NASA Hannigan, James - May 28, 1999
Interview with James Hannigan
Interviewer: Beverly Tomek
Date of Interview: May 28, 1999
Location: Sunrise Beach, Texas
Tomek: Today is May 28, 1999. This is an oral history with James Hannigan for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project. The interview is being conducted by Beverly Tomek, a graduate student at Southwest Texas State University, in the home of Mr. Hannigan in Sunrise Beach, Texas.
Tomek: O.K. Mr. Hannigan. Thank you for taking time to help us with this project. Could you tell me a little bit about you background – your family and educational background?
Hannigan: Well, I was born in Jacksonville, Florida, and went through high school there and was always interested in airplanes and even had a course during my senior – senior -- well actually during all three years of senior high of aeronautics and loved it. I got interested in airplanes and all of that and ended up going to Georgia Tech in Atlanta and got a Bachelor of Science in Aeronautical Engineering and graduated in June of 1953. And from there I went to Boeing Airplane Company in Seattle, Washington. I got married that fall and worked until the Air Force called me in because I was an Air Force ROTC [Reserve Officers Training Corps] student, so they called me in in 1954, January. I spent two years as an Air Force commissioned officer in the communications officer field.
And then when I got out of the Air Force in two years, I went to Lockheed Marietta, Georgia as a flight test engineer with them, and I joined them because we were planning an atomic-powered airplane – a nuclear-powered airplane program, and I wanted to be on that. Well, it didn’t survive politics, so I was a flight test engineer on the C130 Hercules – the first one – and then eventually on the B47 program. I went to work at Eglin Air Force Base in ’59 as a flight test engineer there on the F104 Starfighter – target drone for the Bomarc missile program, and in ’59 NASA came around and interviewed, and I was excited about being a flight controller for NASA. This was during Mercury. And so, I terminated the civil service job there and transferred over to NASA in Houston in April of 1962.
In those days it was called the Manned Spacecraft Center. And I was a flight controller for Mercury. In fact I was what was called a CAPCOM, a capsule communicator, for project Mercury. And so that started my career with NASA in the Houston area. And, well I went from there and moved up in the lines of management and became a section head that started the lunar module, which was the Apollo vehicle that landed on the moon. We started a little group, or section, called Lunar Module Section in 1963 -- ’64. I’m sorry. January of ’64. And I built that up to a branch during the Apollo program of 65-66 people. Lunar Module Systems Branch, these were the people who in flight control, flight operations – again, we were all flight controllers. We were the ones that determined -- we wrote the mission rules for what you would do if – whatever happened during a mission. If you lost a computer, if you lost a cooling loop what would you do? Would you come home? Would you abort? Would you land on the moon? These are called mission rules, and we developed those. We helped with the flight crew to develop the on-board crew procedures. That is, both the nominal and the backup and emergency. If they on board lost a computer, for example, what would they do? Would they immediately change over to another computer? Or if they lost an oxygen loop what would they do? So those were just crew procedures that they did. We worked those out. We worked out all our – what we would monitor during the mission. We would be the guys that would sit on the consoles during mission control, during – I’m sorry, in mission control during a mission, monitoring all the telemetry data from the lunar module on electrical power, cabin pressure, how much propellant they have left in the tanks for the engines. And all the different – hundreds and hundreds of electrical, of telemetry parameters. So we monitored all those and then kept the flight director updated on what was going on. So, that’s called real time monitoring.
In addition to the lunar module, my branch had what was called EMU, Extra Vehicular Mobility Unit. This was a backpack which the crew wore, manufactured by Hamilton Standard. And they had seven channels of telemetry, plus the voice communication so we could monitor from the two guys walking on the moon certain parameters. Electrical power, oxygen pressure, water -- how much water remaining, and those kinds of things. These were all called housekeeping parameters, not scientific. We had no science in the work that I did in my branch. This was all just engineering stuff. Housekeeping. How safe is he? How much electrical power do we have left? Can we let him go, let two guys go that far knowing what we have left in our oxygen tanks and our water tanks, and electrical batteries? Those kinds of things.
So, Grumman [Aerospace] built the lunar module. And I had seven or eight – I’ve forgotten exactly – let’s just say several – Grumman engineers working for me, as well as one Hamilton Standard for the EMU, or the Extra Vehicular Mobility Unit, or backpack. Again, it was not scientific, strictly engineering. Safety. See how far – we would put red lines on how far the crew could go based on how much oxygen or water or whatever. Water was used for cooling in their equipment. Things like that.
Oh let’s see. How far do you want me to go? That was my Apollo experience. After that I picked up – my boss was Eugene F. Kranz, Gene Kranz, [flight director during Gemini and Apollo; assistant flight director to Chris Kraft during Mercury] and we started into Skylab and I picked up in my branch what was called corollary experiments c-o-r-o-l-l-a-r-y, and those were certain scientific experiments, technical -- technology. The backpacks flying around. We tried some lunar backpacks, lunar man maneuvering units inside the Skylab. We did the, all the, astronomy experiments. There were a lot of high school experiments that came under the corollary, so we did that. And then after Skylab we reorganized, and I became Assistant Division Chief to M.P. Frank. F-r-a-n-k. That’s Morris P. Frank. We called him “Pete” and that was in the Flight Control Division in ’74, and I spent, oh I guess, a number of years in that capacity where we did – I helped Pete Frank as Division Chief in Flight Control Division in the systems area.
The first thing we did in 1975 was the Apollo-Soyuz mission with the Russians. We docked a command service module left over from Apollo with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Now, I did not work that. Pete Frank worked that, and while he was busy going to Russia planning that mission, I took care of planning the early shuttle activities. Space Shuttle. And the first of those was the Apollo –I’m sorry, wrong word – approach and landing test, ALT, where we flew the Shuttle Enterprise from the back of the Boeing 747 out at Edwards Air Force Base and tested out the landing capability of the space shuttle. That was in ’75, and then I continued to work the development of the orbital version of space shuttle, which was Columbia. We flew that mission in 1981 for a successful mission. So I was involved in getting all the flight control training, the mission rules, systems drawings or systems handbook, crew procedures, all that, for the first shuttle flight.
July of ’81 I retired and went to work for Scott Science and Technology [Houston]. And that was in the company that Dave Scott, the astronaut from Apollo 15, operated, and so I worked on several programs including supporting the Air Force and providing them all my manned space flight experience with extra-vehicular activity or you’d call it space walking. And so forth to the Air Force who were planning a number of missions. These were all classified missions. We called them “black missions,” deploying satellites, retrieving disabled satellites, etc., etc. And also, after Challenger was lost I ended up doing work with the German space agency doing similar work on their space lab missions that were flown on the space shuttle. How do you do things in space? Nobody has experience in space from a manned standpoint except the United States, so we provided that experience first to the Defense Department, and then to Germany and the European Space Agency. The European Space Agency, which includes Germany, flew several missions.
Then in 1980, I guess it was ’84, I may have these dates goofed up, but in ’84 I went to work with – to help McDonnell Douglas on an Eagle Engineering contract to support Space Station Freedom. We worked from ’84 until ’94, January of ’94 in which I was laid off because the program was cancelled. But we worked ten years. There were nine billion dollars spent by the United States. We had completed the final design and were approaching the critical design review for the first hardware, for all of that hardware built to fly in orbit. But the program was cancelled there around December of ’93, and so I was laid off and decided it was time to leave because I did not want any part of the International Space Station, which was in conjunction with the Russian Space Agency. That whole -- How far should I go?
Tomek: That’s Ok, you can . . .
Hannigan: Well, I feel that that whole thing was a big political entity, in ’94 starting with the Russians. First docking and flying our astronauts with the Mir, M-i-r, Space Station and then eventually going into the International Space Station. It was a big political deal that the United States made with the Russians to keep them from, you know, selling their technology to India and other places in the world, and I resented that. And, so NASA got, I think, got put into a political position, which it should never have been. I attribute that to Dan Golden and George Abbey [director of Johnson Space Center since 1995] and, of course, President [William J.] Clinton. All three of them in cahoots with that kind of crap.
So, anyhow, I have not been associated with that activity since January of ‘94. I have enjoyed retirement out here in the Hill Country and love it. Let me go back and say that in Apollo we flew Apollo 17. It was our last mission. We had flown three missions with what was called the Lunar Roving Vehicle, LRV, or the Rover. We had expanded our horizons on the Moon. We were staying three days, three Earth days, on the Moon, and we were really dramatically increasing our science returns. And guess what. The budget cut us. We lost the last three missions, Apollo XVIII, IXX, and XX. We had budgeted those. They had hardware for it. And we didn’t get to fly any of those. So that’s typical of what happens in the American budget process. Well, we got to Skylab, and we had a beautiful mission on one vehicle. But we had a second set of hardware for Skylab, and we had a major failure at launch on Skylab One, which my deputy branch chief, Don Puddy, was the flight director for. Skylab One launch. A major failure. The Solar wing came off during launch, and they recovered using EVA, or spacewalk. We were able to recover from that. But we had a second set of hardware, a complete second set of hardware built, but again, the budget cuts wouldn’t allow us to fly it. So it went on display like the other Apollo equipment at Johnson Space Center [Houston, Texas], at Marshall Spaceflight Center [Huntsville, Alabama] and at Kennedy [Cape Kennedy, Florida]. Hardware on display that we could have flown. You know, the American budget process got us again.
So anyhow, I wanted to bring that out because I feel so strongly about our whole process. We had spent so much money developing this stuff. We never got to use some of that at the latter part of those programs, and science was – you know science was not part of the original Apollo planning. That was an engineering program to go to the moon. It was a political kind of thing, but boy we started getting science coming back from Apollo, and once the lunar rover, where the guys could get on that little four-wheel vehicle and go out seven or eight miles and come back – they were really getting a lot of science back. And just as we were doing that, well, guess what, the last three missions were cancelled.
So, I don’t know what else to say except that we enjoy living up here on Lake LBJ with no NASA work. So, I guess I’m open to questions.
Tomek: O.K. What was daily life like in the whole program? One of the men we met with at NASA described it as constant movement. Almost as – you can almost feel the tension when he talks about it. Was it like that for you?
Hannigan: Are you talking any specific program, or just the whole time?
Tomek: Just the whole time.
Hannigan: Mercury – you know we were doing Mercury – we were doing Gemini planning and Apollo planning while we were still flying Mercury. Then we got to – Mercury X was canceled, and we did – Mercury IX was our last flight. Then Mercury X was cancelled. So we were still -- then we were planning Gemini. And then early fall in ’62, ’63 we were doing Apollo planning. So we were doing overlapping programs. And I’m telling you, it was – it was not many times I spent at home. Seems like we were either on trips or doing simulations in the control center weekends, nights, you know, it was horrendous. A lot of work. But it never bothered me. I didn’t ever think it was a big deal. It was just something we did and were excited about, and we did it. It was an attitude in those days to get on with what we were doing. It didn’t seem like it was drudgery. It was just something we did, and it was exciting. But it was – and I raised four kids in Dickinson, Texas during that time, two boys and two girls. And I probably didn’t spend enough time with them, or my wife, because we spent a heck of a lot of time in the mission control center or at the remote sites earlier, during the earlier programs, or in mission rule meetings, and planning meetings, and configuration control boards, called CCBs. And, you know, on and on and on. So all I can say, it was very very hectic. A lot of time away from home. We didn’t know weekends from a holiday from Wednesday.
Tomek: O.K. Do you remember any funny stories or little anecdotes about – with any of the people you were telling me about earlier?
Hannigan: Oh, gosh.
Tomek: The man who drew the cartoon [a cartoon in Mr. Hannigan’s possession. It depicts the sick command capsule being saved by a strong lunar module.]
Hannigan: Oh, O.K. Well, I don’t remember any anecdotes. There were a lot of remote site stories, when our flight controller teams went out to the different sites during Mercury and Gemini. Some of our guys were always getting in trouble out there. But, it wasn’t really very funny. To Chris Kraft [flight director at the time] it was a pain in the behind because the State Department would call him and say “Hey, we’ve got so and so, one of your people in jail because he badmouthed the Mexican president,” or, you know, something like that. That happened. And other problems– so, but, when we got to Apollo we didn’t send teams out on remote sites anymore. It was very key. Very significant event. We were remoted. All of our remote sites around the world – when I say “remote sites” I’m talking about the tracking sites where the people used to go and talk to the astronauts, like I did during Mercury, when they came over. I went to Nigeria in Africa. We had them all around the world. But in Apollo we didn’t have to do that. We remoted that data by the Goddard Space Flight center in Maryland. They were the people that provided our network support. They remoted all that data to us in Houston. So, thank goodness we didn’t have to send those teams out. We had people, oh gosh, in Zanzibar, that got in – well, I won’t get into that.
But, in Apollo XIII, I had one of my people, he was called Ed Marzano, he was an Air Force officer on what they call – he was a Detail E [rank designation]. We had a group of Air Force people that the Air Force detailed to us in NASA to get experience in manned space flight because they had planned to go into that eventually. Ed Marzano drew a cartoon during Apollo XIII, a copy of which I still have on the wall, which shows the Lunar Module as being the guy carrying the litter, l-i-t-t-e-r, with the command and service module, CSM, riding on the litter all damaged, injured and sick, bringing them back to home, so I still have that.
I don’t know, Beverly, how many funny things that happened.
Tomek: Were you in the room when they said “Houston, we’ve had a problem?”
Hannigan: I was in the SPAN room. I was the Lunar Module Branch Chief – Lunar Module Systems Branch Chief. And I was in the room where the managers go. In the SPAN room, S-P-A-N-, stands for Spacecraft Analysis. And that was the back room where we, the managers, in flight control met with the managers of the program office, the Apollo program office, and the contractors who built the spacecraft. North American Aviation for the command and service module and Grumman for the lunar module. So I was back there when that occurred. So during my real time monitoring, I was in the SPAN room negotiating and dealing with the program management and the contractors. All my people were sitting on the lunar module consoles in the MOCR, M-O-C-R, which is the mission operations control room.
MOCR is the front room in the mission control. And we had a back room called SSR, and you may have heard this from you contacts, but that’s called Staff Support Room. So we had kind of a Christmas tree arrangement where the MOCR – we had – I had two people in the MOCR reporting to the flight director. And then each of those two people – it was broken up by subsystems within the lunar module: guidance, navigation, propulsion, etc. And the other one would be environmental control, electrical, communications, whatever, and then they had people back in the SSR in more detail. So it was kind of a Christmas tree-type arrangement management approach where the detail people would look at individual subsystems and report to their front room guy in the MOCR. And then the MOCR people, systems people, would report to the flight director. And this was similar – I’m talking lunar module, but it was similar for the command and service module. They had a parallel activity, or group of people, doing the same thing. So we had two spacecraft going simultaneously from, you know, all during the Apollo programs, even during the Earth orbit. Apollo IX and X, XI, etc. And there was I as the Lunar Module Branch Chief back in the SPAN room, or the management room. So, that’s the way it worked.
If there was a political problem, where if something had happened to the spacecraft, if something went wrong, and it affected their contract or their points that they would receive from NASA, on a – I’m not sure how to say this, I can’t remember all the words – incentive points. They got a lot of incentive points if everything worked right, but if there were certain things that went wrong, if there was some discrepancy, then we’d discuss that. Is it a NASA problem? Did the astronauts screw something up? Or did the system fail? Or where it was. And that’s where we would work it out, in the SPAN room, Spacecraft Analysis. That’s an old holdover term from Gemini.
So I let my front-room people and my SSR people, they flew all these Apollo missions. You know, that’s where my 65 people worked during that time. And included was the EMU as I said earlier, the extra-vehicular maneuvering unit, built by Hamilton Standard. That was the backpack, so I had one Hamilton Standard guy that was one of my guys. So, I’m not sure where we are. Where are we?
[Changing tape to side two. The next paragraph refers to an anniversary celebration Mr. Hannigan had just invited our class to later this summer.]
[During] the week of the 20th -- the 24th of July is Saturday, and, but that whole week of the 20th to the 24th is the 30th anniversary of Apollo XI, the first lunar landing. So Johnson Space Center is planning several activities. And you might – what you all ought to do is call public affairs office, PAO. I don’t know the number.
Tomek: They’ll know. That reminds me – that brings up something that one of the people mentioned. Splashdown parties. Did you ever go to those?
Hannigan: Oh did I ever. Yes. Yes. We used to have them first, in my hometown of Dickinson, they had one out – we used to have them out there – gosh what was the name of the place? You could ask Gene Kranz, he could remember. Oh gosh, I can’t think of the name of that place. It was a beer garden. Out there in Dickinson. And we used to have them at the Red Barn occasionally, up in Webster. I think they’ve shut down. Oh, Apollo XIII we had one at the Ellington Officers’ Club. And then we used to have them at – I’m sorry, I can’t remember the names of the places because they’re not there anymore, some of them. There was one on Nasa One [NASA Road One]. What was the name of that? That restaurant. But anyhow, yes, I went to a lot of splashdown parties.
You know, with Shuttle, we didn’t splash down, we landed on a runway. But we didn’t have those kinds of things after we went to Shuttle. It was during Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, oh, and Skylab, when we had splashdown parties.
Tomek: Why do you think it didn’t continue with Shuttle? Is it –
Hannigan: Oh, well, it’s just – taking off and landing on a runway, I mean taking off and then landing, eventually, on a runway was what we were after, but it didn’t – it just wasn’t – the excitement had gone by then I guess. You know, the early, into orbit, Mercury, Gemini, then to the moon with Apollo, and Skylab was in Earth orbit, but it was doing significant things in the huge Skylab module, but the – it was just – well, gosh. It wasn’t – Shuttle became routine I guess is what it’s kind of -- You know, the public doesn’t care anything about Shuttle anymore -- it’s just. You know, you know, like, they don’t get the press. They don’t get the publicity of the shots from the spacecraft to the Earth in the vicinity of the Moon or the exciting things that were done back in those days. So, no, and besides, the other thing was that we didn’t fly in – in Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, and Skylab, we didn’t fly that often. But in Shuttle, you know, we were trying to get routine flights, and after a while, you know, gosh, it became so routine that you didn’t, you didn’t have the excitement of them landing like we used to do in the early days when it was not routine. I think, what did they launch? Shuttle STS 90 – was it 97 this week? I forgot the number, but it was, I think it was, to dock with the Mir space station. Yeh, flight 97, you know. We did have after, in the early days – I don’t know whether they still do it because I’ve been gone five years, from JSC area, but I know that even in the early Shuttle days we used to have – after the last simulation before the launch, you know, the training and simulation guys and flight control used to give us, flight controllers, a hard time on learning the mission. They would -- we would go through a mission in simulation, and they would throw all of these problems at us and sometimes we would make them and sometimes we wouldn’t. But in the Shuttle days I remember going to, I’ve forgotten which Shuttle mission it was, but we’d have a beer party at the Gilruth Center, there at the Johnson Space Center, where the simulation guys would buy the beer just after the last simulation before the launch. And I remember, it was one of those missions in Shuttle where John Young, my roommate at Georgia Tech, was there and Gene Krantz, my boss and neighbor, was there, and we had, oh gosh, a famous author who wrote The Source, Jim Michener, was there. So, John Young, Gene Krantz and I, we got to talk to Jim Michener, and that was one of the Shuttle beer parties that the simulation and training people gave us just before the launch. The last simulation then they’d all adjourn over there and have a big beer party, and Jim Michener was there. I forgot which Shuttle mission it was, but it was one of the earlier ones.
Tomek: Were you in mission control when the Space Shuttle blew up?
Hannigan: No, I was not. I had already retired from NASA at the time, and I was working for – I was over at another related company working on a proposal to – an operational proposal. So, but we watched it on TV. I was not in the control center.
Tomek: You knew all – three – of the astronauts?
Hannigan: Oh, I knew the primary crew, yes. I didn’t know Christa McAuliffe [a New Hampshire school teacher who joined the mission as a civilian] or anything.
Tomek: Were you more shocked? Like, by then was it almost a feeling of “it’s safe, it’s more routine?”
Hannigan: No, I never thought it would be safe. In fact, I didn’t agree, and most of us in mission control and with a background in flight operations, we never agreed with the administration, which at the time was pushing the Shuttle to become more of a well, let’s say the DC3 of the space age. Just bring everybody off the street on board. We disagreed with that. We knew the Shuttle was dangerous. It’s always going to be dangerous, and it will always be dangerous launching into space. Bringing somebody off the street like Christa McAuliffe, and you can get the spelling of that -- I don’t know how she spelled her name -- that was not the right thing. We objected to that, to the administration at the time, which was Reagan [Ronald Reagan], and said “hey, we don’t, you know, this is basically a research vehicle,” but we got overruled, or overridden, and so we carried her, and that problem occurred.
We’re going to have it again. We’re going to have another problem, and we’re going to lose another crew. It’s just the way it is, and technology. Science and technology is dangerous, and it will always be. So, I guess, you know, I feel that it’s going to happen again, and we’ve go to be prepared for it. We lose 747s; we lose other airliners around the world; we lose Air Force planes; we lose Navy planes, but you lose one Space Shuttle with seven people, you know, the world goes berserk. And, that’s not to diminish the loss of those folks, but that’s the way it is. And it’s going to be again.
We may lose a Shuttle on landing because we first thought that the landing, and approach and landing touchdown, was a very dangerous time, and I still think it is, and we’re going to lose, someday, I think, somebody in that kind of an accident, on landing. It’s the way it is when you’re in advanced technology. You’re going to lose people. Look at the Air Force and Navy test pilots and the new airplanes they test. We have a lot of accidents, a lot of deaths in those programs. That’s – it shocked me, yes, greatly, because I lost some dear friends. But it didn’t shock me from a technical standpoint. Do you understand what I’m saying?
Tomek: Right, you’re separating the technical from the emotional.
Hannigan: Yes, Yes, Yes.
Tomek: That’s right. And it sort of seems, from what I’ve read, like the pad fire – it was tragic, but people knew they had to keep going, is that how it was?
Hannigan: Sure, yeh. That was a tragedy too, Apollo I fire. Because I remember that very, very, clearly. And, the people in the control center were monitoring that data from the Cape [Cape Kennedy, Florida] and watched those guys die on telemetry, live. They watched their EKG, and their pulse rate, heart rate, go to zero. And it was due to some stupid things that people do. People are not perfect. But, but we said, “hey, we’ve got to get out of that” just like we did on Apollo XIII. And just like we did after the Shuttle. Apollo XIII was another of those cases where it shouldn’t have happened, but it did because we’re all human. We have frailties, you know, the oxygen tank heater should not have shorted out, but it did.
Tomek: If you were – if we were in each other’s shoes, is there a question that you would have asked that I haven’t? Something you would like to say? Something that I have missed?
Hannigan: Well, I’m not sure from what standpoint. Political, or technical, or what?
Tomek: Either. Just something that you want to share.
Hannigan: Well, let me just say that I think that I was so lucky to be there during the early days, working for Chris Kraft, and then Gene Kranz, and, well, Dr. Gilruth was our center director, Dr. Bob Gilruth at the Johnson Space Center. In those days it was called the Manned Spacecraft Center. But, those were exciting days. We had the Congress and the administration behind us. We had goals set. We were going to do this. And the American public was behind us. Leadership, like those people I mentioned, Dr. Gilruth, and George Low, who was Apollo program director, l-o-w. And my boss Gene Kranz. There wasn’t anything we couldn’t do. It was exciting. It was fun. I never ever thought of it as being worked to death. You know, it was – there were times – well, let me put it this way: I never, ever remember a time I did not want to go to work. You got that? Never. Tired, yes. But there were -- I never ever had a time I did not want to go to work during those days.
But something happened. You know, I don’t know what it was. After, after Apollo, then Skylab, and early Shuttle – I don’t know. Somewhere along the line, the fun got out of it. Actually I was already out of it myself from part of the action, but it seemed to be – it just was never the same. There was never the national goal there of what we were going to do. And then, Space Station Freedom was a -- which I was working on until I retired, or I shouldn’t – when I say retired, I meant when the contract was cancelled with McDonnell Douglas – I was working for Eagle at the time – in December ’93, we had a lot of problems with Space Station Freedom, and I didn’t concur with the program a hundred percent, because I thought we needed to go to Mars. A manned program to Mars. But, we were working on Freedom and there were a lot of problems, but we could have solved them if we had put our head to it, but then that was all cancelled.
And then in January of ’94 my contract was cancelled by NASA and the administration joined up with the Russian space agency to, well, to fly shuttles to the Mir space station, the Russian space station, and then eventually to the ISS, the International Space Station, and I disagreed with that. I think it’s wrong. I think it’s still wrong. We almost killed crews on that program. But it was all political, so that’s about all I can say. I’m glad I’m not involved in it because I would not be a – I don’t know what the word is. I would not be a “happy camper” working under those conditions. I don’t see a -- and I see a very poor future for the United States space program. I’m not sure I’m saying the right words, but I don’t see, I don’t see anything in the future that looks very good. I’m very pessimistic about the future of NASA and man in space.
Tomek: Do you think part of it is the absence of the competition? Because so much of what they wanted to do seemed to be because of Sputnik.
Hannigan: Yeh, that was true. Apollo was basically competition, originally. But then it evolved into science too. Unfortunately, that’s probably true. I don’t like that idea. I think it should be for science and exploration. I believe in exploration. You know, where would we be if Columbus hadn’t explored the New World? So we’re talking about exploring the universe. Well, let’s put it this way, the solar system, which is our universe. But, we landed on the Moon. The first humans to ever land on another, on a foreign planet, or a foreign body, from the Earth. But then we had all that technology and we let it go down the drain. The next job would have been, the next task would have been to land on Mars, and I don’t see it happening. Nobody’s interested. Nobody cares. We go the politics – I don’t know. I don’t know how to put it, but it’s just – I don’t see it in the American, certainly in the American scheme of things for a long, long time. And this International Space Station with Russia is just a waste of our money because we’re paying money for them to design and build things that they won’t even let us design out the safely flaws. We’re not even involved in the safety aspects of the design but we’re paying for it. And it’s wrong. So, I don’t see any, I don’t see anything really positive happening in a long time, and I don’t know what’s going to cause it to happen.
The second thought is “what will it take to want us to go on and investigate or explore Mars with a man or a crew of humans, men and women?” I don’t know what it’s going to take. It will be expensive, sure. But, there’s no competition anymore because there’s nobody in the world, you know, who can compete with the United States now. Russia is down the drain. Politically and economically. So, where do we go from here? I don’t know. That’s – I just am thankful I was part of that during the exciting time in history.
Tomek: O.K. And do you have any last thing you want to add?
Hannigan: No, I sure don’t. I’ve enjoyed talking with you, and that was a great, great group of people. One of the things I think that’s happened in these latter five years is the group of people that did the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo lunar landing, and Skylab, and early Shuttle, kind of have been thrown out, and now the corporate memory is gone. What they’re doing now doesn’t make sense. I don’t know, it’s just unfortunate the way it is in the agency that I used to belong to, which I was proud of in those days and I am not proud of these days. And with that, I’ll sign off.
Tomek: Well, thank you.