>> I'm Tom Sanzone.
I graduated from Villanova in 1968 and for 43 years I worked
for the Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation.
It's a United Technologies Company in Houston, Texas at the Johnson Space Center.
In the Apollo Program, we made the life support backpack that they wore on the moon
and more recently over the last 30 or so years we've made the space suit
and life support system that's used when astronauts do space walks.
We used to say that the space suit is not a large garment, it's a small spacecraft.
And so, everything that you would have in a spacecraft short of propulsion
and now we've actually added propulsion for emergency return to a vehicle
in case you were disconnected is in that life support system and space suit.
So, it's basically taking everything that we take for granted here on the ground,
including the air pressure around us and things that you don't even think about,
and providing those capabilities in space, in a vacuum environment,
and all the thermal environments
where the temperature changes several hundred degrees going from shade
to light and lots and lots of challenges.
So, a lot of smart people did it and we were so busy.
I mean, we just worked like 7 days a week and 12 hours a day plus and those kinds of things.
And so, assignments were kind of handed out like who was kind of next in line or whatever.
And so, one of the things that we did was we trained astronauts in vacuum chambers
and so my boss asked me to take the lead
on training this one crew and it was the Apollo 11 Crew.
So, one of the first people I ever got to train when I was 22 years old,
10 months out of Villanova, was Neil Armstrong, which was pretty cool.
It's become more cool, you know, thinking back on it.
I think my career had 2 basic halves.
The first half of my career was very technically oriented.
And so, back when I first went to NASA, shortly after I got out of Villanova,
the day would consist of I would work on life support systems, help test them, modify them,
we would take astronauts put them in a space suit, put the life support system on the back,
train them in a vacuum environment, put them in another vacuum chamber
that had thermal capability so it could be very cold like minus 200 degrees in there
or plus 200 degrees and that's the environment that the space suit had
to operate in, and we did a lot of training.
During the missions we were in the what was called the mission evaluation room,
the back room to mission control and we would monitor the performance
of both life support systems from the 2 guys that would be out there
and if there were any issues, we'd have to respond pretty quickly, make recommendations.
Obviously in hindsight now with the benefit of history, the hardware worked incredibly well.
The latter half of my career, the last 22 years of my career, I was the general manager
for your Houston office which was very rewarding.
At times it wasn't quite as much fun as the hands on technical stuff that I got to do,
but it was a business environment.
Challenges were not so much technical, they were more business oriented, people oriented,
hiring the right people to get the job done and things like that, but very very rewarding.
Certainly in our lifetimes, it will go down as if not the most,
one of the most incredible accomplishments in the 20th century and beyond,
so it was phenomenal to be able to be a part of it.