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NASA ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

ORAL HISTORY TRANSCRIPT

RICHARD H. TRULY

INTERVIEWED BY REBECCA WRIGHT

GOLDEN, COLORADO – 16 JUNE 2003

WRIGHT: This oral history with Richard Truly is being conducted by Rebecca Wright for the 

NASA Oral History Project at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, 

where Admiral Truly serves as the director. Today is June 16th, 2003.

We thank you for taking time to participate with our project.

TRULY: Thank you for including me.

WRIGHT: We’d like to start by you sharing with us how your interest in aviation began.

TRULY: Well, of course, when I was a kid, I was like all other kids. I was interested in flying, 

but a hundred other things, built model airplanes, that kind of thing, but I never really intended to 

be a pilot. It just never occurred to me that that would be a possibility.

When I eventually went to college at Georgia Tech [Georgia Institute of Technology, 

Atlanta, Georgia], I knew that I wanted to be an engineer, and I had a Navy ROTC [Reserve

Officer Training Corps] scholarship to Tech. When I had to select an engineering degree path, 

aeronautical engineering looked intriguing to me, and I selected AE. Still didn’t want to be a 

pilot. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be, it just never [really occurred to me] I was going to be an 

engineer.
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My [first] midshipman summer cruise, between my freshmen and sophomore years, was 

at sea aboard [a destroyer escort], the USS Fred T. Berry (DDE-858). But the second cruise was 

not an at-sea cruise, but they called it a cruise [anyway]. It was a combination naval aviation 

indoctrination down in Corpus Christi [Texas] and [then] a Marine Corps indoctrination up at 

Little Creek, Virginia. When I went through that summer and went down to Corpus Christi, [it 

was] the first time I was around [naval] aviation. They took us on a couple of flights in some 

kind of [jet] trainer, and the Blue Angels [put on an air show]. At the time they were flying [the 

Grumman] F-11F [“Tiger”]. And I was really intrigued. I mean, I really thought, “Man, this is 

really great.” I never had thought of [an aviation career], really, before.

So when I got back to Georgia Tech, I had thought about it somewhat. I realized that 

[because] I had a Navy scholarship; my commitment, because of the scholarship, to the Navy 

was three years. ... But for [only] one additional year of commitment to the Navy, I could apply 

to flight school. So I figured, I would do that.

I went back to the Navy ROTC unit, and I signed up for a track to be a naval aviator. [I 

graduated from] Georgia Tech at the end of the four years; I got my degree in aeronautical 

engineering but also in that last year [I] took all the physicals for flight school and so forth, and I 

passed them all. So the Navy [issued] me a set of orders to flight school at Pensacola [Florida]. 

So that’s how I got into it. It wasn’t that I wanted to all my life. It was a career choice. I’d 

never intended to stay in the Navy. I intended to go get my wings, fly for the four years, and 

then I was going to get out of the Navy and go to graduate school. So that’s how I ended up 

starting my flying career.

WRIGHT: How did those plans shift where that didn’t happen and you ended up—
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TRULY: Well, I went through flight school, as I said, directly after college, and got my wings 

after about [sixteen] months. I got a set of orders to a Navy fighter squadron, VF-33, which was 

flying off the USS Intrepid and home-based in Naval Air Station Oceana, Virginia. ... First, I 

went to Jacksonville [Florida], trained in the airplane. It was [the Chance Vought] F-8 Crusader. 

Then I [reported] to VF-33, and I proceeded through that first tour.

After that first tour, if you added up the time that I was in flight school, plus that first 

tour, that was when I was going to get out of the Navy. ... [After one year in the squadron], our 

air group, including VF-33, was reassigned from the USS Intrepid to the USS Enterprise. So 

toward the tail end of that fighter squadron tour, I was aboard Enterprise. The skipper of the 

squadron, [commander] Larry Ned Smith, who’s now dead, came to me and suggested that I 

apply to test pilot school, which I had never thought about. Every point in my career, I just kind 

of backed into [the opportunities].

At any rate, the skipper came to me and suggested that I apply for test pilot school. So I 

thought about it, thinking that if I got selected I would be sent to [Naval Air Station] Patuxent 

River, Maryland, where the Navy school is. So I decided to do that, and I was at sea [so I] didn’t 

get a chance to talk to my wife, Cody. I applied to test pilot school and then later told her about 

it, which did not make a big hit, because she had made her plans just like I had for me to get out 

of the Navy and go get a graduate engineering degree. ... 

At any rate, I applied to Navy test pilot training, and I figured that if I didn’t get selected, 

which I didn’t figure I would, then I’d get out of the Navy. If I did get selected, I’d stay in the 

Navy, because I didn’t want to just continually make decisions about will I get out, will I stay in. 

So that was it.
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I wrote off a letter to the Navy, applied to test pilot school, and lo and behold, I got 

selected to go to test pilot school. But the Navy didn’t send me to Patuxent River. Unbeknownst 

to me, the Navy had just started an exchange program with the Air Force out at Edwards Air 

Force Base [California], and so I got a set of orders not to Naval Air Station Patuxent River, but 

to Edwards Air Force Base, to a school that was called the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Research 

Pilot School.

So I told Cody that we were staying in the Navy and moving, and going to the Air Force 

school out at Edwards, and we did that. When I checked out of VF-33 at Oceana, it was in 

November of 1963. I remember [President John F.] Kennedy got assassinated that month, and 

when we were packing out of our house, the black-and-white TV was on and it was Kennedy’s 

funeral. I was a brand-new Navy lieutenant.

... Cody and I packed up the family, and we [started driving] west. I had to go through 

Brooks Air Force Base [Texas] to take a long physical that was required by the test pilot school. 

We arrived at Edwards over the Christmas season, and I started into the test pilot training in 

January of that coming year. I was in class 64A. The commandant of the school was [Colonel] 

Chuck [Charles E.] Yeager.

At that point, I had something over a thousand hours of flying time and about three 

hundred-plus carrier landings. Another person who ended up becoming a dear friend, another 

Navy lieutenant, by the name of Jack [John L.] Finley, was in that class, and most of my 

classmates were Air Force. There was a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot, two Navy, the rest Air 

Force, except for there were also two NASA [test] pilots. One of them was Fred [W.] Haise, 

who later flew Apollo 13, and [the other was] Don [Donald L.] Mallick. Fred and Don were test 

pilots up at the NASA [Dryden] Flight Research Center at Edwards [California].
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WRIGHT: You were part of that school, and how did you learn about the Manned Orbiting 

Laboratory Program, and how did you become part of that program?

TRULY: The Air Force had a [space] program called Dyna-Soar, and as a matter of fact, during 

that [westward] trip, after I had left Oceana and was driving to Edwards, the Air Force 

announced that the Dyna-Soar Program was being cancelled. But at the time same, they 

announced they were going to start a new space program, which was going to be an orbital space 

station, if you will, called the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, or MOL. That didn’t [interest] me, 

since I [felt] that I was not qualified to be an astronaut. I had never thought about it. The 

Mercury guys had been selected to NASA, but, I never even dreamed that I would be able to ever 

do something like that.

So we started into that test pilot training during [1964], and all of us in the school knew 

that MOL was coming and Dyna-Soar had been cancelled. But I was working hard [just] to get 

through the test pilot school, and I wasn’t thinking about flying in space. Well, it turned out that 

unbeknownst to all the students in the school, Chuck Yeager and [an officer] who worked for 

him named “Buck” Buchanan, who was an Air Force lieutenant colonel at the time, later made 

colonel, I believe, had gone to Air Force [Headquarters in Washington, D.C.] and had convinced 

the Air Force that the first group of MOL astronauts to be selected had to be graduates of the 

Aerospace Research Pilot School that I was attending.

The first six months of [the curriculum] was test pilot school and the last six months of it 

was more about space, where you learned about orbital mechanics and spacecraft systems and 
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digital computers and all of that. You’ve got to remember this was 1964, so, a lot of this really 

[was] cutting-edge stuff.

Well, as we got about two-thirds or three-quarters of the way through 1964, through my 

test pilot training, suddenly we realized that [the Air Force] had limited the number of [MOL] 

candidates just to graduates of this school, and they [further] had decided to include our class, 

even though wouldn’t graduate until December of that year. [The game had changed.] 

The other thing that they didn’t tell anybody was that without ever asking for 

applications, Yeager convinced the Air Force that the graduates of the school, of which there 

were only eighty-five including our class, they just figured all eighty-five would want to do it, 

and so they started a selection without anybody knowing it. The candidates to be eventually 

selected, in other words, the candidates to be selected in that first MOL class, were [from] the 

eighty-five graduates of the school.

Now, finally, I realized that our names were in this selection, but it still didn’t [register 

that I had a chance]. I mean, some of the world’s most famous test pilots had already graduated 

from the school. They were setting world records right and left in the X-15 and other airplanes 

at the time. So, again, it didn’t occur to me that I had any chance of being selected. But 

suddenly, I did realize that my name was in that pot.

Meanwhile, down at NASA, NASA was selecting more and more crews, and a lot of 

people that were in the test pilot school made the choice either to not be—you know, “I only 

want to go to NASA,” or, you know, “I’ll do anything.” A lot of them [later flew] to the Moon, 

you know. [Many] were [from] that same group of people that were graduates of this school.

Well, come November, I think, or so of 1964, Yeager and Buchanan flew to Washington 

[D.C.], and they were completing their [secret] selection and they had gone through everybody’s 
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records. There was a selection board. They came back and, I’ll be damned, I got selected, and 

so did Finley. So there were originally [nine] people that were identified for the MOL Program, 

but they weren’t going to announce the selection until the Air Force formally announced the 

beginning of the program, because they needed money from Congress. There were [seven] Air 

Force and two Navy. [I was the youngest.]

Well [in December], I graduated from test pilot school, and the Air Force had to hang on 

to Finley and me. They didn’t want to send us back to the Navy, because they had us there. So 

they decided to keep us at Edwards, and the Navy agreed to this, while the Air Force was waiting 

to announce the MOL Program. They kept us at Edwards as instructors in the Aerospace 

Research Pilot School. So in 1965, I became a test pilot instructor.

During that next year, one of the [nine] crewmen had some sort of a medical problem or 

something [and dropped off the list], and so on November 12th of 1965, there was [an Air Force] 

press conference [in Los Angeles, California]. I remember that date well, because it was my 

twenty-eighth birthday. ... They formally announced the first MOL crew, or group of astronaut 

selection, and it was [eight] people. It was the remaining [six] Air Force, less the one that had 

been taken out of consideration, [plus] Jack Finley and me. ... [In the summer of 1966, Michael 

J. Adams left the MOL program to return to Edwards and fly the X-15. That left seven of us, 

and we jokingly referred to ourselves as “the magnificent seven” after the movie. Unfortunately, 

Mike Adams was killed in an X-15 accident in November 1967.]

So suddenly I was in an astronaut program, and we worked like the devil from that day 

until that program was eventually cancelled in 1969 by President [Richard M.] Nixon. It was a 

classified program. It still remains classified. But we eventually moved down to Los Angeles 

[California]. The MOL Program office was located in El Segundo [California]. So I was an 
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MOL astronaut from that press conference until the day the program was cancelled, which all of 

us in the program still refer to as Black Tuesday. It was Tuesday, the tenth of June 1969.

During that period, we’d made many trips to NASA. The Gemini Program was [flying]. 

Eventually Gemini was over, and Apollo was coming. So they would take us on tours of the 

Cape [Canaveral, Florida] and tours of [Marshall Space Flight Center] Huntsville [Alabama] and 

tours down at the Manned [Spacecraft] Center in Houston [Texas], which was later named for 

[President Lyndon B.] Johnson. So I got to know all the NASA [astronauts]. I already knew 

many of them, but during that period I got to know just about all of the NASA astronauts during 

the sixties. We would go to launches. But we were in a different program, which was a military 

program. So I never filled out an application to be on MOL.

Well, let me tell you one other thing. After that first MOL selection, a lot of other 

[pilots] in the Air Force really complained because they didn’t get a chance to be selected. Some 

of them had gone to graduate school and gotten doctorates and this and that. So the Air Force 

changed the rules after that first selection, and then they had a formal selection where you had to 

apply. Then all the applications would come in, and you would be considered. They’d do a 

selection. And so there were a couple [more] MOL groups of [pilots] that [joined] the MOL 

flight crew during that period.

Well, MOL was cancelled [on June 10th] of 1969, and, of course, Apollo 11 was coming 

up in July of that year. So it was a very exciting time in the space program. All the NASA 

people were happy because they were getting ready to go to the Moon, and the MOL people 

were just crushed. I didn’t know what was going to happen to my career. I went to the 

Pentagon. The Navy was really good, though, and they offered to assign me to any airplane I 

wanted to fly in the Navy and go to Vietnam.
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[During the same time], there was a discussion between NASA and the Air Force about 

what to do with the MOL crew. At the time of the [MOL] cancellation, there were fourteen 

MOL flight [crewmen]. “Deke” [Donald K.] Slayton and the people down at [the NASA 

Manned Spacecraft Center] didn’t want us. They didn’t want any more astronauts, because they 

already had too many. They’ve always had too many, I think. But they had all these people in 

the Astronaut Office. They were in the process of just starting Apollo. They were also in the 

process of winding down the program and looking at cancellations of Apollo 18 and Apollo 19. 

So, Deke didn’t want us.

Nevertheless, [at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.], George [E.] Mueller, who 

you probably have an oral review, and he may have covered this same thing. He was head of the 

Office of Space Flight, and he decided that they should take some of the MOL crew, and the 

agreement that was cut [with the Air Force] was that they would reassign the seven youngest 

MOL crewmen out of the fourteen to NASA. Well, it turned out that of the original MOL crew 

that had been announced at that first press conference in 1965, I was the only one that was young 

enough [in 1969] to still be in the youngest seven of the MOL fourteen. So I never filled out an 

application [to NASA]. So I’m the only person who has ever flown in space that never applied. 

[Laughs]

WRIGHT: That’s quite a character reference there.

TRULY: [At] any rate, Cody and I picked up, [packed the family, and] moved to Houston, which 

was very traumatic. ... The fact [that NASA] didn’t want us didn’t have anything to do with 

personalities or anything. They just had too many people. So any rate, they took us. We drove 
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from Los Angeles to Houston in August of 1969, and the family’s heels were dug in all the way 

across the country. [Finally] arrived in Houston. [Our dog even died on the trip!] God, it was 

typical Houston awful summer, humidity was terrible.

I arrived in the Astronaut Office in between Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. So Neil [A. 

Armstrong] and his crew had flown to the Moon, and Pete [Charles] Conrad and his crew were in 

training. That’s how I got to NASA.

WRIGHT: Before we get into those days, can you share what you were able to share maybe with 

your family and friends when you were part of the MOL? What were you able to tell people that 

you were doing?

TRULY: Well, the description of what the program was was unclassified. It was a [two man 30-

day mission, a] Gemini-[B] spacecraft attached to a sixty-foot cylindrical station, thirty feet of it 

closest to the Gemini module was called a habitation module, or hab module. Then the [aft] 

thirty feet was the mission equipment, [called the mission module].

However, what that mission was on orbit was classified and still remains classified. So 

we didn’t tell anybody anything. NASA has always invited the public to know everything about 

[NASA programs] that’s possible to know. In the Air Force, that press conference we had the 

day we were announced was the last press conference that the MOL flight crew ever had, and we 

were not allowed to even talk to the media. It was a classified program. So I really couldn’t go 

home with the family and tell them much about it, and I wish they’d declassify the damned thing

so I could. But I can’t change that.
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WRIGHT: What were some of your first duties and responsibilities once you arrived as part of the 

Astronaut Office?

TRULY: When I got down there, they decided to take the better part of a year so we could learn 

about NASA—we already knew a lot. I mean, we already had trained to fly. We knew all about 

spacecraft systems and all that. But on the other hand, we did not know specifically about the 

Saturn booster or the [Apollo] command module and the lunar module and all of that. So we 

went to school and went to training briefings about the NASA hardware.

Skylab was also coming along. We were beginning to fly the remaining flights of the 

Apollo Program, but everybody knew that Apollo was going to be cut short. Somewhere in 

there, Apollo 18, 19, and, I think, 20, which were planned, were all cancelled. So the Astronaut 

Office was all tied up with the Apollo missions, as they should be. In those days, you had a 

prime crew, a backup crew, and a support crew devoted to every mission. Dave [David R.] Scott 

asked me to be on the support crew for Apollo 15, and I was thinking about that. At the same 

time, Walt [Walter] Cunningham was leading the part of the office that was planning Skylab, 

[and he asked me to join Skylab].

I just decided [against] hanging onto Apollo, even though it was a magic mission, it will 

never be repeated, but I didn’t see any future in me being on the support crew for Apollo 15 or 

any other Apollo mission, and I did think I could bring a lot to the Skylab [effort]. So I elected 

[to turn] down the opportunity to be Apollo 15 support crew, and I joined Walt and the team of 

people in the office that were planning Skylab, which was getting essentially no notice at the 

time because Apollo was still going on.
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I was in the [Astronaut] Office during all the Apollo missions, except for Apollo 11, and I 

learned about the command module and I knew all the hardware and all that stuff, but I was 

never directly on any of the support crews or backup crews for Apollo. I devoted myself entirely 

to working towards Skylab. That was a full-time job, it really was. It was a totally different 

mission, different hardware, except for the command module. So I got into that. The job that I 

was given was the Orbital workshop which was being built by McDonnell Douglas in 

Huntington Beach [California].

I should back up for a minute. Back when I was on the MOL Program, I was working on 

that classified part of the mission, and that was done in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, by 

General Electric. So when I lived in Los Angeles, I was having to travel to King of Prussia, 

Pennsylvania, to work on the space program, and Huntington Beach was right down the road. So 

then when I moved to Houston, then my job was out at Huntington Beach, and so now I’m living 

in Houston working on the Skylab workshop, which was in Huntington Beach. The other parts 

of the Skylab were in different parts of the country, being built by different contractors. One was 

in St. Louis [Missouri], but they were all over the country.

So most of the MOL crew was assigned to Skylab—me, Bob [Robert L.] Crippen, Bob 

[Robert F.] Overmyer, who’s now dead, and several others. So we were really workhorses in 

bringing Skylab to its launch. All of those different parts of the Skylab were having problems in 

the factory. [NASA] had to get them out of the factory and send them all down to the Cape so 

they could eventually be assembled.

I was working the Skylab mission, and as we got closer to flight, [NASA] decided who 

was going to fly [the three] Skylab [missions]. I foolishly thought that maybe I would actually 

get to fly on Skylab, but I really didn’t account for the fact that [for] Deke and Al [Alan B.] 
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Shepard—the way it worked was, you were in a line. There were a lot of people in line ahead of 

me, and so even though [the MOL crew] imagined that maybe we’d get assigned [to fly] Skylab, 

it wasn’t to be.

So they announced the crews, and Pete [Conrad] was going to command the first Skylab 

crew, and then Al [Alan L.] Bean the second and Jerry [Gerald P.] Carr the third. By this time 

we had worked on Skylab, we knew all about it, and so as we got closer to flight and the 

hardware had [been shipped] to the Cape, we began training in the [Mission] Control Center. 

We were going to be the CapComs [Capsule Communicators] on Skylab.

Well, I got assigned the job of being the ascent, rendezvous, and entry CapCom on the 

first mission, but I had never worked on [the command module], even though I had [gone 

through] those early briefings on the command module. ... I knew all about the workshop, but I 

didn’t know much about the command module, so I had to learn that. So my first experience in 

actual flight, not counting the training, was in the ascent and rendezvous for Skylab.

I was on [Flight Director] Phil [Philip C.] Shaffer’s team, “the Purple Gang. ... If you 

remember [when] the workshop was put into orbit, the meteorite shield fell off, [and] one of the 

solar wings was torn off. I was prepared the very next day to be the CapCom for Pete Conrad, 

[Joseph P. Kerwin, and Paul J. Weitz] going to the workshop, and I was sitting in the CapCom 

seat for that unmanned launch when the meteorite shield fell off.

Well, of course, you know what happened. NASA had to figure out what the heck to do. 

They thought they were going to lose the mission. They eventually did all the workarounds, and 

we hustled. There was a launch opportunity for Pete and his crew, if I remember right, every 

five days. They still were working so hard to figure out how to save the mission, that [we] 

missed [the first five-day launch] opportunity. So ten days later, they actually launched.
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I was the CapCom for the launch and the rendezvous. At the end of the rendezvous, [the 

crew was] supposed to just dock, and they couldn’t dock. They had a problem with the docking 

hardware, and so I [and] the Purple Gang and I could not get off the console because since they 

couldn’t dock, they had to back away and essentially re-rendezvous, and we were the only 

rendezvous flight control team. So I think I was plugged [into the console] for twenty hours or 

so. I mean, the record would show. But the team behind us couldn’t relieve us because our team 

[was] the only one that knew the rendezvous.

Well, finally, late, late, late that night, we made one last [docking] attempt, and if that had 

failed, we were going to park the command module several miles behind the workshop, and 

think about it. And sure enough, by golly, they docked. So then we had to stay on console 

longer, because we were the ones that, once they started opening hatches and stuff, [only the 

purple gang] had trained for all of that. So we finally got off the console, and I don’t remember 

how many hours it was.

At any rate, the Skylab mission flew, and I was the entry CapCom for the reentry of Pete 

Conrad’s crew. But then after that first mission, somebody decided that they wanted somebody 

else to do the reentry, and that was good, because it allowed somebody else to get that reentry 

training and experience. Bob Crippen became the entry CapCom. So in the second mission, 

“Beano’s” mission, and Jerry’s mission, [the third mission], I was the ascent and rendezvous 

CapCom, but “Crip” was the entry CapCom.

WRIGHT: Well, our time is almost up today.

TRULY: It passes in a hurry, doesn’t it?
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WRIGHT: Yes, sir, it does. And there’s so much more to talk about Skylab, maybe the next time 

that we can sit down, we could pick it up from here. Would that be okay?

TRULY: Sure, I’d be glad to. Yes.

WRIGHT: All right.

[End of interview]