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June 25, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:15:06
Edition 400 - David Chudwin's Apollo 11 Story

David Chudwin was the only teenager allowed to cover the Apollo 11 Moon launch in July 1969 - we hear his amazing recollections...

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My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
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The guest on this edition is going to have what I think is a charming and fascinating story for you, and a story that he's waited half a century to tell.
Dr. David Chudwin, these days, is a medical doctor.
But back in 1969, he was a young man with his entire future ahead of him.
Massively interested then, as he is now, in space.
So how does a young man of 19 manage to get himself accreditation, along with people like Walter Cronkite, to cover the Apollo 11 moon launch and landing?
Well, David Chudwin was able to do this through means that he will describe here.
It's a wonderful story.
You won't have heard it before, and I'm delighted to unfold the story to you on this edition.
David Chudwin has written a book all about it, and I think that will fascinate you as well.
But you're going to hear the man himself from the United States telling the story of a time in our lives that we are commemorating and celebrating this year, and possibly even in the month that you hear this.
The Apollo 11 moon landing, the greatest moment in the history of mankind to date.
Wouldn't you say so?
Sir David Chudwin managed to get himself a part of that.
Just thinking about that is remarkable, isn't it?
It's almost like, I don't know, here I am in London today, the sun is beating down, it's almost like me calling Buckingham Palace and saying, I'd rather like to come to Buckingham Palace and meet the Queen.
And somebody at the other end saying, well, by all means, Howard, you know, you're only half an hour away, so get on the train and come into town and we'll meet you at the gates.
Not going to happen.
Well, the same kind of thing, you might think that's a daft example, but the same kind of thing happened to David Chudwin.
So let's get to him now.
We'll talk about him, the story, and the book.
Dr. David Chudwin, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
You're quite welcome.
Now, David, this story that we are going to unfold is a remarkable story.
I'm not going to give any of it away right now because it's too nice to give away like that.
But why have you waited 50 years to tell it?
Because I, my senior year of college, had to decide whether to go into journalism or medicine.
And I went into medicine with the thought that I would continue writing.
So writing's kind of been my side job.
And about five years or so ago, I put up a series of daily Facebook posts using some color slides I had taken of Apollo 11.
And several people told me this could make a good book.
So about five years ago, I decided to piece together based on my pretty vivid memories, based on notes I had taken and based on these color photographs, what happened 50 years ago when I was the only college reporter specifically accredited by NASA to cover the Apollo 11 launch for the college newspapers.
Now, that is a remarkable story in itself.
And when I recorded the intro to this edition of my show, I said it was almost like phoning up Buckingham Palace here in London and asking if it would be possible to pop around, take a look at the place and meet the Queen.
It was a hard thing that you accomplished.
Well, it was difficult.
First of all, I had to get permission from the editors of the college newspaper, the Michigan Daily, to represent the newspaper.
I was just finishing my freshman year in Ann Arbor, Michigan at the university there.
And usually only juniors or seniors took away trips to cover different events, most usually political events.
And I was perhaps the only person in that building, which was Phil of Humanities majors studying philosophy and political science who had any interest whatsoever in space.
So I made a case to the editors that it would be worthwhile for us to cover the first moon launch.
They agreed with the proviso that I had to cover my own expenses because covering a rocket launch was not high on their priority list.
Wow.
I mean, saying that today through the lens of 50 years, that's extraordinary, isn't it, that they weren't that interested in the thing.
But of course, the entire world became interested in this, as we've seen over the years.
The footage that you can see on YouTube is often broadcast on the TV of people waiting with bated breath to watch and hear those first steps on the moon.
But your editors didn't quite share the enthusiasm.
No, I was kind of a voice in the wilderness there.
But the hardest part, though, was getting approval from NASA to cover it, because normally NASA did not accredit college journalists.
They considered them students and not real reporters.
Well, look, you know, I'm a journalist and I have accreditations over Here.
And I have to tell you, about a year or two ago, I tried to do a NASA special for my radio show.
And the NASA people were enormously helpful, but I can tell you, it was a very, very long and convoluted process to be able to get that done.
So I have no idea how, in the world of the 1960s, as a student which you were, you got them to say yes.
Well, I was lucky that a fellow editor of the Michigan Daily was working in Washington as head of a group called the College Press Service, which was a group of over 500 university and college newspapers.
He was able to actually go into the NASA Public Affairs Office in person and argue that we deserved a press pass because we weren't covering it specifically for the University of Michigan, but for all the college newspapers.
Okay, so in America, you used to have this great thing, and I always used to love hearing the people say the words, a mutual news.
A mutual news was an aggregation of all of the local radio stations, a lot of the local radio stations across the U.S., those that weren't affiliated to ABC, CBS, NBC, whatever.
And they pulled their news together.
They got together, all these little stations, and together they had a greater presence.
So you told NASA that you were representing a whole load of college newspapers.
Now, this was before the internet.
So the way that they actually exchanged newspaper articles was sending copies via the U.S. Mail.
Okay, right.
So the only way to trade copy, as you say, was the old-fashioned way, write it down, fold it up, stick a stamp on it, and let the mail person deliver it.
Exactly.
It was a totally different world 50 years ago as far as journalism.
And there was no internet.
There were no cell phones.
We operated very differently.
What was it like phoning NASA, which presumably at some point you had to?
In order to be able to sound credible.
Well, when you're 19, just thinking back to when I was 19, and if we think back to an era before this one where everybody wants to be famous and everybody thinks they're a rock star at 17, well, that's a generalization, forgive me for that.
But, you know, this was an era when kids were a little shyer.
How did you pull that off?
Well, I was very determined.
I mean, you know, one of the lessons I learned from this experience and since then, and I talk about in the book, is never give up.
And so this determination led me to call them and get nowhere.
We ran up against a brick wall.
But then this fellow journalist was able to plead our case and successfully so.
He must have been very persuasive.
I wasn't there.
I was back in Michigan while he was in Washington.
And did you think that you really had a chance?
In your heart of hearts at the time, even with this person's intervention, did you feel you had a chance you'd be able to do it?
Yes, I was very optimistic about it.
And although as we got closer and closer to the scheduled launch, which was scheduled months before for July 16th, 1969, I began to wonder whether it would come to pass.
And so we didn't actually get the press pass until about a month before the event.
Right.
And when it arrived, when you realized that you'd got it, how did that feel?
Well, it was one of the happiest days of my life.
As I opened the envelope, my hands were shaking, and I kept looking at it over and over again to see if, was this really real?
And that press pass actually is one of my most prized possessions.
I have it framed in my study.
And can you remember, because look, this was a politer era.
It was pre-email.
It was pre-internet.
And the way things were put, I mean, I used to write to television stations and radio stations, and I get lovely typed replies back that were incredibly polite in the way that they were phrased.
I even wrote to American radio stations, and they used to send me very nice letters and loads of publicity material back.
But it was a different era we're talking about.
I'm talking about the 70s.
You're talking about the 60s.
Can you remember what the actual sort of letter that came with that?
I know this is a crazy question that you probably haven't been asked before.
What it looked like?
What it said?
Well, actually, I have the letter, and a page from it is one of the illustrations in my book.
I was a teenage space reporter.
The actual letter is in there.
It was a form letter giving the parameters of the press pass.
So in other words, what areas we could go to at the Kennedy Space Center and what the kind of rules of the road were.
So it was like a six-page letter from NASA, and with it was this plastic-encased press badge.
Can you remember any of the rules that you had to adhere to?
Yeah, you had to stay on certain roads in the Kennedy Space Center for security reasons.
And it gave the buildings that you could go to.
So, for example, there was a press center, there was a cafeteria you could go to, and things like that.
Okay, when you've got this thing, you realize it's real.
I have to do this.
You have one month to get your act together.
Now, where were you and where did you have to go to?
Well, at that point, I was home over summer break from the university, and I was working in a men's clothing store.
And one of the provisos when I took the summer employment was I told them I had to have a one week off during the summer.
And so I had a choice that summer because coming up in August was a music festival that was later known as Woodstock.
And so I had to make a choice between going to Woodstock or Apollo 11.
I've got to tell you, an awful lot of your contemporaries would have seen that as no contest and they'd have been off to Woodstock.
I know.
That's why I was an unusual choice there.
But I could only take a week off, and I figured that there was going to be only one first attempt to land on the moon, and there might be other music festivals, although in retrospect, none were kind of as unique as Woodstock.
Well, that's true.
A difficult choice to make, but I'd have made the same choice as you too, especially as you'd gone to all that effort and pulled off the fact of getting accreditation.
Talk to me then about the preparations and about actually going there.
Well, the preparations, the main thing that I did that proved to be extremely valuable was I got an old camera that belonged to my father from the 1940s.
It was a Kodak camera called a Retina, and it was a totally manual camera, as were all of them then.
There was no digital photography at all.
But I got a camera and I bought three rolls of color slide film, Kodachrome slide films, to bring with.
So that's 118 shots that I was bringing with.
Now, you know, my father had slides and we took them on.
We didn't use them for very long, but people forget about 35 millimeter slides, don't they?
Very popular in America, less so, I think, here in Europe.
But they were seen to be more faithful.
And of course, you could stick them on a projector.
You could actually project them onto a screen or onto your wall, and they would look great.
So you plan to take a slide, a reel-of-slide film, a roll-of-slide film with you and this 1940s camera.
Right.
And the slide film I kept after these events, I kept them in a cool room in the dark, and they held up their color and maintained their clarity for over 45 years until I had them professionally scanned at a photo lab.
And these are many of the illustrations in the book.
Okay.
So it had dawned on you that you were going to be one of the chroniclers of history there.
That's a big responsibility.
Right.
And the other thing I did is I kind of kept everything.
So, for example, I kept the copy of my airline ticket.
I kept a copy of my motel bill.
The motel rate then at this somewhat seedy motel we stayed at was $10 per night.
Okay, right.
How many nights did you get in the hotel, in the motel?
Well, initially five, but then extended it because I wanted to stay for the landing.
But that was the main thing was getting that type of stuff.
The other thing, besides the airline ticket and the motel, was just kind of planning out the plan of attack once we got there.
So I went to this with a friend of mine who was also very interested in space, and he also got a press pass with me.
And we went down on July 13th, three days before the launch.
And at the airport, we recognized this older woman who looked very familiar.
It turns out that she was Mrs. Rose Cernan, the mother of astronaut.
Rose Cernan, right?
We had met her three years before at a Gemini celebration in the Chicago area.
So we fly down to airport in Melbourne, Florida, which was the main airport then, rather than Orlando.
And we get off the plane and we see her.
And she's with four men.
And they look kind of familiar.
And she introduces us to astronauts Alan Bean, Charles Duke, Jim Irwin, and Bruce McCanlis.
Three of these men would later walk on the moon.
Wow.
So within 20 minutes of landing in Florida, we met four NASA astronauts and talked to them and took pictures with them.
Look, you say in the book at the very beginning that you were lucky.
You know, some people lead charmed lives, I think, and some people have greater luck than others in this world.
It's just a fact.
You were lucky to get the accreditation, and then you find yourself meeting Gene Cernan's wife, who introduces you to other astronauts.
So, you know, as they say in some parts of the world, you were AFAR away.
Right, yeah.
I mean, this seemed like an incredibly good omen for the rest of our coverage.
And the next three days before the launch were among the most exciting days of my entire life.
We got to go on two incredible tours of the space center there.
We got up to go within 2,000 feet of the Apollo 11 Saturn V, this mammoth 363-foot-tall rocket.
We got to go to the base in the assembly building of the Saturn V rocket for the next flight, Apollo 12.
We were within 100 feet of the base of this rocket.
We got to go to the roof of the assembly building.
We got to go to news conferences with people like Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist.
Did you ask him questions?
I was there.
There were so many reporters, it was difficult to ask him questions, but I was within 10 feet of him.
What was he like when you actually saw him for real 10 feet from the man?
What was he like?
Well, he had a lot of presence in charisma, and he answered one question that really resonated with me years later.
He was asked, what's the importance of this Apollo 11 launch?
And he looked back at the reporter and he said without a pause, it's like when amphibians left the ocean to live on land.
At the time, I thought that was hyperbole, but through the years, I've understood that in the long run, you know, the human destiny is to explore the moon, explore Mars, explore the solar system, and that this is a start of a whole new frontier, and that it wasn't an exaggeration at all.
I don't think people understood that then, and they didn't understand it through the 70s, and then they kind of forgot about it in the 80s and 90s when we were, you know, being nearer to Earth with the shuttle missions, the reusable vehicles.
But, you know, that was the great dream of the age, wasn't it?
And it's only now, 2019, This time, we're starting to realize that that indeed is our destiny.
I think Buzz Aldrin said it recently.
Well, I think that Professor Stephen Hawking, in several talks before he passed away, talked about space as being a lifeboat for humanity.
And the point here is that nuclear war, environmental pollution, greenhouse gas effect could actually threaten the existence of humanity.
And that space is a lifeboat for the future of humankind.
I think a lot of people are agreeing with that, and a lot of people are waking up to that realization.
So there you are.
You're going on the tour.
Now, we sort of skipped over very quickly the fact that you stood at the base of the Saturn V, the one that was actually going to the moon.
You were 2,000 feet from it.
You also went to the assembly building.
Now, if my memory serves me right, when I was a kid, at the time, this was the biggest structure, I think, for that kind of thing, maybe the biggest structure on the planet.
It was huge, wasn't it?
Yes, it was at that point.
There were two high bays that could potentially fit four of these huge Saturn V rockets in there.
The building was so big that you could get storms in the top of it, that there could be like, depending on the weather, clouds in the upper part of it.
And it just was an absolutely massive structure.
It was built to survive hurricanes, which they've been through, storms, and it's still standing more than half a century later.
What was the vibe as you went around and you met people who were involved in construction and actually would ultimately be involved in the deployment of Apollo 11?
What was the vibe, the mood there?
Well, there was a tremendous amount of pride.
President Kennedy made a very bold decision, which he announced May 25th, 1961, of sending men to the moon.
At that point, they had no spacecraft that could do that.
They had no rockets that could do that.
They didn't even know how they were going to do it.
It was a very audacious plan.
And so over 400,000 engineers, technicians, all kinds of workers worked day and night on weekends, on holidays to fulfill that goal.
And so Apollo 11 was like a culmination of that.
And, you know, usually in the United States for the national football championship, there's something called the Super Bowl.
And at the Super Bowl, everybody who has anything to do with football or sports, you know, goes to that, all kinds of celebrities and things like that.
Well, I like to say that Apollo 11 was kind of the Super Bowl of space, that there were all kinds of dignitaries from all fields who were invited.
NASA invited close to 7,000 invitees to go there, ranging from former President Lyndon Johnson to television entertainers and actors.
A lot of people were in on that.
It was a big deal for the U.S. Of course it was, and the world.
So there you are.
You're going on tours.
How much of the actual preparation for the big event, the main event, were you allowed to see?
Well, the preparations for launch were very extensive.
And we were taken to the launch control center, and we were able to actually see the Apollo 11 launch controllers at work two days before the launch.
That's extraordinary.
There was a glassed-in area, and we could look down and see all the people at these electronic consoles.
Now, at the time, this seemed extremely high-tech, but by today's technology, it was very, very primitive.
There were no monitors.
There were cathode ray tubes.
The telephones were rotary dial telephones.
All the sensors from the Saturn V rocket, which was over three miles away, were hardwired.
Each sensor hardwired to the control center.
They didn't have the type of electronics we have now.
So at the time, again, it seemed very advanced.
But if we look back at the technology, I'm almost amazed that we were able to get to the moon on that sort of technology.
Well, yes, if you consider the computing power that we carry with us these days in a smartphone, compared with what they had on the lunar module, it's quite a sobering thought, isn't it?
Did you get to see, did you get to experience the person who for many people was the on-the-earth hero for these missions, Gene Krantz?
No, Gene Krantz was in Houston.
And so I did not go to Houston as part of this trip.
Mine was a very low-budget press operation.
Mainly I was funding it myself.
And while after the launch, a lot of the reporters flew to Houston.
I had to stay at Cape Kennedy and report on the landing from the NASA News Center there.
And it was better than being at home, but I missed the opportunity to interact with him, although I've met him in later years.
Right.
And when you met him in later years, he always came across.
I can remember he was part of Apollo 13, wasn't he, when things went wrong and they had to rescue the thing.
He came across as a man of great integrity and tremendous calm.
Right.
Gene Kranz, there were four groups of flight controllers for Apollo 11.
And his call sign was white flight.
Each team of controllers had a color associated with it.
So he was known as white flight.
And he always wore a white vest.
His wife made him a series of vests that he wore during the missions themselves.
He was an ex-military man and a tremendous leader among people.
He set an example.
He was as hard on himself as he was hard on the other flight controllers.
I mean, this is just an aside, but I know we're talking about Apollo 11, but on Apollo 13, I think he said that white jacket, which was his hallmark and trademark and the world knew him by, that he wasn't going to take it off until they were on the way home.
Right.
And it was him, again, during Apollo 13, not Apollo 11, you know, that made the famous statement that failure is not an option.
And his motto during this time, Apollo 11 as well, was that the flight controllers needed to be tough and competent.
So much attention was paid to the astronauts, and rightly so, because they were very brave to sit on a bomb and be sent to the moon.
But the flight controllers also played a really key role in this.
Okay, back to the days before the launch and you were given the tour, you were able to see things that ordinary members of the public were not able to see.
Did you get a sense of any tension there?
Was it stressful for some people that you saw?
Well, there was a concern about the success and safety of the astronauts.
NASA officials and the astronauts themselves said before the flight that they thought the chance of a successful landing on the first try was only about 50-50%.
And there were other estimates by other people that there was a 10% chance of actually not coming back.
So there was a tremendous risk there.
And like I said before, sitting on a Saturn V, they were sitting on hundreds of thousands of gallons of explosive fuel.
And it was literally, as you said, sitting on a bomb.
The press people who were liaising with and dealing with you, everything these days is about a thing called spin.
It doesn't matter what government you're in, whether you're in a company, corporation, whatever.
People spin news.
We weren't quite so sophisticated about these things, thank goodness, 50 years ago.
But what kind of a presentation were they putting to you?
Were they trying to give you the impression that it was another day at the office for NASA?
Well, you know, there's a very interesting book called Marketing the Moon by a friend of mine, Richard Jurick and David Bierman Scott.
But this whole book is about how NASA handled public affairs and public relations.
And they made a decision early on not to spin, to provide the information and the data in as straightforward a way as possible.
And that this was a very successful approach.
Okay, so what was it like for you as a young 19-year-old with your friend there being shepherded around these various opportunities?
Well, I was like a kid in a candy store.
I mean, I was thrilled and almost a state of disbelief that I had gotten this close to the Apollo 11 Saturn V that we went on the floor of the launch control.
I mean, member of the public is never, ever able to do that.
We couldn't go on the floor of the room where they were actually getting ready for Apollo 11, but there was an adjacent firing room is what they called the control rooms.
And we were able to wander on the floor where I was able to sit at the flight director's desk in this other firing room and imagine that I was preparing Apollo 11 for launch.
And all the time you'd have been thinking to yourself, geez, I'm part of history here.
Right.
And so I really did my best in terms of the photographs to capture that.
And that's one of the things I'm very proud about in this book is the photos.
I could have had as many as 180 illustrations.
We cut it down to 85, but still, that's a lot for a book like this.
And these illustrations, I think, are very unique.
It's not the typical NASA pictures.
It's color slide images that I took 50 years ago.
Yeah, they look very different.
They're not picked and staged and all the rest of it.
There is one particular image that you've taken of the astronauts themselves walking out to the craft.
Talk to me about that one.
Well, on the day of the launch, we got up at 4.30 in the morning, drove from the Sea Missile Motel, which is where we were staying, to the NASA Press Center in Cape Canaveral.
We got on a bus there, and there was like three or four buses that took us inside the Kennedy Space Center near the building where the astronauts had their crew quarters.
We got out, and there was a roped-off area where the plan was for us to watch them walk out of the crew quarters.
Well, the doors of the bus opened, and all the reporters started to run to get the best positions along the rope.
It was like a rugby scrum.
Elbros were flying and people were pushing before everybody established their position.
And around 6.30 in the morning, there was a lot of activity inside the building.
We could see through the open doors.
There was a white dot that started approaching.
And as this white dot came closer, we could see that it was Neil Armstrong in his spacesuit.
So Neil Armstrong was followed by Mike Collins and Buzz Aldrin.
And they walked out of the controls, I'm sorry, the crew quarters there.
And it was very exciting.
There were flash bulbs going off.
Again, this is primitive technology.
There were flash bulbs going off.
There were cheers.
And we watched them walk out and take the last steps on Earth before going to the moon.
And it was a very exciting, emotional experience.
Now, these were handpicked people.
They did have the right stuff.
How did they look?
Well, they were very happy.
Armstrong and Aldrin gave a thumbs up.
They were smiling.
They looked very, very happy.
And it only lasted less than a minute or so.
But it was really quite a celebration for the people in the crew quarters and all the people watching it.
Describe the actual process coming up to the launch then.
They obviously get the elevator that takes them to the top.
They get inside.
They start doing their pre-flight checks.
What's happening with you?
What are you aware of then?
Well, at that point, we were in a traffic jam.
There were over a million people in the area to watch the launch, and even though we were inside the Kennedy Space Center, there was also a traffic jam there.
The bus was supposed to take us back to the NASA Launch Complex 39 press site, which was near the Launch Control Center.
And it took us forever to get there.
We finally got there and looked around, and there were literally hundreds and hundreds of journalists in a grandstand and then also arrayed along the water looking out three and a half miles away at the rocket.
Kind of at the last minute, we jumped on a NASA bus that took us to another viewing site where all the VIPs were and ended up watching the launch from there.
But this was where over 5,000 invited guests were, like I said, including politicians, military leaders.
Were you supposed to be there?
We were kind of allowed there in the sense that we had press passes, but the security was really very, very minimal compared to how it would be today.
Yeah, it's different here.
They took a cursory look at our press pass and just kind of waved us by.
You see, once again, that luck that you seem to have all the way through this comes in.
What are your recollections of the famous people there, the notable people who were there?
Well, we were really surprised by some of the non-space people there.
For example, there were television entertainers, two gents, Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon, who were top television hosts there who were there.
Actor Hugh O'Brien was there.
So there were people from those walks of life.
There were also military leaders like General William Westmoreland, who was the U.S. commander in Vietnam, and then the Army Chief of Staff was there.
And the top politician there was former President Lyndon Johnson.
He and Ladybird Johnson were there accompanied by the Secret Service.
How close to them could you get?
I was within maybe 50 feet of them, and I have photographs of them.
And again, there are photographs of that in the book.
See, Johnson was a man, as we know, as history has told us, had quite a turn of phrase, let's put it that way about him.
And he didn't take fools gladly.
I'm just wondering what his demeanor was like on that day.
Well, Lyndon Johnson was really the godfather of the U.S. space program.
He was a very influential senator and headed the Senate Space Committee.
And then when he became President Kennedy's vice president, he was head of the Space Council.
And he was president of the United States during most of the early part of the Apollo program.
And so it was very appropriate that he was there.
And he seemed to be having the time of his life.
He was, you know, gabbing with everybody.
Accompanying him was James Webb, who was the main NASA administrator during the Apollo program.
And he was there.
The new large telescope, the Webb Space Telescope, is named after him.
And there were a lot of senators and governors and people from all walks of life.
Did you get to speak to any of them?
Well, we spoke to a few people.
A couple of astronauts talked to Philip Chapman, who was an Australian-born scientist astronaut who later left the program.
We also talked to Fred Hayes of Apollo 13 fame.
And Fred was the Apollo 11 backup lunar module pilot.
He had gone into the spacecraft around midnight and was checking all the switch positions and everything.
And then after, and then came to the CIP area and saw the launch.
And I've gotten to know Fred, and he was one of the astronauts who wrote an advanced praise for the book.
Well, do you know something?
Fair play to you for getting that conversation at that time, because you weren't going to be able to get to talk to the families of or, you know, the actual men themselves who were going to the moon.
But to get to talk to Fred Hayes, who was as close as you could get, that was on the day, was pretty remarkable.
And how was he?
What are your memories of him and the way that he was presenting himself that day?
Well, we asked him what was the crew's state of mind, and he said that it was like people that had worked a long time for something and were happy that the occasion had finally arrived.
That's pretty neat.
That is pretty neat.
Did you ever feel like a student kid reporter at this thing?
Because you were on equal terms with the real deal, with the real people.
Well, to be honest, my friend and I were absolutely ignored by everybody else in the press.
And I don't think that was necessarily because of our age, but there were like over 3,500 journalists there from all over the world.
And people were so kind of wrapped up in their own responsibilities because they knew this was such a historic occasion that it's not surprising.
So we were definitely ignored.
Did you get anywhere near Cronkite, the face and voice of the missions for so many people?
Yes, actually we did.
One was in a formal setting and one very informal.
The informal setting is the day we arrived there, July 13th, three days before the launch, we walked to the NASA News Center to check it out.
And that was kitty corner to the Cape Kennedy-Hilton, where a lot of the bigwigs were staying.
So we just took a walk through the area there and walked by the pool.
And we saw that Walter Cronkite was sitting there on a deck chair and holding court poolside at the Cape Kennedy-Hilton.
The second time was one of the news conferences we were at was two nights before the launch, there was a remote interview with the astronauts.
They were in quarantine in their crew quarters, but then the press was in the NASA News Center, and there was a stage set up, and Walter Cronkite and three other journalists did a remote interview on live television with the Apollo 11 crew.
And I was right in there with them watching the whole thing.
And so we were able to see Walter Cronkite and these other journalists in action.
Okay, back to pre-launch then.
There you are in the compound, whatever you want to call it, with all those P5,000 dignitaries, LBJ and all of those people, military people.
What is that like?
Is that like a party atmosphere?
Is it a tense atmosphere?
What was the feeling?
Well, it was celebration tinged with trepidation.
The trepidation was that most people that knew about the program understood that there were definite risks involved.
And this was only the fourth launch of a Saturn V rocket with 363 feet tall with thousands of gallons of fuel.
And so there was concern about that.
But there is also a celebration that this was culmination of all these efforts of over 400,000 people in Project Apollo who had worked on it as NASA employees, but even more as contractors to get to this point.
It was an occasion of really great pride at the time.
I can imagine, and to be part of it is, well, is a gift that you've taken through your entire life.
So talk to me about the moments and the, I don't know, the 15 minutes or so before launch when they're doing their pre-flight checks.
And then, of course, I think it's the five-minute mark they start the countdown.
What's that like?
Well, we staked out an area in front of the bleachers that were set up for the dignitaries.
So we were about 50 yards or so in front of them and watched the launch preparations from there.
There were loudspeakers with the voice of Jack King, who was the NASA public affairs official.
He had a very distinctive voice.
If you hear any tapes of the launch, you can definitely make out Jack King.
And he gave commentary along the way of each of the different milestones before the launch.
Now, you have to remember that this date and time, July 16th at 9.32 a.m., had been set months before.
And we had a lot of concern about whether it would make it off on time because there is a long history of postponements and scrubs of space launches due to mechanical problems, weather problems, things like that.
As I told you before, I only had a week off from my job.
And so it was really important that the rocket get off because a scrub would involve two days.
And the most we could stay there for would be two scrubs.
Right.
And you'd have to go back to the clothing store.
Right, exactly.
Which would have been very anticlimactic.
Oh, God.
Well, you know, again, luck was with you.
So the countdown, NASA has an odd word for normal called nominal.
So the countdown was very nominal, and everything went very, very smoothly.
So we were standing there, and the rocket gets down to the famous T-10, 9, 8 ignition sequence start.
And at the base of the rocket, we can see, even though we're three miles away, because this thing was so huge, we could see the rocket, there was a little ball of flame at the base of the rocket with ignition.
And then huge sheets of flame and smoke shoot out from either side of the rocket.
There were flame deflectors that sent out the fire and smoke to either side so it wouldn't destroy the launch pad itself.
And so the rocket is there, and it just sits there with flames and smoke and fumes pouring out of it.
And I started to get a little bit worried.
It was just sitting there, and it seemed like it was sitting there forever.
And I had a brief wonder twinge of whether this thing was actually going to rise off the launch pad.
So very, very slowly it rises up and clears the launch tower.
But it seemed like forever, but apparently it was about 10 seconds from the ignition to actually clear the launch tower.
And meanwhile, all this time it's silent because light travels faster than sound.
But as it starts to clear the tower, we hear this tremendous, unbelievable roar.
Some of the adjectives have been like that it's like a hundred locomotives, but it's this loud crackling sound that physically assaulted us.
It was like beating on my chest, the sound.
So a very visceral experience.
Right.
The ground was shaking.
There was vibration.
And as it rose up, we could actually feel the heat from the rocket, even though we were three and a half miles away.
That's astonishing.
Anybody who's actually seen in person a Saturn V launch knows that it's unique.
Very different than a shuttle launch because with the shuttle, there was ignition.
Once the solid rockets went off in the shuttle, it would zoom right out of there.
But this was very slow getting off the launch pad, and it made for a very, very exciting, nerve-wracking launch.
And when it appeared to be going well, you know, when it was off the pad and going up, I presume among the people who were in the know there, there was a tremendous, the people around you, tremendous feeling of relief.
Yeah, I mean, There was a cheering and a roar of the crowd, but the roar from the rocket was so big that it drowned out the cheering from the crowd.
It took about a couple minutes or so for the rocket to gain speed, and eventually all we were able to see was a point of light in the sky.
And the rocket noise started to dissipate, and we could hear the cheering from the people in the grandstands.
And once it disappears from view, and once it is confirmed as being, you know, heading out of our atmosphere and on its way, what's that like?
Is it anticlimactic?
No, I think it was very, very exciting because there were certain milestones to this mission.
And one of the key milestones was getting the Apollo spacecraft into Earth orbit where it could be checked out before going to the moon.
And so there was a sense of relief and also of joy that it actually gotten off the ground on time at the same moment that had been preordained months ago.
And my friend and I were absolutely thrilled that we were able to see an on-time launch and be able to experience this without having had to go back to our normal life and missing it.
That would have been anticlimactic.
And of course, there were no cell phones.
There was no internet.
To file your copy to the newspapers, because you were representing, what, 500 of them, I think, or whatever, did you have to keep running for phones?
Yes.
Although, you see, the news cycles then were a lot slower than now.
You know, there's a 24-hour news cycle and things are reported instantaneously.
It was kind of a slower world then.
So what we did after the launch is we'd been up since 4.30 in the morning.
So we went back to the motel.
And actually what I did, my friend did, we took a swim in the swimming pool.
And I kind of imagined myself as I was floating in the swimming pool, how the astronauts were floating in space at the same time.
And so I didn't go and write the story until later that afternoon.
And there was no internet.
There were only two ways to get a story in.
One could either use a teletype machine, which we didn't have, because again, this was a low-budget operation, or we could dictate the stories.
When I put that in the book, my editor, who was in her 40s, didn't understand what I meant by dictate.
So I had to explain that I would write the story on a manual typewriter that they had at the press center.
And then I would call the newspaper on a rotary phone, rotary dial phone, and I would read the text of the story word by word to someone at the other end who was sitting at a typewriter and would type it out.
Listen, I was trained to do this.
I'm a radio guy, but I was trained by newspaper people who forced me to understand the principles of writing for newspapers before they'd allow me near a microphone.
So that's what it was like when I started.
When I was a kid, you had to dictate copy from wherever you were, and you would say, a man is recovering in hospital following a major crash on whatever road it is.
And then you would say at the end of the sentence, point.
In the UK, you say, point.
Then you'd get to your next few lines out.
And when you want to change paragraphs, you'd say par.
And then you'd start again.
It was a whole different, I don't know what it was like in the States, but it was a whole different way of doing things.
It was very, very similar to that.
And in the NASA News Center, they had long tables with manual typewriters on it.
And then they had a row of pay rotary telephones that one could use to call in the stories to the newspapers.
Now, look, when you dictated your first piece of copy about having been at the launch, gee, for any journalist, whether you've been doing it for 40 years or whether you've been doing it for four days, the hardest thing is that first line.
Can you remember what was your top line on the first piece of copy?
The Apollo 11 crew is on their way to the moon after a launch witnessed by over a million people in the Cape Kennedy area.
That's a pretty close paraphrase of it.
Yeah, well, I think that's, as we say here, deliciously understated, isn't it?
I mean, you don't want to be a story like that, you've just got to tell the story, I think.
And that's what you did.
Right.
No, it's interesting what I did with the byline there that shows how I understood the history of it.
Usually I used my nickname in the byline, you know, by Dave Chudwin.
That one story was the only story where I ever used my full name by David Chudwin.
And was it noticed?
Was the story noticed?
Did you get any plaudits for it?
Well, the story was printed on the front page along with some wire copy photos of the launch and the astronauts walking out.
But again, with the lack of social media and things like that, I didn't get any real feedback until later in that summer when I was back at the university.
Okay, and was it, I'm sure it was.
Was it positive feedback?
Were people saying nice things?
Yes, absolutely.
So, you know, when we ever came back from our summer breaks to university, people always would say, what did you do over the summer?
And so when they asked me that, I would say, oh, I was there when they launched to the moon.
Right.
And they would say to you, yeah, sure, I was hanging out with Sinatra.
I mean, it's the kind of thing that a lot of people would think that you were making it up because it is such an unlikely thing.
Well, you know, even after I got home, I wasn't done with Apollo 11 because on August 13th, 1969, the Apollo 11 crew went to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles all in one day.
Right.
And you were part of covering the Chicago parade, weren't you?
Right.
And I got to see them again, got up close to them during this Parade in Chicago that was viewed by over a million people.
Crazy question, but what else can I say?
What was that like to be among the throngs of people and to see them having returned from the moon, you know, parading themselves for the world to see?
Well, it was very difficult to cover because there was a lot of policemen.
And I had my Apollo 11 press pass with me from NASA, and I kept flashing it.
And that worked for a while.
But eventually they told me to get back to the sidewalk or they'd arrest me.
And of course, in that day and age, when people told you to do a thing, when police told you to do a thing, people did it.
Right.
Well, but I was able to get some nice close-up pictures.
Again, some of these are illustrated in the book and see them again.
And it was very striking the two times I saw them in 1969.
The first time as they were walking out in their white spacesuits, and the second time was in this triumphant parade after having just been on the moon three or four weeks before.
In later years, you got to speak to all of them, I think, or you certainly got to speak to two of them.
Right.
I had dinner, actually, in different years with Mike Collins and with Buzz Aldrin at a happening called Space Fest, which is an annual gathering of space enthusiasts.
And it was very, very thrilling for me to sit down and have dinner with those two.
And were you able to tell them, by the way, I covered the launch?
Right, yeah.
And in fact, I showed them some of the pictures.
And it was funny because when I showed the pictures of them coming out to Mike Collins, he pointed to something he was holding in his hand during the walkout that was a paper bag.
And he asked me, do you know what this bag is?
And he was absolutely astounded that I knew that that's a paper bag in which he carried this fish trophy to present as a gag gift to the pad leader, Gunter Wendt.
Well, that's a nice story.
If you read the book, First Man, and I was lucky enough to interview the person who wrote that book, upon which the movie's based on, that gives you a very, very clear sketch of the characters of the people involved in this.
And you would have thought that they would pick very similar people to go to the moon, but they weren't, were they?
Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins, three totally different personalities.
Right.
And they were not really a close crew.
Collins described them in his book as, quote, amiable strangers, close quote.
And they each had a different personality.
Neil Armstrong was a perfect choice to be the first man.
He was very dignified.
He was an incredible pilot.
Twice during the space program, during the testing and everything, he saved himself from just seconds from dying.
The first time was during Gemini 8.
There was a stuck thruster, and he and Dave Scott got into this terrible role because this thruster was stuck open.
They were going around and around and around every second.
They were about ready to pass out, which would have been fatal when he was able to disengage the thruster and save them.
You have to have tremendous intestinal fortitude.
I remember reading about that to be able to pull that off.
The second incident was he was testing the lunar landing test vehicle, the LLRV.
Was that the flying bedstead?
Yeah, the flying bedstead.
And it started to crash, and he ejected just fractions of a second before he would have been killed.
And so NASA knew that he had really had the right stuff.
I mean, he was very, very cool under pressure.
He was very methodical.
He was very thoughtful.
But I think that this recent movie, First Man, though, did him a disservice.
It just showed one part of his character with respect to his feelings and everything after his young daughter died of leukemia.
But actually, he was a very happy guy.
He laughed a lot.
He had a dry sense of humor.
And I was privileged to hear him speak a few times after he came back from the moon and was at some events that he was at, although I never personally met him like I did Aldrin and Collins.
Armstrong wasn't exactly a recluse.
He went into academia for a while, but he didn't put himself out there like the others did.
Aldrin, now, I have a soft spot for Aldrin.
He was a big, larger-than-life character, but from what I read about him and hear about him, he did have a propensity to sometimes, as we say here in England, to rub people up the wrong way.
Right.
And I think part of that, you know, my observations about him are that there's a good buzz and a bad buzz.
The good buzz is charming, is friendly, and is a wonderful proponent for the future of space exploration.
The bad buzz is that he can be very focused on certain things like rendezvous and going to Mars, but if someone tries to talk to him about other subjects, he totally ignores them.
Also, there were issues in the past about charging for autographs where he would charge up to $600 to autograph items.
Okay, well, I must admit, I hadn't heard that, and I need to look that up if that's documented.
I guess there was a reason for that, but I don't know what it was.
I mean, overall, Aldrin was, I think, given a bum rap in this movie First Man, which showed him as very awkward and inappropriate.
Aldrin was an excellent test pilot.
He's a Master of computers and rendezvous.
And there was a good reason he was chosen for the crew of Apollo 11.
At one point, Armstrong was given an opportunity and asked, you know, do you want Buzz Aldrin on your crew?
This was when they were first forming the crew.
And he said, yes, he did.
And there was a good reason for that.
And it was?
Oh, the good reason for that because he was such a proficient flyer.
He was expert with computers, experts with rendezvous, a very good systems engineer.
So, you know, even if you didn't love him, he's the kind of man you'd want on your team.
Exactly.
And Mike Collins then is totally different from either of them.
Mike Collins is a Renaissance man.
He was the first director of the National Air and Space Museum.
He's a watercolor artist.
He's an author.
And how did he live with being the man who was up there orbiting the moon while the other two were getting all the coverage down, you know, down on the surface?
Well, he was at one point he was described as the loneliest person on Earth, you know, because he was like flying behind the moon when everybody else was watching them do the walking on the moon and everything.
And he's always said that he never felt that way, you know, that he felt part of the mission.
And these command module pilots, the astronauts that flew in the command ship and never landed, actually are underappreciated the degree of responsibility they had for the success of the mission.
And Collins did an outstanding job in maintaining the command ship and flying it while Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon.
And of course, if they'd crashed into the moon, he'd have been coming home alone.
Right.
Although NASA really didn't like to talk about it that much.
But no, that would have been the case.
I mean, that's what made the landing on the moon so scary.
To me, the most difficult and exciting part of the entire mission, even more so than the launch, was the landing on the moon because that was so difficult a piloting task.
NASA had some maps of the moon, but these were not high enough resolution to pick up large boulders that could have destroyed the landing craft, the lunar module.
And in those vital seconds just before touchdown, it was down to Neil Armstrong.
It was down to the two of them to make sure that that craft, with its last remaining fuel, avoided the boulders and the rocks.
And I think there was an indentation there in order to be able to land upright.
Because if they'd landed on an angle, then they'd have found it very hard, if not impossible, to take off again.
Right.
The landing was very exciting.
I listened to it from the NASA News Center at Cape Kennedy.
They had all the voice communications there.
And as they started to go down, there were a couple of computer alarms.
And they would indicate that there were problems with the computer, which they needed to land.
Luckily, these computer alarms had been noticed in earlier simulations where they go through and do sample missions.
And they were told to go ahead.
What was happening was that the Apollo computer, which was a guidance computer, which was very primitive, was being overloaded with too much data.
And so they said to go ahead despite that.
And then as Armstrong brought the Lunar Module Eagle closer in, they could see that where they were supposed to land was a field of boulders that would have been fatal.
So he flew over the boulders and then still couldn't land because there was a small crater there.
And so with just a little bit of fuel left, they come to a smoother area.
And Charlie Duke, the capsule communicator, tells them 30 seconds.
What that meant was they better land in the next few seconds or they're going to run out of fuel and crash.
And so Armstrong did find a smooth area, landed, and that's when Charlie Duke gave the famous call.
You've got a lot of guys who are about to turn blue.
You're breathing again.
Thank you.
So to me, that was the most exciting part of the flight.
What was it like to be in the press center with all the journalists where you were when that happened?
Well, most of the journalists had headed out to Houston.
And so there was just a couple hundred journalists there.
So it was not, you know, there was a couple of cheers going on.
I frankly had a few tears in my eye when they successfully landed.
You know, I thought of the Apollo 1 crew, Grissom, White, and Chaffee, that had given their lives in the Apollo 1 fire in January of 67.
And it was just a tremendous feeling of relief that the men were down there in one piece.
Well, you lived through a remarkable few days, and it's a wonderful story to be able to tell.
Am I right in saying that during that period that you were there, that you were able to get an interview with the director of NASA?
Have I got that right?
It was the director of manned spaceflight for NASA, Dr. George Miller.
He was the associate administrator of NASA in charge of the manned space program.
And we were able to get a 20-minute private interview with him, which was another high point of the trip down there.
What did he tell you?
Well, the interview concerned two things.
Number one is I asked him about the future of the space program, and he came up with a very important and also visionary concept that the United States, which at this point had none of these,
should develop a space shuttle to get people into orbit around the Earth, have a space station around the Earth, have another space station around the Moon, have a shuttle between those two, and then have lander on the Moon to build up eventually colonies in space.
Did he have any thoughts on the time scale?
No, but he would have never have thought it would have taken this long.
He passed away a few years ago, but I Corresponded with him and actually sent him a text of that 1969 interview, which he thanked me for.
And he made a comment to me that it didn't really go as quickly as he thought it was going to.
But it's interesting.
You know, there was a space shuttle, there's an international space station now.
One of the next steps that is being planned is a man-tended space station around the moon called Gateway.
And then also plans for landers from Gateway to the surface of the moon.
So 50 years later, we're starting to fulfill some of the aspects of this plan by George Miller.
And of course, in this day and age, we have a very small step in the direction of the civilianization of space.
We have Sir Richard Branson's plans, the Virgin Galactic missions, if I can call them missions, flights that are planned.
I have a friend, a famous astronomer here in the UK, Nigel Henbest, who sank a good portion of his life savings, $200,000, as you know, $200,000, into booking himself a place on one of those flights.
So things are changing in that direction, too.
Well, you know, NASA was kind of in a rut because of budgetary issues.
You know, One of my chapters is named No Bucks, No Buck Rogers.
If you don't have the money, you're not going to have the flights.
And NASA has been stuck with about half the resources it had during the height of Apollo Project.
If you take, you know, 19, I'm sorry, if you take 2019 dollars, we were spending the equivalent of $45 billion a year on space in the United States in the mid-1960s, and that's down to $20 billion now.
So we have half the resources.
And this was very disconcerting.
But there's two things that have really made an important difference.
One is international cooperation.
So for example, the International Space Station, Russia, the European Space Agency, including the UK, and Canada have provided modules and have provided funding for the space station beyond what NASA has had.
But the main source of encouragement to me, a source of optimism, are these private companies.
You mentioned Sir Richard Branson and Virgin Galactic.
There's also Jeff Bezos, who is one of the founders of Amazon and a company called Blue Origin.
both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are going to send people as space tourists within the next two years.
And do you think that they will visit?
What do you think?
Well, I think that it's taken a lot longer than he predicted, and the initial promises of going up years ago turned out not to be true.
But I think they've gotten a lot of the engineering kinks out of it.
And my best guess is that within two years, there'll be space tourists.
And then talking about SpaceX, of course, who've been testing the craft that will take over from the Russian craftsmanship.
craft that America's been using to get its astronauts up to the space station.
There have been problems with that.
How do you see SpaceX?
Well, I think SpaceX is very exciting, and I'm very positive about SpaceX.
SpaceX has developed pretty much with a lot of Elon Musk's own funding or other investors with him, a series of Falcon rockets.
The Falcon 9 rocket, which is the one used most frequently now, has lifted dozens of important payloads into Earth orbit.
More recently, they've developed this Falcon Heavy rocket.
And this will be important to the future of space.
And again, this is in addition to NASA efforts.
Unfortunately, for years, all the eggs were in one basket.
That's NASA.
And NASA did not have competition.
And what's allowed this competition in the private sector is this amount of wealth from the Internet.
The Internet billionaires have provided a lot of the funding.
For example, Bezos is reportedly spending a billion dollars a year of his own money on Blue Origin.
And not only are they developing space tourism, but they're developing a whole new rocket system, a heavy lift rocket system that will be called New Glenn, after the first American astronaut, with new rockets and engines and designs.
And so I'm very optimistic these days about the future of the space program.
Of course, there are people who say, and they would have been saying it in 1969, they're saying it now, that some of this money that's being plowed into space would be better deployed here on Earth to end the poverty, try and sort out our climactic problems, our climate problems here.
You know, that debate has always gone.
Have you ever asked a question like that of anybody to do with the space program?
I know it's a question that a lot of journalists ask.
Well, first of all, I think that that's a big fallacy because no money is spent on space itself.
It's spent on workers and jobs and corporations and economic development here on Earth.
So I think that that's a false dichotomy, a false question.
In terms of asking NASA people about it, actually, back in 1969, I sent a letter to, you know, when I was 19, I sent a letter to astronaut Paul Weitz, P.J. Weitz, who unfortunately just recently passed away, asking him about that, you know, what's the value of the space program.
And he actually did some research and wrote me a very nice letter back describing how the benefits of the space program in terms of weather forecasting, in terms of agriculture, in terms of technology development, all the electronic revolution of the last 50 years, a lot of that derives from the space program.
And a lot of miniaturization, silicon chips, and all of those things.
So a lot of those things have come out of and been tangential to the space program.
So I get exactly what you're saying here.
I want you to do one thing for me as we come to the end of this conversation, David.
And I've loved your insights into a period that we're going to be looking back across this summer into.
But you were there.
You know, you're 69 years of age now.
I can do the math that far.
But as you look back at yourself then, now you became a medical doctor.
Back in 69, it seems to me that with the amount of spirit that you had going, you know, the fact that you were able to get yourself to cover the launch in that way, you could have become a leading science or space journalist.
You know, you could have been ABC News science correspondent, whatever.
Do you have any regrets that you went into medicine and you didn't do that?
Because your enthusiasm for space absolutely has shone through this conversation.
Well, space has always been part of my life.
I mean, I was seven-year-old when Sputnik went up and have been fascinated by space ever since.
When my senior year of college, I had to decide whether to go through pre-med or whether to go through journalism.
I chose medicine, and I don't regret that because I've had the opportunity to write and speak about space in addition to that.
And medicine has provided me the means to do that.
And when you look back at that young man of 19, what do you think of him?
I think I was pretty damn lucky.
And in some ways, it almost seems a little bit unreal.
But then I have the notes and photographs and motel receipts and airplane tickets and stuff like that to prove it.
But I just feel very fortunate.
If I would have been a little bit younger, I wouldn't have been able to cover the launch.
If I would have been older, I would have been out of college.
If I would have been born in another country, it wouldn't have been possible.
So I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time and then to take advantage of the opportunities.
And now 50 years on, you have a wonderful story to tell that I've thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed hearing.
If people want to get the book here in the UK, and I think there's an audiobook version of it too, you can tell me.
How do they do that?
Okay, well, the book is available all the online booksellers.
I don't know if I'm allowed to give names or not.
Well, you mean the likes of Amazon.
Yeah, so it's on Amazon UK.
It's on Foils.
It's on WH Smith.
It's on all the online booksellers.
And it's actually in the stores in certain ones.
For example, there's several FOILs bookstores in London and in Birmingham that actually have it physically in stock.
Right.
And I want you to tell me the title because it is the coolest title on any planet.
Well, I appreciate That very much.
It's I Was a Teenage Space Reporter from Apollo 11 to Our Future in Space, and it's by David Chudwin, C-H-U-D-W-I-N.
I hope one of these days we'll get to talk again, David, but I've loved hearing the story, and thank you.
You're quite welcome.
Thank you.
David Chudwin, I'll put a link to the book and him on my website, theunexplained.tv.
More great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained.
So until next, we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been The Unexplained Online.
And please, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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