NASA Reim, Milton - May 31, 2001
Interview with Milton Reim
Interviewer: Scott Jordan
Date of Interview: May 31, 2001
Location: Reim home, Brenham, Texas
JORDAN: Today is May 31 [2001]. This oral history with Milton Reim is being conducted at the home of Mr. Reim in Brenham, Texas. The interview is being conducted for the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in conjunction with the Southwest Texas State University, History Department by Scott Jordan.
First of all, I want to thank you for joining me today. What did you do for NASA?
REIM: I was a public information officer.
JORDAN: Okay. How did you first become interested in what you did—things you were involved in for NASA, public information or news, or journalism?
REIM: You mean, where did I start working for the government? I actually started working for the government at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. I was an editor for the air university newspaper there.
JORDAN: Okay.
REIM: And then when NASA opened up in Houston, I transferred. I just did a lateral transfer to Houston after I got a job offer here, in the Houston area at NASA, it was called the Manned Spacecraft Center.
JORDAN: Why don’t you tell me a little about your background—family background, and your education.
REIM: Like where I was born and so forth?
JORDAN: Yeah, where you grew up.
REIM: Well, I grew up in the Texas Panhandle, in a little town called White Deer. And then I was called into the service in 1943 and ended up in the Navy in the South Pacific on Guadalcanal. Then when I got out, I came back, went to school one year at West Texas State, which is now part of A&M, I think, in Canyon, Texas. And then I transferred to the University of Missouri, graduated from there in 1952, worked for newspapers in Decatur, Alabama, Jasper, Alabama, Decatur, Alabama, and then went to Montgomery to Maxwell Air Force Base in civil service.
JORDAN: Describe your military experiences and how they may have prepared you for your later work for NASA.
REIM: Well, I was in a photo lab—we were in Guadalcanal—an aviation repair unit, repairing aircraft. I didn’t repair the aircraft, but I took photographs of various things that we were doing, and that’s about it. I mean that’s what my job was, to photograph. We also processed film a lot of times. One time we processed film for a photo squadron that went to film the invasion of the Philippines, and they only had one—they had three planes, only one made it back, and all of them were injured. So, we had to process the film for them in our photo lab for the invasion of—they were going to invade Mindanao, but they didn’t end up going in there, they went into another island.
JORDAN: How did you become involved with the space program?
REIM: Well, when I was in Montgomery at Maxwell Air Force Base, I was editor of the newspaper there. A friend of mine—there were four us guys that use to work on the same newspaper in Dothan, Alabama, and all four of us ended up working for NASA: one of them in Huntsville, one in Mississippi test facility, one in Florida, and myself in Houston. So, being the editor of the paper there, I was called to come over and edit the Space News Roundup. I did that for a couple of years when I first came to NASA at the Manned Spacecraft Center.
JORDAN: You started during the Gemini program, is that correct?
REIM: Yeah, right at the end of the Mercury program and the beginning of the Gemini program. Gordon Cooper was the last Mercury flyer; he made that 22-orbit flight of Earth.
JORDAN: What were your thoughts about early accomplishments by both the Soviet Union or the United States, for instance, with Sputniks I and II for the Soviets and then with Alan Shepard and the Mercury flights for the U.S. Did you see any kind of—?
REIM: Well, I saw Sputnik go over a couple of times one night when I lived in Dothan, Alabama. It’s when I was working for the Dothan Eagle there. And then—I sort of followed the space program, but I didn’t follow it closely until I actually started working in Houston.
JORDAN: Yeah. What were your responsibilities at your job? How did you go about fulfilling them?
REIM: Well, after I was editor for about a year and a half—a little over—then I was assigned various responsibilities for interfacing with the news media. And my main focus was on the flight control division, the mission planning division and recovery division, and the astronaut office. Then I traveled with astronauts quite a bit on their geology trips and other trips. Like, they went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where they would do star sightings in the planetarium they had at Chapel Hill.
JORDAN: You mentioned you had accompanied the astronauts on geology trips. How did those—how did those prepare the astro—how were those designed to prepare the astronauts for space exploration?
REIM: Well, you know, the thinking was the moon was—had volcanism on it, so we went to various areas like in Alaska. We went to Katmai National Monument, which is now a national park. We went to Hawaii, down in Mexico, a meteor crater in Arizona, down to Big Bend National Park, and other locations in the United States. And also to a big impact crater in Canada in Sudbury, Ontario, where the International Nickel Company has a place up there; they did some—because there are a lot of impact craters on the moon also. But that was to familiarize the astronauts for when they landed on the moon, so they would know what they were looking for.
JORDAN: Yeah. How did you—how did you have to adjust to life in the space program, working in the space program? Because people there worked, tended to work long hours, I mean sometimes they didn’t go home at night, and things like that. How did you adjust to that kind of lifestyle?
REIM: Well, it wasn’t much of an adjustment for me, it was more of an adjustment for my wife and kids, but it was no big problem. It was—I think the longest time we worked was during Skylab, because we worked twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, and it got kind of tiresome and boring at times.
JORDAN: After you had joined with the Gemini and Apollo program, what were your thoughts regarding the “space race” between the U.S. and the Soviet Union?
REIM: Well, I knew we were going to win the race. I mean, I didn’t have any doubts about that. But it wasn’t that much of a—in my mind—competition for me, but, I mean, I’m sure there were other people for NASA that were gung-ho on—I was just interested in doing my job that was present at the time.
JORDAN: What do you think sort of put the U.S. ahead? Which particular missions?
REIM: Well, when the, I think when the Russians had a big rocket blow-up on their launching pad, which they were kind of quiet about, but it was found out. But anyway, I think we had a lot more technology at our disposal than the Russians did and a lot smarter people in general. Now they had some smart people, too, but I think we had more of them.
JORDAN: What were some of the changes that occurred over the several years that you worked, say, for instance, from the early days of the Gemini program, through Apollo and Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz? What were some of the administrative changes, or perhaps changes in technology, or ideology?
REIM: Well, I remember when I first came to Houston—of course, we were—the Center had been built then—we were in thirteen different locations scattered around the Houston area, with Ellington Air Force Base as one of the main locations, but we had other sites all over. And back then, if you wanted to go see somebody and resolve or solve a problem, you went directly to that person. But as the bureaucracy set in at NASA, like it does in most government agencies, then you started to have to go through one person, and two persons, and so forth; you had to go through the chain-of-command before you could get to the person that you needed to talk to. That was, to me, that was a disadvantage—not only for me, but for the people that were actually working on the space program.
JORDAN: What were some of the greatest or most difficult challenges that you and your colleagues had to deal with?
REIM: You mean, like during a mission or something? Well, that was getting set up so that we could handle the news media. For instance, I think on Apollo 11, we had over four thousand news media. Of course, you had to be there twenty-four hours a day to answer their questions, because a lot of them had deadlines around the world, deadlines all the time. For instance, one newspaper I remember in particular, it was the Tokyo [newspaper], they had twenty-five reporters there and they had twenty-four editions, so they had one guy for each hour to come in. And he would get his little bit of information and, I guess, send it back to Japan, and then put it in the edition of the paper. They had twenty-four editions, because I think they had, at that time, seven million circulation. But we had other people from Europe and other countries in the Near East, South America, and so forth.
JORDAN: How did you go about planning and organizing these interviews with astronauts and other employees at NASA?
REIM: Well, before each mission we would set up with the major news media, we would set up a schedule—and that was my job, to set up the schedule for the interviews, like NBC, CBS, and ABC. We didn’t have all these other networks around. And the BBC and the major newspapers around the country, we would set up interviews and schedule them. They would get, each one of them would get fifteen minutes to thirty minutes, depending on some missions, the number of media we had, and we’d just shuffle them from place to place. Of course, the T.V. networks had a studio set up and we tried to get them all in the right, in the same area because we couldn’t spend too much time traveling between locations. It worked out pretty well. A few of them would try to run over, but we would just have to cut the interview short and say, “Tough, that’s the end of it,” and go on to the next one, because we had people waiting. Any other question on that?
JORDAN: What kind of—what kind of questions did these news people tend to ask the astronauts?
REIM: Well, sometimes they would ask personal questions about their life, but mostly it was about the mission, what they were going to do on the flight, and how they felt about it, whether they were apprehensive or not.
JORDAN: You worked as the news center manager for the USS Yorktown, which I presume rescued the astronauts for Apollo 8?
REIM: The Apollo 8 recovery. We boarded the Yorktown in Hawaii and then went down near the Equator. We were on station when they launched, so that in case they aborted we’d be in a position to recover them then. And then after they were in orbit on their way to the moon, after they were TLI, translunar injection, we got on position where we would recover them if they aborted and came back, or when they came back from the moon. In Apollo 8’s case, they just circled the moon several times and then came back. But we were on station, and, of course, my job there was to give information to the news media. We had a little newsroom set up on the Yorktown, and I had two or three young sailors, I guess, who were aspiring to be journalists, and they worked with me and helped me man the news center, the news room.
JORDAN: Were you in direct communication with Mission Control?
REIM: Not direct. Communication, where we were, in the South Pacific, communication was terrible; you couldn’t—we had—let’s see, it was an aircraft carrier along with us called the Arlington, which had been off of Vietnam. The Vietnam War was going on then, and so they came over to join us at our location. And they had better communication equipment than we did, and we got a lot of our information through them. We were in control, I mean, in communication, with the control center back in Houston through them.
JORDAN: I see. What were your thoughts at the time when you—after Apollo 8 had, you know, had made its splashdown, and apparently was a success—what were your thoughts on that mission?
REIM: We beat the Russians to the moon. We hadn’t landed on the moon yet, but we were there ahead of them. And the interesting thing was that we knew where they were going to land, and the skipper of the Yorktown was steaming toward it, and then he realized he might be steaming right underneath the command module when it landed. So, he did a one-eighty and backed away from it, because it could have landed on the flight pad. So, just to be safe, he—but you could see the Apollo 8 coming down. It had flashing strobes on it, it was still dark when they landed there, just before daylight, before it started breaking day.
JORDAN: Did the astronauts give an interview aboard the Yorktown?
REIM: They had to—not right then. The first thing they did they got on the telephone, and, I think, talked to—who was president then? [laughs]—and to their families. They let them make phone calls, and they were able to do that, because we had the Arlington there. That was an aircraft carrier converted to a communication ship. You couldn’t land a plane on it, they had antennas all along the flight deck.
JORDAN: Right. So, I guess they did their main debriefing—?
REIM: Yeah, they were debriefed, and then they did get some interviews, brief, not, not, not very long, but just brief. They met with the crew, and they had a big cake for them, and things like that.
JORDAN: What were some of the things that they said about their mission—the astronauts?
REIM: I can’t remember anything specific that they said, but, you know, they—of course, they had said it all while they were orbiting the moon.
JORDAN: Yeah.
REIM: So, there wasn’t too much more for them to tell about the flight.
JORDAN: Did you work directly with any other missions for Apollo?
REIM: Well, I was—I had always worked in—I’d always go down to the Cape [Cape Kennedy] a couple of days before the lift-off, and then the night before the lift-off I’d come back to Houston and work the news center there. I’d work the news center down at the Cape and work the news center there. We’d always call in public affairs officers from other NASA centers to work at the Cape and in Houston because we would always be short on manpower, when you had a big influx of newsmen coming in.
JORDAN: You—did you work on any photography projects at NASA?
REIM: Oh, I’d take a camera with me occasionally sometimes, when I—like when I went to Hawaii with the Apollo 13 crew, which didn’t get to land on the moon, but I had a movie camera and a still camera. I shot some—while we were in Volcanoes National Park there—I shot some movies; probably weren’t too good because I wasn’t that good at shooting movies, but I shot some still photos and things. We had a photographer with us, a U.S. Navy photographer from the naval base there in Hawaii—[third voice in background]—he went with us to accompany the crew and so forth. But I was just along mainly to serve as the liaison between the astronauts and the news media that we had there.
JORDAN: I presume that you met a number of astronauts while you were there. What was your impression of these astronauts? How do you think they were different from the rest of us, what kind of qualities did they, did they possess?
REIM: Well, they were either test pilots or the later astronauts had to have a Ph.D. in some field of study. Ordinarily, when I was out with them, they were just like ordinary people. They weren’t that much different; they all had the same wants and desires as anyone else.
JORDAN: Did you have a personal interest in geology?
REIM: Not really; and I didn’t really learn too much, but I learned a little bit about geology. But I’ve forgotten most of it by now. Of course, you couldn’t help but—we had—I know of the head of the geology department at the University of Texas had a contract with the U.S. Geological Survey, who the contract with NASA to do the geological training for the astronauts. So, you pick up a little bit just by listening; and I was usually along with them while they were doing a lot of the geology work.
JORDAN: What did you do after the Apollo program ended in 1972?
REIM: Well, we were getting ready then for the Skylab, the Skylab program. So, we did just routine work, you know, interviews and things like that, and more training for—because they were getting in new crews all the time. We got—let’s see, I can’t remember exactly when the first females came in, but I would travel with them when they, the females and the new recruits that were mission specialists, they called them, and I would go with them. I know we went one time to Enid, Oklahoma, where they got their parachute, how to land, taught them how to land in a parachute, because some of them were not pilots. Then they had water survival. We went down to Florida Homestead Air Force Base for water survival training. And also up at Lake Texoma, they had water survival training up there. For some of the older astronauts, they would throw them up in a parasail and let them drop in the water and get rescued—
JORDAN: To prepare them for splashdown?
REIM: Yeah, prepare them for splashdown. And they had to know how to inflate their vests and things like that, to make sure that they didn’t drown after they got down.
JORDAN: Sure. What other kind of training instruction were you involved in?
REIM: Well, like I think I mentioned earlier I went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for the star-sighting training, and I sat through the classes on that in the planetarium. Then, also on—I went with Pete Conrad out to Denver. He had to go out there with some piece of equipment, he was checking that out there. Just general things like that, just to go along in case the news media wanted an interview, you had to have somebody from the public affairs office there to make the arrangements. And fend off, sometimes you had to fend off the news media. They would get pretty aggressive, some of them would.
JORDAN: I’ve heard that Pete Conrad was sort of a character. What was your—what was he like? What was your experience with him?
REIM: Well, he had his good points. He had a language problem; you couldn’t put all of his language out on the air [laughs]. I think if you, if anybody listened to Skylab, when they were trying to get this solar wing out, he didn’t realize that he was in contact with Earth. He had a few choice words to say while he was up there working during an EVA [extravehicular activity] trying to get that thing loose. But he was a pretty good guy. He was easy to get along with once you knew him.
JORDAN: He succeeded in getting that—
REIM: Yeah, they got the wing links down in and then put a—because they’d lost, when they launched, they’d lost part of the shield over, over the Skylab, the portion of the living quarters. And, of course, without any shield over that, they had to put a thing like a canvass shield over it that they’d carried up with them and put that over to keep the hot sun from baking the interior and getting it too hot inside.
JORDAN: Skylab lasted for about a year, am I correct?
REIM: Yeah, we had three different missions. The first one I think was twenty-eight days, and then they doubled that, and then they went for, I think it was, three months on the last one. There was, of course, there was an interval in between, but I don’t remember exactly how long it was. It might have been not quite a year I don’t think.
JORDAN: Did the pace of NASA seem to change with Skylab and other projects of the ‘70s as opposed to the Apollo program?
REIM: It probably slowed down a little bit, because it wasn’t as hectic trying to get everything ready to go to the moon. That was—there was a lot more—well, I think we cut back considerably on the employment there at the Center. They had probably laid off several thousand contractors; they didn’t lay off any civil service employees, but the contractors would be laid off when their contract expired, which is normal. But it was not quite as hectic after, after the final Apollo mission. Well, even before the final Apollo mission, because the news media had sort of lost interest in the space program there toward the end. It was just sort of blasé and nothing there out of the ordinary for them just to cover another flight with NASA.
JORDAN: Were you involved in the Viking Mars Landing?
REIM: Yeah, I went out to the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena, California, and was out there nearly a month. I worked seven to three, every day, from seven in the morning—I just worked in the news center there and tried to answer the news media questions.
JORDAN: What kinds of things did you tell the news media? There may not be a lot of people who were familiar with the Viking Mars Landing.
REIM: Well I, of course, I had a press kit and had things that I had read through, and I just tried to answer their questions. And if I couldn’t answer the question, I would set them up an interview with one of the officials there that knew more detailed information on it, because I wasn’t that familiar with Viking program itself. I knew we were going; they were going to try to land on Mars on July the 4th, 17, 1976, the two-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
JORDAN: Yeah. What did you do after you left NASA?
REIM: Well, I didn’t do—we just traveled a lot. I had a motor home and we spent about ten years traveling around in that thing, and got tired of that, and I parked it, got it out in the garage out here yet. But anyway, in ’85, one of the guys in the public affairs office in Houston called me wanting to know it I wanted to come back and work some of the missions as a rehired annuitant—that meant I’d only get paid as much as the difference between what I’d been making while I was there and what I drew from the government. So, I agreed to that. I went back and I worked five or six missions in—we had a lot of flights in 1985—and I worked those missions. I missed one mission because I was on a trip in the motor home. So anyway, I worked that. I worked one in January of ’86, and then they blew up Challenger. I’d always wait here in Houston—in Brenham—and watch it on CNN when they would launch. I would go to Houston because I worked the three to eleven-thirty shift. I was the night news manager for that period of time. I got caught one time I went down there and they didn’t launch, so I had to come back. So, I’d always wait here until the launch and then go to Houston.
JORDAN: Before the Challenger accident, what expectations did you have of the Space Shuttle program after you were recalled to work?
REIM: Well, I knew what their goal was, you know, to, to eventually build a space station. That had been the goal for a long time. Of course, I wasn’t too much involved in that, I was only just mainly—we would answer queries of the people, the news media, when they came in. When they finally landed, at the Florida landing site or out at Edwards Air Force Base, as soon as they hit the ground I was off the clock and I went home, until the next mission.
JORDAN: You worked in Houston?
REIM: At the news center in Houston, yeah—the Johnson Space Center.
JORDAN: Okay. So, you stopped working for NASA immediately after the Challenger incident, is that correct?
REIM: As a matter of fact, I didn’t even go in, because I was watching it on T.V. and I saw that—my first comment to my wife was, “They’re all dead.” Because an explosion like that, there wasn’t any way they could really survive that. So, I tried to get through to call them to tell them I wasn’t coming in. It took me a couple of hours to get through, because everyone else was trying to call in, and they only had ten lines into the news center. But I finally got through and told them I wasn’t coming in. They said that was fine, they didn’t need me anyway.
JORDAN: Why did you stop working for NASA at that time?
REIM: Do you mean, when I retired? Well, there was a cut in the NASA budget. Congress cut the budget, and so they were going to have to lay off the new-hires, you know, they were going to have to lay a number of people—I think eighty-something people they were going to have to lay off at the Johnson Space Center. Of course, other centers had to do the same thing. But rather than do that, the civil service commission said that if you wanted to retire and you had at least twenty years of government service and you were over fifty years of age, you could take early retirement. And that way they would avoid laying off the new hires. I think at the NASA Center in Houston, there were about 450 people retired, so they had to go out and rehire people, because they were short then. When all these high-paying people got out, that helped the budget even more, by eliminating all that big payroll for the GS-13s, 14s, and 15s [Government Service pay scale]. And I had enough time to retire. I had about twenty-three years, and I was going to turn fifty-five, and I told them, “Bye bye,” at the end of the year, in December.
JORDAN: What were the fringe benefits, I guess, of working for NASA? Like, for instance, your retirement pension.
REIM: That was one of them, yeah. But it was a prestigious job. I mean, you know, I had numerous newsmen come up to me and say, “Gee, I wish I had your job.” Even though they had a job with a big newspaper or something, they would’ve liked to have worked for NASA. A lot of people would like—I guess I was just fortunate that I was in the right place at the right time and knew people that were working for NASA at the time, guys that I had worked with on newspapers before. A lot of people that worked in the NASA public information office were former newspaper men. A few of them had been with television, well, but prior to that, they had been with the newspapers. So, just an extension of working for a newspaper or a television station, getting into the information, information business.
JORDAN: Why do think those newspaper people would say that they would have preferred your job?
REIM: Well, I think it was the prestige. You know, [unintelligible] it was a fun job, interesting job, you got to travel a lot. I actually traveled more than I really wanted to, because we would go a lot of times to places where they were building parts of the space vehicle and go there for a roll-out of that. Like I went to, up in Long Island for the lunar module roll, the first roll-out of that one. And then for the—in Tulsa, Oklahoma—Rockwell built the shroud for the lunar module. And then when I was out a couple times out in California at Rockwell out there where they were building the Apollo spacecraft. It involved a lot of traveling a lot of times. And there were some interesting trips, like to Hawaii and Alaska, Canada, Mexico. We went down to Mexico once on a geology field trip, down into the Pinacate Mountains, in Western Mexico. I was down there with the Apollo 14 crew, Al Shepard’s crew—we were down there for geology training down there. And, let’s see, we stayed on the American side, and then we’d, during the day, we’d drive over down into Mexico, down in the mountains, and do their thing, geology.
JORDAN: Where it’s dry and cold, it might resemble the lunar surface?
REIM: Well, not so much that it resembled the lunar surface. It was just for studying volcanism and impact craters. As a matter of fact, when we were at Sudbury, Ontario, where International Nickel has this big nickel plant there, where they mine various minerals—anyway, the Member of Parliament up there, he was very upset with NASA because the newsmen said the area around Sudbury looked like the moon. And it did, because in the late 1800s and early 1900s, they had cut down all the timber up there and semi-refined the ore by piling it on lumber, trees, and burning it. And the sulfur dioxide that came up killed all the plant life in the area and killed the fish in the lakes around there. And, so, it did look a little like the moon.
JORDAN: What do you consider to be your proudest or most significant achievement while you were working for the space program?
REIM: Well, there were—I don’t know of any particular one achievement. But I felt like I was contributing something to the space program by getting the information out to the news media. Of course, that helped NASA get a budget. That was the purpose of the public affairs office, was to promote the space program and get the Congress to keep appropriating money for it. There were times during the early phases of the program where Congress was reluctant to appropriate enough money. And so we had various programs that went out in schools and things like that. I wasn’t involved with that part of it, but they would go out and put on programs for, you know, grade schools and high schools. And that kind of helped the [space] program that’s going on now, because they got the young people interested in it, and now they’re grown up, and they’re all for the space program, the ones that—not all of them, but I mean most of them are.
JORDAN: I should have asked you this a while back. When you worked for the Apollo-Soyuz, did you encounter news people from other countries, perhaps from the Soviet Union?
REIM: Oh yeah, we had—even during the Apollo program, we had news media types from the Soviet Union. I know during Apollo, I was—let’s see, I took one guy from Hesvesky and one from Pravda, and I took them on a tour of the Mission Control Center—this was during Apollo—and they were kind of flabbergasted because at that time no news media were allowed in the Russian control center. And I don’t know what they thought, maybe they were, but they were probably doing a little spying for the Russian government anyway. But they were very appreciative of me taking them through the control center.
JORDAN: Were there any people with whom you worked that made a significant impact on you, personally or professionally?
REIM: Nah, not really. I can’t think of anybody in particular. I knew a lot of people there. I know when I first went with NASA, you knew practically everybody. But then as more and more people started coming in, you kind of got lost in the shuffle because there were just too many people to remember. But more people knew me than I knew them, because I was exposed to them, you know, like in the control center and other training exercises. I knew a lot of people, but being in the position I was in, they knew who I was, but I didn’t always know who everybody else was. That’s the way it is when you’re trying to promote things like NASA did in the public affairs office.
JORDAN: Just out of curiosity, were you ever filmed on television?
REIM: Yeah, I was. You know, because when we’d have interviews for the—we’d have a press conference for the news media. Then several times I was sort of the M.C. and would direct the questions to the various astronauts while they were being interviewed. We had a special interview room there in our building.
JORDAN: Okay. What do you see for the future of manned or unmanned spaceflight?
REIM: I think there’s probably a future for both of them. I think we’re probably going to be doing a lot more unmanned stuff, like on Mars, for now anyway. It’s going to be a long time before we ever think about going to Mars, because that’s going to be quite an undertaking and very, very expensive, unless we get some new technology that we haven’t gotten right now. We have the tech—we could go to Mars now, but we’re not certain about whether the crew would survive that long a flight. And I think the space station will probably prove to be a boon to science and to technology and so forth.
JORDAN: My understanding is that the purpose of the space station is to run tests to see if people can survive in outer space; and they do a lot of those—
REIM: I think that’s a part of it. And then of course there’s some other things where they do some experiments in zero gravity. They did some of those during Skylab and during Apollo. But I think they’re going to be doing more of those up there as they get the other sections of the space station assembled and so forth. I understand now they’re having to—I read something in the paper, they’re having a problem with that arm that the Canadians built, the new one they built, they’re having some problems with it right now, so they’ve postponed—I think in this morning’s paper—postponed future flights that involve the big arm that moves things around.
JORDAN: Do you see any possibility, or even a purpose, for establishing temporary communities in Earth orbit on something like a space station?
REIM: Yeah. Well, that’s what it’s going to be; it’ll be manned around all the time, the space station will. But there’s a possibility that we might have a manned space station on the moon. Because you could use that as a base for launching and it would take a lot less to launch from the moon that it would either from Earth orbit or from the space station.
JORDAN: Because of the less gravity?
REIM: Less gravity, yeah.
JORDAN: I guess, looking back to when you first became involved in aeronautics, or as a public affairs officer with NASA, did you ever—would you have imagined that it would lead you to the twenty years or so that you worked with NASA? Do you feel it was—did you have any expectations about the space program when you first started?
REIM: You mean, when I first started for NASA? Of course, I looked at it as a career move, and I—the reason I went to work for the government was because when I worked for newspapers everybody else got all the holidays off, and we always had to work the holidays on the newspapers. That’s when you worked the hardest, was during the holiday season. So, that was one thing I was looking forward to when I went to work for the government, because you got the holidays off, normally, except during, you know, when we had mission or something.
JORDAN: What changes could you see in public attitude, you know, based on the inquiries that reporters would give you, throughout the twenty years or so that you were with NASA? You know, in regards to the Apollo program, the space lab, and the Space Shuttle? Were there any changes in public attitude?
REIM: Oh yeah, there was a period, you know, like we had people protesting outside the Center, you know, “Feed the hungry and the poor!” and they said, “We’re spending all that money on the moon,” and all that. We weren’t spending anything on the moon. It was all being spent in the United States. I don’t know whether they realized that or not, that they thought we were spending the money on the moon. The money that was being spent was being spent all over the United States at various factories and training facilities and things like that. It was employing people. They were wrong in that respect. And a lot of people were complacent about the space program. Like Americans, they get bored with things easily. They were sort of bored with it until Apollo 13, and that revived the interest some. After Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and Apollo 12—there wasn’t as much interest in Apollo 12 as there was in Apollo 11. And then [Apollo] 13, there was hardly any interest from the news media, until they had the problem. And then the interest revived, and everybody—that’s sort of like these car races, there’s not much interest until somebody crashes and gets killed, and then they really get interested—because they were looking at the possibility that the crew wouldn’t get back.
JORDAN: There’s probably some things that I haven’t touched on. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about, or add?
REIM: Well, I’m enjoying my retirement. I’ve been retired now for twenty-one years.
JORDAN: I’m sure, yeah.
REIM: Longer than I actually worked at NASA, I’ve been retired [laughs]. But I still keep up with it, in the newspaper and on T.V. When there’s something on I try to keep up with it. I’m not as actively involved in it anymore because I have nothing to do or say about it.
JORDAN: By any chance, do you still keep in contact with some of your former colleagues with NASA?
REIM: Yes, we—as a matter of fact, we’ve had two reunions of retired public affairs officers. We had one here about three or four years ago down in Florida, and then we had one here in Houston a couple of years ago, at least two years ago, and now they’re trying to get one up in Washington, D.C., this October sometime. But it hadn’t been finalized yet, but I’ll probably go attend that. We get to see a lot of people. Well, there’s one Chuck, Chuck Biggs, in Houston, he’s retired also, but he keeps a—on the Internet he has a listing of all the PAO [Public Affairs Office] people and their addresses and phone numbers and e-mail addresses, so I can keep up with some of them there. It turns out that the—as I mentioned before, the four guys that all went to work for NASA, including myself, one of them—we all worked on the same newspaper at the same time, on the Dothan Eagle in Dothan, Alabama. One of them went to the ABM at Huntsville before NASA was formed—the Army Ballistic Missile Agency—and he was working for them when NASA formed in 1960—’58, in 1958. And then he got the other two guys involved. There was Donald Lackey that was at the Huntsville center up there, and he got Zach Strickland who had worked for the paper and had gone to work for the television station, he [Biggs] got him [Strickland] involved, and he went to work down at Cape Kennedy, or Cape Canaveral it was then. And then Mack Herring, he went to work at the Mississippi test facility, and he worked in Huntsville for a while, and then he went to Mississippi test facility where they tested out all the rockets and everything. It turns out I’m the only survivor; all three of those guys have died. And I’m the sole survivor of the four of us that worked for the Dothan Eagle, back in the ‘50s.
JORDAN: Well, I guess that concludes the interview. Thanks for having this chat.
REIM: You’re welcome.