Apollo Program Space Race with Larry Sheaks
Video from the channel Don Counts about Apollo program, linked on its Above Ten Thousand entry. Duration: 35:24. Language: English. Video type: News.
What's being covered
Interview from a local television program in Lincoln County with Larry Sheaks, a life support systems engineer who worked for Garrett AiResearch on the Apollo program and followed several missions from mission control in Houston. Sheaks reviews his career, from his childhood on a farm in northern Indiana (he was born in Gary in April 1941) to his retirement, with Apollo 13 as the central episode.
Background
After a basketball scholarship at UCLA, he paid his way through an engineering degree as a certified aviation mechanic and joined Garrett AiResearch in 1965; he graduated in 1966. The company had supplied the life support systems for the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules. He worked on a paraglider so that Gemini could land on the ground, and on a small hydrogen-oxygen combustion engine for Apollo. After the Apollo 1 fire, which he attributes to a short circuit in a cable next to the hatch in a pure-oxygen atmosphere, he took part in the redesign of the system, and in 1967 moved to Houston as engineering lead for the thermal vacuum test of spacecraft 2TV-1. NASA asked him to stay at the environmental control system console: he followed Apollo 7 from the support room, and Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 from the console.
What it means
His account of Apollo 13, in April 1970, is the core of the interview: after asking the crew to stir the cryogenic tanks, the explosion occurred when the fan in oxygen tank 2 was switched on, and he watched the available oxygen quantity drop. He remained at the console for about 72 hours until the crew was settled into the lunar module, designed for two people. He explains the CO2 problem: the square lithium hydroxide cartridges from the command module did not fit the lunar module's system, which used round cartridges, and an adapter was improvised with tape and plastic cards. He attributes the failure to a tank defect that was not detected at the Cape during its draining. He then followed Apollo 14 and Apollo 15, moved into sales, worked from 1988 in Huntsville on the space station, and retired in the mid-1990s. He also recalls Wernher von Braun, Chris Kraft and Gene Kranz, and a Boeing tribute to the Apollo 13 controllers on its 35th anniversary.