The Man Who Hung Out With Astronauts: Craig Sumner, NASA Engineer

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.
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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.
Take it away, Craig.
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 a one thousand-pound 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 the sixties.
I thought I really would like to go work for NASA.
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 able to make choices.
You know.
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 in Pensacola. So I went over and talked to him, and they said, “How would you like to go work at NASA at the 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. 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 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 our astronauts, the LEM, the Lunar Excursion Module, and the Lunar Rover all had to be able to endure 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 them 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, “If you hadn’t cut me off at ten thousand feet in my fighter airplane—they were flying T-38s—I would have got on the ground first.” And I was thinking to myself, as a young twenty-year-old at the time.
These guys are crazy.
They’re up there.
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.
Of a badge of courage.
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. John got farmed out to ants and uncle neighbors and graduated top in his high school class, college, flight school, Astronaut Corps. He 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 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.
And his dedication just was immense.
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 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 15 mission, I got selected to be part 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 moonbuggy 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, and fortunately it all deployed.
Out just the way you would expect it to.
They put up their poolside seats, jumped in there, threw a few switches, put on their Velcro seat belts, and away they went at eight miles an hour.
Now, eight doesn’t sound very.
Fast, but on Apollo 11, 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 16, the first day they were up, there was eighty-five degrees outside. As soon as you walk behind a boulder 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 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-38 jet. Little did I know, within about a year, I was going to.
Be flying the same airplane. Because when this program was over, so was my draft deferment.
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.
When we come back.
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And we returned to Our American Stories.
And when we last left off, Craig Sumner was about to go to Vietnam after working at NASA on the Lunar Rover project.
Now we returned to Craig. Got.
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 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 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 they moved all the training down to Houston, and they would get in the simulators.
We would allow them to fly this.
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 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. Skylab, unfortunately, came back into Australia, decayed in its orbit, and burned up for the most part. As it came back in. We didn’t have the Shuttle 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.
I had this jet.
Experience in flying C-130s, and I thought, “Okay, I got some good leadership skills.”
What can I do with that?
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-5. 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 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 pad. I’d get on an airplane out here at Redstone Arsenal, a NASA airplane, be about eight of us on board, and we’d land 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 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, who was my first Center Director, and have the privilege of representing the team that built this magnificent machine and put.
Put it into orbit.
When I went down to my first Space Shuttle launch, you sit in a control room with a headset, and sitting beside you is a project manager from the contractor Lockheed Martin or Martin Marietta 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. 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.
He said, “Craig, I need you to go to the launch.”
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 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.
And there are issues.
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 LOX 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. 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 red-headed 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 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.
Out of the way. Well, that’s where I was at.
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.
Have you ever had that happen?
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.
Up to see what’s up there.
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 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 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 Manned Flight Awareness dinner, and 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.
Process to be an astronaut.
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 with so many of the other men and women as a team effort was pretty phenomenal as.