 Good evening and welcome. I am Catherine Robb, the granddaughter of LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson and the daughter of Linda Bird Johnson Robb, who is here tonight. So thank you mom. On behalf of the Johnson family and the LBJ Library Museum and the LBJ Foundation, I want to welcome you all here this evening for what I know is going to be a really remarkable and exciting program. I have to tell you I'm excited to be here and welcome y'all, not just because I love this library and the programs we put on and because I'm a friend, fan of the library and my families, but I am also a huge fan of PBS and just as I was sort of born into my family, I feel a little bit like I was born into the PBS system. My grandfather signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, just a few years before I was born, and I have been a lifelong consumer of PBS. I have also been on the board of KLRU, our local PBS station here, which is a great, great PBS. By the way, we'll cheer for them. I've been on the board there for many, many years, shall we say, many terms, and I have realized it's a little bit like when you join the Johnson family. And if you know people that have worked for my grandfather, you know that once you join the family, you really don't ever leave. It's a little bit like that with KLRU, and I hope that our extended Johnson family feels the same way I feel about KLRU and the PBS system and that it's really a joy to sort of always be part of the family there. They put on tremendous programming, and we're obviously going to get to experience some of that tonight. So tonight, we're going to be treated to a sneak preview of a new six-hour PBS landmark documentary series from American Experience, Chasing the Moon. The film, which will air on PBS stations across the country, including KLRU, in July, is about the space race from its earliest beginnings to the monumental achievement of the first lunar landing in 1969 and beyond. Tonight, we will get to see 38 minutes of clips from the film focusing on the historic Apollo 8 and 11 missions. Apollo 8 marked the first time a space mission left Earth's atmosphere and circumnavigated the moon, and Apollo 11 was the first mission to land on the moon. The clips we will see features some never-before-seen footage, including the home movies of the wife of Apollo 8's commander, Frank Borman, watching the launch at home surrounded by the wives and families of other astronaut wives. This is really cool, y'all. After the screening, Mark Up to Grove will lead a discussion on the film with the filmmaker Robert Stone, Roger Launius, former chief historian of NASA, and Poppy Northcott, who at 25 gained worldwide attention as the first woman to serve in the all-male bastion of NASA's mission control. Now to introduce tonight's film preview is Chasing the Moon's producer Susan Bellows, an award-winning producer and writer who has been producing programs for public television for more than 20 years. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Susan Bellows. Thank you, Catherine. Good evening, everyone. It's really wonderful to be here with you all tonight. We're just a few months away from the 50th anniversary of one of the most significant achievements of the 20th century, the moment when the first human set foot on the moon. That moment reverberated across the planet. It defined a generation and it remains the standard by which we measure technological advancements to this day. We're thrilled to present one of the first public looks at Chasing the Moon tonight, right here, in the place that honors a man who played such a pivotal role in the race to the moon. Before we continue, I'd like to acknowledge our funders, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, the Robert D.L. Gardner Foundation, members of the Documentary Investment Group, including Ira and Diana Rickles, as well as our corporate sponsors, Liberty Mutual Insurance and Consumer Cellular. I'd also like to acknowledge our home station, WGBH Boston, and PBS for their support of this project. Chasing the Moon will premiere, as Catherine mentioned, on KLRU and PBS stations nationwide on July 8th, 9th, and 10th. Over the course of six hours, Academy Award-nominated director Robert Stone reveals the space age as a fascinating stew of scientific innovation, political calculation, media spectacle, and personal drama. Offering a visual feast of rare footage, the film features new interviews with a diverse cast of characters who played key roles in this historic event. Tonight, you'll see two excerpts from the film. We'll start with the material that Catherine was referencing, this incredibly rare footage that was shot in the home of Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman as his wife and family watched the launch on television. Then we will join the crew of Apollo 11 as they prepare to undock and begin their descent to the lunar surface. After the screening, you'll hear from writer, director, producer, and co-editor of Chasing the Moon, Robert Stone, historian Roger Launius, and the first woman to serve in mission control, Texas native Poppy Northcutt, in a discussion led by Mark Uptigrove. But first, here's a look at Chasing the Moon. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage Robert Stone, Poppy Northcutt, and Roger Launius. Well, welcome to all of you, and Robert, congratulations on a stunning accomplishment. This is a beautiful film. We'll start with you, yes, we'll start with you. The story of the Apollo missions and of the space race in general is pretty well trodden ground for filmmakers and for authors and others. Why did you decide to do this film? Well, I was 10 years old when they landed on the moon, and so the whole period in my childhood leading up to the landing of the moon was full of the anticipation of this great event happening. And it was a transformative moment in my life that I will never forget, as it was, I think, for anybody who was alive at that time. And as time has gone by, as you say, there have been lots of books, there's been lots of films about this, some of them are very good. And, but most of them generally have portrayed this story through the lens of the astronaut experience. Now, I know the clips that we saw tonight do that because we do include this, but there's a lot, this is a six hour movie and we do a lot more than this. But what I really wanted to try to capture was what it felt like, what I remember it feeling like as a 10 year old boy growing up with this. And that moment of just the whole world being united in a way that I've never experienced since, and probably never has happened before or since in human history. And this just sense of wonder and optimism, and it was just a magical moment. And I wanted to try to capture what that was like for us. And not so much because I think, you know, after it happened, we all wanted to know, well, what was it like for the astronauts? Because we didn't know that at the time, but this time has gone by. To me, the real story, the real story is what it was like for all of us. The main event was here. And so, and also to put the whole, to put the race to the moon within its political and social and cultural context. You know, it didn't just happen in isolation. It happened in this incredibly divisive and tumultuous time in our history. And yet we came together at this moment and did this incredible thing. And so I think there's a lesson in that for today as well. So I think if you take the journey through all six hours, I think you'll really see a take on this that's quite unique. And with lots of stories and lots of footage that stories have never been told and footage that's never been seen. Roger, you're NASA's historian. You've seen a lot of work around this as well. What makes this film different for you? Yeah, I mean, there's obviously several things about it. For one thing, Robert was able to take the time necessary to tell a story in a more fulsome manner. Usually documentaries are relatively short and hour or two. Feature films are obviously, you know, below that sort of threshold as well. So it's hard to tell a very large story in that context. And this film does a beautiful job of that. I mean, you know, the space race is a piece of this. It's captured in pretty fundamental ways where we talk about the context of the Cold War environment that sparked this decision to go to the moon and then the carrying out of it. The social tumult of the 1960s, which were very real and led people to maybe not pay too much attention to the space program that's happening around them. I'm a few years older than Robert, but not very much. And I was engaged in this as well, watching all of this unfold through the mercury and the Gemini flights into Apollo. And I was sort of jazzed by it. But most of the time, as a kid in high school, I didn't pay that much attention. I paused like everybody did at the time that Apollo 8 went around the moon in December of 1968 and, of course, the summer of 1969. Poppy, one of the many stories in this film that hasn't, we haven't seen in others, is your story. You went from being a computerist for TRW to being the first woman to manifestation in mission control. How did that happen? Well, as you said, I went to work. I graduated from the University of Texas. I had a mathematics degree. And I went to work for TRW, a contractor. I was a computerist, which is a fancy word for a tech aide. Those of you who saw Hidden Figures may have seen that title there. I didn't realize that that was a common title for women that were doing tech work at the time. I thought it was very odd that they seemed to think that we were female computers. We did do a lot of number crunching. Anyway, I was very, I had not expected to work in the space program. I had taken some courses that would certainly be applicable, but I just ended up in this job. And I became fascinated by the mission, by the problem that we were solving. Because the company I worked for, we had a contract to develop a family of trajectory programs. We worked on trans-lunar injection, lunar orbit insertion, and mid-course maneuvers, both coming and going from the moon, and trans-Earth injection. And I became a return to Earth specialist working in the lunar phase of the program. So when Apollo 8 was accelerated, the schedule was accelerated because of the big fear that the Russians were going to beat us to the moon. So the schedule was accelerated. They were going to be doing all these maneuvers that they had not previously dealt with. I mean, there were so many new steps that were happening all in that first mission, that Apollo 8 mission. And they wanted us to come over that had worked on developing these programs to assist the retrofire officer in particular, because they were dealing with so many new things. I had no idea when I walked in over there that I was going to be the first woman to work in mission control in an operational role. What was it like to be the only woman in not only a room, but an organization full of men? Well, I had already been experienced in a sense in being the only woman in the room a lot of times. Okay, because I used to say there were more hooping cranes in Texas than there were women doing the kind of work I was doing. And so, you know, I was accustomed to being the only woman in the room, although I wasn't accustomed to being the only woman in such a big room. There was full of men. My first impression of it wasn't so much about being the only woman in the room. My first impression was, my God, how do I cope with all of this cacophony of information that is coming into you? Because you're watching four or five different channels at the same time. You're hearing all of this stuff on different channels coming in through the headset. And as I said, it had not been planned that we would be over there. I was expecting to spend the mission sitting in my office, maybe somebody calling me from the mission planning and analysis division, but I wasn't expecting to be over there. So the big challenge for me was that, you know, overcoming that. Right. Robert, there is stunning footage of Susan Borman watching her husband as he embarks on this mission. And it looks like it was almost filmed in a Hollywood soundstage. It's so dramatic and so vivid. How did you come by these home movies? Well, they're not home movies. This was actually shot by a professional film crew. This stuff, when I interviewed Frank Borman out in Montana, we had a wonderful day with him and he was driving us to the airport. And we were getting pretty close to the airport and we're just chatting. And he goes, you know, Robert, I got a bunch of rolls of 35 millimeter film in my closet. Are you interested in any of that stuff? He's like, what? Turn the car around. So we raced back to his house and he goes in his closet and he brings out this big, huge box with these old rusty cans of 35 millimeter motion picture film. So I don't know what's there. I was like, okay, I can't take this on the plane. Let's go to FedEx. So he quickly went to FedEx. We shipped it back. And when I got home, I took it down to Technicolor in New York. To digitize it so you could see it. And it was 35 millimeter. It's actually filmed in Cinemascope. Beautiful footage of the Borman home on the day of the launch. And he'd just been sitting on this stuff all of these years. Who commissioned it? And it was stunning. It was NASA. The astronauts had an exclusive contract with Life Magazine where only Life Magazine reporters were allowed in to take photographs. Instead of a media circus going on. You see the media circus on the outside of the house, but nobody was allowed inside the house except for Life Magazine photographers. But this was an exception. NASA made an exception, allowed this one filmmaker in to do this, this one time. And this guy had grand ambitions to make a big, you know, multi-million dollar documentary about the race of the moon. He never got the money and got pissed off and said, here, Frank. Here's the footage, which Frank just sort of, he didn't know what it was really. He just sat in his closet all these years. And so it was, as you said, I mean, it was so beautiful. You know, we kept in a lot of the sink, the slates, you know, just to indicate to the audience like this is not actors. Because almost everybody I show this to thinks it looks like, you know, the astronaut wives club. Had the Bormins seen the footage before you, or that they gave it to you and you processed it? No, I processed it and I gave Frank a DVD. And so what was their reaction to this, seeing it 50 years after the mission? Well, Susan sadly is suffering from Alzheimer's. And he showed this to her to see if it would rouse something that she didn't really, apparently, according to him, didn't really register. But, you know, Frank has showed it to his family and sure it was. I mean, it's a time capsule of their time. And Frank obviously wasn't there. He was on his way to the moon. It's remarkable. Roger, you can see the toll that these missions had on the families. What did it do to the marriages of the astronauts in general? Well, I mean, obviously, when you're sort of focused on a single-minded effort for a long period of time. And it's really how you define yourself and your activities. There's a lot of people whose marriage has suffered, whose families were sort of torn asunder by the work environment that the astronauts were engaged in. The long distance relationships that some of them had to have. They're living in Houston, but they're going to the Kennedy Space Center all the time or other various places around, literally around the world to do training and reviews. So, yeah, I mean, all of that takes a toll over time. There's no question about that. And the astronauts, you know, many of the marriages broke up. And it's, you know, it's a sad experience in many ways that this is what happened to some of them. Some families went through it just fine. And they might have had some bumps in the road, as most do, but they were able to survive and remain, you know, a couple to the stay. It's worth noting that the crew of Apollo 8, all three of their marriages are intact. They're the only ones of the Apollo era. I want to, you alluded to the tumult of that time. But Apollo 8 happened at the end of a particularly tumultuous year. Last year we looked back at the 50th anniversary of 1968, and there were some remarkable events that played out throughout the course of that year. What did Apollo 8, going circumventing, circumnavigating the moon on Christmas Eve mean to America at the end of that incredibly tempestuous year? Yeah, no, I think that that's a very real issue there. You know, the whole year had sort of begun with, you know, the Ted Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the summer riots that took place, demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention. I could go on and on. All of these horrible things that were taking place that were demonstrations of the difficulties that were present in American society. Vietnam obviously was a big piece of this as well. And at the end of the year they circle the moon, they have a Christmas Eve broadcast, they read from the Bible, the very first part of it. They wish a Christmas greetings to the people of the good Earth. I think that's a very telling comment. And for a very short period of time, it was very short, people sort of focused on this activity, and it became a human experience all around the globe, in the same way that I think Apollo 11 was as well the next year. It didn't last long, but clearly it was significant. And Frank Borman loves to tell the story that he got lots of letters and all these kinds of things after the mission, but one misive that he got said, thank you, you saved 1968. And it's a telling comment, because lots of people were feeling the difficulties of the time. When you watch this film, you feel the tension. I mean, it's just, it is palpable. Just in the clips that we saw, what was it like to be in Mission Control? What are you feeling? Well, first of all, if you wouldn't mind, talk about when you were in Mission Control, the missions in which you sat in Mission Control. I was over there for Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, and 13. Remarkable. And so what are you, what are you feeling? Did it change from mission to mission, or was there a constant state that you felt? Well, Apollo 8 for me was the most challenging mission, partly because it was the first one that I worked on, but also because so many of them, so many things that were absolutely new for the very first time were happening. But when you work there, you live in an alternative universe. You don't even know whether it's night or day until you come out of the control center, okay? You don't know what day of the week it is. You don't know what time of day it is. You're in an alternative universe. You're living on mission time. Everything is measured from launch, are measured, and you see the clocks in the footage when you look at them. I mean, how many minutes is it till whatever, or how many minutes past whatever? And you compartmentalize. You have to focus on what your job is. You can't focus on what other people's job is. You have to focus on your job. So it was stressful in some ways, especially for me when it was coming up to a critical maneuver, but you have to remember to, as I said, you can't worry about other people's jobs. You have to just focus on your job and trust that the other people are doing their job. You mentioned the tension of watching the film. See, I find lots of tension in watching the film. I find that much more stressful for me to watch this thing than it was for me to live through it. And especially like on Apollo 13, there's a movie about Apollo 13. I can't ever watch that movie. I can't get more than 10 minutes into that movie, and I start feeling anxiety attacks. But when I was in the control center during Apollo 13, I was cool as a cucumber, okay? I was focused, okay? I knew what I was doing. I'm doing my job. I'm focused. I've got my job under control. I know that they have all these other problems out there, but I'm not thinking about those things. I'm thinking about what am I doing? So if you're cool as a cucumber during those tense moments, when there is a jubilant moment, when Neil Armstrong touches down on the moon or Apollo 8 starts circumnavigating the new, what are you feeling then? Are you feeling the same jubilation we were at the time that we watched those things playing out on television? Probably not. Because for me, you do not have a successful mission until Splashdown, and there we recovered, okay? And no matter how exciting it was to see them land, I know that they still have to get back up. They have to die. And I have to work on getting them back safely to the earth. And so I wasn't lighting cigars, okay, whenever they land, okay? The Splashdown parties, though, were very happy events. I'll tell you that. You've never seen people party as much as they party at those Splashdown parties afterwards. Poppies is one of the great stories in this, Robert, but there's another wonderful story, a story that I had never known before, and that is that of Ed Dwight. Can you talk about Ed Dwight and his significance in the NASA saga? Yeah, I mean, I'd never heard of Ed Dwight either. It's a remarkable story that in 1963, the Kennedy administration was persuaded by, actually the idea started with Edward R. Murrow to recruit an African-American astronaut into the astronaut corps, with the idea being that, you know, here we are, we're sending people into space. The idea is that we're presenting America as the vanguard of the future in competition with the Soviet Union, telling the rest of the world, come with us. Well, if... And civil rights has become a very big issue in the United States. And the idea was that this would, a, help advance the civil rights process symbolically and present American a favorable light around the world, particularly in the developing world. So they recruited this guy who was a crack-based fighter pilot with an advanced degree in aeronautical engineering, and they sent him, if anybody has seen the right stuff, they sent him off to train with Chuck Yeager at Edwards Air Force Base, and he went through the whole process. And so he's in the whole training process, Ed is our guide through this, as Poppy was in mission control. And eventually he did not make it to be an astronaut, but his story and the what might have been is remarkable. Another thing that was going on at the same time as this is that Kennedy was also in negotiations with Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet Union, to do a joint mission, a Soviet-American joint mission to the moon because both Khrushchev and Kennedy were appalled at the escalating costs and the duplication of effort and they both wanted to wind down the Cold War. So that was another, and they'd actually agreed to do it, Khrushchev had actually agreed to do it. Kennedy had proposed this several times, Khrushchev had actually agreed to do it about a month before Kennedy was assassinated. And that idea fell apart as well. So one of the interesting things, there are many, many stories like that in the movie, is that we go through this story without imagining what the ultimate outcome is, you know? And this whole story was touch and go, anything could have happened, maybe it would have landed on the moon with a Soviet-American team, maybe an African-American astronaut would have been on the moon. Who knows, maybe the whole thing was going to fail, maybe political support would crumble, the popular support would crumble and the whole thing would be canceled, or there would be a disaster. The whole thing was touch and go the whole way. And I think one of the tensions that's in the film throughout is what you hope for in any film is what's going to happen next. So that's, you know, using a lot of contemporaneous news reporting helps and I'm not seeing talking heads. So it's not all this, the reflecting back in the past allows the story to play out in a present tense. And yeah, many of the most remarkable stories are the little subplots, this could have happened, that could have happened, which as Roger was saying, you're never going to get to deal with those in a 90-minute or two-hour film. But, you know, PBS gave me the resources and been at this for five years, you know, to really dig deep and to do something broad and expansive and as epic as the adventure deserves, I think. Roger, so many of the films that are done on the space, right, the books too concentrate on the astronauts. The astronauts are the heroes. Who are the unsung heroes of the triumph of our landing on the moon? Well, I mean, you saw some of them in this particular film. I looked up and I saw George Lowe and Bob Gilruth and a variety of other people who are associated with NASA who are not household names. The mission controllers, everybody from the mission, the flight directors, down to the person who's doing EECOM or whatever it happens to be there. The people who are in the back rooms who are doing all kinds of really critical work. You couldn't go to the moon without this. I mean, we've got a team at the height of the Apollo era between NASA civil servants and contractors of over 400,000 people that are putting them on the moon. And the sense of mission was present throughout this. Up and down the industry and the agency itself, everybody has this sort of single-minded focus. We're going to do this. We're going to accomplish this. And it's amazing to see how that is. There's famous stories from the timeframe in which people who are associated with NASA in some particular way, but not working specifically on the Apollo program. Maybe they're mowing the lawn at what is now the Johnson Space Center or something like this, but you ask them what are they doing and it's not I'm mowing the lawn or I'm doing something else. I'm helping us get to the moon. And that sense of mission is something that NASA's always enjoyed certainly during the Apollo program, but I would contend since then as well. Bobby, what is the greatest misconception that laymen have about the Apollo missions? The average Joe might have about what it took to put a man on the moon. Well, I do think that this focus on the astronauts may be part of it because I think that hardly anybody realizes how many people were involved and it's even bigger scope I think than Roger's mentioning. I mean, there were people on Ascension Island in the middle of the Indian Ocean that were working on this. There were people all around the world literally working on this and every one of them was critical. Okay? Every one of them. Because if you look at Apollo 13 you now see how critical one little thing can be. Okay? You have a short and a piece of equipment and you have a disaster in space. You have a sign, S-I-G-N era in a piece of computing programming. You can have a disaster and the rocket goes and comes down. Okay? So the number of people that were involved and the absolute dedication to task I think is almost incomprehensible. Even working in the program it's almost incomprehensible to think of that many people being that focused on one thing and actually getting it all together to do it. This is a question for all of you. What does this mean 50 years later? We're about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of men first landing on the moon. Astronauts Armstrong and Aldrin. What does that mean to America and the world 50 years on? Roger's the historian. I certainly have lots of thoughts on that. Let me just suggest one thing and there's many other things I could talk about but one of them is, you know, we decided to do this. There's nothing magic about this. There was a political decision based upon a political crisis and that's how we got into this. And within a couple of years that crisis had more or less resolved at least a lot of it after the Cuban Missile Crisis and a sort of thawing of relations in the 1963 timeframe. The original impetus is sort of gone but we had made this commitment. We're going to pull this off. Americans are great at this stuff. When you're back to the wall, when the chips are down I can think of other cliches if you wish to hear them along those lines but you rise to the occasion and you accomplish what is required. And this is the great object lesson of Apollo from my perspective. As a people we have it within ourselves to do these things. It also leads us then to the next logical question that we thought at the time that the moon landings. If we can put a man on the moon why can't we and choose the hard problem of your choice? And the answer is we can. We have to decide that we can do it though and that's the first step. I think there's a real yearning particularly among young people to be a part of something bigger than ourselves and to get past all of the divisiveness in our country and to come together and to do something grand and ambitious. And the space program in this very divisive time which was not dissimilar to our own provided that outlet. And I think there's a real lesson in that and that I think we, as Roger said, clearly technologically we can do anything. Any technological challenge that we're confronted with we can probably overcome if we set our minds to it and the process of doing that of setting a goal and having a timetable and say by golly we're going to do this by this particular date is empowering and it doesn't necessarily have to be something super practical. I really equate putting a man on the moon to building a Gothic cathedral or building a pyramid to something. I think it was a monumental achievement of our time that's equivalent to that. I think in terms of facing challenges today climate change would be a good one that these lessons I think could be applied to. And I think the support would be there because, as I said, I think there's a yearning in all of us to be a part of something larger and oftentimes throughout history that yearning has manifested itself in war. And the space program was in a sense a war by other means but it really brought out the best of us. As wars tend to do they bring out the worst in us and the best in us but if we channel that human emotion and human energy into something positive it can be a great and wonderful thing and I'd like to see us do it again. Papi, are we capable of doing something that in Robert's words monumental today? I hope so. And I believe that we are. We have to get the political will to do it but we certainly have the intellectual capacity. And I also think that one of the important things that that does is that it didn't just bring pride and unity a moment of unity to people in this country. That pride was felt all over the world. That was a human achievement and people all over the world didn't just watch. They felt proud that not just Americans had done this human beings had done that. And I think it's in our DNA that we want to explore we want to conquer that impossible thing we want to cross that river and find what's on the other side or that lake or that mountain or that iceberg and for us it was that thing that was up there in the sky but we have this longing and I think we should do it because it does make us proud we benefit from it and we change the world. We can't do better than that to end the discussion. This was a stunning accomplishment and it is an equally stunning film. I've had the privilege of seeing all of it. It is magnificently rendered and I want to thank you all for being here and sharing it with us. Thanks so much for being here. Thank you all.