>>This program is brough to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation a proud partner of WUCF and the Central Florid community.

>>Up next on this episode of Florida Road Trip... >>Gemini was so incredibly important because that was the program that the engineers and the astronauts used to prove we had all the skills that we needed to successfully get to the moon.

>>We explore our space history in Florida from some of the first launches along the Space Coast.

Through the benchmarks.

>>Got 15 minutes in space, 15 minutes, and we're already saying we're going to go to the moon by the end of the decade.

>>To the expansion and evolution of America's space program.

>>It was like, okay, that's gone.

What's next?

>>Plus, meet some of the people who were on the front lines of the space race.

>>It's almost like you're married to the job, especially on the Apollo program.

It became your whole life.

>>Buckle up and strap in.

Florida Road Trip is blasting off to the Kennedy Space Center.

♪♪♪ Hi there, and welcome to Florida Road Trip.

I'm your host, Scott Fais, and this episode we'r exploring Florida space history right here at the Kenned Space Center in Brevard County on Florida's east coast.

You'll likely recogniz the iconic building behind me.

The VAB, also known a the Vehicle Assembly Building.

This 526ft tall structure was completed in 1966 as a place to assemble the Apollo Saturn V moon rocket.

The largest rocket of its kind at the time.

Beginning in 1981 and over the next three decades, the VAB is where America's space shuttles were attached to their external fuel tan and solid rocket boosters prior to rolling out to the launch pad.

The VAB was also renovated to service the Space Launch System, commonly referred to as the SLS, responsible for the Artemis moon landing program and crewed Orion capsules.

From the rooftop, the horizon showcase the landscape of space history.

But before we explore all there is to see now, let's take a step back in time and see how KSC came to be.

When it comes to Central Florida being named a hub for spaceflight.

It's really all about location, location, location.

With the proximity to the equator, large bodies of water that are ideal for rocket launches, and Cape Canaveral's relatively small population during the 1950s, this area of Florida became prime real estate for building the Space Coast.

>>When I was growing up, when you turned south on A1A, there was nothing but palmettos until you got to Cocoa Beach, which was a service station and a souvenir shop.

>>The population increase o Brevard County comes in phases, and in essence, when you have your first launch in 1950 to the beginning of Sputnik, you know when Sputnik launches in 1957, you have this period in which you have people that are coming to Brevard County, but they're not coming here primarily to live her for a prolonged period of time.

>>I first moved to Florida in 1955.

I'd previously been coming down for two years and launching a rocket and going back to Huntsville or Redstone.

This Brevard County was very primitive.

All we had was mosquitoes and alligators.

Kennedy Space Center did not exist.

You know, that was not even in our dreams.

>>My parent moved down here in the late 50s when things were just starting, and I came down on spring break from college and I said, wow, this is really neat.

You could drive on the beach then locally.

I said if I ever graduate I'm going to come here live, get a job because they're launching rockets from that place up there.

Looks like that would be a good thing to do.

So the population was low but it was growing faster than a rocket went into orbit.

>>Just about everybody you met were already engineers from, you know, all our closest friends on that street were people that worked out at the KSC or the Cape.

>>Most of our crew, it was their first job out of college.

You know, you couldn't go out and hire a rocket guy with ten, 15 years experience.

>>It was an intense job.

Whether you were the technician with the wrench in his hand, or whether you were the inspector that was making sure that every step in every procedure was accomplished the way it was designed to be accomplished.

Whatever your job was, it was intense.

I wouldn't trade it for the world, by the way.

>>The atmosphere was infectious and the job was amazing.

They threw me in the briar patch right from day one.

Go down and run this test.

Run that test, you know, and you had to rely on the technicians and the inspectors the guys that have been working this hardware for the last five years.

They took engineers under their wing and basically taught them the trade.

And I really respected those guys, and I owe a lot to them even today, and I'm still friends with some of them.

We're all getting kind of up in years, but there's some great guys from those days.

♪♪♪ >>Project Gemini aimed to develop and test the techniques and technologies needed for longer duration space flight.

Project Gemini's ten manned missions gave NASA the knowledge needed to successfully place mankind on the moon.

>>Roger.

Zero G and I feel fine.

Capsule is turning around.

Oh, that view is tremendous.

>>After thre successful orbits of the Earth, John Glenn returned to Centra Florida on February 20th, 1962 and was celebrated for his heroic achievement.

Glenn became the first U.S. astronaut to orbit the Earth during the third huma spaceflight of Project Mercury.

Just a month prior, NASA announced its second human spaceflight program, named Project Gemini.

>>Gemini was so incredibly important because that was the program that the engineers and the astronauts used to prove we had all the skills that we needed to successfully get to the moon.

Shortly after our 15 minutes and 32 seconds or such in space, what does President Kennedy say?

I believe this nation shall commit itself in achieving the goal before this decade out... >>Of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.

>>Those guys in the trenches were "Goll what's this guy talking about?"

One day we were like a mom and pop and grocery store.

The next day, after he said that, we were like, Walmart or Amazon.

>>Got 15 minutes in space, 15 minutes.

And we're already saying we're going to go to the moon by the end of the decade.

>>We started that not long before that on the Mercury program.

We didn't know if your eyes were going to pop out when you went in space.

So it was a rapid succession of improvements.

>>I think all the guys will tell you back then going to work.

You didn't know what the day was going to bring because we had tremendous number of problems.

>>By the time the Mercury program ends, there are so many technical challenges that the engineers at NASA had to be able to figure out before we were going to be able to get to the moon, do anything on the moon, and bring those men safely back, because at minimum, this is a six day trip, and those batteries in 1963 were still only lasting for 25 hours.

>>We were trying to make a goal that everyone knew about.

And I can tell you, we the workers, the people doing the work, we understood that we were part of history.

>>Our whole intention was the moon program and getting to the moon, that was you want an outlook on life was we're going to get there.

♪♪♪ >>The Apollo program marked the first tim that man successfully set foot on the moon during the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.

The Apollo program furthered our knowledge of the moon and changed our space exploration goals into a what if mentality.

There's never been a time in the space program that was quite as intense and quite as community involved as the Apollo program, simply because of a national goal being set.

>>They had so much invested in the success of the Apollo program, and every time something happens, certainly with the Apollo I fire when we had three astronauts die, they take that incredibly personally.

>>The most tragic thing that in our career, our heroes, was in 1967, January when we had the Apollo I fire.

I mean, no, no one ever forgets the sadness and the, that tragedy.

>>I was actually on station that night when the fire occurred.

The last test we ran was myself and Skip Chauvin and Gus Grissom running the test.

And, the communication was really bad.

And, Skip said, let's take a ten minute break here and see if we can fix this comm.

And during that break i when the one of the astronauts, we believe it was Gus said fire.

We got a fire in the capsule.

And then just a few seconds later to get us out of here, we're burning up.

and then it was all quiet, and we could never, like, I think, a 3 or 4 minute break before that pad leader finally came back and we tried to find out, you know what's going on, he says.

I can't begin to describe it.

And we knew we were.

We'd had a real bad situation.

>>As soon as the fire happened, they closed the doors.

They locked all the books.

Nobody can move.

Nobody can take anything.

It's all frozen.

All the documents, etc., etc.

so when I showed up that night, the crew was still in there and then they needed help pulling the bodies out.

So I helped in carrying the bodies out of the capsule.

And, you get the bodies of the people you've been working with and it's like being in combat I guess.

They were there two days ago.

You were having fun, and now they're gone.

>>The loss of life is certainly an emotional event.

And unfortunately, I had the experience of conducting investigations.

That was probably one of the most emotional things to get over.

Was working on that kind of work.

>>I was on automatic pilot as far as driving and coming back and thinking, because every time I looked at a capsule, I saw the three guys.

>>Those astronauts they're top notch people, and they knew any time you're venturing out, you're taking some risk.

And they were willing to take that risk.

>>That literally takes the wind out of your sails.

Obviously, when an event like that happens, the whole program grinds to a stop.

And there was times there right afterwards, I wondere if Apollo would ever continue.

>>What made that event really important to the success of Apollo is those engineers had the vehicle.

It was sitting on the ground when this accident happened and they were able to take part and figure out exactly what went wrong.

And Chris Kraft, who was the flight director for NASA, said if that had happened in space, we probably never would have made it to the moon by the end of the decade, because the engineers were able to deconstruct that accident and figure out what went wrong and how to make it right moving forward.

>>After Apollo I, everyone became a lot more conscious of safety in my part.

What is my part in making sure something like this doesn't happen again?

>>The rest of us were working hard, making sure that our system wasn't in line for some catastrophic thing like that in the testing that was left, it really stressed ourselves further because now we're still going to keep this goal.

But we got to redesign, rebuild, requalify.

>>We had to make sur that all the copper pads worked when the batteries put the juice to them, because they were going to have to work on a trip to the moon.

>>That was our job.

Prepare and test them.

Be at a point when they want to go that your engine is ready to go.

And so whatever it took to do that, that's what this relatively small crew of guys and gals on each system did.

>>The dedication of NASA's employees and contractors provided the necessary fuel t face the many challenges ahead and the journey to the moon.

>>It's almost like you're married to the job, especially on the Apollo program.

It became your whole life.

>>We spent an awful lot of time at work.

I think the longest I spent was three days out there without coming home.

>>There would be weeks at a time.

I never came downtown Titusville, and we were working long hour and we were working many days, and there was a whole period of time that when you were not at work, it was a blur.

>>Our focus was, you know, what we're doing there at the Space Center.

We were kind of really detached from what was going on in the community.

Yeah, we joined clubs and the kids were involved in the sports and school, obviously important and that kind of thing.

But our focus was on our work.

>>You had sort of come home and say, who the hell are all these kids in my house?

Well, most of them are mine.

We're at work all the time.

We couldn't wait to get to.

Couldn't wait to get to work.

We're going to the moon.

>>They didn't see their families.

They didn't see their kids because there was a lot to learn.

And a lot to do, and a lot of things that had to happen right for us to get to the moon by 1969.

>>We covered the capsule processing which went three shifts a day, seven day a week, from beginning to end.

No rest for the weary.

Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving.

We were out there.

>>I overheard one of m employees telling a new person that something came up about a meeting that I had scheduled rather late in the day, and they were told that they had to realize that I considered half days 12 hours.

>>I, as a manager and of course, counsel people that, you know, in spite of how hard we're working, I recognize you got to have some time because there's other aspects in your life besides rocket engines and turbo pumps.

>>But a lot of us were by a telephone.

We'd get calls at night.

My wife would say, hello, is Ernie there?

Where else would Ernie be?

Zonk, bam.

So I had to talk to the guy and she says, why do they call you?

I, you know, that's showbiz.

>>It was just not a ho-hum job.

I'll come in at 8 and leave at 4, there was a passion.

There was a mission.

>>And that mission was to land a person on the moon and safely return them to Earth.

>>I worked the Apollo program all the way through.

And that was just incredible.

And I would just watch Cocoa Beach grow up around me as I worked through those years.

I thought it was, you know, as chaotic during the Apollo 8, Apollo 11 timeframe when the eyes of the world were on us.

>>I stood on the launch umbilical tower the evening we got ready to launch, and the moon came up and I thought, how many generations of people have wanted to go to the moon and looked at the moon over eternity, and now we're doing it.

>>The engine system is the major component.

And of course, it's one that everybody's kind of concerned about because, you know, a rocket engine is really just a controlled explosion, and you do everything you can to make sure that you don't lose control, because when you do, al you got left is the explosion.

>>The booster had to burn 15 minutes and all the stages were gone.

And that huge, beautiful thing thundered out of here.

>>Watching it launch, as opposed to a little black and white TV set and liftoff, was one of these kind of moments for Bobby.

Oh, wow.

Look at that.

Yeah, and there's guys in there and I know them.

And I sure hope everything works.

♪♪♪ >>When we launch Apollo 11, they had a color TV camera going with them.

And I said, if they're going to have a color TV camera, I'm going to have a color TV.

And I went down and bought the color TV 19 inch, bo I was in high heaven, because I could see this in color, not just black and white.

>>It was almost a week and a half that that capsule had to work on its own with no help.

We can have from the moon walking, cleaning, rock gathering.

My God, you know, all this stuff.

And then when it came back, then we could say, wow.

Yeah.

>>The space shuttle program revolutionized human space travel thanks to its five reusable orbiters.

From the first launch of space shuttle Columbia just behind me in 1981 to the construction of the International Space Station.

The legacy of the space shuttle program continues to inspire the next generation of spaceflight.

>>That ripple effect that we had in the 60s, where the communities on the mainland and Merritt Island and Cocoa Beac and the city of Cape Canaveral are expanding and expanding, expanding the circles are contracting in the 1970s because folks had moved away, and we really don't see that expansion again until the space shuttle program.

>>With the shuttle program came a new generation of engineers and construction workers who shared the enthusiasm of their season managers.

>>You know that what you do is just as important as somebody that's in that control room on launch day, with a headset and a speaking role and cameras on him.

You you do know that, and you should know that.

And when everything works, you ought to take just as much pride of accomplishment as those folks that are in the control room with the highly visible jobs, and that's what made it work to me.

Everybody kne that, yeah, they are important.

>>The first shuttle since, yeah, we didn't have any flights before it was manned.

My gosh, you know, here we all say have we made a huge mistake?

Yet I kept dreaming of a peeling apart like a banana peel.

It lifts off and here goes the solids over here.

And here goes a tank here.

And here comes the auger over here.

Never happened that way.

>>I'd be in the firing room for launch and hop on an airplane and go to California to try to be there for the first landing opportunity.

It was interesting that not nearly as much attention seemed to be played to the landing as it is to the launch when it was pretty harrowing also.

>>When you experienced something like that, you can feel the power and there's an extraordinary amount of pride.

And if you're nine miles away across the water, you can still feel that in your chest.

>>Boost for ignition.

And the final liftoff of Discovery, a tribute to the dedication, hard work and pride of America's space shuttle team.

The shuttle has cleared the tower.

>>The power that we have in terms of science, with the International Space Station, the amount of data that we've gathered now over those 18 going on 19 years, the longitudinal studie that we've been able to do, ISS has been permanently manned since the year 2000.

That's decades worth of work.

And that's just what we're doing in near Earth orbit.

The probes that we've been able to sen to other planets, the potential of going back to the moon an the potential of going to Mars.

I don't think we know the extent of it yet.

>>We know you're only as good as your next launch.

The last launch went fine, and that's good, but everything's riding on th next one anyway, so inherently that's still in here and in here.

It's got to go well.

>>You stop and you say, jeez, that was a good launch, but hold it, we got another one next.

And and you're off on to that.

>>It was like, okay, that's gone.

What's next?

>>Atlantis flew the final mission of the space shuttle program, STS 135, landing here at the Kennedy Space Center on the morning of July 21st, 2011.

I had the good fortune of being here on the press mount.

I will never forget the sound of those twin sonic booms piercing the atmosphere, letting us know Atlantis was home for the final time.

Feeling those emotions, seeing her land, and then being towed back to the VAB for a final time.

It's something that has stuck with me ever since.

Standing just yards away from Atlantis and knowing that this real life spaceship had just spent more than a week in orbit and brought her final crew home safely to our backyard, filled m with an intense sense of pride.

I felt those same emotion on Friday, November 2nd, 2012, when Atlantis was wheeled inside her permanent home.

♪♪♪ With the museums and memorials found in the Miracle City, Titusville gives folks from near and far the opportunity to learn more about how space exploration has impacte Central Florida and the world.

♪♪♪ >>The whole park itself.

When you go from the Mercur to the Gemini across the street to Apollo and Shuttle, it's encompassing the space program from here, from Kennedy.

And they tell the story.

The Apollo monument has 12 huge panels around that actually tells the Apollo story.

The shuttle has six panels, one for each orbiter.

The only real memorial we have up there is one pylon right in the middle between shuttle and Apollo, and it's a memorial to all those men and women that were killed here at KS and on the Air Force side doing their jobs.

They had no idea that coming out here an working as a construction guy, or working as a roofer, or going from one building to another to do your job, that you would get killed doing that.

You know, I look at that, and I think of the ones that I knew that died.

>>It brings back a lot of memories of, first of all, there's a lot of names there that brings bac relationships that you had with people that you worked with and brings back memories of things that that occurred, that you worked together on difficult times, successful times.

>>What is the best memory in all of the years involvement in the space program?

It was.

It was the people.

The people that had a purpose, enjoyed what they did.

They did it well and it showed.

>>Those were people that contributed t the advancement of technology, that produced the technology to do what we've done in the spinoffs, that they have the benefit of that they're carrying around in their pockets.

>>Think of what that goal drove in the way of developing technologies that wouldn't have been there if you didn't have that kind of pressure put on you to develop.

>>If you go back to the Apollo program, to me, it still boggles my mind that it worked so beautiful because we were working with 1960s hardware.

>>You know, I got more computing power in my pocket than we used.

You know, on that Saturn V. >>It's just been that kind of an explosion, the amount of computing that we do without even thinking about it these days.

>>We call this the golden age of space.

And, you know, being part of that all the way through, which is fantastic.

And if I was 40 years younger, I'd be out there now doing the same thin because it was part of my life, really was.

>>Every mission was unique.

It was always a thrill.

It still is a thrill.

It's just mind boggling, still, to think that we've had people walking around up there.

>>That's great, is the lighting halfway decent?

>>Yes, indeed, they've got the flag up now.

>>And that's going to wrap it up for this edition of Florida Road Trip.

Thanks for joining us.

I'm Scott Fais.

I invite you to join us again next week as we continue to explore the history of Florida that surrounds us all.

Until then, safe travels everyone.

♪♪♪ >>This program is brough to you in part by the Paul B.

Hunter and Constance D. Hunter Charitable Foundation, a proud partner of WUCF and th Central Florida community.