Thibodaux graduate helped land men on moon 40 years ago

Monday marks the National Aeronautics and Space Admini-stration’s (NASA) 40th anniversary of one of mankind’s greatest scientific achievements – landing men on the moon.

It took nearly 2,000 engineers – including a local man – to put Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969.

For Dr. William C. Schneider, a 1958 graduate of Thibodaux College, the predecessor to E.D. White Catholic High School, working on Apollo 11 was the culmination of a dream pursued since he was a young boy.

“Getting those guys to the moon was probably the most exciting and stressful period of my life,” he said. “I would work nine or 10 hours a day on the space program. Then I’d work until two in the morning on my master’s and my Ph.D.

“We were in a fierce competition with the Russians, which we won,” he added. “We’ve been to the moon many times. They have yet to even go once.”

While NASA last sent humans to the moon in 1972, Schneider, 69, is working to make extended stays in Earth orbit a reality in the not-so-distant future.

One of his 13 patented inventions, the Inflatable Human Habitat Spacecraft, is being tested for use as a hotel by billionaire Robert Bigelow, owner of Bigelow Aerospace.

“He asked me to be one of the head engineers to design it and get it into orbit because he wants to use it as a space hotel for some of his rich friends and other people who want to go,” Schneider explained. “We have two in orbit right now – Genesis I and Genesis II.”

Schneider was a junior at Louisiana State University-New Orleans when President John F. Kennedy announced on May 25, 1961, the goal of sending astronauts to the moon before the end of the decade.

He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1962, and was offered a job at NASA.

“The head of the Mechanical Engineering Department called me out and here were the three top guys at NASA that I had been reading about in magazines,” Schneider said. “They wanted to interview me and give me a job in Houston because they were starting the space program to go to the moon.”

Classified as a “regular” engineer during his first few years at NASA, he would work on numerous aspects of the Gemini and Apollo missions.

Before the Johnson Space Center was completed in September 1963, NASA operated out of several warehouses scattered around the Houston area.

“We had to use taxis to get around to have a meeting,” Schneider recalled.

It wasn’t all work and no fun for the young engineer. He got to meet President Kennedy on a NASA visit in early 1963.

“I remember him passing right by me,” Schneider said. “We had what was called the shaker because it would shake spacecraft, simulating takeoffs. We put an aluminum plate on the shaker and played ‘Hail to the Chief’ on it.”

That was NASA’s highlight for most of the 1960s. At that time, America was losing the space race to the Soviet Union. The Soviets launched satellites, put a cosmonaut into orbit and performed a space walk before the United States.

“They were way ahead of us,” Schneider summarized. “The good thing was back then no newsperson would say anything negative about the program. A lot of our stuff in the beginning blew up. They showed it, but they didn’t gripe about it and say, ‘Why are we spending all that money?’ Nowadays, anything that happens is put in a negative light.”

According to Schneider, the biggest problem NASA’s early spacecrafts faced in the beginning was with control systems. Engineers couldn’t keep the rockets continuously balanced throughout a space flight.

“It’s like trying to balance a large building on a pinpoint,” he said.

NASA morale hit its lowest point on Jan. 27, 1967. That’s when an electrical fire destroyed the Apollo 1 command module during a training exercise killing astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee.

“As soon as it got hot, the internal pressure sealed the hatch and they couldn’t escape,” Schneider explained. “That was the first real setback we had. It wasn’t a rocket blowing up in flight. They were still on the ground where everybody saw it.”

From that tragedy, NASA kicked into overdrive to fulfill Kennedy’s man on the moon proclamation.

Starting with Apollo 2, Schneider was part of the team that redesigned the command module escape hatch so it could open from the outside.

By the 1968 Apollo 8 mission, NASA and the Soviet space program were neck and neck in the race to the moon.

According to Schneider, President Lyndon Johnson wanted NASA to beat the Soviets in launching a lunar module into the moon’s orbit.

However, the lunar module was not finished. So Schneider and another engineer built a 32,000-pound simulator, enabling a rocket to circle the moon.

“That was one of the first things I built that could have blown up everybody,” Schneider admitted. “It was right above the hydrogen and oxygen tanks, so if even one rivet would have failed, there would have been a big explosion and killed everybody at Cape Canaveral. Luckily, it worked really well.”

On July 16, 1969, Apollo 11 launched an eight-day mission to the moon. While Schneider spent most of that time at the engineers’ mission control at the Johnson Space Center, he watched – along with an estimated one billion people around the world – as Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon four days later.

“When they landed on the moon, it was about 2 a.m. Houston time,” he said. “I could see it on TV. Neil Armstrong was getting out of the lunar module. It was a full moon and I remember going outside and sitting in front of my house. I looked at that moon and said, ‘God, I can’t believe it. We’re really there.”

NASA would successfully launch five more moon missions – Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. Schneider did not play a significant role in getting the ill-fated 1970 Apollo 13 mission returned safely back to Earth.

But he did design the Mobile Equipment Transporter or “moon buggy” used by astronaut Alan Shepard during Apollo 14 in 1971.

Even before the final flights to the moon, NASA had asked Schneider to begin designing the space shuttle.

“It would have been fun to colonize the moon, but we accomplished our goals and it was time to move forward,” he said.

By the time the Apollo missions ended in 1972, Schneider had earned a master’s degree from the University of Houston and completed a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering at Rice University.

When he retired in 2000 after 38 years, he was senior engineer at the Johnson Space Center, overseeing the safety and design of the space shuttle program.

NASA planned to use Schneider’s Inflatable Human Habitat Spacecraft for manned missions to Mars.

The inflatable is made of lightweight aluminum and can expand to five times its size when fully deployed. Air is recycled throughout the structure by pumping oxygen in and removing carbon dioxide.

“To take a spacecraft to outer space, every pound you carry costs 20 pounds in rockets and fuel to get there,” Schneider said. “Any time you save weight, you save money. This makes it practical and economically feasible to go to the moon or to Mars.

However, NASA cancelled the project after Schneider retired.

Bigelow bought the patent rights to the inflatable spacecraft and hired Schneider, who also teaches mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University, as a consultant.

Every two weeks, he flies out to Las Vegas to work on the inflatable spacecraft.

Currently, two 24-foot long, 24-foot diameter Genesis models orbit the Earth. Schneider has completed designs for larger models.

“The next generation will be three times bigger, so the volume will be tremendous,” he said. “When (Bigelow) first bought the patents, he considered using them as a hotel on the moon, but that was quickly disregarded. These will eventually be used for tourism, scientific and manufacturing purposes.”

The world has benefited handsomely from the manned moon missions, according to Schneider. Technologies most people use every day such as GPS and the transistors in household electronics were breakthroughs derived from the space programs.

He also believes the manned moon missions played a key role in ending the Cold War.

“It scared the peanuts out of the Russians,” Schneider insisted. “They realized after that they could never economically compete with us.”

Schneider will attend NASA’s Apollo 11 40th anniversary celebration on Monday at the Johnson Space Center.

For him, it will be more than just old friends and colleagues reminiscing about their younger days. He hopes the occasion reminds people of what can be accomplished when Americans channel their collective intellect into a single positive purpose – the impossible becomes routine.

“I thank the good Lord every day for having that opportunity to be an engineer at the right time when I was needed,” Schneider said. “It was a privilege to do something I wanted to do since I was 10 years old.”

Besides helping to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon, Dr. William C. Schneider was also a designer on the Space Shuttle Columbia, as seen in the undated photo. * Photo courtesy of DR. WILLIAM C. SCHNIEDER