Oral History Program Vera Lynn Hansen Interviewed by Brian Hansen 25 April 2008 i Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Vera Lynn Hansen Interviewed by Brian Hansen 25 April 2008 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library ii Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Hansen, Vera Lynn, an oral history by Brian Hansen, 25 April 2008, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Vera Lynn Hansen. It is being conducted on April 25, 2008, by her son Brian Hansen in Ogden, Utah. Vera Hansen discusses her memories of the Great Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. BH: So, to get things started, I would like to ask when you were born. VH: I was born May 21, 1951, in Richmond, California. BH: Okay, I’m talking with my mother, and we have found interest in the Great Space Race of the late 50's and 60's, so I'd like to talk about that. So, what is the first thing you remember about, what we would come to call, the space race? VH: The first thing that I remember was hearing about Sputnik. I was very young, probably around five or six when all that happened...when Sputnik first came out and it seemed like a very exciting thing at the time that people could actually send something out into space. My next memory that I have was December of 1957—I would have been six and a half years old at that time. For some reason, my dad took me to a babysitter, which he didn't normally do and I got to go downstairs and watch TV 'til it was ready for me to go school. That particular day happened to be the day that they launched a rocket, and they actually televised it. There was a lot of publicity about this particular rocket going up into space and it was done at Cape Canaveral, Florida and it was televised. I remember it being very early in the morning. It was probably 6:30 in the morning in California when they showed it on TV. I guess that they had a special report because TV usually didn't come one that early in the morning. I believe it was the Vanguard 1 rocket that went up. I thought it was very exciting. There was a countdown and there was all this fire and white smoke everywhere and it started to go up and I don't remember it ever lifting off the launch pad. That's why I think it was the Vanguard because apparently the Vanguard went up about four feet and then crashed. It exploded and it was really sad. But, for me, I was thrilled. I didn't realize that wasn't what it was supposed to do, that it was supposed to go all the way up to the sky. My memories of that were really exciting. I remember when my Dad came to pick me up from school that we all talked about it. How exciting it was that we were trying to get a rocket up into the sky. Probably about a month later, the first Jupiter rocket, I guess it was Explorer I, really truly went up. That was amazing to me, absolutely amazing. You could see the smoke trail going up and you could just see the teeny, tiny rocket some of the flames and stuff coming off. They explained to us in the newscast how the stages of the rocket were going to separate. I thought that had to be the most awesome thing in the whole world to be able to see. And that is what I remember...those are my first memories of the space race. BH: I know you were young but did you have any idea why we were doing this? VH: At the time, no. I really didn't. At our household, politics were not spoken of because my Dad was very conservative and my Mother was very liberal and they did not see eye to eye on anything. When the news came on at night, it was 6 o'clock at night and that's when we were eating dinner and we never eat with the TV on, so, I never saw news. I never saw a newscast during the day or during the evening, and at 10 o'clock I was already in bed. So I never got to see news televised. News didn't normally come one, when I was little, until late morning. Maybe 10 o'clock...9, 10, 11 o'clock, so I never got 2 to see all the politics. Later, as I got a little older and as kids talk—you know, they all hear their parents talk about these things—there was a great fear of the Sputniks. You could wait outside at night and watch them fly overhead. You could just see they looked like a shooting star. They discovered that those could take pictures. You could find out where we were, and so we began to worry more about...instead of going out and exploring planets and the moon, Mars, and see if there was life out there, these rockets were now starting to go out, in our mind at least, were going out to spy on us. And we were sending ours up to spy on Russia, and Russia was sending theirs out to spy on us to see, especially where we already had a bomb already. I think it was the hydrogen bomb, we were...had used that in World War II. That seemed to be very prominent in people's minds and impacted my childhood greatly. Because we were worried that they would send missiles through space and hit our...fire from Russia right on top of our school. I mean, that's what we thought. We got a lot of preparation for that, so it was scary. It was a very scary time. It was exciting and it was scary. I remember seeing the monkeys that they showed getting ready to go out to space. I do remember that. And we did get to see pictures in the newspaper and stuff when we ran across them and teachers would talk about them in school. But getting ready to send animals up so that a real person could go, and go up to space and see the Moon and see outer space and all the stars and planets and everything, that was just wild crazy. It was crazy. BH: Did you do that a lot when you were kids? Look up and see the satellites streaking across? VH: You could. We also...we were in transition with all this technology. Richmond, California is in the Bay Area. It is 45 miles east of San Francisco. In the San Francisco area and 3 the Oakland Bay Area which are...they are right across the bay from each other: two major airports. There were military bases everywhere out there. So, we would also see, among many other things, we would see blimps, like the Goodyear Blimp, well we'd see those all the time. They flew over our house constantly. We'd also see the military aircraft. The flying boxcar is the one I remember the most. And we'd also see huge weather balloons. And you could see them during the middle of the day and when they'd launch. They'd catch the light the higher up they went, so you could even see those during the day. So, there were a lot of exciting things going on in the inner atmosphere that I was around, as well as over our heads. But, yes we'd watch. We'd hear...my father worked for the telephone company and he would about when these satellites were coming over. It was a big deal and we went out and watched them. BH: So, what's the next big event that you remember? VH: Oh, I remember the...seeing the first picture we took of outer space, when you are in outer space and actually looking down at our Earth. That was incredible! We were looking at Earth! You could see the clouds. You could see the continents. You could see the oceans. Amazing, I mean just amazing! I mean I was still...you were still going with wind-up film in your camera. You know, where you put the film in and you had to wind it up kind of like a 35mm now. You did that with all the things. And to see, actually see, Earth—what Earth looked like all the way out from space. It was just black out there. It was amazing. I would have thought that the stars would have been so much brighter and we would have been out far enough that we could have touched them, almost. It was really an incredible view from out there. I had no idea that's what Earth looked like. It was just amazing! Just absolutely amazing! Cause you'd have the Earth and 4 everything that you could see during the day and you could see the little atmosphere around it. And then you could see all this...billions of miles of black after it. It was just...I couldn't believe that somebody could take a picture of the Earth. Especially when it's...I mean that just blew me away. That was cool. And, of course, we got caught up in all the...if they're sending monkeys to space (and I believe that the reason why we sent monkeys to space instead of, Russia sent their dog...a dog at first and that was to make sure that it would survive, that if we sent a monkey up, which is more like a human) that maybe man could go up in space. There was so much talk about space and what space suits were going to look like. Halloween was kind of fun because there was all these kids dressed up as space men. And then you worried about life on Mars and were the Martians going to come out and get you. There were a lot of funny things. My brother is three years younger than myself and he went out for Halloween. My Mom made him his costume of out of aluminum foil because we were sure everything...you know you had a little bucket over your head and aluminum foil everywhere and that was your space suit. It was the coolest thing in the world. Everybody wanted to go to space. Everybody wanted to-to be in and help and see what was out there. It was huge...it was like a huge adventure. You couldn't...all the sudden there were endless possibilities. There was talk of people building homes on the moon, when I was a kid. You know you'd just take a rocket up there and build yourself a house. It was crazy. I mean everybody...you still had the thing about the man in the moon and the Swiss cheese or green cheese that the moon was...that the moon was made out of cheese. It was...it was nuts. We used to have these children's books called Golden Books and they ranged anywhere from stories to introductory science books. And they had a huge thing on space. And I 5 remember...I kept the book that was on space, from my childhood, and when I pulled it out, as you children were getting older and able to appreciate it more, we were going through it looking at the Sputnik kind of satellites. And Sputnik looked kind of like you'd taken a little Styrofoam ball and stuck a bunch of toothpicks in it. You know, and it had all these little things and it beeped and it blipped and made all kinds of noises that was orbiting the Earth to what looked... incredibly...very much...really hadn't changed at all, looked like our space shuttle that we have now. It was amazing. It was printed in like...maybe '58, '59, possibly 1960. It...just was amazing and it brought up so many new...it was kind of like a gold rush, but going to...it was to go to the Moon. It was incredible and yet, at the same time you're trying to protect your country too. There was all that excitement of the pioneer spirit, if you will...of the “I gotta get there first.” Like the gold rush kind of thing. But there was also fear of what the other guy was doing and would he beat you to it. There was a huge drive toward education, believe it or not. Because we felt like we were falling behind in the sciences and there was a huge, huge push for girls to learn science and math. A lot like there is now, but there was this big push because...as I got older, maybe 6th, 7th grade, mostly I remember it in my 7th and 8th grade there was this huge push for sciences for girls, science and math. Because now China was getting in there and Japan was in there and they were all smarter than we were. And our school systems weren't chugging out Werner Von Braun or...umm, they weren't coming up with these huge scientists. Our scientists were imported from Germany, had actually fled from Germany to help us. And the Jupiter rockets were done at Redstone Arsenal in Alabama with Werner Von Braun. He was...he came over from Germany to help us and to fight and to help our country win the space race basically. 6 And we were stationed there, I don't know if you remember there the Huntsville Space Museum out there—we got to walk around all the rockets and the satellites and the little...like the Apollo missions where the nose cone would have these little...Well, they weren't little that's for sure, but they were very cramped. For their return from space, the astronauts would come down in this little space capsule and it kind of looked like a bell. It had a narrow top and flared out at the bottom. It was airtight to make it back from space and aircraft carriers and naval ships would land the capsule in the ocean, so that it would not hurt the astronaut and they could get to them. And they would go out and capture these space capsules. BH: What's the first manned mission that you remember? VH: That's a good question. It's funny because I can't remember his name...I believe...it was probably the Mercury mission that was...that happened and Allen Shepherd was the astronaut there. Honestly, we were afraid he was going to die. We were so scared for him. There's a lot of...there were so many unknowns at that time about sending a man up into space. There were even theories that he would come back either very much older or very much younger than he went up. So...because he was revolving around the Earth at a different rate, faster than we could, we were just standing stationary we weren't really sure if time was going to be the same for them as it was. Crazy things happened back then! We didn't know. We had no idea what to expect. But, cool things were made to go into outer space: freeze dried ice cream, Tang (Tang was cool, that was our space beverage and that was cool. Everything revolved around space.) Like I said, it was a good time and a bad time. And it was amazing that all these things could be happening in my lifetime. 7 BH: Did you see the broadcast of the lunar landing? VH: Yes. When we...that was in 1969, July of 1969, and I had graduated from high school the month before, so things worked a little different. There was TV and they replayed it over and over and over again like we do now. It was absolutely incredible! We all...I remember sitting in our living room watching TV together, watching him walk on the Moon. And bounce! And the weightlessness in space! Then we prayed mightily that he would be able to make it home too. But we also couldn't believe that we could hear him talk to us. Because in school you learn about the speed of sound and then you learn how far away the Moon is. And now we've got cameras taking pictures and sending pictures back to us on the same day it happened and you could hear him talk! "It's one small step for mankind." It was awesome. It was truly awesome. It was...that was such a time for this to be happening. Because it was 1969: you had the hippie revolution and the Vietnam War was going crazy, protests and here we are walking on the Moon. And then there was the big...they brought back space rocks and dust and they explored the Moon. It was just incredible, incredible that it could happen, that you could bounce around outside. You could put the American...you wouldn't even think, as hard as you'd think the crust of the Moon is (because in my mind it was solid rock), how could you indeed put a flag even out there. There's nothing to hang it on, you gotta stick down in there. It was just amazing. BH: So how did the space race impact you? VH: It did a lot. It had a lot of impact on my life, as well as a whole nation full of people. It sparked curiosity farther than we ever thought we could. Our education system changed 8 to "we wanted to be the best school" and so we were taught endless possibilities. You know, that nothing was impossible, which was part of what was going on. You also had the women's movement going on at the same time that women could be anything, so there was the equality thing going on here as well. It made us think outside of our little...plume (planet?)...that it made so many other things possible. We went from, during that time, the medical things that they'd done for space, to keep astronauts alive and keep things going, a lot of that technology was brought back to the medical community that has impacted everyone's lives today. There's also, for me personally, we always heard that the sky was the limit. Well, in my lifetime we went from propeller planes to jets to rockets to landing on the Moon, just in twelve years. Twelve years! That's my entire kindergarten through...well 1st grade through high school. Literally, it all happened in that short...I mean that's an incredible amount of time! It opened so many possibilities to men, to new sciences. We needed faster computers. When I graduated high school, a computer filled a room, a huge room: one computer. We now have laptops; we have things that we can...communications systems. We have satellite TV. We have satellite communications. I work now for Comcast™ and all I have to do is push a button and it sends a signal from my computer in Utah up to space and down to a computer...or a satellite TV or a receiver. It sends that signal in a matter of two or three seconds to someone clear across the world from me. It's made me feel safer. We can Google™ ourselves now and find ourselves on the map, where we are, here we are. A picture form outer space that we can see the Great Wall of China, that we can see forest fires, if they are big enough. We've become a much more global people and I think...we now have satellites going around now, space stations that stay up there, and 9 our enemy, Russia at the time when I was little, is now our partners, in a sense. We work together now for the common good. We work as friends and as colleagues. In some ways, the space race made me feel really, really small. I was a tiny, tiny dot among billions of people on the Earth. But, when you look at the big picture and see us all working together, it seemed like we were...we had to work together eventually. We couldn't do...none of us could do it by ourselves. Even Werner Von Braun came and helped us in the beginning, because he didn't like what his country was doing with the rockets he'd been trying to invent in World War II. He put them o good use with these manned space missions now. We conduct...Utah State University conducts space experiments and finds out if seeds will grow up; grow up-side-down, or right-side-up in space where there is no gravity. Which way are they going to grow? We've got TV that we can watch and we can watch them spinning around in space, squeezing their Tang and watching them catch the drops. It is just amazing. These pioneers that went through the space and were actually astronauts...I mean Thiokol™...you know we've had many...they had a huge space...they deal with parts for rockets, like the o-ring on the Challenger, that blew up and they were there. They test rocket engines out there all the time. It seems so common place, and yet still I am truly amazed by what we are able to accomplish. When you're older brother was in 3rd grade, we had pictures of rings around Neptune and when they did a space project he got in big trouble because he put rings around Neptune and Saturn. We had to take the National Geographic issue and talk to his teacher that "yes, they are." It changes so fast. We have so much knowledge out there. It's opened up a world of possibilities. It opened up thousands and thousands of jobs for people. All of the sudden, you went from knowing what you were going to be 10 when you got out of high school or when you got out of college to, all of the sudden, what you went in for college for may not exist when you get out and there's going to be all kinds of new technology that may not have been invented yet by the time you went in. You think that in twelve years, if you spent four years in college that is a huge chunk of technology that we went through and advanced in during that time. It was truly, truly amazing. I don't know how...We've learned to use our satellites for good. We still use...The military still uses them for reconnaissance, which saves lives and I don't see anything bad about that. We've tried to control the bad things, like the Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Those were scary when I was a kid. We did...I remember running home from school one day, crying my eyes out, sure that we were going to die that day because we'd done a drill. If we had seen a big flash of light, we had to hide under our desks and cover our head with our hands and not open them 'til the big light had passed. There were...and I was scared to death that I was going to die. I was sure I was going to die. It was crazy. I left my brother at school, but... Laughter I ran home all the way and it scared me to death. I think that was during the Bay of Pigs because I was older. I was probably around 5th or 6th grade at that time. That was a big part of school. You learned how to take care of yourself and what would happen. There were all these little government films that came out (They look really cheesy now, but they were scary then) on what to do if an atomic bomb hit and what it would be like. That part of the space race I did not enjoy at all. I gotta tell you. I was just...because we sat...Richmond had oil refineries. I mean we were a prime target area. We were very close to San Francisco and Oakland, more military bases. We had a naval weapons station not far from us. We had lots of naval bases, lots of army bases, lots of...air force was farther 11 north and farther south from us. We had a huge military presence and we had all this oil to protect and tons of refineries. The ships would come in. There was Chevron™ and Shell™ and...well Chevron™ was called Standard Oil back then. It was just crazy and we were sure that we were going to be big targets for this...if a bomb hit. They wouldn't bother with New York. They'd hit the San Francisco area and we were goners. It was really scary. BH: With all the excitement about, you know, going up in space and pictures and Earth and a landing a man on the Moon, why do you think that excitement died off, eventually? People weren't, kind of in general, as excited about space as you were. VH: It got expensive and it was costing people's lives. I think the expense and the fact that we were doing it so often...it was like...if something happens once or twice a year and it's a big, a huge event, you try and make it. You know, you want to be there and see that. But, with our ability to replay the news and get it on the computer and all of the sudden you didn't have to have live TV anymore. I mean live TV was great. You had to have it, but you didn't have to be there for it. I think it kind of got commonplace. "Yep, we're sending somebody else up. Yep, we're sending another astronaut went up." It was just like we had all these manned space missions and they go up and come back down. You paid attention to the things that were new and unique. You paid attention to more of the disasters, unfortunately. The Apollo mission, they got stuck up in space and their navigation system wasn't working and they missed the windows. We didn't know if we'd get them back alive. Being an astronaut was a scary proposition. The rockets looked the same going up, unless there was something different about them. I remember, when you kids were older, the Challenger when it went up. Christa McAuliffe was a teacher 12 and she had all her kids watching her; students and their parents were watching her go up to space. That Challenger blew up...oh my goodness! I think people decided, at some point, that...there was...there was a lot of contention over the cost of space and whether it was worth it, now that we had landed on the Moon. A lot of people thought that we'd won the space race, why bother doing anymore? What's out there? We didn't find little green men. We didn't find any other land that we could really inhabit. We haven't found a planet like ours—ours is one of a kind to support life and I think people wondered if it was worth it. I know a lot of people did and there are people out there, to this day, that believe that the man landing on the Moon—when they landed on the Moon—they believe that it was staged on a movie theater, for real, seriously. They do not believe that it truly happened. I think that a lot of people did not see the benefit of the space exploration. We have now come to believe that Pluto is not a planet, though I don't agree with that. But, that's it. We get excited about meteors and things that come along once in a blue moon. The common place, every day things...we don't get excited about jumping into our car anymore, where that was, a hundred years ago, that was unheard of. Now it is just a thing that we do. I think that it became a thing that we did. Then it got to a point where we're talking about taking everyday people up into space. Kind of a Disneyland™ ride, so to speak. If you've got enough money, you could go up. I think that people just did not see the value in space technology. BH: Well, I'd like to thank you for this interview Mom. It's been great. VH: Thank you, Brian. I appreciate you asking me. 13