August 2, 2024 • 27 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Craig Sumner worked at NASA from the time of the Apollo missions to the days of the space shuttle, helping to build the lunar rover in the process. This is his story.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your stories.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Send them to our American Stories dot com.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And now our next story comes to us from Craig Sumner,
who worked at NASA from the time of the Apollo
missions to near the end of the Space Shuttle program.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Take it away, Craig.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I had a dad that was a marine fighter pilot,
in this case in World War Two in Korea, and
I got to put a little excerpt in here. You know,
what my parents did were kind of my benchmark. And
dad flew in the Pacific dropping bombs on Japanese islands,
and he flew one mission with Charles Lindbergh and World
Most of these would take off with one thousand pound
(01:01):
bomb in the center and two five hundred pound bombs
on the wing. Charles Lindbergh took off with three one
thousand pound bombs and went on to design a two
thousand pound bomb released in the center. Those stories kind
of stayed with me as a young person, and I
knew someday I wanted to fly, and so as I
started thinking about NASA when it really started going in
(01:22):
the sixties.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
I thought I really would like to go work for NASA.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I used to build model airplanes, the Blue Angels, you know,
I'd build space stations, so I had a dream. I
had an interest in following that kind of a path.
I wasn't the strongest student when I first got started
in school. I became a lot more serious later on
and realized how important that math and science was going
to be to me in order for me to be
(01:47):
able to make choices.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I'd finished up two years of college and I had
an associated science degree in electrical engineering and the last
two years was a system science degree, and I really
didn't quite know what I was going to do with
that degree. And I learned about the co op program
out of the University West Florida and Pensacola. So I
went over and talked to him, and they said, how
would you like to go work at NASA at the
(02:09):
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and we'll pay
you to go. And I got involved on the Lunar
Rover program, which was a moonbuggy program that they told us,
if you start, you've got to finish in seventeen and
a half months delivered to the Kennedy Space Center to
go on Apollo vehicle going to the Moon, or don't
start nineteen million dollar program to go build four lunar
(02:31):
rovers for nineteen million dollars that wound up costing thirty
nine million dollars for it's all over with. So it's
hot and cold on the Moon. The hottest temperatures two
hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit, the coldest temperatures two hundred
and fifty degrees below zero. So those are the environments
that are astronauts. The limb, the lunar excursion module, and
the lunar rover all had to be able to endure
(02:53):
on the Moon's surface and it can't break down. So
in the course of building the lunar rover, I'd go
pick up these astronauts that were going to the Moon.
I'd take him in my sixty six Valiant Plymouth I
still have it, and I drive them over to our
training facility. And the conversation front seat to back seat
between many of the astronauts that I carried was like
(03:14):
if you hadn't cut me off at ten thousand feet
in my fighter airplane they were flying T thirty eight's.
I would have got on the ground first. And I
was thinking to myself, as a young twenty year old
at the time.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
These guys are crazy.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
They're up there.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Jockeying around in the skies, racing each other from Houston
up to the Redstone Arsenal here and fighting to see
who's going to land on the ground is kind.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Of a badge of courage.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
But when they put on their spacesuits and climbed up
in our simulators out at the Marshall Space Flight Center,
it was all business. John Young was my favorite. So
I got to tell you about John. When John was
eight years old, there was a knock at the door
and they took his mother away. She had a mental illness.
She was a paranoid schizophrenic. John's dad was a delivery man.
(03:58):
John got farmed out to ants and uncle neighbors and
graduated top in his high school class, College, flight school,
Astronaut Corps, flew Gemini, flew Apollo, went to the Moon.
He was our first shuttle commander. And John was more
passionate in college than I was. John studied six nights
(04:18):
a week to one o'clock in the morning. So when
we were all ready to go home after a eight
ten hour day, John's ready to go another six hours.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
And his dedication just was immense.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
And so, you know, when I look at somebody like that,
and I was in flight readiness reviews where I'm up
presenting and John Young asked a question, and either you
don't know the answer or you've got the answer and
you tell them. But if you don't know the answer,
don't give them something that's not right. And fortunately this
(04:51):
team effort, you know, somebody might pipe up and answer it,
or we go off and get the answer. But at
the end of every question John asked, he'd always say
just asking, and everybody would laugh. John said, I don't
understand why everybody laughed. When I said that, I was
dead serious. So as we got it close to the
actual Apollo fifteen mission, I got selected to be part
(05:14):
of their backup team. It was an engineering backup team
out here at the Marshall Space Flight Center. And when
they landed on the Moon, they didn't land on a
nice flat surface, and they had one of their footpaths
down in a hole and the whole thing was leaning over,
so it wasn't level and we thought when the moon
buggy came out, it might get hung up on some Well,
they didn't go two hundred and forty thousand miles to
leave it stuck up there on the side of the limb,
(05:36):
and fortunately it all deployed.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Out just the way you would expect it to.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
They put up their pool side seats, jumped in there,
threw a few switches, put on their velcro seat belts,
and away they went at eight miles an hour.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Now, eight doesn't sound very.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Fast, but on Apollo eleven, our first landing on the Moon,
our astronauts had to just walk around and the suits
I told you, you know, they only weighed sixty or seventy
hounds total. But it's still a lot of work walking
around up there on the Moon's surface. On Apollo sixteen,
the first day they were up, there was eighty five
degrees outside. As soon as you walk behind a boulder
(06:10):
and get out of the sun's rays, you're out of
the app There is no atmosphere up there. It drops
down up to two hundred and fifty degrees below zero.
So it's kind of fun, you know, it's my fifteen
minutes of fame, and nobody knew that I was really
doing this. You know up here my parents did, my sisters, did,
some of my friends. But I was having the experience
(06:31):
of my life and talking to these astronauts as I
drive them over to our simulation facility, go have a
biscuit with them, Listen to them talk about flying the
T thirty eight jet. Little did I know, within about
a year, I was going to.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
Be flying the same airplane. Because when this program was over,
so was my draft deferment.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And you're listening to Craig Sumner, who worked at NASA
from the time of the Apollo missions to near the
end of the Space Shuttle program.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
When we come back.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
More of Craig Sumner's story here on our American Stories. Folks,
(07:29):
if you love the great American stories we tell and
love America like we do, we're asking you to become
a part of the Our American Stories family. If you
agree that America is a good and great country, please
make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and
seventy six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
American Stories dot com now and go to the donate
button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot com.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And we returned to our American Stories.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And when we last left off, Craig Sumner was about
to go to Vietnam after working at NASA on the
lunar rover project.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Now we returned to Craig got.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Caught up in a draft lottery. Well that didn't help
me any because the first draft lottery was up to
like one hundred and something and my number was sixty two.
And so I was off to go to flight school
and I got to go fly some jets and get
to do some of the things that these astronauts that
I got to work with shared with me over a
biscuit or a cup of coffee or while we were
waiting for the simulator to get up and going. So
(08:43):
I went off and did that, and unfortunately, after four years,
the war was over and I got to get out
of the service early. And guess where I wanted to
come back. I want to come back to the Marshall
Space Flight Center and work for NASA again. Well, when
I came back, politics had changed, and a lot of
the training that we were doing here at the Marshall
Space Face Flight Center where the astronauts was being moved
to Houston. And when I came back after getting out
(09:05):
of the service in nineteen seventy six, Skylab was starting
to decay in its orbit. It was up there rolling,
it was tumbling end over end, had somewhat of an
optical roll to it as well. And so we were
building a teleoperator system that would go up and dock
with Skylab and push it up into a higher orbit.
And our astronauts would fly up here from Houston before
(09:26):
they moved all the training down to Houston, and they
would get in the simulators.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
We would allow them to fly this.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Thing out of the back of the orbiter and go
try to dock the Skylab and then run out of gas. Well,
I was a young now twenty seven year old, and
I'd flown it every day for eight hours a day,
and I got pretty proficient honing my skills and being
able to do it within a tank of gas. And
so our science and engineering director was speaking to a
(09:53):
Senate subcommittee and said, if the guy's down in Houston
can't do it, we've got an engineer at the Marshall
Space Flight Center that could. Once again, I thought I
was going to get my fifteen minutes of fame, but
that wasn't to happen. Sky Lab unfortunately, came back into Australia,
decayed and its orbit and burned up for the most part.
As it came back in. We didn't have the Shuttle
(10:14):
ready in time, and so that's what happened. So then
I started getting involved in the Space Shuttle program and
I continued my education. As I was working with NASA
and learning about project management, I thought maybe that was
something that I could really go do.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
I had this jet.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Experience in flying C one thirties, and I thought, Okay,
I got some good leadership skills.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
What can I do with that?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
And that's probably one of the highlights of my career
was working on the Space Shuttle program. I was the
deputy project manager of the Space Shuttle External Tank. We
built those down in New Orleans, just like we did
the C five, and then we finished building them. When
we'd put them on a barge, tie it to a
tug with a twenty five hundred foot rope one inch
in diameter, and haul it down through the Gulf of
(10:58):
Mexico around the Key up the landing coast to the
Kennedy Space Center and offload it and put it up
on the eighth floor of the vertical assembly building until
we were ready to integrate it over on the other
side of the aisle, as we called it, to get
a stack ready to roll out to the pan. I'd
get on an airplane out here at Redstone Arsenal, NASA airplane,
be about eight of us on board, and we'd land
(11:19):
on the Shuttle landing strip down in Florida. And it's
such a pretty sight to see as you come up
on a runway that's three miles long three hundred feet wide,
I believe, and go get in our rental car and
then go into work about ten hours prior to a
Space Shuttle launch and my team I hate the word I,
because it was the people around me that really accomplished
(11:40):
the work at hand. We'd load five hundred and thirty
five thousand gallons of fuel on board, and about two
and a half hours prior to a Shuttle launch, we'd
bring the crew out and strap him into the Space Shuttle,
and about t minus nine minutes we'd give the launch
director permission to go fly. And I never thought I'd
find myself in the same firing room as Werner von Braun,
(12:02):
who was my first center director, and have the privilege
of representing the team that built this magnificent machine and put.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Put it into orbit.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
When I went down to my first Space Shuttle launch,
you sit in a control room with a headset and
sitting beside you as a project manager from the contractor
Lockheed Martin or Martin Marrietta when I first started, and
the two of you have got these headsets on to
folks down in New Orleans and people up at the
Marshall Space Flight Center and our Huntsville Operations Support Center.
(12:33):
A lot more people than I really realized were out
there available to me. And I was a fairly new
project manager when my boss's daughter was killed in an
amobile accident seventeen years old, and he called up and
told me of that tragic event.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
He said, Craig, I need you to go to the launch.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
And all of a sudden I realized I was going
to go from just learning about this vehicle but representing
this team. Carried all these books with me, all these
technical manuals, and I was reading too late in the night,
trying to get up to speed where I could maybe
contribute to what was going to go on, only to
find out that just by pressing a button on my
(13:13):
console when something came up or something happened, that I
had an extensive group of people, men and women out
there that I could call on and work issues.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
And there are issues.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
When you're tanking this vehicle for eight hours or so,
things start to happen to the vehicle. We're putting these
really extremely cold temperatures in the hydrogen tank four hundred
and twenty three degrees below zero, in the locks tank
over three hundred degrees below zero, and the phone, the
thermal protection system on the outside sometimes doesn't behave the
way it wants to, and you don't fly the next day.
(13:46):
You have to go out there and actually do a repair,
and then you get some surprises. Sometimes three day weekend,
everybody takes off. And it was the mating seasons for
the redheaded woodpecker. And if it wasn't a redhead, it's
the one that I remember. Woodpecker put over two hundred
holes in our external tank. Some very very smart folks
flew with me down to the Kennedy Space Center and
(14:08):
we went out and climbed up on the external tank.
I put a harness on and did you watch a
shuttle flight with a beanie cap that raises up at
the very end and swings over.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
Out of the way. Well, that's where I was at.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Looking for holes in the external tank and make a
recommendation of my program managers on what we needed to
do to fix that. While I was standing out there,
you know, you're every bit of two hundred and fifty
feet off the ground, and you're looking straight down to
the ground, and something was steering at me.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Have you ever had that happen?
Speaker 3 (14:39):
There were five birds vultures up in the sea breeze
stationary forty feet above my head looking at this tasty
morsel trying to count woodpecker holes, and you just never
forget that image. You know, shouldn't be anybody around me,
and I felt something steering at me, and I still
occasionally look.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Up to see what's up there.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
But I would say my very first Space Shuttle launch
was probably the probably the most stressful, and it just
got better and better after that. When it counts down
to zero, you can't help but stand up out of
your seat and turn around. In three miles away, you
see the engines roaring to life and the vehicle coming
to life, and it's doing one hundred miles an hour
(15:21):
before it ever clears the launch pad, trying to get
up to that magic speed of seventeen thousand, five hundred
miles an hour, the orbital velocity that you need to
stay in low Worth orbit. And it was just totally awesome.
And the men and women that I got to work
with and their backgrounds. I would sit with people from
all walks of life who had a particular gift of
(15:42):
wanting to be an astronaut, who had PhDs and master's degrees,
skilled way beyond my understanding of engineering, that were being
selected to go fly into space. And I sat one
night with Katie Coleman, and she was a brand new
astronaut and we were fixing talk to a group of
one hundred people, had a man flight awareness dinner, and
(16:04):
we were going to watch a Space Shuttle launch the
next day. And I sat there somewhat kind of uneasy
with this young lady that had excelled so well in
her academic career and been selected, which is a very competitive.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Process to be an astronaut.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
And I was about halfway through my dinner when she
leaned over she said, you know, I'm really nervous about this,
getting up in front and talking to these people, and
of course I just kind of took a deep breath
like I did it every day, and explained to her
what she was going to see the next day, because
it was going to be her first launch too. And
then to watch her career blossom and go up and
stay on the International Space Station and fly several times
(16:40):
with so many of the other men and women as
a team effort was pretty phenomenal as well.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And you're listening to Craig Sumner talk about his experience
in the Space Shuttle program. I don't know if you've
ever had the chance to see one of these beasts,
these giants launch.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I have twice. You never forget it. And miles away that's.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Where you get to watch if you're lucky, or just
anywhere near Cocoa Beach or Cake Canaveral, anywhere near that area.
If it ever happens again, bring the family. It is
indescribable to be close to it. This is five hundred
and thirty five thousand gallons of gas in this quote vehicle.
It's just surreal, surreal. And Americans do this like we
(17:21):
do so many other things with ease and with grace
and with a deep sense of adventure. Craig Sumner's story
and NASA continues here on our American story, and we
(18:08):
returned to our American stories and the story of Craig
Sumner who worked at NASA from the time of the
Apollo missions to the Space Shuttle program. And when we
last left off, Craig was talking about the team effort it.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Takes to launch a shuttle or a rocket.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Greig now shares with us stories about that team and
the people you worked with.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
The responsibilities immense when you sit in that room and
realize you've got five or more souls out there on
the Space Shuttle fixing a go launch, and all the
people that we had affect if we had some kind
of an accident. Puts a lot of stress, I think
on the launch team. But we were up to the challenge.
Jim Odom was the first project manager on the Space
(18:51):
Shuttle External.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Tank, and time and time again he.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Told us, test what you fly, and fly what you test,
and when the money gets short, guess what gets taken
off the table. I'm about to go run a test
that's going to cost four hundred thousand dollars it's a
lot of money, and it's to determine whether the foam
that we use on the downcomers, the feed lines that
bring liquid oxygen off the new Space Launch vehicle down
(19:18):
to the engines, if that phone will stay on there.
If it doesn't stay on, it's become a debris hazard.
And only through tests do you really find out whether
something's going to work or not. And it helps anchor
your analysis and it gives you confidence in margins that
you might not otherwise have. And the wrong place to
find out about.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
It is after the vehicle's built.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Test pilots are an interesting breed of men and women.
And so when I was flying C one thirties, a
lot of times I got these arrogant pilots on board
and I'm smiling, but they knew everything. But when they're
on my airplane, they had to follow our rules, and
they weren't my rules, they were standard rules.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
A lot of times they didn't go by the rules.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
One of the things my dad taught me as a
jet pilot, you better fly within the envelope. And that's
within all the training, with all the education they can
possibly give you, and if you fly outside the envelope,
be prepared to suffer the consequences, and so he didn't
live by his own advice. He would exceed the limiting
(20:23):
altitude and a corsayer for the failure of different pumps
that did different things in the engines, and you know
he could burn those out, you know. And the torque
on these coursayers that my dad flew were so strong
that if you threw the power to it and didn't
have some left rudder put in, you might lose a wing,
(20:43):
which he did during takeoff. And the next day he
went in to see his commander expecting to be put
out of the Marine Corps, and commander had enough wisdom
and there was a war going on, so that probably helped. Lieutenant.
Did you learn anything? So, yeah, you get some of
that stuff along the way that really helps ground you
into people saying no, we're not going to do test,
(21:06):
and you know that it's going to require a test,
and you have to keep pushing on it even when
they say no. And if you know you're right, then
you've got to stand up and say what you really
truly believe. And if you can't do that, then you
need to be in a follower job, and follower jobs
are important, but if you're going to be in a
leadership role, you also need to be able to listen.
(21:27):
It'll be that quiet person in your group that has
a solution to your problem that you don't call on
or that you don't see on the side and get
the information that you need for the team to benefit from.
But you know, these guys in the Apollo were fearless.
So I'm sitting with Fred Hayes out in Denver and
(21:49):
everybody tells me, hey, when you get around Fred ask
them what it was like on Apollo thirteen. Well can
you imagine how many times he's been asked what was
it like on Apollo thirteen? So I'm sitting there, we're
waiting to fly the simulator, and I look over at
Fred and I say, hey, Fred, so how was it
on Apollo thirteen? And he just kind of looks around,
you know, he's looking for a camera. Who's a smart
(22:11):
alec that puts you.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Up to it? Other than I almost died? You know.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
It was the way he started off my conversation and
that kind of stuck with me, you know. So you know,
Alan shephard our first man into space. On a poll
of fourteen, he and ed Mitchell have already separated from
the Command of Service module and they're in their limb
going down to the Moon and their radars not working,
and at ten thousand feet it's a no go. You know,
(22:36):
everything's supposed to be working at ten thousand feet. Mission
control knows that it's not working. Al Shepherd knows it's
not working, and he looks over ed Mitchell and said,
don't touch that button. It's the abort button up here
that takes you back up immediately to the command and
Service module. It said, yes, sir, there are backwards. They
can't even see where they're going. They're deaccelerating. And people
(22:56):
in mission control knows this guy that's been agrounded for
eleven years got put back on flight status, put himself
on this mission.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
He's going to go in visually.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
So they got to thinking real quick, you know, what
in the world could they possibly do? And they called
up and said, hey, how reach over and unplugged the
circuit breaker to the radar, Count to five and plug
it back in. It rebooted just like your computer at home.
And I think they landed within like sixty feet, so
you know, they're on the moon. They're going through their
checklists of shutting off engines and this, that and the other.
(23:27):
And ed Mitchell looks over and he says, hey, how
just curious would you've gone in visually? Shepherd looked over
and says, you'll never know. And they're both deceased. And
he never would tell ed Mitchell what he really was
going to do. But most of us were condenced. He
would have gone in visually. Now he'd gotten a lot
of trouble. He didn't care. He's probably going to be
(23:50):
done when he got back, asuming he didn't get smushed
on the moon surface. Those were the risk takers and
take people like John John Young, my favorite astronaut. Go
look at his heart rate landing on the Moon's surface.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
You know it elevated a little bit.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Because he had somebody stand beside him, Charlie Duke. You know,
that's supposed to be doing his job. But that probably
put a little bit of stress on him. Every other commander,
it kind of peeked on up their ways. But cool,
calm and collected John Young. He knew what his focus
was going to be on, and that was the land
on the Moon and land where he was supposed to land,
and he did it. Werner von Braun was my center director.
(24:29):
But what I got locked into when I came up
here was one of the second generation of Germans that
came over and his name was Heines Lauser, and Heines
was responsible for building the Moon map that would simulate
us driving on the Moon.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
So we had.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Pictures of what that surface looked like where we're going
to be landing, and with foam, rubber and latex paint.
I watched Heiness Lauser use a blow torch and nitrogen
to burn a crater and put it out. Burn a crater,
put it out. We got a three D picture over here,
and keep going. And when he was done, all this
stuff started coming together. I was a computer programmer, and
(25:09):
the simulator that we had downstairs was just like any
other flight simulator that you see today, the commercial.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Pilots shoes, military pilot shoes.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Our lunar rover program only had a about a three
foot round screen sitting in front of us up on
this hydraulic system that was one hundred yards away from
the computers that ran it, and the map that the
German that I got to work with built, and all
of that came together with four little teflawn balls that
ran across the little bumps and crooks and crannies of
(25:40):
this latex map. So the team were NASA civil servants,
contractor individuals, but it took a team. It took a team.
Nobody did this on their own. It's amazing. I think
what I missed the most when I retired were the people.
And so the triumph was, go find a group of
(26:01):
people that had faith in you that you could provide
the environment, the leadership and the support and the encouragement,
and turn that team loose and watch them excel. And
when that happens, you've got something going. It far exceeds
anything that you can do as an individual.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
And you've been listening to Craig Summoner and his life story.
Great job as always Tamanti for bringing us that piece
and his dad it advised them always fly within the envelope,
fly outside the envelope, and prepare to suffer the consequences.
Now also love that line, test what you fly, and
fly what you test. In the original test flight dummies
(26:39):
were two guys called the Wright Brothers because they actually
tested what they flew, and it differentiated them from everybody
else who is tinkering engineers engineered pilots flew.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
And they couldn't talk to each other. The right brothers
knew both angles, both flew.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
The story of Craig Sumner, the story of NASA in
a way, an American flight and innovation and space adventure.
Here on our American story
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your stories.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Send them to our American Stories dot com.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
And now our next story comes to us from Craig Sumner,
who worked at NASA from the time of the Apollo
missions to near the end of the Space Shuttle program.
Speaker 2 (00:39):
Take it away, Craig.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
I had a dad that was a marine fighter pilot,
in this case in World War Two in Korea, and
I got to put a little excerpt in here. You know,
what my parents did were kind of my benchmark. And
dad flew in the Pacific dropping bombs on Japanese islands,
and he flew one mission with Charles Lindbergh and World
Most of these would take off with one thousand pound
(01:01):
bomb in the center and two five hundred pound bombs
on the wing. Charles Lindbergh took off with three one
thousand pound bombs and went on to design a two
thousand pound bomb released in the center. Those stories kind
of stayed with me as a young person, and I
knew someday I wanted to fly, and so as I
started thinking about NASA when it really started going in
(01:22):
the sixties.
Speaker 4 (01:23):
I thought I really would like to go work for NASA.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
I used to build model airplanes, the Blue Angels, you know,
I'd build space stations, so I had a dream. I
had an interest in following that kind of a path.
I wasn't the strongest student when I first got started
in school. I became a lot more serious later on
and realized how important that math and science was going
to be to me in order for me to be
(01:47):
able to make choices.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
You know.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
I'd finished up two years of college and I had
an associated science degree in electrical engineering and the last
two years was a system science degree, and I really
didn't quite know what I was going to do with
that degree. And I learned about the co op program
out of the University West Florida and Pensacola. So I
went over and talked to him, and they said, how
would you like to go work at NASA at the
(02:09):
Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and we'll pay
you to go. And I got involved on the Lunar
Rover program, which was a moonbuggy program that they told us,
if you start, you've got to finish in seventeen and
a half months delivered to the Kennedy Space Center to
go on Apollo vehicle going to the Moon, or don't
start nineteen million dollar program to go build four lunar
(02:31):
rovers for nineteen million dollars that wound up costing thirty
nine million dollars for it's all over with. So it's
hot and cold on the Moon. The hottest temperatures two
hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit, the coldest temperatures two hundred
and fifty degrees below zero. So those are the environments
that are astronauts. The limb, the lunar excursion module, and
the lunar rover all had to be able to endure
(02:53):
on the Moon's surface and it can't break down. So
in the course of building the lunar rover, I'd go
pick up these astronauts that were going to the Moon.
I'd take him in my sixty six Valiant Plymouth I
still have it, and I drive them over to our
training facility. And the conversation front seat to back seat
between many of the astronauts that I carried was like
(03:14):
if you hadn't cut me off at ten thousand feet
in my fighter airplane they were flying T thirty eight's.
I would have got on the ground first. And I
was thinking to myself, as a young twenty year old
at the time.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
These guys are crazy.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
They're up there.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
Jockeying around in the skies, racing each other from Houston
up to the Redstone Arsenal here and fighting to see
who's going to land on the ground is kind.
Speaker 4 (03:35):
Of a badge of courage.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
But when they put on their spacesuits and climbed up
in our simulators out at the Marshall Space Flight Center,
it was all business. John Young was my favorite. So
I got to tell you about John. When John was
eight years old, there was a knock at the door
and they took his mother away. She had a mental illness.
She was a paranoid schizophrenic. John's dad was a delivery man.
(03:58):
John got farmed out to ants and uncle neighbors and
graduated top in his high school class, College, flight school,
Astronaut Corps, flew Gemini, flew Apollo, went to the Moon.
He was our first shuttle commander. And John was more
passionate in college than I was. John studied six nights
(04:18):
a week to one o'clock in the morning. So when
we were all ready to go home after a eight
ten hour day, John's ready to go another six hours.
Speaker 4 (04:27):
And his dedication just was immense.
Speaker 3 (04:31):
And so, you know, when I look at somebody like that,
and I was in flight readiness reviews where I'm up
presenting and John Young asked a question, and either you
don't know the answer or you've got the answer and
you tell them. But if you don't know the answer,
don't give them something that's not right. And fortunately this
(04:51):
team effort, you know, somebody might pipe up and answer it,
or we go off and get the answer. But at
the end of every question John asked, he'd always say
just asking, and everybody would laugh. John said, I don't
understand why everybody laughed. When I said that, I was
dead serious. So as we got it close to the
actual Apollo fifteen mission, I got selected to be part
(05:14):
of their backup team. It was an engineering backup team
out here at the Marshall Space Flight Center. And when
they landed on the Moon, they didn't land on a
nice flat surface, and they had one of their footpaths
down in a hole and the whole thing was leaning over,
so it wasn't level and we thought when the moon
buggy came out, it might get hung up on some Well,
they didn't go two hundred and forty thousand miles to
leave it stuck up there on the side of the limb,
(05:36):
and fortunately it all deployed.
Speaker 4 (05:37):
Out just the way you would expect it to.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
They put up their pool side seats, jumped in there,
threw a few switches, put on their velcro seat belts,
and away they went at eight miles an hour.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
Now, eight doesn't sound very.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Fast, but on Apollo eleven, our first landing on the Moon,
our astronauts had to just walk around and the suits
I told you, you know, they only weighed sixty or seventy
hounds total. But it's still a lot of work walking
around up there on the Moon's surface. On Apollo sixteen,
the first day they were up, there was eighty five
degrees outside. As soon as you walk behind a boulder
(06:10):
and get out of the sun's rays, you're out of
the app There is no atmosphere up there. It drops
down up to two hundred and fifty degrees below zero.
So it's kind of fun, you know, it's my fifteen
minutes of fame, and nobody knew that I was really
doing this. You know up here my parents did, my sisters, did,
some of my friends. But I was having the experience
(06:31):
of my life and talking to these astronauts as I
drive them over to our simulation facility, go have a
biscuit with them, Listen to them talk about flying the
T thirty eight jet. Little did I know, within about
a year, I was going to.
Speaker 4 (06:43):
Be flying the same airplane. Because when this program was over,
so was my draft deferment.
Speaker 1 (06:49):
And you're listening to Craig Sumner, who worked at NASA
from the time of the Apollo missions to near the
end of the Space Shuttle program.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
When we come back.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
More of Craig Sumner's story here on our American Stories. Folks,
(07:29):
if you love the great American stories we tell and
love America like we do, we're asking you to become
a part of the Our American Stories family. If you
agree that America is a good and great country, please
make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and
seventy six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters.
Speaker 4 (07:47):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (07:48):
American Stories dot com now and go to the donate
button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our American Stories dot com.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
And we returned to our American Stories.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
And when we last left off, Craig Sumner was about
to go to Vietnam after working at NASA on the
lunar rover project.
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Now we returned to Craig got.
Speaker 3 (08:21):
Caught up in a draft lottery. Well that didn't help
me any because the first draft lottery was up to
like one hundred and something and my number was sixty two.
And so I was off to go to flight school
and I got to go fly some jets and get
to do some of the things that these astronauts that
I got to work with shared with me over a
biscuit or a cup of coffee or while we were
waiting for the simulator to get up and going. So
(08:43):
I went off and did that, and unfortunately, after four years,
the war was over and I got to get out
of the service early. And guess where I wanted to
come back. I want to come back to the Marshall
Space Flight Center and work for NASA again. Well, when
I came back, politics had changed, and a lot of
the training that we were doing here at the Marshall
Space Face Flight Center where the astronauts was being moved
to Houston. And when I came back after getting out
(09:05):
of the service in nineteen seventy six, Skylab was starting
to decay in its orbit. It was up there rolling,
it was tumbling end over end, had somewhat of an
optical roll to it as well. And so we were
building a teleoperator system that would go up and dock
with Skylab and push it up into a higher orbit.
And our astronauts would fly up here from Houston before
(09:26):
they moved all the training down to Houston, and they
would get in the simulators.
Speaker 4 (09:30):
We would allow them to fly this.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
Thing out of the back of the orbiter and go
try to dock the Skylab and then run out of gas. Well,
I was a young now twenty seven year old, and
I'd flown it every day for eight hours a day,
and I got pretty proficient honing my skills and being
able to do it within a tank of gas. And
so our science and engineering director was speaking to a
(09:53):
Senate subcommittee and said, if the guy's down in Houston
can't do it, we've got an engineer at the Marshall
Space Flight Center that could. Once again, I thought I
was going to get my fifteen minutes of fame, but
that wasn't to happen. Sky Lab unfortunately, came back into Australia,
decayed and its orbit and burned up for the most part.
As it came back in. We didn't have the Shuttle
(10:14):
ready in time, and so that's what happened. So then
I started getting involved in the Space Shuttle program and
I continued my education. As I was working with NASA
and learning about project management, I thought maybe that was
something that I could really go do.
Speaker 4 (10:29):
I had this jet.
Speaker 3 (10:30):
Experience in flying C one thirties, and I thought, Okay,
I got some good leadership skills.
Speaker 4 (10:35):
What can I do with that?
Speaker 3 (10:36):
And that's probably one of the highlights of my career
was working on the Space Shuttle program. I was the
deputy project manager of the Space Shuttle External Tank. We
built those down in New Orleans, just like we did
the C five, and then we finished building them. When
we'd put them on a barge, tie it to a
tug with a twenty five hundred foot rope one inch
in diameter, and haul it down through the Gulf of
(10:58):
Mexico around the Key up the landing coast to the
Kennedy Space Center and offload it and put it up
on the eighth floor of the vertical assembly building until
we were ready to integrate it over on the other
side of the aisle, as we called it, to get
a stack ready to roll out to the pan. I'd
get on an airplane out here at Redstone Arsenal, NASA airplane,
be about eight of us on board, and we'd land
(11:19):
on the Shuttle landing strip down in Florida. And it's
such a pretty sight to see as you come up
on a runway that's three miles long three hundred feet wide,
I believe, and go get in our rental car and
then go into work about ten hours prior to a
Space Shuttle launch and my team I hate the word I,
because it was the people around me that really accomplished
(11:40):
the work at hand. We'd load five hundred and thirty
five thousand gallons of fuel on board, and about two
and a half hours prior to a Shuttle launch, we'd
bring the crew out and strap him into the Space Shuttle,
and about t minus nine minutes we'd give the launch
director permission to go fly. And I never thought I'd
find myself in the same firing room as Werner von Braun,
(12:02):
who was my first center director, and have the privilege
of representing the team that built this magnificent machine and put.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
Put it into orbit.
Speaker 3 (12:12):
When I went down to my first Space Shuttle launch,
you sit in a control room with a headset and
sitting beside you as a project manager from the contractor
Lockheed Martin or Martin Marrietta when I first started, and
the two of you have got these headsets on to
folks down in New Orleans and people up at the
Marshall Space Flight Center and our Huntsville Operations Support Center.
(12:33):
A lot more people than I really realized were out
there available to me. And I was a fairly new
project manager when my boss's daughter was killed in an
amobile accident seventeen years old, and he called up and
told me of that tragic event.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
He said, Craig, I need you to go to the launch.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
And all of a sudden I realized I was going
to go from just learning about this vehicle but representing
this team. Carried all these books with me, all these
technical manuals, and I was reading too late in the night,
trying to get up to speed where I could maybe
contribute to what was going to go on, only to
find out that just by pressing a button on my
(13:13):
console when something came up or something happened, that I
had an extensive group of people, men and women out
there that I could call on and work issues.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
And there are issues.
Speaker 3 (13:24):
When you're tanking this vehicle for eight hours or so,
things start to happen to the vehicle. We're putting these
really extremely cold temperatures in the hydrogen tank four hundred
and twenty three degrees below zero, in the locks tank
over three hundred degrees below zero, and the phone, the
thermal protection system on the outside sometimes doesn't behave the
way it wants to, and you don't fly the next day.
(13:46):
You have to go out there and actually do a repair,
and then you get some surprises. Sometimes three day weekend,
everybody takes off. And it was the mating seasons for
the redheaded woodpecker. And if it wasn't a redhead, it's
the one that I remember. Woodpecker put over two hundred
holes in our external tank. Some very very smart folks
flew with me down to the Kennedy Space Center and
(14:08):
we went out and climbed up on the external tank.
I put a harness on and did you watch a
shuttle flight with a beanie cap that raises up at
the very end and swings over.
Speaker 4 (14:17):
Out of the way. Well, that's where I was at.
Speaker 3 (14:20):
Looking for holes in the external tank and make a
recommendation of my program managers on what we needed to
do to fix that. While I was standing out there,
you know, you're every bit of two hundred and fifty
feet off the ground, and you're looking straight down to
the ground, and something was steering at me.
Speaker 4 (14:37):
Have you ever had that happen?
Speaker 3 (14:39):
There were five birds vultures up in the sea breeze
stationary forty feet above my head looking at this tasty
morsel trying to count woodpecker holes, and you just never
forget that image. You know, shouldn't be anybody around me,
and I felt something steering at me, and I still
occasionally look.
Speaker 4 (14:59):
Up to see what's up there.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
But I would say my very first Space Shuttle launch
was probably the probably the most stressful, and it just
got better and better after that. When it counts down
to zero, you can't help but stand up out of
your seat and turn around. In three miles away, you
see the engines roaring to life and the vehicle coming
to life, and it's doing one hundred miles an hour
(15:21):
before it ever clears the launch pad, trying to get
up to that magic speed of seventeen thousand, five hundred
miles an hour, the orbital velocity that you need to
stay in low Worth orbit. And it was just totally awesome.
And the men and women that I got to work
with and their backgrounds. I would sit with people from
all walks of life who had a particular gift of
(15:42):
wanting to be an astronaut, who had PhDs and master's degrees,
skilled way beyond my understanding of engineering, that were being
selected to go fly into space. And I sat one
night with Katie Coleman, and she was a brand new
astronaut and we were fixing talk to a group of
one hundred people, had a man flight awareness dinner, and
(16:04):
we were going to watch a Space Shuttle launch the
next day. And I sat there somewhat kind of uneasy
with this young lady that had excelled so well in
her academic career and been selected, which is a very competitive.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
Process to be an astronaut.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
And I was about halfway through my dinner when she
leaned over she said, you know, I'm really nervous about this,
getting up in front and talking to these people, and
of course I just kind of took a deep breath
like I did it every day, and explained to her
what she was going to see the next day, because
it was going to be her first launch too. And
then to watch her career blossom and go up and
stay on the International Space Station and fly several times
(16:40):
with so many of the other men and women as
a team effort was pretty phenomenal as well.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
And you're listening to Craig Sumner talk about his experience
in the Space Shuttle program. I don't know if you've
ever had the chance to see one of these beasts,
these giants launch.
Speaker 2 (16:56):
I have twice. You never forget it. And miles away that's.
Speaker 1 (17:00):
Where you get to watch if you're lucky, or just
anywhere near Cocoa Beach or Cake Canaveral, anywhere near that area.
If it ever happens again, bring the family. It is
indescribable to be close to it. This is five hundred
and thirty five thousand gallons of gas in this quote vehicle.
It's just surreal, surreal. And Americans do this like we
(17:21):
do so many other things with ease and with grace
and with a deep sense of adventure. Craig Sumner's story
and NASA continues here on our American story, and we
(18:08):
returned to our American stories and the story of Craig
Sumner who worked at NASA from the time of the
Apollo missions to the Space Shuttle program. And when we
last left off, Craig was talking about the team effort it.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Takes to launch a shuttle or a rocket.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
Greig now shares with us stories about that team and
the people you worked with.
Speaker 3 (18:28):
The responsibilities immense when you sit in that room and
realize you've got five or more souls out there on
the Space Shuttle fixing a go launch, and all the
people that we had affect if we had some kind
of an accident. Puts a lot of stress, I think
on the launch team. But we were up to the challenge.
Jim Odom was the first project manager on the Space
(18:51):
Shuttle External.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
Tank, and time and time again he.
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Told us, test what you fly, and fly what you test,
and when the money gets short, guess what gets taken
off the table. I'm about to go run a test
that's going to cost four hundred thousand dollars it's a
lot of money, and it's to determine whether the foam
that we use on the downcomers, the feed lines that
bring liquid oxygen off the new Space Launch vehicle down
(19:18):
to the engines, if that phone will stay on there.
If it doesn't stay on, it's become a debris hazard.
And only through tests do you really find out whether
something's going to work or not. And it helps anchor
your analysis and it gives you confidence in margins that
you might not otherwise have. And the wrong place to
find out about.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
It is after the vehicle's built.
Speaker 3 (19:38):
Test pilots are an interesting breed of men and women.
And so when I was flying C one thirties, a
lot of times I got these arrogant pilots on board
and I'm smiling, but they knew everything. But when they're
on my airplane, they had to follow our rules, and
they weren't my rules, they were standard rules.
Speaker 4 (19:57):
A lot of times they didn't go by the rules.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
One of the things my dad taught me as a
jet pilot, you better fly within the envelope. And that's
within all the training, with all the education they can
possibly give you, and if you fly outside the envelope,
be prepared to suffer the consequences, and so he didn't
live by his own advice. He would exceed the limiting
(20:23):
altitude and a corsayer for the failure of different pumps
that did different things in the engines, and you know
he could burn those out, you know. And the torque
on these coursayers that my dad flew were so strong
that if you threw the power to it and didn't
have some left rudder put in, you might lose a wing,
(20:43):
which he did during takeoff. And the next day he
went in to see his commander expecting to be put
out of the Marine Corps, and commander had enough wisdom
and there was a war going on, so that probably helped. Lieutenant.
Did you learn anything? So, yeah, you get some of
that stuff along the way that really helps ground you
into people saying no, we're not going to do test,
(21:06):
and you know that it's going to require a test,
and you have to keep pushing on it even when
they say no. And if you know you're right, then
you've got to stand up and say what you really
truly believe. And if you can't do that, then you
need to be in a follower job, and follower jobs
are important, but if you're going to be in a
leadership role, you also need to be able to listen.
(21:27):
It'll be that quiet person in your group that has
a solution to your problem that you don't call on
or that you don't see on the side and get
the information that you need for the team to benefit from.
But you know, these guys in the Apollo were fearless.
So I'm sitting with Fred Hayes out in Denver and
(21:49):
everybody tells me, hey, when you get around Fred ask
them what it was like on Apollo thirteen. Well can
you imagine how many times he's been asked what was
it like on Apollo thirteen? So I'm sitting there, we're
waiting to fly the simulator, and I look over at
Fred and I say, hey, Fred, so how was it
on Apollo thirteen? And he just kind of looks around,
you know, he's looking for a camera. Who's a smart
(22:11):
alec that puts you.
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Up to it? Other than I almost died? You know.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
It was the way he started off my conversation and
that kind of stuck with me, you know. So you know,
Alan shephard our first man into space. On a poll
of fourteen, he and ed Mitchell have already separated from
the Command of Service module and they're in their limb
going down to the Moon and their radars not working,
and at ten thousand feet it's a no go. You know,
(22:36):
everything's supposed to be working at ten thousand feet. Mission
control knows that it's not working. Al Shepherd knows it's
not working, and he looks over ed Mitchell and said,
don't touch that button. It's the abort button up here
that takes you back up immediately to the command and
Service module. It said, yes, sir, there are backwards. They
can't even see where they're going. They're deaccelerating. And people
(22:56):
in mission control knows this guy that's been agrounded for
eleven years got put back on flight status, put himself
on this mission.
Speaker 4 (23:04):
He's going to go in visually.
Speaker 3 (23:06):
So they got to thinking real quick, you know, what
in the world could they possibly do? And they called
up and said, hey, how reach over and unplugged the
circuit breaker to the radar, Count to five and plug
it back in. It rebooted just like your computer at home.
And I think they landed within like sixty feet, so
you know, they're on the moon. They're going through their
checklists of shutting off engines and this, that and the other.
(23:27):
And ed Mitchell looks over and he says, hey, how
just curious would you've gone in visually? Shepherd looked over
and says, you'll never know. And they're both deceased. And
he never would tell ed Mitchell what he really was
going to do. But most of us were condenced. He
would have gone in visually. Now he'd gotten a lot
of trouble. He didn't care. He's probably going to be
(23:50):
done when he got back, asuming he didn't get smushed
on the moon surface. Those were the risk takers and
take people like John John Young, my favorite astronaut. Go
look at his heart rate landing on the Moon's surface.
Speaker 4 (24:04):
You know it elevated a little bit.
Speaker 3 (24:06):
Because he had somebody stand beside him, Charlie Duke. You know,
that's supposed to be doing his job. But that probably
put a little bit of stress on him. Every other commander,
it kind of peeked on up their ways. But cool,
calm and collected John Young. He knew what his focus
was going to be on, and that was the land
on the Moon and land where he was supposed to land,
and he did it. Werner von Braun was my center director.
(24:29):
But what I got locked into when I came up
here was one of the second generation of Germans that
came over and his name was Heines Lauser, and Heines
was responsible for building the Moon map that would simulate
us driving on the Moon.
Speaker 4 (24:44):
So we had.
Speaker 3 (24:45):
Pictures of what that surface looked like where we're going
to be landing, and with foam, rubber and latex paint.
I watched Heiness Lauser use a blow torch and nitrogen
to burn a crater and put it out. Burn a crater,
put it out. We got a three D picture over here,
and keep going. And when he was done, all this
stuff started coming together. I was a computer programmer, and
(25:09):
the simulator that we had downstairs was just like any
other flight simulator that you see today, the commercial.
Speaker 4 (25:15):
Pilots shoes, military pilot shoes.
Speaker 3 (25:18):
Our lunar rover program only had a about a three
foot round screen sitting in front of us up on
this hydraulic system that was one hundred yards away from
the computers that ran it, and the map that the
German that I got to work with built, and all
of that came together with four little teflawn balls that
ran across the little bumps and crooks and crannies of
(25:40):
this latex map. So the team were NASA civil servants,
contractor individuals, but it took a team. It took a team.
Nobody did this on their own. It's amazing. I think
what I missed the most when I retired were the people.
And so the triumph was, go find a group of
(26:01):
people that had faith in you that you could provide
the environment, the leadership and the support and the encouragement,
and turn that team loose and watch them excel. And
when that happens, you've got something going. It far exceeds
anything that you can do as an individual.
Speaker 1 (26:19):
And you've been listening to Craig Summoner and his life story.
Great job as always Tamanti for bringing us that piece
and his dad it advised them always fly within the envelope,
fly outside the envelope, and prepare to suffer the consequences.
Now also love that line, test what you fly, and
fly what you test. In the original test flight dummies
(26:39):
were two guys called the Wright Brothers because they actually
tested what they flew, and it differentiated them from everybody
else who is tinkering engineers engineered pilots flew.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
And they couldn't talk to each other. The right brothers
knew both angles, both flew.
Speaker 1 (26:53):
The story of Craig Sumner, the story of NASA in
a way, an American flight and innovation and space adventure.
Here on our American story
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.