Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland 20771

ENGINEERING COLLOQUIUM

Monday, February 27, 2006 / 3:30 PM, Building 3 Auditorium

Guenter Wendt

"From Mercury to Apollo: 35 Years in the Trenches"

ABSTRACT -- Guenter Wendt, Pad Leader, will give us an inside view of the day to day activities at Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Center, beginning in the late 1950s and stretching to the shuttle flights in the 21st century.

We started our manned flight program in the middle of "The Cold War." The Russians had beaten us in being first to put a man is space. Were their fishing boats we could see off our coast sending "Command Destruct Signals" to the rockets we launched? Setbacks and failures were rather common. Mistakes were made and corrected (hopefully). It was a great learning experience. In 1961 we reached a milestone when we launched the first American, Alan Shepard, into space. No longer was the payload just a "nosecone" or "dummy payload" which could be readily replaced. Failures that had been a way of life in the past were no longer acceptable. The Gemini program moved us ahead of the Russians with many first time accomplishments. But, tragedy struck again when we lost three Astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire. Nobody would forget or talk about it for a long time. The next challenge was to accomplish the landing of a man on the Moon, as President Kennedy had promised the nation.

Come to the Engineering Colloquium to experience all 35 years of Guenter Wendt's years in the trenches at the Cape.

SPEAKER -- Guenter F. Wendt, a mechanical engineer now living in Merritt Island Florida, was born and educated in Germany. He came to the U.S in 1949 and became an American citizen in 1955.

He was responsible for spacecraft launch operations for all Mercury and Gemini flights. In 1967, after the Apollo fire, he accepted a position with the North American Corporation at the Kennedy Space Center and was responsible for spacecraft launch preparations for all manned Apollo, Skylab, and the ASTP flights. He was the last person seen by the flight crews prior to liftoff. Guenter looked out for the flight and ground crew safety during the Shuttle ALT program and the orbital flights of the Space Shuttle prior to his retirement in 1989.

Since his retirement he has traveled extensively to many continents and presented the case for an ongoing space program to high school and college students in many parts of the world. After appearing in the movie Apollo 13, Tom Hanks asked him to be a technical advisor and to appear in the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon. As a member of the recovery expedition, he assisted in the recovery of Gus Grissom's Mercury spacecraft that had sunk 38 years earlier in 16,000 feet of water off the coast of Florida. He wrote the book The Unbroken Chain to present the day to day activities of the thousands of workers that made the "American Dream" possible.