engineering in prior years he was busy on space projects with nasa and r c a and played a key role in bringing the last apollo moon walked into living rooms around the world so welcome sam now you saw it from both ends of development so how did you get involved in the space program what brought you to that point well actually it goes way back when i stories on radio and also in magazines during world war two i remember when the germans the two rocket development and it was actually discovered what it was the secret weapon that it just seemed that the whole world had changed at that point well i had been interested in technology from the get go i was interested in electricity and my dad said chief i think all the way finished at rensselaer polytechnic institute but i was interested in electronics and got a wonderful job right after school that's when jobs are really available there was a lot of work being done with the government and i went to a great company called airborne instruments laboratory on long island and they came out of the mysteries to radiation lever tory was a worked on laboratory at mit and columbia university and they were known as the company of engineers and i really fit into that and got into some projects early on nasa was formed after the sputnik had gone up let me stop you there sure just talk right about that point when sputnik went up because i was around then too once but nick went up everybody felt bad about the russians beating us to this what were the conversations like in the workplace where you were people upset about sputnik i think it was an exciting time because it really got us off the d we had a very modest project for something called the international geophysical year that was one nine hundred fifty seven fifty eight it was an eighteen month year so to speak were really caught off guard but i think you know from my standpoint it was a point of real excitement that something is really going on and it's interesting when what and i am interrupting you because i just realize you know you and i are older but there are probably a lot of people who don't realize that maybe sputnik what it was what was different about sputnik as opposed to viking at that time well viking it was just an idea that people talked about that we were going to put a satellite into orbit the idea being if you can get a rock it moving far enough toward the east the faster it goes the further it falls and finally it ends up literally falling around the earth into an orbit and that was a new idea idea really for most people the people in science fiction and  people who are interested in simon i was just a kid at that point and hearing what was going on and what i thought was scientific circles was it was something that would be done definitely would be done  but it was such a dramatic thing to see that the russians had put this satellite up they had heard nothing from them about what was going on and they had a whole program and it was new to us that we really didn't understand and suddenly the announcement that the earth satellite has been put up by the russians and you could go out and watch it move in this way and to see a little star really creeping across the sky at a pretty quick quick pace and also knowing that it was sending out radio signals and that they could do this at any time it just really i think it was scary t public definitely i mean the threat imagined was that well if the russians can do that they can put things in space and bomb us from space and it was the beginning of the time when we we having development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and there was all super secret at that time but this really brought it to the fore that really there was a need for the u s to do something the eisenhower administration didn't think that it was very important but the people did and there was a lot of pressure to get things going alderman he leading to kennedy's pronouncement of the moon program field operation in fort meade which is not too much of interest right here but i came back and felt i wasn't doing very much and  i went and called up one of the consultants at this company and i said well i'm really not doing a lot right now and is there something i could do and it was not long before that after that that  was in a project working in space and later worked on a small nasa project which was six exploring the i am a sphere doing something rockets and satellites but the thing that really grabbed hold of me was the apollo project idea of putting a man on the moon and bringing him back alive and there was just a i just wanted to be a part of that very much and i was learning as much as i possibly could about everything to do with space i mean rockets and tracking and everything the electronics particularly and so i took a job with the grumman company with the idea that they would send me to houston and i did that as a consultant to them to help them work on their planning for the for the moon  landing how they would manage mission control and all of that and by the way they sent me out on one of the earlier missions on the gemini program gemini for gemini was a two man spacecraft it was the whole idea of the program was to explore the whole problem of rendezvous in space that is not just putting something into orbit around the earth but putting something else in orbit and being able to navigate to this other spacecraft or body or whatever it was and how you do all the mechanics the celestial mechanics of being able to get there which put me out as a flight control crew as what they call the astro simulator simulator so i would go out on this ship and i was really part of the crew but i helped out in simulations because they needed the voice of an astronaut when they did their simulations and i was in another part of this ship the ship was a converted liberty ship  we flew down to lima peru and shipped out of peru and went about eight hundred miles southwest of through the reason we went out into the sea because the way all of the tracking stations had been set up were for justice a mission where you would go from the cape and go around the earth and come back so they had all of these satellites these stations in th so they could pick up and they could check on what was going on and but on a longer mission in this was a four day mission first time they went beyond a day long and during when you have an orbit going around the earth the earth is turning underneath that orbit so to speak and at night time all of the stations were out of communication range with any of any of the fixed locations so they had place this ship out in the south pacific so we were the ones that were in contact with this spacecraft at night and it was it was an exciting experience because i was really i mean aside from my help on the simulator i was really part of the crew there were six of us that went to engineers two doctors a capsule communicator and myself and the technology of that time was really although it was the best that we had at that point it was really crude by today's standards the reason we were out there as part of a mission control team was that the communications with houston which they were just opening up at that point for mission control they could be in communication only through these ground stations or with the ship and the ship communicated only by high frequency or what we call short wave radio that let me ask you sam charge you strike me as a very polite individual and probably because of the time you were raised but can you tell me when the men are all together in that situation did they get upset when somebody lost contact or something went wrong was there a lot of screaming and yelling get that you can remember we didn't have any on this particular trip i remember though that a friend of mine he turned out to be later the guy who became captain video in the mission control when they had television from the moon but he was in a flight control team at hawaii and it was during a simulation and they were trying to simulate different circumstances and he pretended that he was having a heart attack right there the tracking station created a riot on the other that work out that's the only yelling and screaming but a lot of lot of talk about that you know i think about our current situation and right now nasa we're trying to figure out how to get back to our space station that's up there right now so you know even though you're talking about the challenges and the crude technology in some ways some of the same challenges exist today we've got to get back there we've got to land we've got to have enough fuel to get to get there we've got to be able to dock and connect to the space station so we're we've got some some problem still i think there was something great about the way the apollo program was set up it was set up by a president a president who said we're going to go to the moon and we're going to put a man on the moon and we're going to bring him back and we're going to do that in this decade there was the mission and there was the deadline and right now in a way we have no deadline and it keeps on getting pushed on pushed on and i think probably also because we had a marker president president kennedy nobody was going to take away from that project we were going to go there in a way it was for him and i mean as probably similar to maybe the military in a way except that we were killing anybody we were we were ventures really creating something new when he made his pronouncement that we were going to go to the moon nobody really knew how we're going to do it and there were proposals for giant giant roger rockets that were just probably impossible to do quickly within that time scale and it was a do it if we could possibly could there were a lot of obstacles in the way there was the apollo fire on apollo one or three strikes or killed on the pad and probably that helped the program a lot bad as it was tragic as it was that we we were as as a as a program to really determine to go ahead and do it do it the right way which we did want to be part of that must be the best one of the high points of your life who different time is a wonderful time it was a it was it was exciting it was working not only with people in the spirit of moving ahead and it was kind of a blue sky spirit i don't know about it that were really really exploring something greatly knew well that were there any concerns i mean this is a non technical question maybe you can't answer this but since we hadn't been to the moon yet at least we hadn't put a man on the moon yet whether any concerns that we would discover something where there's any was there any preparation for life other discoveries on the moon met the time i need conversation about what's up there at that point well well along in the program there was concern that well maybe there's something up there some diseases that we don't know anything about so that became very fearful to be afraid that they might bring some diseases back and  so there was something called the lunar receiving station where everything came back from the moon had to go through and be inspected and checked out that was that was one thing let's see  another thing which is interesting that was being tried out you're normally when scientific research is being done scientists will go out they'll have a project going they'll be funded and so forth the project will be done  and it will take years before maybe a paper would come out on what the results were of the one we're going to the moon you had to do everything during that one mission and there was something called doing science in real time and so there were support people in the wings at mission control that were helping guide the exploration along because if they found something new they wanted to be able to find out what it was and maybe if they should be doing something else while we were there knowing that they never would have the opportunity to come back and do it again you just couldn't couldn't repeat it so that i think this is what i don't understand once we went there i don't understand why we haven't gone back again but that's another show that we're going to have to talk about the politics of that talk with done and being able to reuse the boosters that he is sending up so the cost of access to space as possibly can come way down in the future and then of course many many things are going on right now  tourists in space going up straight up and coming back down maybe for i don't know two three hour flight you get to the edge of space you're weightless you come back down there seems to be a real appeal for that the ticket price for going there is very expensive but looks like some people are going to be able to afford obgyn to wait till they find the wormhole but listen to what that's about the show i'm going to bring you back to have that conversation ok i want to know since you were part of this what drove you to leave all of this move into film i mean i can't even imagine well you know i think there were a few things that really  it i thought about it of the time of course when i was a kid i had a real interest in photography and film my dad took home movies and i was very interested in what he was doing that i was very interested in sound recording  the technology i used to build things fires and audio systems and and there was something that happened when we i was working asteroid didn't have to be pointing the camera they they had other things to do and so the camera could be controlled really from mission control it was with that project that r c a had me to do some public relations work for them also they thought i could speak well for the camera project and other projects that they had so i was doing a little p r sessions with the press on television and i think just being in that whole environment of being you know with the media and being fascinated with it and coming back to where i was when i was growing up so and what happened in the early seventies with the funding for the space program came right back to last came way down in  these things from when i was a kid interest that i had as a kid i just became more and more powerful and i decided i wanted to follow this and so i finally left r c a started my own business for a while and then joined with some filmmakers who are actually doing documentary film for new jersey public television and we formed a company in one nine hundred seventy eight and did quite a number of very very interesting work and looking back on it the whole idea of video if you said video well that was a technical thing but there was no such thing as doing a video up until the early seventies the only thing we had was television television people didn't do videos there was no way to really record video other than what could be done in a big studio but we also in the saw in the seventies that maybe this would be an interesting business to get into similar to filmmaking i mean it is filmmaking in a way but using a different medium and so i really was in at the beginning of making videos and now of course everything is changed again so that something that in the seventies was very difficult to do to do a video required a lot of money and you had to have a big studio you expensive cameras we were in business and early seventy eight and to finish you biddy zero program for a company we had to go to new york city to have it edited in a so my own i phone which i use and i really the video quality video quality is very very good on it i think to feature films have now already been filmed using i phones and  it's just extraordinary that anybody has access to this the know how is a little bit different but you have all the tools available for relatively modest cost to do your own and  it's just stunning back and i remember the first video project we did i think it was probably one nine hundred eighty we had a truck full of equipment we did it was johnson and johnson wow and we drove up in a truck and just everything unloaded and so forth and but the equipment was that complex and cumbersome at that time well i just think that your gift because you're also teaching as well now as well as continuing your work in video i think you are a gift to people and i look forward to having more conversations with you would just say it's your curiosity has driven you from place to place to your current work it has been curiosity yes it has and actually i'm doing a not a lot of teaching but i really enjoyed it  particularly doing it in teaching documentary film which i really love i mean i it's different from the hollywood style or scripted shows a lot of scripted shows are