This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Ready to feel energized and in control again? At Orderly Meds, we have helped thousands just like you take charge of their health with a GLP-1. If you've tried dieting, exercising, and relying on willpower, and nothing seems to stick, then it might be time to talk to a licensed provider about your options.
That's what Orderly Meds is for. This fall, choose healthier habits for yourself with a visit to orderlymeds.com. You don't need to visit with a physician in person to become eligible. Orderly Meds has a Virtual process. Connect with licensed medical professionals who can determine whether a GLP one treatment may be appropriate for you wherever you are.
Get started from the comfort of home online. Change your habits and consider a new approach to feeling your best. Visit orderlymeds dot com to learn more. That's orderlymeds dot com. Orderlymeds dot com.
Gain confidence and choose better habits this fall. Compounded medications are not FDA approved. Eligibility required. Determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary.
See website for details. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past two hundred and fifty years, and now it takes form in a new way. The twenty twenty six semi quincentennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint it celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
Shop new official. Coins at usmint.gov/semiq. That's usmint.gov/semiq.
Sometimes the road of life goes a little off-road, and the 2026 Nissan Rogue is ready for anything the day brings. With all-wheel drive and five different drive modes, it's designed for adventure, with room for the whole family. And since the 2026 Rogue has Google built-in and a 12.3-inch display, you can just pick a destination, punch up a soundtrack, and take off. Adventure is waiting for you, and the 2026. Nissan Rogue Power Slab 24 arrives in Las Vegas on Friday, October 9th at the Chelsea Theater at the Cosmopolitan.
If you've never been to a Power Slap event, now is your chance to see one of the most exciting live sporting events on the planet. Power Slap tickets in Las Vegas start at sixty dollars and can be purchased on Ticketmaster or Powerslap dot com. That's Friday, October ninth in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan. Tickets are on sale now. Don't miss out on this one of a kind live event.
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field. I'm Nicole Auerbach. And I'm Joshua Perry. We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world: college football. From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football.
Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch Rushing the Field on NBC Sports now. 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. Send them to ouramericanstories dot com.
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, and in this case, in World War II and 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 where most of these marines would take off with a thousand pound bomb in the center and two 500 pound bombs on the wing, Charles Lindbergh took off with three 1,000 pound bombs and went on to design a 2,000 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 when it really started going in the '60s, 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 of college, and I had an associate 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 of West Florida in Pensacola, so I went over and talked to them, and they said, "How would you like to go work at NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama?" And will pay you to go.
And I got involved on the lunar rover program, which was a moon buggy 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 rovers for nineteen million dollars that wound up costing thirty nine million dollars. Before it was all over with, so it's hot and cold on the moon. The hottest temperature is 250 degrees Fahrenheit. The coldest temperature is 250 degrees below zero.
So those are the environments that our astronauts, the limb, 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 take them in my '66 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 10,000 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 and fighting to see who's going to land on the ground. It's kind of a bad badge of courage. But when they put on their space suits 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 aunts and uncles, 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 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 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 and I was in flight readiness reviews where I'm up presenting. And John Young ask a question, and either you don't know the answer, or you got the answer, and you tell him. But if you don't know the answer, don't give him something that's not right. And fortunately, this team effort—you know—somebody might pipe up and answer, or we'd 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 close to the the actual Apollo fifteen 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 footpads 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 240,000 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 pool sides. 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 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 pounds total, but it's still a lot of work walking around up there on the moon surface. On Apollo Sixteen, 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 at. There is no atmosphere up there.
It drops down to up to 250 degrees below zero.
So it's kind of fun, you know. It's my 15 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 thirty eight 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, more of Craig Sumner's story here. On our American stories. Folks, 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. Go to ouramericanstories. dot com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's ouramericanstories. dot com. If you're ready to feel confident again, visit orderlymeds. dot com to learn about which GLP one you may be eligible for. Getting started is fast, easy, and happens virtually through telemedicine from licensed professionals.
Gain confidence, choose healthy habits this fall. Check it out for yourself. Go to orderlymeds. dot com. That's orderlymeds.
dot com. Taking care of yourself feels great. Compounded medications are not FDA approved. Eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary.
Vary. See website for details. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past two hundred and fifty years, and now it takes form in a new way. The twenty twenty six semi quincentennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint.
It celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new. Official coins at usmint.gov/semiq. That's usmint.gov/semiq.
Power Slap Twenty Four arrives in Las Vegas on Friday, October ninth at the Chelsea Theater at the Cosmopolitan. If you've never been to a Power Slap event, now is your chance to see one of the most exciting live sporting events on the planet. Power Slap tickets in Las Vegas start at sixty dollars and can be purchased on Ticketmaster or PowerSlap.com. That's Friday, October ninth in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan. Tickets are on sale now.
Don't miss out on this one-of-a-kind live event. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field. I'm Nicole Auerbach, and I'm Joshua Perry. We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world: college football. From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football.
Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch rushing the field on NBC Sports now. Upgrade to elite checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 3.5% APY, plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with Early Pay. Don't settle. Choose checking that rewards you and aligns with your values.
Visit America'sChristianCU.com/ihart. Minimum balance of one cent required to earn advertised APY. Early pay not guaranteed. APY equals annual percentage. Membership eligibility required.
NCUA insured. And we return 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 return 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 a hundred and something, and my number was 62. And so I was off to go to flight school, and I got to go fly some jets, and 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 wanted to come back to the Marshall Space Flight Center and work for NASA again. But when I came back, politics had changed, and a lot of the training that we were doing here at the Marshall Space Flight Center with the astronauts was being moved to Houston. And when I came back after getting out of the service in 1976, Skylab was starting to decay in its orbit.
It was up there rolling, it was tumbling end over end, had somewhat of a 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 to Skylab, and then run out of gas.
Well, I was a young, now 27-year-old, and I had 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 guys 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 and 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 finish building them, and we put them on a barge, tie it to a tug with a 2,500-foot rope, one inch in diameter, and haul it down through the Gulf of Mexico, around the Keys, and up the Atlantic 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, 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, 300 feet wide, I believe. And go get in our rental cars, 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 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 them into the space shuttle. And about T-minus nine minutes, we 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 it into 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. His daughter was killed in an automobile accident, seventeen years old, and he called up and 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.
So I carried all these books with me, all these technical manuals, and I was reading till 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, 423 degrees below zero, in the LOX tank, over 300 degrees below zero, and the foam, 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 season for the red-headed woodpecker. And if it wasn't a red-headed, it's the one that I remember. This one woodpecker put over 200 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 the 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 to 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 staring at me. Have you ever had that happen? There were five birds, vultures, up in the sea breeze, stationary, 40 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 staring 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. And three miles away, you see the engines roaring to life, and the vehicle coming to life. And it's doing a 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 Earth orbit.
And it's just—it was just totally awesome. And and the men and women that I got to work with, and 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. We were fixing to talk to a group of a hundred people at a man 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 well. 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. I have twice. You never forget it. And miles away, because that's where you get to watch if you're lucky, or just anywhere near Cocoa Beach or Cape Canaveral, anywhere near that area. If it ever happens again, bring the family.
It is indescribable to be close to it. This is 535,000 gallons of gas in this quote vehicle. It's just surreal, surreal. And Americans do this like we do so many other things with ease and with grace and with a deep sense of adventure. Craig Sumner's story at NASA continues here on our American story.
If you're ready to feel confident again, visit orderlymeds.com to learn about which GLP-1 you may be eligible for. Getting started is fast, easy, and happens virtually through telemedicine from licensed professionals. Gain confidence, choose healthy habits this fall. Check it out for yourself. Go to orderlymeds.
dot com. That's orderlymeds. dot com. Taking care of yourself feels great. Compounded medications are not FDA approved.
Eligibility required and determined by a licensed provider. Individual results may vary. See website for details. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past two hundred and fifty years, and now it takes form in a new way.
The twenty twenty six semi quincentennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint it celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues. Shop new. Official coins at usmint.gov forward slash semiq. That's usmint.gov slash semiq.
Power Slab Twenty Four arrives in Las Vegas on Friday, October ninth at the Chelsea Theater at the Cosmopolitan. If you've never been to a Power Slap event, now is your chance to see one of the most exciting live sporting events on the planet. Power Slap tickets in Las Vegas start at sixty dollars and can be purchased on Ticketmaster or PowerSlap dot com. That's Friday, October ninth in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan. Tickets are on sale now.
Don't miss out on this one of a kind live event. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field. I am Nicole Hourback. And I'm Joshua Perry. We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world—college football.
From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football. Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch Rushing the Field on NBC Sports now. Upgrade to Elite Checking from America's Christian Credit Union and earn up to 3.5% APY, plus everyday perks and access to your paycheck up to two days early with Early Pay. Don't settle.
Choose checking that rewards you and aligns with your values. Visit AmericasChristianCU dot com forward slash iHeart. Minimum balance of one cent required to earn advertised APY. Early pay not guaranteed. APY equals annual percentage yield.
Membership eligibility required. And CUA insured. And we return 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 takes to launch a shuttle or a rocket. Craig now shares with us stories about that team.
And the people you worked with. The responsibility is immense. When you sit in that room and realize you've got five or more souls out there on the space shuttle fixing to go launch, and all the people that we would 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 shuttle external tank. And time and time again, he 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 am 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 to the engines, if that foam 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 and margins that you might not otherwise have. And the wrong place to find out about it is after. The vehicles built.
Test pilots are are an interesting breed of men and women, and so when I was flying C-130s, a lot of times I got these arrogant pilots on board, and I'm smiling, but they knew everything. And but when they were on my airplane, they had to follow our rules, and they weren't my rules. They were they were standard rules. A lot of times they didn't go by the rules.
So one of the things my dad taught me as a 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 altitude in a corsair 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 and the. Torque on these Corsairs 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, 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. 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. And to people saying no, we're not going to do test, 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 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.
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 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 was sitting with Fred Hayes out in Denver. And everybody tells me, "Hey, when you when you get around, Fred, ask him what it was like on Apollo 13." Well, can you imagine how many times he's been asked what was it like on Apollo 13?
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 13?" And he just kind of looks around, you know, he's looking for a camera. Who's the smart aleck that put you up to it? Other than I almost died, you know, was the way he started off my conversation, and that kind of stuck with me, you know.
So, you know, Alan Shepard, our first man into space on Apollo on Apollo 14, he and Ed Mitchell have already separated from the command and service module, and they're in their limb going down to the moon, and their radar's not working, and at 10,000 feet, it's a no-go. You know everything's supposed to be working at 10,000 feet. Mission Control knows that it's not working. Al Shepard knows it's not working, and he looks over to 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." Ed said, "Yes, sir." They're backwards.
They can't even see where they're going. They're decelerating, and people in Mission Control knows this guy has been grounded for 11 years. Got put back on flight status. Put himself on this mission. He's going to go invisibly.
So they got to thinking real quick, you know, what in the world could they possibly do? And they called up and said, "Hey Al, reach over and unplug the circuit breaker to the radar. Count to five and plug it back in. It rebooted just like your computer at home." I think they landed within like sixty feet.
So you know, they're on the moon. They're going through their checklists, shutting off engines, and this, that, and the other. And Ed Mitchell looks over and he says, "Hey Al, just curious, would you have gone in visually?" Al Shepard looked over and said, "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 convinced he would have gone in visually.
Now he'd have gotten a lot of trouble. He didn't care. He was probably going to be done when he got back, assuming he didn't get smushed on the moon surface. Those were the risk takers, and take people like John Shipman, John Young, my favorite astronaut. Go look at his heart rate, landing on the moon surface.
You know it elevated a little bit. Because he had somebody stand beside him, Charlie Duke, you know, that's supposed to be doing his job. That probably put a little bit of stress on him. Every other commander, it kind of peaked on up their ways, but cool, calm, and collected. John Young, he knew what his focus was going to be on, and that was to land on the moon and land where he was supposed to land, and he did it.
Gorner von Braun was my center director, 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 Heinz Lozier, and Heinz was responsible for building the moon map that would simulate us driving on the moon.
So we had pictures of what that surface looked like where we were going to be landing, and with foam rubber and latex paint. I watched Heinz Lazer use a blowtorch and nitrogen to burn a crater and put it out. Burn a crater, put it out, and look at 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 the simulator that we had downstairs was just like any other flight simulator that you see today. The commercial pilots use, military pilots use. 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 a 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 Teflon balls that ran across the little bumps and crooks and crannies of 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 is to go find a group of 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. And you've been listening to Craig Sumner and his life story.
Great job, as always, to Monty for bringing us that piece. And his dad had advised him always fly within the envelope, fly outside the envelope, and prepare to suffer the consequences. I also love that line: "Test what you fly, and fly what you test." And the original test flight dummies were two guys called the Wright brothers, because they actually tested what they flew, and it differentiated them from everybody else who was tinkering. Engineers engineered, pilots flew, and they couldn't talk to each other. The Wright brothers knew both angles, both flew.
The story of Craig Sumner, the story of NASA, in a way, an American flight, and innovation, and space adventure here on our American stories. Ready to feel energized and in control again? At Orderly Meds, we have helped thousands just like you take charge of their health with a GLP-1. If you've tried dieting, exercising, and relying on willpower, and nothing seems to stick, then it might be time to talk to a licensed provider about your options. That's what Orderly Meds is for.
This fall, choose healthier habits for yourself with a visit to OrderlyMeds.com. You don't need to visit with a physician in person to become eligible. Orderly Meds has a simple virtual process. Connect with licensed medical professionals who can determine whether a GLP-1 treatment may be appropriate for you wherever you are. Getting started from the comfort of home online.
Change your habits and consider a new approach to feeling your best. Visit OrderlyMeds.com to learn more. That's orderlymeds. dot com. Orderlymeds.
dot com. Gain confidence and choose better habits this fall. Compounded medications are not FDA approved. Eligibility required and determined by licensed provider. Individual results may vary.
See website for details. Liberty has never been just a word to we Americans. It has guided every one of our endeavors for the past 250 years, and now it takes form in a new way. The 2026 semi-quintennial coin and medal program from the United States Mint it celebrates the founding ideals that have long shaped our coinage. Available one year only, this historic collection features new coin designs, limited edition releases, and reissues.
Shop new official. Coins at usmint.gov forward slash semiq. That's usmint.gov slash semiq. Power Slap 24 arrives in Las Vegas on Friday, October 9th at the Chelsea Theater at the Cosmopolitan. If you've never been to a Power Slap event, now is your chance to see one of the most exciting live sporting events on the planet.
Power Slap tickets in Las Vegas start at sixty dollars and can be purchased on Ticketmaster or PowerSlap.com. That's Friday, October 9th in Las Vegas at the Cosmopolitan. Tickets are on sale now. Don't miss out on this one-of-a-kind live event. I love a brighter smile.
What I don't love is that little wince when I take a sip of something cold, or even breathe in cold air. You know that feeling? It takes your breath away. That ouch, eek. That's why I like Sensodyne Clinical White.
Its triple-action formula whitens, polishes, and helps protect against sensitivity. Plus, it protects against new stains for up to six months, so I can keep enjoying my iced coffee and everything else I love without the sensitivity. Whiter teeth, without the wince. Try Sensodyne Clinical White today. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Rushing the Field.
I'm Nicole Auerbach, and I'm Joshua Perry. We're so excited to be here to chat about our favorite thing in the entire world—college football. From the biggest headlines and breaking news to the stories shaping the sport behind the scenes, Rushing the Field is your home for everything college football. Whether you're obsessed with rankings, rivalries, or game day drama, we've got you covered. Watch Rushing the Field on NBC Sports now.
