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The Space Race: A Deep History of the Greatest Competition Ever Waged — From V-2 Rockets to Apollo and Beyond · Sleepless History: Sleep Documentaries

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Sleepless History.
• 0:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are going on a very long journey.
• 0:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not just through the pages of history but upward, past the clouds, past the thin blue line where the air runs out and into the cold, silent dark of outer space.
• 0:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we are telling the story of the Space Race, one of the most extraordinary, costly, dangerous and quietly beautiful competitions in the history of civilization.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story that spans roughly three decades, from the ruins of a devastated Europe in the years after World War II, all the way to a handshake 140 miles above the surface of the earth in the summer of 1975.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a story about two superpowers, the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republic, who, after defeating a common enemy, found themselves staring at each other across an ideological chasm so wide that neither side could quite imagine the other.
• 1:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, somehow, in their rivalry, they managed to push human beings beyond every boundary that had ever existed.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is also a story about individuals, engineers who dreamed of stars, astronauts and cosmonauts who volunteered to sit on top of enormous exploding machines, and the quiet army of mathematicians, welders, seamstresses, and technicians whose names never made the history books, but whose work made everything possible.
• 1:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we will cover it all and we will take our time.
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have organised this journey into five chapters.
• 1:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do not worry if you drift off somewhere in the middle.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: The history will still be here when you return.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you've tuned in tonight to help your mind drift off, you're in the right place.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the reason I create these.
• 2:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you find this helpful, consider following and leaving a comment about where you're listening from and what the time is.
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love reading through the comments.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's something surreal about knowing someone is watching at midnight in San Francisco, while someone else is starting their day in Stockholm,
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 1, the Foundations, post-war shadows, rocket men, and the first satellite.
• 2:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: To understand how the space race started, we need to go back a little further than most people expect.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: We need to go back to a small town in Northern Germany called Pina Monday, on a thin strip of Baltic coastline where the wind comes in cold off the water and the pine trees lean away from the sea.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is 1942.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Second World War is in full swing.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Germany is fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously and its government.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The National Socialist regime of Adolf Hitler is pouring extraordinary resources into weapons development.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of those weapons is being developed here at Pina Monday in a complex of low concrete buildings surrounded by pine forest and barbed wire.
• 3:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The weapon is called the Agra-Gat-Vir.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Allies will come to call it the V2.
• 3:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is a ballistic missile, which means it is a rocket that carries an explosive warhead, flies up into the edge of space, and then comes back down on the other end.
• 3:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It stands 14 meters tall.
• 3:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It weighs about 12,000 kilograms when fully fueled.
• 3:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: it burns a mixture of ethanol and liquid oxygen and it travels at speeds that in 1942 no human-made flying object had ever reached.
• 4:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The man most responsible for its existence is a tall, blue-eyed aristocratic young German engineer named Werner von Braun.
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was born in 1912.
• 4:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: in a town in what is now Poland, the son of a Prussian barren.
• 4:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: From the time he was a teenager, he had been obsessed with the idea of spaceflight, not missiles, not weapons, spaceflight.
• 4:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had read the books of the early rocket theorists, had corresponded with pioneers of rocketry and had dedicated his professional life to the idea that human beings could one day travel to other planets.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: To do that, he needed funding, and in 1933, when the Nazi party came to power in Germany, the only organisation willing to fund serious rocket development was the German military.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Von Braun joined the programme.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would later say he was naive, that he told himself he was building towards space.
• 5:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: and that the war applications were just a means to an end.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether you find that explanation satisfying, is a question we will not try to answer tonight.
• 5:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: What is historically clear?
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: is that the weapons program he led, resulted in the deaths of thousands of people, both the victims of V2 attacks on London and Antwerp, and the forced laborers, many of them concentration camp prisoners, who were used to build the rockets at an underground factory called Mittalverk.
• 5:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the rockets themselves were astonishing achievements of engineering.
• 5:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the first V2 was successfully launched from Pinnomundi on the 3rd of October, 1942, reaching an altitude of nearly 80 kilometers, one of Von Braun's colleagues reportedly said, the spaceship was born, but it landed on the wrong planet.
• 5:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: By 1945, it was clear that Germany was losing the war.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Allied forces were closing in from both east and west, and both the United States and the Soviet Union, new about the V2 program.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both understood that whoever captured the Pena Monday scientists and their rocket technology would gain an enormous advantage.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: What followed was a quietly desperate scramble.
• 6:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the American side, the operation was called Operation Paperclip.
• 6:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a program run by the United States Office of Strategic Services, the wartime intelligence organization that would later become the Central Intelligence Agency with the goal of recruiting German scientists and engineers.
• 6:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before the Soviets could get to them, the name came from the paper clips that were attached to the files of scientists who had been selected for recruitment.
• 6:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The program was, from a moral standpoint, complicated.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many of the scientists being recruited had been members of the Nazi party.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some had directly overseen the use of forced labor.
• 7:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their wartime records were, in many cases, quietly cleaned up or set aside by American authorities.
• 7:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: who decided that the strategic value of their knowledge outweighed the ethical problems of bringing them to the United States.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vern Hervon Brown was among them.
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the final weeks of the war, he and a group of his colleagues made the deliberate decision to surrender to American forces rather than Soviet ones.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: they packed up as many technical documents as they could, hid them in a mineshaft and drove south through the crumbling German countryside until they found an American unit to surrender to.
• 7:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Von Braun arrived in American custody with his arm in a cast.
• 7:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had broken it in a car accident a few weeks earlier and reportedly greeted his captors by asking where he could find someone to surrender to.
• 8:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would spend the rest of his life in the United States.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would become a citizen, learn to give speeches without an accent.
• 8:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: write articles for popular magazines about the future of space travel and eventually become one of the most prominent public figures in the American Space Program.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the Soviet side, the story was different in texture, but similar in outline.
• 8:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviets had also sent teams to Germany to find rocket scientists and technology.
• 8:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were somewhat less successful at capturing the top scientists.
• 8:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of the senior Pena Mundi team had chosen to surrender to the Americans.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Soviets did capture a significant number of lower-level technicians and engineers, along with blueprints, hardware, and manufacturing equipment.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: They also captured the underground middle-work factory itself, since it fell within the Soviet occupation zone.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: they brought German rocket engineers and technicians to the Soviet Union, initially on what those engineers were told would be a short working visit.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It turned out to be considerably longer than advertised, most of them were held in the Soviet Union for several years, before being allowed to return to Germany.
• 9:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the Soviets also had their own rocket pioneer.
• 9:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in many ways, he was a more remarkable figure than Von Braun.
• 9:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: His name was Sergei Pavlevich Korolev.
• 9:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was born in 1907 in what is now Ukraine, the son of a teacher.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had been obsessed with flight and rocketry since childhood.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the 1930s, he was one of the leading figures in a Soviet rocketry research group.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, in 1938, he was arrested.
• 9:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was during the period of Stalin's great terror, a wave of political purges that swept through Soviet society and destroyed the lives of millions of people on the basis of denunciations, real or fabricated.
• 10:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Coral Eve was accused of being a saboteur.
• 10:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was sentenced to years in the Gulag, the Soviet forced labour camp system, and spent time at one of the most brutal camps in the system, a gold mine in the Colomar region of Siberia, where the death rate among prisoners was catastrophic.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He survived, barely.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was eventually transferred to a Shirashka, a special type of Soviet prison institution, where scientists and engineers worked on state projects while in custody.
• 10:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked on aircraft designs during the war, and eventually he was fully rehabilitated, his sentence commuted, and he returned to rocket work.
• 10:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The experience left him with broken health, several missing teeth knocked out during interrogation, and a kind of cold, driven determination that those who worked with him found both inspiring and terrifying.
• 11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was known to be brilliant, demanding, and impatient in equal measure.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He worked in enormous hours.
• 11:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He expected those around him to do the same.
• 11:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: For security reasons,
• 11:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Coral Eves' identity was kept completely secret by the Soviet government for most of his working life.
• 11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was referred to in official Soviet publications, simply as the chief designer.
• 11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: His name would not become publicly known in the West until after his death.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now let us talk about what these rocket programs actually.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: look like in the years after the war, the early testing period, the desert launches, the spectacular failures and quiet successes that eventually led to the first satellites.
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans brought their German rocket scientists, von Braun, and over a hundred of his colleagues to Fort Bliss, Texas,
• 12:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And later to the white sand's proving ground in New Mexico, this was in the late 1940s.
• 12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The desert landscape there is remarkable, flat, pale, almost lunar, with the Sacramento mountains rising to the east and the air shimmering with heat.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scientists and engineers were given warehouses full of captured V2 rocket paths that had been shipped over from Germany, and they were told to assemble and launch them for testing purposes.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The work was often made shift.
• 12:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The desert heat was different from anything the Germans had experienced in Northern Europe.
• 12:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: The supply chains were unreliable.
• 12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans working alongside the German scientists will often not quite sure what to make of their new colleagues and the German scientists will often not quite sure what to make of their new surroundings.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the rockets flew.
• 13:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Between 1946 and 1952, dozens of V2 rockets were launched from white sands.
• 13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them carried scientific instruments to measure cosmic rays and atmospheric conditions at high altitudes.
• 13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them were test vehicles for new guidance systems.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of them, in 1946,
• 13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: carried a camera that took the first photographs of Earth from space.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grany, black and white images showing the curve of the planet and the darkness beyond.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Images that caused considerable excitement among the scientists who received them, there were failures too, rockets that veered off course, rockets that exploded on the launch pad.
• 13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Rockets that came down in the wrong place.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: one notoriously landed in a cemetery in Juarez, Mexico just across the border, which caused a diplomatic incident.
• 14:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The engineers would examine the wreckage, argue about what had gone wrong, make corrections, and try again.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is, in essence, what rocket development looks like.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is not glamorous.
• 14:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is an endless cycle of design, build, test, fail, analyze, revise, and test again.
• 14:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The headline-making moments, the launches, the explosions, the spectacular successes.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: are the visible surface of an enormous, submerged body of work that is mostly just people sitting at desks, running calculations, arguing about specifications, and trying to figure out why something did not work the way the equations said it should.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the Soviet Union, Coral Eve was doing similar work, but under very different conditions.
• 14:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet rocket program was based at a facility called Kapustin Yav, a remote site in the step region near the Volga River.
• 15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The conditions there were harsh, brutal cold in winter, brutal heat in summer, dust storms and a sense of profound geographic isolation.
• 15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The scientists and engineers who worked there lived in barracks and worked in
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: than anything their American counterparts were experiencing.
• 15:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But Coralev was a force of nature.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He drove his team relentlessly.
• 15:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also had something Vombron did not have in these early years.
• 15:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: the direct attention and backing of the Soviet state at the highest levels.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Stalin's death in 1953, the new leadership of the Soviet Union, particularly Nikita Kruschev, who would eventually emerge as the dominant figure, saw ballistic missiles and space technology as crucial tools of both military power and international prestige.
• 16:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kruschev was a man who understood the propaganda value of technological achievement.
• 16:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He grasped before most of his counterparts in the West, that a rocket that could launch a satellite could also deliver a nuclear warhead to the other side of the world, and that demonstrating one would implicitly demonstrate the other.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He gave Coral-Ev resources, authority, and his attention.
• 16:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Coraluv, in turn, delivered results.
• 16:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the mid-1950s, both superpowers had developed intercontinental ballistic missiles, rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads across the ocean.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both superpowers were also talking about launching artificial satellites.
• 16:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1955, both the United States and the Soviet Union publicly announced their intention to launch satellites as part of the International Geophysical Year, an International Scientific Co-operative
• 17:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: the announcement was fairly quiet.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most ordinary people did not pay much attention.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was about to change.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 4th of October 1957, a Friday, at the Biconor Cosmodrome, a launch facility in the Kazak step of the Soviet Union, an enormous flat, treeless landscape under an enormous sky, a rocket called the R7 stands on a launch pad.
• 17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The R7 is the world's first true intercontinental ballistic missile.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight, it has been repurposed as a launch vehicle.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sitting on top of it, inside a polished metal sphere about 58 cm in diameter, roughly the size of a large beach ball is a small payload.
• 18:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has four thin radio antennas extending from it like spider legs.
• 18:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It weighs 83 kilograms.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Its name is Sputnik.
• 18:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is a Russian word meaning roughly travelling companion or fellow traveller.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: At 28 minutes and 4 seconds past 9 in the evening, local time.
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: the R7's engines ignite.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rocket lifts off from the launch pad.
• 18:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It rises into the dark sky, accelerating, and within a few minutes it has left the atmosphere and entered orbit.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sputnik begins transmitting.
• 18:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The signal it sends is simple.
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: A steady beep on a frequency that amateur radio operators around the world could pick up.
• 18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Beep, beep, beep, regular as a heartbeat.
• 18:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: calm and cold and utterly indifferent to everything happening on the planet below.
• 19:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the hours that followed that beep was heard around the world, and it's effect on the United States was profound.
• 19:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth pausing here to understand just how shocking the sputnik launch was to the American public and to American political leadership.
• 19:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In 1957 the United States was by most measures the most powerful nation on earth.
• 19:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had the world's largest economy.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had a technological
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: that was widely considered unrivaled.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: It had won the Second World War, it had the bomb.
• 19:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Americans, in general, had a fairly confident sense of themselves as the people who built things, invented things, and solved problems.
• 19:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, on a Friday evening in October, the Soviet Union, which many Americans regarded as a backward, agricultural or authoritarian society, launched the world's first artificial satellite.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: they did it before the Americans.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They did it with a rocket that was demonstrably more powerful than anything the United States had yet launched.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reaction was something between embarrassment and panic.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Newspapers ran enormous headlines.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Politicians demanded investigations and explanations.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word Sputnik entered the English language immediately.
• 20:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were serious, non-historical questions being asked about whether the United States had fallen dangerously behind in science and technology, and what that might mean for national security if the same rocket that launched Sputnik.
• 20:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: could be used to deliver a nuclear warhead.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Dwight D. Eisenhower, for his part, tried to project calm.
• 21:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said, Sputnik was not a military threat.
• 21:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was correct that the satellite itself posed no danger.
• 21:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But his calm was widely perceived as complacency and it damaged him politically.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, on the 3rd of November, the Soviets launched Sputnik II, which was larger than the first and carried a passenger, a dog named Lyker.
• 21:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lyker became the first living creature to orbit the Earth.
• 21:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: She did not survive the mission.
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The spacecraft had no reentry system, and she died from overheating several hours into the flight, though this was not publicly acknowledged by the Soviet government for decades.
• 21:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the fact that the Soviets had put a living creature into orbit, while the Americans were still trying to get their first satellite off the ground at all, sent another wave of anxiety through the United States.
• 22:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: came on the 6th of December 1957.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: A navy rocket called Vanguard carrying a small satellite lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It rose about one metre off the launch pad, then the engines lost thrust and the rocket fell back and exploded in a fireball.
• 22:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The satellite rolled off into the grass, transmitting its signal pathetically as it lay in the dirt.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The press was brutal.
• 22:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rocket was called flopnic, kuputnic, and stay putnic.
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans did eventually get a satellite into orbit.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: On 31 January 1958, a rocket called Jupiter C, designed by Von Braun's team at what was now the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville,
• 22:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alabama successfully launched a satellite called Explorer 1 into orbit.
• 23:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a real achievement, but it came after the Soviets, and in the political calculus of the cold war that mattered, the Sputnik shock had lasting consequences.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: It accelerated American investment in science education.
• 23:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The National Defense Education Act of 1958 poured hundreds of millions of dollars into schools and universities to train more scientists and engineers.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It led to the creation of the National Eronautics and Space Administration or NASA in 1958.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it fundamentally changed the way both superpowers thought about space, no longer just as a scientific curiosity or a military utility, but as a theatre of ideological competition, a place where the superiority of one system over another could be demonstrated to the whole watching world.
• 24:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The race was on and it was just getting started.
• 24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first astronauts, the first cosmonauts, and the first walks in space.
• 24:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us slow down here and spend some time with the people because it is easy in a history like this one to get caught up in the machinery, the rockets, the trajectories, the orbital mechanics, and the machinery is genuinely fascinating.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the extraordinary thing about the space race, the thing that still catches in the throat when you think about it properly,
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: is that human beings climbed into these machines and agreed to go.
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They agreed to sit on top of rockets that were in the early years, extremely prone to exploding.
• 24:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: They agreed to go to a place where there is no air, where the temperature swings from
• 25:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: where a hole the size of a pin prick in their suit or capsule would kill them within seconds.
• 25:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: They agreed to do this in vehicles that were, by the standards of what came later, extraordinarily primitive.
• 25:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: who were these people.
• 25:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the United States, the selection of the first astronauts was announced on the 9th of April 1959.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were 7 military test pilots, and they became immediately famous.
• 25:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Alan Sheppard, Gus Grisson, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Wally Shira, Gordon Cooper,
• 25:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Life magazine ran a long, warm feature about them and their families that presented them as clean-cut American heroes, patriotic and level-headed, wholesome in every conceivable way.
• 26:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: The reality was somewhat more complicated.
• 26:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were test pilots, a breed that has never been famous for quiet domesticity.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Most of them had significant extracurricular histories that were not discussed in the life magazine feature, but they were also genuinely exceptional people.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: To have reached the level of military test pilot in the 1950s, required extraordinary flying ability.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: a high tolerance for risk, and a particular kind of psychological resilience, the ability to remain calm and analytical, while sitting in an experimental aircraft that might at any moment decide to do something the designers have not anticipated.
• 26:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The selection process was itself extraordinary.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The men were subjected to weeks of medical and psychological testing that were, by all accounts, exhaustive and frequently humiliating.
• 27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were poked, prodded, measured, stress tested and psychologically evaluated in ways that the participants later described
• 27:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They sat in heated rooms until they were nearly incapacitated.
• 27:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were spun in centrifuges at many times the force of normal gravity.
• 27:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were subjected to isolation tanks and sensory deprivation tests.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were asked to answer hundreds of psychological questionnaire items while sleep deprived.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea was to find people who were not just physically fit and skilled at flying, but psychologically stable under extreme conditions.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the conditions they would face would be quite literally extreme by any definition.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Once selected, the training was long and methodical.
• 28:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The astronauts spent thousands of hours in simulators, practising procedures over and over, until they were reflexive.
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: They studied orbital mechanics, rocket engineering, medical physiology, meteorology, astronomy.
• 28:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: They trained in centrifuges to prepare for the high gravitational loads of launch
• 28:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: They practiced emergency procedures for every conceivable failure mode.
• 28:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Much of the training was, frankly, monotonous.
• 28:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a word that does not often appear in the heroic accounts of the space program, but it is accurate.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: A large fraction of astronaut training consisted of repeating the same procedures again and again in a simulator, until they were completely automatic.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: not exciting, not dramatic, just the careful patient accumulation of procedural competence that is the foundation of safety in any high-risk profession.
• 29:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Glenn, in particular, was known for the almost obsessive care he brought to his preparation.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would go over checklists repeatedly.
• 29:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He studied everything.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He flew practice runs until his performance was as close to flawless as human beings can get.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: His colleagues respected him enormously, though his earnestness also made him at times something of an
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: quicker, harder-edged, intensely competitive, he wanted to be first.
• 29:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 5th of May, 1961, Shepherd became the first American in space, riding a redstone rocket in a capsule called Freedom 7 on a 15-minute suborbital flight that reached an altitude of about 187 km.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: had gotten their first.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 12th of April 1961, three weeks before Alan Shepard's flight, a young Soviet Air Force pilot named Yuri Alexeiovich Gagarin, climbed into a spacecraft called Vostok-1, a top-and-r7 rocket at Bikonor Cosmodrome, and became the first human being to leave the earth.
• 30:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gagarin's flight lasted 108 minutes.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: He made a single orbit of the Earth at a maximum altitude of about 312 km.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He re-entered the atmosphere, and then following the design of the Vostock capsule, which had no parachute landing capability for passengers, ejected from the capsule at about 7,000 meters altitude.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: and parachuted separately to the ground, landing in a field in the Saratov region of Russia, a farm worker and her daughter working in the fields saw him descend and walk toward them in his orange flight suit and white helmet.
• 31:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: He introduced himself and asked if they could point him toward a telephone so he could report his landing location.
• 31:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: the world reacted with astonishment.
• 31:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even in the United States, where the political disappointment was acute, many people felt a complicated mixture of admiration and wonder.
• 31:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: A human being had left the earth.
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever else you thought about the Soviet Union, that was extraordinary.
• 31:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who was Yuri Gagarin?
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was born on the 9th of March, 1934, in a village
• 31:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: His parents were collective farm workers, his father was a carpenter and bricklayer, his mother, a dairy worker.
• 31:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The family was poor in the way that most Soviet rural families of that generation were poor.
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: During the German occupation of their region in World War II, Gagarin's family was displaced from their home, and the experience of the war was formative for him, as it was for everyone in that generation.
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was a bright student, particularly in mathematics and physics.
• 32:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He trained as an industrial worker first, a metal worker's apprentice, before his academic ability got him into technical school, and eventually into an aviation club, where he discovered a passionate love of flying.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He became a military pilot, flew jets in the Arctic, was selected for the Cosmonaut program,
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: an ideal product of the Soviet system, a man of working-class origins who had risen through ability and dedication, personal, photogenic and modest.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: His training, like that of the American astronauts, was rigorous.
• 33:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet cosmonaut selection process had begun in 1959, the same year as the American program, and involved similar batteries of medical
• 33:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet approach placed somewhat more emphasis on ideological reliability, alongside physical and intellectual qualifications.
• 33:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The candidates were examined not just for what they could do, but for who they were politically.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was after all the Soviet Union.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cosmonauts trained for the specific requirements of the Vostok spacecraft, which was in some ways less sophisticated than the Mercury capsule the Americans were developing.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Vostok was designed so that the cosmonaut could not manually control the spacecraft, except in emergencies, the flight was controlled from the ground.
• 33:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: This reflected some uncertainty on the part of the Soviet engineers about how human beings would respond to the stresses of spaceflight, and whether a pilot in that environment could be trusted to make good decisions.
• 34:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was genuine scientific debate in this period about whether weightlessness might cause psychological disorientation severe enough to incapacitate a person and the design of the Vostok was partly a hedge against that uncertainty.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gagarin was aware of this.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The manual controls were sealed with a combination and the combination
• 34:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: that Gagarin was told he could open if he needed to fly manually.
• 34:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was also quietly told the combination beforehand by a colleague who thought it was absurd for him to be sitting in a spacecraft without access to the controls.
• 34:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: As it turned out, Gagarin flew the entire mission without needing to touch the controls anyway.
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gagarin's response to the experience of spaceflight, as recorded in his debriefings and later writings, was one of composed wonder.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described the view of Earth from orbit with phrases that became famous.
• 35:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The planet's colours, the black of space, the way the horizon curved.
• 35:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described the feeling of weightlessness, unexpected in its complete freedom, strange, pleasurable.
• 35:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He ate and drank in space to demonstrate that human physiology could function in weightlessness, which was not yet certain.
• 35:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: was far from guaranteed.
• 35:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was treated as a global hero.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was paraded through Moscow.
• 35:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was received by heads of state around the world.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: His photograph was everywhere.
• 35:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Children in dozens of countries knew his name.
• 35:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is hard now to fully recover what that moment felt like in 1961.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: We live in a world where spaceflight, while still remarkable, is no longer incomprehensible.
• 36:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has happened enough times, been televised enough times, become ordinary enough, that we have lost the ability to feel it the way the people of 1961 felt it.
• 36:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: For them, the idea that a human being had been in space,
• 36:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: had orbited the entire planet in under two hours, had looked down at the globe from a perspective no human eye had ever occupied, this was not just news, it was a rupture in the category of the possible.
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Between Gagarin's flight in April 1961 and the beginning of the Apollo program's development, both superpowers launched a rapid series of missions that progressively explored
• 36:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans, after Shepard's suborbital flight, sent Gus Grisson on a second suborbital mission in July 1961, and then in February 1962, John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth.
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: making three orbits in a flight of just under five hours.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Glenn's flight was watched by an estimated 40 million Americans on television.
• 37:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: When his capsule, Friendship 7, splashed down in the Atlantic, the relief and joy in the country was palpable.
• 37:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: He received a ticketate parade in New York City that drew enormous crowds.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviets, meanwhile, were continuing to achieve firsts.
• 37:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: In June 1963, a woman named Valentina Terishkova became the first woman in space, flying the Vostok 6 mission for nearly three days.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was a textile worker and amateur parishutist who had been selected partly for her working class background and her political reliability.
• 38:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: She had no prior aviation experience, which was a point of some private frustration among the more experienced pilot cosmonauts in the Soviet program.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But she flew the mission, she completed it, and she became another propaganda triumph
• 38:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would be 20 years before NASA sent a woman into space.
• 38:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, let us come to the first space walks.
• 38:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The year is 1965.
• 38:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both programs are moving fast, pushing their technology and their people to do things that have never been done before.
• 38:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: and on the 18th of March 1965, a Soviet cosmonaut named Alexei Leonov climbed out of his spacecraft and became the first human being to float freely in open space.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leonov was a cosmonaut of a particular type, artistic, expansive, gregarious, with a warmth that seems to have come through in every account of his personality.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was also by any measure, courageous.
• 39:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: What he did on the 18th of March required courage of a very specific kind.
• 39:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: not the dramatic courage of a battlefield, but the quieter, more deliberate courage of doing something for the first time.
• 39:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: In a context where the consequences of any misjudgment are immediate and fatal, he exited the Voscold 2 spacecraft through an airlock and spent 12 minutes outside in open space, tethered to the spacecraft by a 5-meter umbilical cord.
• 39:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described the experience afterward as overwhelming, the planet below him, the silence, the absolute blackness of space, the strange sensation of floating, but it nearly killed him.
• 39:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: His space suit inflated in the vacuum of space, becoming rigid and ballooning outward, and when he tried to re-enter the airlock, he found that his arms and legs could not reach the controls properly.
• 40:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was too large to fit back through the opening.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spent what he later described as the most terrifying minutes of his life, struggling to get back inside, using only the strength of his body against the pressure of his suit.
• 40:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He made a decision that was not in the protocol.
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: He bled some air out of the suit, reducing the pressure and allowing himself enough mobility to bend his body and re-enter the airlock.
• 40:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: This was a calculated risk, reducing the pressure in a space suit in a vacuum, risks causing gas bubbles to form in the bloodstream, a condition called decompression sickness that can be fatal.
• 40:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He managed it successfully.
• 40:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: He got back inside.
• 40:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not tell his flight controllers exactly what had happened.
• 40:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described the reentry as difficult, but did not disclose the full danger until years later.
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not wanting to cause alarm, the mission had further problems.
• 41:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The automatic reentry system failed, requiring the crew to fire their retro rockets manually, and the capsule landed in a dense Siberian forest, far from the intended landing zone.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crew spent a night in the spacecraft in freezing temperatures before rescue teams reached them, but Alexey Leonov had walked in space, and he had survived.
• 41:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American response came 11 weeks later, on the 3rd of June 1965, astronaut Ed White opened the hatch of the Gemini Force spacecraft and stepped out into the void above the earth.
• 41:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: White was different in temperament from Leonov, a composed, methodical air force officer with a pilot's economy of expression.
• 41:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he shared with Leonov the ability to project calm in a situation that was anything but.
• 42:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spent 23 minutes outside the spacecraft, maneuvering with a small handheld jet thruster.
• 42:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was tethered to the spacecraft by a umbilical and a tether rope.
• 42:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Below him the earth turned, he passed over the Gulf of Mexico, across the United States out over the Atlantic.
• 42:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: his comments during the spacewalk became famous, partly for what he said, and partly for how he said it.
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: When ground controllers told him it was time to return to the capsule, he said, this is the saddest moment of my life.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not want to come in.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is something in that response, the saddest moment of my life that feels important.
• 42:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was 20 miles above Earth, moving at 17,000 miles an hour in a vacuum that would kill him in seconds without his suit, with nothing between him and the entire universe, but a thin membrane of technology and human ingenuity.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: and he was sad to leave.
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the things that makes the early space programs so moving to contemplate even now.
• 43:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: These were not just technical achievements.
• 43:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were expansions of what human experience could be.
• 43:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the people who had those experiences tended to describe them in terms that suggested they had encountered something profound, something that changed their sense of what the world was and what their place in it might be.
• 43:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And here, speaking of profound, let us spend a moment with a speech.
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 12th of September, 1962, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood in the heat of a Texas September at Rice University in Houston and gave a speech that has since become one of the most quoted addresses in the history of American public life.
• 44:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kennedy had already committed the United States to a moon landing in a speech to Congress in May 1961, shortly after Gagarin's flight.
• 44:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: That speech was driven by political urgency.
• 44:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: The United States needed to demonstrate that it could match and surpass Soviet achievements in space.
• 44:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: and Kennedy's advisors had identified a moon landing as a goal achievable before the Soviets, if the commitment was made immediately and made total.
• 44:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Rice University speech was something else.
• 44:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the great explanatory address, the speech where Kennedy tried to answer the question of why.
• 44:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said, in a passage that has been quoted countless times since, we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
• 44:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spoke of space as a new ocean and said that the United States intended to sail it.
• 45:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spoke of the history of human exploration of the impulse that had always driven people to move beyond the known boundaries to go where no one had gone before.
• 45:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He spoke of the knowledge and technology that the space program would generate, knowledge that would benefit all of humanity.
• 45:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was 23 months from his assassination.
• 45:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The moon landing he promised was 7 years away.
• 45:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: He would not live to see it.
• 45:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: but the speech caught something real.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something that was not just about competition with the Soviet Union, not just about cold war politics, but about a genuinely human impulse, the desire to go further, to know more, to reach out into the dark, and bring back something that had never been brought back before.
• 45:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a phrase from that speech that stays with me.
• 45:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said that the exploration of space would, in many ways, hold the key to our future on earth.
• 46:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was speaking in the context of his own time, his own political moment.
• 46:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the phrase echoes differently now, from a perspective of six decades, when that future he was speaking of has become our present.
• 46:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The key to our future on earth.
• 46:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth sitting with that phrase for a while, in the quiet.
• 46:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: chapter 3, the lunar push, tragedy, perseverance, and the long road to Apollo.
• 46:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the mid-1960s, the goal was clear.
• 46:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both superpowers wanted to reach the moon.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: the question was how to get there and whether the cost would be paid only in dollars and rubles or also in something else.
• 46:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the Soviet Union, the Moon Program was plagued by problems that, for the most part, were not revealed to the outside world for many years.
• 47:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet lunar effort was divided by internal competition between different design bureaus, different groups of engineers, who each had their own ideas about how to get to.
• 47:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: the moon, and who competed for resources and authority.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Coralev's death in January 1966, he died on the operating table during what was supposed to be a routine surgery.
• 47:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: His body warned down by the years in the Gulag and decades of brutal work, the program lost its central organising genius and never quite recovered the coherence it had under his leadership.
• 47:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: the main Soviet moon rocket, the none, was an enormous machine, as large as the American Saturn 5 that never successfully flew.
• 47:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was launched four times between 1969 and 1972.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: all four launches ended in catastrophic failure.
• 48:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The second launch, on the 3rd of July 1969, produced what is reportedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in the history of the planet, the rocket collapsed back onto its launch pad and destroyed a large portion of the Biconol launch facility.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The explosion could reportedly be seen from hundreds of kilometers away.
• 48:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviets never admitted these failures publicly at the time.
• 48:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: To the outside world, they simply appeared to lose interest in a moon landing as if they had never really been trying.
• 48:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The truth of the non-program was not publicly acknowledged for over 20 years.
• 48:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the Americans,
• 48:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mercury, which proved that Americans could function in space, Gemini, which developed the techniques and technology needed for a lunar mission, and Apollo, which was the lunar program itself.
• 49:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mercury and Gemini are fascinating programs in their own right, but we have already spent some time there.
• 49:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us now come to Apollo,
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The 27th of January 1967, it was a Friday evening, and the crew of Apollo 1, Command of Virgil Gusgrissum, senior pilot Ed White, the same Ed White, who had performed America's first spacewalk less than two years earlier, and pilot Roger Chaffey were conducting a routine ground test in their spacecraft on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral.
• 49:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The test was called a plugs out test, which meant the spacecraft was running on its own internal power, simulating the conditions of flight, while still sitting on the pad.
• 49:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crew was suited and strapped in, running through checklists, dealing with a series of minor communication problems that had been frustrating the test team all day.
• 50:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was never conclusively determined who said fire.
• 50:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then we've got a fire in the cockpit.
• 50:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then in the final seconds of the transmission, a brief, unintelligible sound.
• 50:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: the cabin pressure built rapidly, the inner hatch of Apollo 1, which opened inward and required the pressure inside to be equalised before it could be opened, could not be opened in time, grissum, white, and chaffy, died of a sfixiation.
• 50:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Possibly within about 30 seconds of the fire's ignition, the fire had started somewhere in the wiring of the spacecraft.
• 50:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The pure oxygen atmosphere inside the cabin, 100% oxygen at a pressure slightly above sea level atmospheric pressure, turned what would have been a manageable fire in normal conditions into something that burned ferociously and spread instantly.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Materials that would not readily burn in a normal atmosphere burned readily in pure oxygen.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The hatches were opened six minutes after the fire began.
• 51:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was nothing to be done.
• 51:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Gus Grissom was 38 years old.
• 51:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ed White was 35.
• 51:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Roger Chaffey was 31.
• 51:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Grissom had been the second American in space in 1961.
• 51:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: and had also commanded the Gemini III mission in 1965.
• 51:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had been slated to command the first operational Apollo mission and was widely seen as a leading candidate to be the first American to walk on the moon.
• 51:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a story perhaps apocryphal, but often told that a few weeks before the fire, Grissam had hung a lemon on the Apollo 1 spacecraft during a visit to the factory.
• 52:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was frustrated with the quality of the hardware, with the number of problems and deficiencies that had been found and noted and not adequately addressed.
• 52:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to make a point, he had concerns.
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whether or not the lemon story is precisely accurate, what is documented is that Grissam had genuine specific concerns about the safety of the spacecraft, and that he had expressed them.
• 52:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He and his crew were dead.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Apollo program was suspended.
• 52:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A thorough investigation found dozens of design and manufacturing problems with the spacecraft.
• 52:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: The interior of the cabin was redesigned to eliminate materials that burned easily.
• 52:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The hatch was redesigned to open outward, so it could be opened quickly from the inside, even under pressure.
• 52:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The atmosphere inside the spacecraft was changed.
• 52:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would now use a more normal nitrogen oxygen mixture at lower pressure once in orbit, reducing the fire risk.
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: None of these changes brought back grism, white, and chaffey, but they made the spacecraft that would eventually carry human beings to the moon's safer.
• 53:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The pause in the program lasted about 20 months.
• 53:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: This section of the history tends to make people quiet,
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three men went to work on a January evening and did not come home.
• 53:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They knew the work was dangerous.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had signed up for it, knowing the risks.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But knowing the risk abstractly and encountering it concretely are different things.
• 53:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the gap between them is where grief leaves.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: It is worth remembering in any account of the space programs achievements that those achievements were built on a foundation of sacrifice.
• 53:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: not just the sacrifice of grissam, white and chaffy, but of the Soviet cosmonauts who died as well.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vladimir Comorov died on the 24th of April 1967, three months after the Apollo 1 fire, when the parachutes of his Soyuz-1 spacecraft failed during reentry.
• 54:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the capsules smashed into the ground at high speed.
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Comeroff is believed to have been fully aware during the final moments of his descent that the parachutes had failed and that he was going to die.
• 54:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were reports disputed but persistent that he spent those final seconds in rage and grief over the failures of the program that had sent him up in a spacecraft he knew was not ready.
• 54:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were other deaths, other close calls, other moments where the machines very nearly took human beings with them when they failed.
• 54:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is not a reason not to go, but it is a reason to remember who went and what they risked and what it cost.
• 55:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the Apollo 1 fire, the program rebuilt itself.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: New managers were brought in.
• 55:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Quality control was tightened across the board.
• 55:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: and gradually, step by step, the program worked its way back toward its goal.
• 55:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Apollo 7, in October 1968, was the first crude Apollo mission, and it was a success.
• 55:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Command Module performed well.
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crew, Wally Shira, Don Isle, and Walter Cunningham, orbited the Earth for nearly 11 days, testing every system.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shira was famously can tanker us throughout the mission, broadcasting live television with a head cold and quarreling with mission controllers, but the spacecraft worked as designed.
• 55:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Apollo 7 was Earth orbit.
• 55:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next mission, Apollo 8, was something else entirely.
• 56:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The decision to send Apollo 8 to the Moon, rather than on another Earth orbit mission, was made quickly and under pressure.
• 56:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the end of 1968, an extraordinarily turbulent year in American life.
• 56:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: with assassinations and political upheaval and social division.
• 56:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there were indications that the Soviets might be planning a circumluna mission, a flight that would carry cosmonauts around the moon without landing.
• 56:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: If they did that before the Americans, it would be another Soviet first.
• 56:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: The decision was made, a Apollo 8 would go to the moon.
• 56:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not to land, the lunar module that would eventually be used for the landing was not ready, but to orbit it.
• 56:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crew was Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders.
• 56:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Borman was the commander, a disciplined, intensely-focused officer who had been deeply involved in the post-apollo-1 redesign efforts.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lovell was an experienced astronaut, warm and capable, and is was making his first space flight.
• 57:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 21st of December, 1968, Apollo 8 launched from Kennedy Space Center on a Saturn V rocket, the enormous vehicle that had been designed specifically for the moon missions.
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: standing one hundred and eleven meters tall and producing more thrust at launch than any rocket ever built.
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: It took three days to reach the moon and on the 24th of December the crew became the first human beings to orbit another world.
• 57:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: the images and the moments from Apollo 8's time in Lunar orbit have become iconic.
• 57:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The photograph taken by William Anders, showing the earth rising above the lunar horizon, small and blue and luminous against the absolute black of space, is one of the most reproduced photographs in history.
• 58:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was taken almost by accident.
• 58:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anders had been documenting the lunar surface.
• 58:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when he looked up and saw the earth rising into view, he grabbed his camera and took the shot.
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It became known as earth rise.
• 58:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the moment that most people remember from Apollo 8 happened on Christmas Eve, the three astronauts in orbit around the moon on a night when back home, hundreds of millions of people were celebrating Christmas.
• 58:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: made a television broadcast.
• 58:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: More people were watching than had watched almost any television broadcast in history.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They took turns reading from the book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, the creation narrative.
• 58:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Borman read first, then level, then Anders.
• 58:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Their voices were calm, deliberate, matter of fact, coming from a point in space where no human voice had ever spoken before.
• 59:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They read about the formless void and the first light and the separation of the waters, and outside their window hung the moon, barren and pocked and ancient, without a breath of air or a drop of water.
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: exactly as it had been before anything on earth had drawn its first breath, and God called the dryland earth, red-borman, and the gathering together of the waters called the seas, and God saw that it was good.
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then he said, and from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a merry Christmas, and God bless all of you, all of you on the good earth.
• 59:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The broadcast ended, for a moment, the watching world was very quiet.
• 59:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 4 The Moon Landings, Apollo 11, and the blueprint that changed everything.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have been building toward this for a while.
• 1:00:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have come through the wreckage of Europe and the cold of the Kazakhstan step through the test pilot bars and the simulator sessions and the early launches in the desert through the grief of a January fire and the wonder of a Christmas broadcast from Luna orbit.
• 1:00:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we arrive at the thing itself.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: the 16th of July 1969 Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
• 1:00:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Saturn V rocket stands on pad 39 alpha in the early morning light surrounded by steam from the supercooled propellants being loaded into its tanks.
• 1:00:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It stands 100 and 11 meters tall.
• 1:00:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It weighs 2.8 million kilograms.
• 1:01:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It will produce about 34 million newtons of thrust, more than the combined output of about 85 of the largest modern aircraft jet engines.
• 1:01:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crew is already aboard, Neil Armstrong, Commander, Michael Collins, Command Module Pilate, Edwin Buzz Aldrin, Luna Module Pilate.
• 1:01:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have been strapped into their seats for some time, running through checklists, talking to ground controllers, waiting.
• 1:01:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: A million people have gathered in Florida to watch the launch.
• 1:01:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds of millions more are watching on television around the world.
• 1:01:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let us take a moment with Neil Armstrong.
• 1:01:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was born on the 5th of August, 1930, in a small town called Wapper-Conetta in Ohio.
• 1:01:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was quiet as a child, serious, with a particular passion for model aircraft that translated into a passion for actual flight.
• 1:02:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: He had his student pilot's license before he had his driver's license.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was 17 years old.
• 1:02:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He flew combat missions in the Korean War, was shot at, survived, and came home to study aeronautical engineering, and become a test pilot at NASA's Flight Research Center in California.
• 1:02:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: A center that later became the Dryden Flight Research Center.
• 1:02:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: He flew experimental aircraft, including several flights in the X-15 rocket plane that reached the edge of space.
• 1:02:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was selected as an astronaut in 1962.
• 1:02:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, by all accounts, a person of considerable inner depth whose exterior was extremely difficult to read.
• 1:02:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was not cold, people who knew him well described warmth and humour, but he was profoundly private.
• 1:02:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the more famous he became, the more private he became.
• 1:02:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did not like public attention.
• 1:02:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: He found the celebrity that the mission brought him uncomfortable in ways that he was never entirely able to express.
• 1:03:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: When people asked him how it felt to be the first person to walk on the moon, he tended to redirect the question to the technical aspects of the mission.
• 1:03:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was more comfortable talking about thrust to weight ratios than about the weight of historical significance, but he felt it.
• 1:03:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever he felt, you could see it in the care with which he carried the responsibility, not just of the mission itself, but of what the mission represented.
• 1:03:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He understood that he was not just flying a spacecraft.
• 1:03:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was carrying something on behalf of everyone who had worked on every program that led to this moment.
• 1:03:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And everyone who had ever looked up at the night sky and wandered.
• 1:03:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: At 9.32 in the morning, eastern standard time on the 16th of July 1969, the Saturn V's first stage engines ignited.
• 1:03:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sound was enormous.
• 1:04:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: People miles away felt it in their chests.
• 1:04:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Birds lifted from trees across a wide area.
• 1:04:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The rocket lifted slowly from the pad.
• 1:04:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It takes a moment of seeming suspension before the sheer mass of the vehicle begins to move.
• 1:04:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: and then faster, and then it was climbing, the trail of exhaust spreading behind it, and within minutes it was out of sight over the Atlantic.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: The journey to the moon takes approximately three days.
• 1:04:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is something almost meditative about that.
• 1:04:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three days in a spacecraft, about the size of a large living room, moving between worlds, watching the earth shrink behind you and the moon grow ahead, the crew were professional about the journey.
• 1:04:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: They ran systems checks and maintenance tasks.
• 1:04:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They slept in scheduled shifts.
• 1:04:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They filmed brief television broadcasts showing their surroundings and answering questions from mission controllers.
• 1:05:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Collins floating through the command module, described the experience of seeing Earth from deep space, the whole planet visible at once, impossibly small against the darkness, impossibly beautiful.
• 1:05:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 19th of July, the spacecraft entered lunar orbit.
• 1:05:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: For two days, Armstrong and Aldrin prepared the lunar module, a spindly angular vehicle that looked like nothing else
• 1:05:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: because it was designed for a context in which there was no air, no need for aerodynamics, nothing but the cold equations of thrust and gravity.
• 1:05:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was designed to land on the moon, and it looked like something designed to land on the moon, which is to say it looked peculiar and fragile and purposeful.
• 1:05:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: On the 20th of July, Armstrong and Aldrin entered the lunar module, separated from the command module where Collins would remain in orbit and began their descent.
• 1:06:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The descent to the lunar surface is.
• 1:06:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the history of the Apollo program, a story within a story, because it almost did not work.
• 1:06:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The on-board guidance computer was flashing a code, 1, 2, 0, 2.
• 1:06:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody in the Luna module had seen that alarm before.
• 1:06:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody in Mission Control had seen it during the actual descent, only in simulations.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: A 26-year-old software engineer named Jack Garmin, sitting in a back room at Mission Control,
• 1:06:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a program alarm, indicating that the computer was overloading and dropping lower priority tasks to keep up with critical ones.
• 1:06:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: He told his supervisor that it was safe to continue.
• 1:07:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The supervisor told Flight Director Jean Cranz.
• 1:07:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Cranz gave the go to continue the descent.
• 1:07:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: The alarm came again.
• 1:07:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And again, each time the decision was made to continue.
• 1:07:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: watching the approach, saw that the computer was guiding them toward a crater, with boulders in and around it, the kind of surface that could flip or damage the lunar module on touchdown.
• 1:07:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He took semi-manual control and flew the vehicle past the crater, searching for a smooth area.
• 1:07:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fuel was running low.
• 1:07:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Mission Control, controllers were calling out the remaining seconds of fuel.
• 1:07:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: 60 seconds, a controller said.
• 1:07:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armstrong was still flying, still searching.
• 1:07:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: 30 seconds.
• 1:07:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The surface was close.
• 1:07:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armstrong saw a flat area.
• 1:07:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then, at 20 hours, 17 minutes and 40 seconds, universal time on the 20th of July 1969, the contact light on the Lunar Modules Instrument Panel lit up, a probe extending from the landing legs had touched the surface.
• 1:08:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armstrong shut off the engine.
• 1:08:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Houston, he said, tranquility base here.
• 1:08:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The eagle has landed.
• 1:08:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In mission control, the room erupted.
• 1:08:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Controllers who had been maintaining rigid professional composure for days, let it go in that moment.
• 1:08:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They cheered.
• 1:08:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some of them wept.
• 1:08:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Flight director Jean Cran's reportedly could not speak for a moment.
• 1:08:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Charlie Duke,
• 1:08:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: the capsule communicator, managed to say, Roger, tranquility, we copy you on the ground.
• 1:08:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: You've got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.
• 1:08:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're breathing again.
• 1:08:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks a lot, they had landed at 417 in the afternoon, Houston time, Armstrong and Aldrin spent the next few hours running systems checks, eating, preparing for the Moonwalk.
• 1:09:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were supposed to sleep first, but neither of them could, and Mission Control agreed to let them proceed directly to the extra vehicular activity.
• 1:09:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: At 10-56 at night,
• 1:09:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eastern Standard Time, which was 2056 Universal Time, but also the early hours of July 21st in most of the world.
• 1:09:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Neil Armstrong opened the hatch of the lunar module, crawled backward on his hands and knees to the ladder, attached to one of the landing legs, and began to descend.
• 1:09:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: He paused partway down to pull a lanyard that deployed a small folded platform on the side of the lunar module, which contained a television camera.
• 1:09:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: The camera activated and transmitted its signal, grainy and ghostly, in black and white, to earth.
• 1:10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: 600 million people were watching.
• 1:10:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the largest television audience in the history of the medium up to that point, and possibly since.
• 1:10:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: They watched a small, helmet-clad figure on a ladder, in a monochrome world that looked like a negative photograph.
• 1:10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Descend toward a surface, no human foot had ever touched.
• 1:10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armstrong reached the bottom of the ladder.
• 1:10:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: He paused, one foot on the landing footpad.
• 1:10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to step off the lunar module now.
• 1:10:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He stepped off, his left boot touched the surface of the moon.
• 1:10:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's one small step for man, he said.
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: one giant leap for mankind.
• 1:10:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: He later said he had intended to say, one small step for a man, the article A, providing the contrast with mankind.
• 1:10:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word was lost, perhaps in static, perhaps in the moment.
• 1:11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The phrase was heard without it.
• 1:11:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has been quoted without it ever since.
• 1:11:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: He stood on the moon.
• 1:11:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described the surface.
• 1:11:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The footprints were crisp in the absence of wind.
• 1:11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: A footprint on the moon will remain for millions of years, unless a meteorite disturbs it.
• 1:11:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described the color as ranging from grayish brown to light tan depending on the angle of the sun.
• 1:11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He described the starkness of the landscape.
• 1:11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: No gradation of atmosphere, no haze.
• 1:11:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing to soften the contrast between the blinding sunlight and the absolute shadow.
• 1:11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: the surface is fine and powdery, he said.
• 1:11:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can pick it up loosely with my toe.
• 1:11:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does adhere in fine layers like powdered charcoal to the souls and sides of my boots.
• 1:11:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I only go in a small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my boots and the treads in the fine sandy particles.
• 1:12:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Aldrin joined him 19 minutes later, they set up scientific instruments, they collected rock and soil samples, about 21 kilograms in total.
• 1:12:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: They planted an American flag, choosing a flag pole design with a horizontal rod along the top to keep the fabric extended in the windless environment.
• 1:12:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it would look like a flag rather than a limp cloth.
• 1:12:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armstrong photographed Aldrin standing beside it.
• 1:12:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: They received a phone call.
• 1:12:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: President Richard Nixon, calling from the White House, told them, this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made from the White House.
• 1:12:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Armstrong responded with a brief,
• 1:12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: gracious acknowledgment.
• 1:12:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were on the lunar surface for about two and a quarter hours.
• 1:12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then they returned to the lunar module, removed their helmets and gloves, left on the surface a collection of items including a plaque on one of the landing legs that read, here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon.
• 1:13:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: July 1969, AD.
• 1:13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: We came in peace for all mankind.
• 1:13:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They slept, briefly, and imperfectly, in the tiny cabin of the lunar module.
• 1:13:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The floor was not flat.
• 1:13:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: There were engine components in the way.
• 1:13:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was cramped and uncomfortable, and full of the smell of lunar dust, which older and later described as something like gunpowder.
• 1:13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then they lifted off.
• 1:13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The ascent engine of the lunar module fired, and the ascent stage rose
• 1:13:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: leaving the descent stage behind, leaving the flag, the plaque, the scientific instruments, the footprints.
• 1:13:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They rendezvoused with collins in the command module, transferred themselves and their samples.
• 1:13:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: and began the three-day journey home.
• 1:14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on 24 July 1969.
• 1:14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a question that people sometimes ask about the moon landing.
• 1:14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: What did it mean?
• 1:14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The political answer is that it meant that the United States had won the space race, demonstrating the superiority of its system and its technology.
• 1:14:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That answer is not wrong,
• 1:14:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: The deeper answer has to do with something that was expressed clumsily and earnestly.
• 1:14:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: In the plaque Armstrong and Aldrin left on the moon.
• 1:14:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: We came in peace for all mankind.
• 1:14:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: The plaque was American in the sense that an American rocket funded by American taxpayers carried Americans to the moon.
• 1:14:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the experience of the moon landing, the watching of it, the feeling of it was understood by hundreds of millions of people around the world as something larger than national.
• 1:15:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Something human, the footprint Armstrong pressed into the lunar soil was not just an American footprint.
• 1:15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the first footprint of a species that had figured out how to leave its home world.
• 1:15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is not a small thing.
• 1:15:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Whatever else you think about the space race, about the nationalism that drove it, and the money that funded it, and the politics that shaped it, that is not a small thing.
• 1:15:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Five more Apollo missions would successfully land on the moon after Apollo 11.
• 1:15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Apollo 12 in November 1969, Apollo 14 in February 1971, Apollo 15, 16 and 17,
• 1:15:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Apollo 13, in April 1970, famously did not land after an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the moon.
• 1:15:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crew survived through improvisation, and what many at NASA considered something close to miraculous problem solving.
• 1:16:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: returning safely to Earth after looping around the moon in a damaged spacecraft.
• 1:16:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: The last humans to walk on the moon were Apollo 17 astronauts, Jeanne Sernan and Harrison Schmitt, who left the lunar surface on the 14th of December 1972.
• 1:16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sernan was the last to board the Ascent stage.
• 1:16:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Before doing so, he knelt down in the lunar dust and traced his daughters' initials, T-D-C. For Theresa Dawn's Sernan in the surface, they are still there.
• 1:16:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chapter 5.
• 1:16:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Thor, Skylab, Salute, and the handshake in space.
• 1:16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The moon landings were the climax of the space race, in the sense that they represented the ultimate achievement toward which both programs had been striving.
• 1:17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: After Apollo 17, the program ended.
• 1:17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The remaining Apollo missions were cancelled for budgetary and political reasons.
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Saturn V rocket, the most powerful launch vehicle ever built, was retired.
• 1:17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: No human being has left low earth orbit since December 1972, but the story of the
• 1:17:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: it transforms in a different kind of place, a more modest, quieter place, where the grand gestures of the lunar program give way to something more patient and more durable.
• 1:17:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: that something is long-term human habitation of space.
• 1:17:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Both superpowers by the early 1970s had recognized that the next phase of space exploration was not going to be a series of dramatic firsts, but a slower, more methodical process of learning to live and work in space over extended periods.
• 1:18:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: For the Soviet Union, this shift had actually begun before Apollo 11.
• 1:18:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Unable to win the race to the moon, the Soviets had redirected their efforts toward orbital space stations.
• 1:18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The result was the Salute Program, a series of space stations that began with the launch of Salute 1 in April 1971.
• 1:18:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first crew to visit Salute 1 was Georgie Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Victor Patschev.
• 1:18:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They arrived on 7 June 1971 and spent 23 days aboard the station.
• 1:18:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: At the time, the longest human space flight ever completed.
• 1:18:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They conducted scientific experiments and systems tests and demonstrated that human beings
• 1:18:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and work productively in space for extended periods.
• 1:19:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They did not survive the return trip.
• 1:19:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the Soyuz 11 capsule that day was bring them home re-entered and parachuted to a landing in Kazakhstan and the recovery teams opened the hatch, they found all three cosmonauts dead.
• 1:19:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: A ventilation valve had opened prematurely during the un-docking from the station, venting the air from the capsule.
• 1:19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: The capsule's re-entry and landing systems had functioned perfectly.
• 1:19:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was only when the hatch was opened that the recovery teams discovered what had happened.
• 1:19:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dobrevolsky, Volkov, and Patsayev had been dead for hours, sitting in their couches in a perfectly-landed spacecraft.
• 1:19:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had not been wearing precious suits because the Soyuz capsule at that time did not have room for three suited cosmonauts.
• 1:19:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Changes were made after their deaths to the Soyuz design to address this.
• 1:20:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Salute Program continued despite this tragedy.
• 1:20:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Salute 2 3 4 5 6 and 7.
• 1:20:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Followed through the 1970s and early 1980s.
• 1:20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: with progressively longer missions and more sophisticated scientific programs.
• 1:20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The program eventually evolved into Mia, the long duration space station that operated from 1986 to 2001, and Mia evolved into the International Space Station, which is still operating as I record this.
• 1:20:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The salute program was, in retrospect, an enormous scientific and technical achievement that received far less public attention than the Apollo lunar landings.
• 1:20:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The missions were not dramatic in the way that moon landings were dramatic.
• 1:20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were long, methodical and quiet.
• 1:20:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: The work of people learning day by day and week by week.
• 1:21:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: how human biology and psychology respond to extended periods in space, how to maintain systems in a microgravity environment, how to conduct scientific research under conditions that are wildly different from anything on earth.
• 1:21:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The cosmonauts who spent months aboard salut stations returned to earth with atrophied muscles and reduced bone density
• 1:21:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: their bodies changed by the months of weightlessness in ways that took considerable time to recover from.
• 1:21:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Each mission taught something new about what spaceflight does to the human body and that knowledge has been built upon ever since.
• 1:21:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American equivalent of the Salute stations was Skylab.
• 1:21:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Skylab was launched unmanned on the 14th of May, 1973.
• 1:21:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was built from the upper stage of a Saturn V rocket, the hardware of the lunar program, repurposed into a space station.
• 1:22:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was the largest structure ever put in orbit at that time, about 83 cubic meters of pressurized volume, roughly the size of a large apartment.
• 1:22:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: the launch went wrong almost immediately.
• 1:22:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: A meteorite and debris shield, which also served as a thermal shade, was torn away by aerodynamic forces during a scent.
• 1:22:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the two main solar panels was also torn away, and the other was stuck in a partially deployed position.
• 1:22:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: By the time Skylab reached orbit, it was overheating badly and producing only about a quarter of its planned electrical power.
• 1:22:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first crew, Commander Charles Pete Conrad, Paul Whites, and Joseph Kerwin, launched on the 25th of May and spent the better part of their first week in orbit, improvising repairs rather than conducting the scientific program they had trained for.
• 1:23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They deployed a thermal shade through an airlock.
• 1:23:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: A device improvised by engineers on the ground in something like 10 days that brought the internal temperature down to a workable level.
• 1:23:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: They performed space walks to free the stuck solar panel and deploy additional power.
• 1:23:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: The repairs worked.
• 1:23:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Skylab was saved.
• 1:23:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And over three successive crews
• 1:23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: and 1974.
• 1:23:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Skylab conducted an enormous program of solar astronomy, earth observation, and medical research.
• 1:23:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The three crews spent 28 days, 59 days, and 84 days aboard the station respectively, progressively setting records for the longest human space flights up to that point.
• 1:23:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is something about the Skylab program that gets overlooked in the popular history of the space program, which tends to go from Apollo to the shuttle and skip the middle.
• 1:24:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the Skylab missions produce some of the most extraordinary images of the sun ever captured, using instruments that were specifically designed for the station.
• 1:24:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: They watched and photographed solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
• 1:24:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They made detailed observations of the Earth's surface and atmosphere.
• 1:24:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: They learned things about the human cardiovascular system and musculoskeletal system in weightlessness that informed everything that came after and they lived there for months.
• 1:24:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: They ate, slept, exercised, worked, argued, laughed, looked out the window at the earth below.
• 1:24:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were not just visiting space, they were inhabiting it.
• 1:24:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a different thing, and it mattered.
• 1:25:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Skylab was eventually abandoned after its third crew departed in February 1974.
• 1:25:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not designed for extended unmanned operations, and without a spacecraft capable of boosting its orbit, the space shuttle that was supposed to provide that boost was delayed, it gradually decayed.
• 1:25:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It re-entered and broke up on the 11th of July, 1979, scattering debris over the Indian Ocean and a portion of Australia.
• 1:25:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Shire of Esperance in Western Australia, with great dignity, issued NASA a fine of $400 for littering.
• 1:25:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: NASA did not pay it, though the fine was eventually settled, partly through a radio fundraising campaign.
• 1:25:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: in 2009.
• 1:25:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now we come to the end of our story, not the end of space exploration that continues and will continue for as long as there are human beings with the capacity to pursue it.
• 1:26:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the end of the particular historical moment we have been tracing, the end of the space race as a competition and the beginning of something different.
• 1:26:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: The year is
• 1:26:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: The political climate between the United States and the Soviet Union is by the standards of the Cold War, relatively relaxed.
• 1:26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: This period is known as datant, a French word meaning a relaxing of tension, and it represents a deliberate effort by both sides to reduce the risk of catastrophic conflict through a combination of negotiation, arms agreements, and symbolic gestures of cooperation.
• 1:26:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of those symbolic gestures was the Apollo Soyuz test project.
• 1:26:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The idea was straightforward, an American Apollo Command and service module, and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft would launch separately, rendezvous in orbit and dock together.
• 1:27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: The crews would transfer between the two spacecraft through a specially designed docking module.
• 1:27:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: They would conduct joint scientific experiments.
• 1:27:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then they would undock and return home separately.
• 1:27:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: This sounds simple.
• 1:27:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was not simple.
• 1:27:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two spacecraft used different atmospheres.
• 1:27:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American vehicle used a nitrogen oxygen mixture at lower pressure.
• 1:27:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviet vehicle used a higher pressure, more oxygen-rich mixture.
• 1:27:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: These are not directly compatible.
• 1:27:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: The docking module served not only as a physical connection, but as an airlock and pressure adjustment chamber.
• 1:27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Getting the hardware to work required cooperation between engineering teams that spoke different languages came from different design traditions and had been for the better part
• 1:27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: actively competing with each other.
• 1:28:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Getting the people to work together required something similar.
• 1:28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American crew, Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald Dekis Layton, and the Soviet crew, Alexei Leonov and Valerie Kubosov, spent months in joint training, learning each other's procedures, spacecraft systems, and importantly,
• 1:28:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: enough of each other's languages to communicate directly.
• 1:28:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mission launched on the 15th of July, 1975.
• 1:28:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Americans launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida early in the morning.
• 1:28:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Soviets launched from Biconor Cosmodrome a few hours earlier, as their orbital mechanics required.
• 1:28:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: The two spacecraft spent about two days in orbit before rendezvousing and docking.
• 1:28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: and the hatch between the spacecraft opened, Thomas Stafford and Alexi Leonov shook hands in the docking tunnel.
• 1:29:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are photographs of this moment, in them, both men are grinning.
• 1:29:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stafford is a large broad-shouldered man with a comfortable open face.
• 1:29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leonov, the same Leonov who had floated in space a decade earlier, who had nearly died getting back into his spacecraft, who had traced his finger
• 1:29:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In those last seconds trying to find a way back in, Leonov was grinning in a way that seemed to involve his entire body.
• 1:29:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had been enemies, in the sense that their countries had been enemies.
• 1:29:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had been rivals, in the sense that their programmes had been rivals.
• 1:29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: They had been, in some abstract sense, racing, the accumulation of all the launches and
• 1:29:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: in part, a race between these two countries and the systems they represented, and here they were shaking hands in orbit.
• 1:30:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leonov reportedly said to Stafford in English, glad to see you.
• 1:30:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Stafford replied.
• 1:30:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Russian, Russian he had learned specifically for this moment, in the Russian equivalent
• 1:30:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: They spent about two days docked together, eating shared meals in the docking module, floating between the two spacecraft, conducting experiments.
• 1:30:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Leonov, characteristically, had brought art supplies and sketched portraits of the American crew members.
• 1:30:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was, by all accounts, a genuine warmth to the proceedings.
• 1:30:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of warmth that happens when people who have been abstractly adversarial meet in person and discover that the other side is also made of human beings.
• 1:30:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: The mission ended on the 19th of July.
• 1:30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the two spacecraft undocked and separated for the last time, the Soviet crew returned to Earth a few days later.
• 1:31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The American crew had a harder time, a valve problem during their re-entry.
• 1:31:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: toxic nitrogen tetroxide gas to enter the cabin, and all three crew members were hospitalized briefly after splash down.
• 1:31:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: They all recovered fully, and that was that.
• 1:31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: what did the space race mean?
• 1:31:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: It meant in the most immediate sense, a technological achievement of staggering scope in the two decades between sputnik and Apollo Soyuz.
• 1:31:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Human civilization went from the first artificial satellite to a docking in orbit, from beep beep beep to handshakes
• 1:31:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: from the wreckage of German rocket factories to a joint American Soviet mission that was partly an exercise in the ancient practice of breaking bread with a former enemy.
• 1:32:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It meant thousands of scientific discoveries in material science, in medicine, in astronomy, in our understanding of the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
• 1:32:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: The knowledge generated by the space programs of both countries has worked its way into virtually every area of modern life.
• 1:32:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fire-resistant materials developed after the Apollo 1 fire are used in firefighters gear.
• 1:32:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: The advances in miniaturization required for spacecraft guidance computers helped drive the development of the micro-processor.
• 1:32:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The careful study of human physiology in microgravity has informed our understanding of cardiovascular disease, bone loss, and immune function.
• 1:32:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It meant a generation of young people around the world.
• 1:32:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: who looked up and decided to become scientists and engineers, not because they were told to, not because it was economically rational, but because they had watched a human being walk on the moon and understood in some deep and in our particular way that the universe was larger and stranger and more wonderful than they had previously known and that they wanted to spend their lives understanding it.
• 1:33:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: and it meant perhaps most importantly, a demonstration that human beings can do extraordinary things when the will to do them is present, when the resources are committed, when the best minds are focused.
• 1:33:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: When failure is treated not as a reason to stop, but as information about how to try again, there is one more thing worth saying before we let the history rest.
• 1:33:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: All of the people who made this happen, the engineers at Pinnomonday and Huntsville and Bikano, the mathematicians at Mission Control and in the back rooms of the Soviet program, the seamstresses who sewed the space suits, stitched by stitch, the welders who built the engines.
• 1:34:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The test pilots who flew the experimental aircraft, the seven Mercury astronauts and the 12 moonwalkers, and the dozens of cosmonauts who flew the Vostok and Vostkod and saw you spacecraft.
• 1:34:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: The three men who died in a spacecraft on a launch pad in January 1967.
• 1:34:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: the three men who died when a valve opened during reentry, Corolev, and Vombrone, and Glen, and Gagarin, and Leonov, and White, and all the rest, all of them were, in the final analysis, doing something that had no clear practical justification when you stood back and looked at it from a certain angle.
• 1:34:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were going somewhere because it was there.
• 1:34:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the moon hung in the sky and the stars were beyond it, and human beings have apparently always been the kind of creature that looks at something beyond their reach and decides with or without good reason.
• 1:35:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: To reach for it anyway, that seems worth something.
• 1:35:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That seems worth quite a lot.
• 1:35:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for spending this time with Sleepless History.
• 1:35:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We hope the story of the space race has given you something to drift off with, not a sense of anxiety or urgency.
• 1:35:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: but perhaps a quiet sense of wonder.
• 1:35:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The kind of wonder that comes from knowing that there are boot prints on the moon right now and that the people who made them are still with us in some form in the materials we build with.
• 1:35:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The satellites we navigate by, the medicines we take, the photographs we inherit of a small blue planet rising over a grey horizon.
• 1:35:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sleep well, the stars will still be there when you wake up.
• 1:35:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: This has been Sleepless History.
• 1:35:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you enjoyed this episode, we would be grateful if you shared it with someone who might find it restful.
• 1:35:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: We will be back with more long form history soon.