In fact, Joe also was in that same group. We did evaluate four proposals to grade and vote submit to the board to pick who would build the vehicle, which turned out to be Rockwell. And I left the astronaut office and moved to work for Aaron Cohen. So I moved into the arbiter project office as his technical assistant and served on the engineering change board. And led the ops group through all the design reviews through critical design review on Enterprise ad through preliminary design review on Columbia. That’s where a large assembly of people descend on Rockwell at that time. And based on the data available, discrepancies. They’re called review item discrepancies. And of course, different groups look at different data from their aspect. In my case, the ops group I assembled to go with all other astronauts, people from mission control, some of our training people would be on that group that we, and would particularly look at things that applicable to operations.
Now the data pack was available back at Johnson. So many other people would also review it and submit to us through our group rids that would now have to be reviewed and that that was a preliminary board, and then go up to the big board if they affected safety, mission success, and obviously cost and schedule to approve or not approve. So that’s the way that process went on through each of these design reviews initially, a program, PRR, program review, and then a system review, then a preliminary design review, and then a critical design review.
So this is like a three to four year exercise to get to where you finally have enough definition, you can write the RFP, Request for Proposals, to submit to the world to let people bid on. So I was involved through that process. The ground level up. So it’s kind of a wound to tomb adventure. I felt blessed to be one of the two crews to be assigned when we got ready to go get ready to think about flying Enterprise. And so it was interesting to go through the early program facets of the development of things you had to develop to do that kind of, we had to develop our training plan. There was no training plan. We had to develop the simulators. Joe Engle was specialist, took on the shuttle train aircraft, actually flew tests with Grumman on the aircraft before NASA accepted it.
And the moving base simulator, Dick Truly, Bob Crippen, and Hank Hartsfield worked mostly the software. I took on the factory, finished manufacturing and build up and test of the vehicle. Although I use people on, I call people in with the other crews for certain tests that would go, obviously go on 24 hours a day to support certain tests like flight control, for instance. But I did that part cause I’d done that for a year at Grumman, basically test operations at Palmdale, California, where we built the arbiters. And so I’d gone through all of that early stuff before we ever got to the point of thinking of flying. So, you know, developing really the checklist, very simple flight plan where we just had to fly the short flight around Edwards.
And we had good support crew, Bob Overmyer, they were our two guys for support. And they alternated who would be the capcom for the flights and who would chase, be chase. So we had a good small team. It was isolated off from the major program going on at the time. De Slayton was the head of test operations. We had a number of the key Kennedy people there who later became early launch directors. They were very early launch directors cause they came out to support the test of Enterprise in the factory. And then as we got it ready to fly, we had the very best of the, what was left over of the Rockwell test conductors that had not been laid off at the end of Apollo. So we had kind of the cream of the crop there as well. So it was a very good overall team to run that program.
Host: Well, what do you think, I mean, I think I know the answer to this, but I want to hear your take. What was harder flying space shuttle Enterprise on the approach and landing test or learning to pilot the lunar module?
Fred Haise: Well, there were different vehicles Different characteristics. The LM would be more unusual. It was somewhat akin to a helicopter except using reaction control jets for attitude control and a rocket engine rather than the rotors of the propel for your lift or your support that way. So no, it was a whole different kind of a vehicle to fly. The shuttle itself, the orbiter, was just a, you know, an airplane. It was a little bigger airplane than a fighter, but nevertheless, how it handled, how you flew, it was no different than flying an airplane.
Host: Well, that’s the answer I expected, but yeah. Had to ask. So if you could go back in time and tell yourself something on your first day at NASA, or NACA at the time, that you wish you knew then that you know now, what do you think you would’ve said?
Fred Haise: Well, it’s looking over that path, obviously, and I wish we’d have gone on from Apollo and had continued funding to move further out that we’re still talking about like Mars that we’re not, it’s not nowhere near time anyway. And from shuttle standpoint, I wish we could have built what I call a B model. Airplanes, as you know, any airplane built normally has models like the best F-86 Sabre jet was the H model. The A model was the one that flew in the Korean War against the mig. B 52’s are now up to H models. So I wish we could have built a B model of the shuttle in my mind. Maybe if after getting past space station assembly, maybe have a smaller payload bay, a smaller vehicle in an all-metal vehicle. Not the tile system also put money into the processing, a ground processing and maintenance to make it cheaper to turn around. It’s still up to the end with the tile system, and the tech checks had to be done on that. And replacement, overall, the vehicle was not efficient, from a military maintenance standpoint, a very efficient vehicle to maintain and operate that we could have done a lot better on with, you know, with also this techno computing where it had gone. We were still using on shuttles, people in escape suits out to like fill the RCS system which is limited. I think they only work several hours in escape suit. And you had to keep changing people out. Normally you’d only use escape people when there was a problem on the facility, a maintenance issue they had to go fix. You wouldn’t use them for just normal servicing. See, we just took the hand me down Apollo launchpad and did the best we could cheaply to convert it to launch shuttles is basically, one way of saying it, that we would’ve done much better with the ground system and the turnaround capability.
Host: Well, we’re trying to go back to the Moon with the Artemis program, and, you know, we’re working a lot now with commercial partners. We have strong international partner collaboration. But what do you think are the most important lessons learned from Apollo that we need to take into the future to be successful?
Fred Haise: Well, Artemis and the architecture is built on a bigger picture of eventually established like a lunar base, right? So the thing that my old company, in fact is contracted to build a thing that’s in orbit for around the Moon, Northrop Grumman. And the features that way are built to more thinking of logistically support to service a lunar base. It’s not as simple as like we had one rocket to only go and for a limited, very limited time and pick up some rocks. It’s got a bigger thought in mind than how it was put together. So in that respect, integration wise, it’s a little more complicated. It requires more launches, right. The rendezvous to that orbiting station, the Europeans are involved as well with that operation. So, that’s one facet that’s different clearly with Artemis and where they’re thinking of taking it to it in a similar way. I don’t think it’s obviously funded at an Apollo level. And that has caused schedules to go to move out to the right in that program, because it was, I don’t, I was not involved. So I don’t know whether original program plan on what they had established or built, developed to where it would be as far as the first man flights and then the first landing. But I think it’s beyond where they planned. And that’s mainly because of budgeting shortfall.
Host: Oh, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for your service to our country. And thank you for your service to NASA for sharing your stories here with us. And it’s really an honor to have you here. So thank you so much.
Fred Haise: Thank you.
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Host: Thanks for sticking around and I hope you learned something new today. If you want to know what else is up with NASA, visit us online at nasa.gov for the latest. You can also continue your audio journey at nasa.gov/podcasts. Reach out to us here at Johnson Space Center on social media, Facebook, X, or Instagram using #AskNASA to submit an idea and make sure to mention it’s for Houston We Have a Podcast.
This episode was recorded Aug. 26, 2024. Thanks to Will Flato, Dane Turner, Abby Graf, Jaden Jennings, Gary Jordan, Shanee Rine, James Blair, and Charles Clendaniel. And of course, thanks again to Fred Haise for taking the time to come on the show. Give us a rating and feedback on whatever platform you’re listening to us on and tell us what you think of our podcast. We’ll be back next week.
This is an Official NASA Podcast.