WEBVTT

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>> I'm Tom Sanzone.

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I graduated from Villanova in
1968 and for 43 years I worked

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for the Hamilton Sundstrand Corporation.

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It's a United Technologies Company in
Houston, Texas at the Johnson Space Center.

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In the Apollo Program, we made the life
support backpack that they wore on the moon

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and more recently over the last 30
or so years we've made the space suit

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and life support system that's used
when astronauts do space walks.

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We used to say that the space suit is not
a large garment, it's a small spacecraft.

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And so, everything that you would have
in a spacecraft short of propulsion

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and now we've actually added propulsion
for emergency return to a vehicle

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in case you were disconnected is in
that life support system and space suit.

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So, it's basically taking everything that
we take for granted here on the ground,

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including the air pressure around us and
things that you don't even think about,

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and providing those capabilities
in space, in a vacuum environment,

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and all the thermal environments

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where the temperature changes several
hundred degrees going from shade

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to light and lots and lots of challenges.

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So, a lot of smart people
did it and we were so busy.

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I mean, we just worked like 7 days a week and
12 hours a day plus and those kinds of things.

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And so, assignments were kind of handed out
like who was kind of next in line or whatever.

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And so, one of the things that we did was
we trained astronauts in vacuum chambers

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and so my boss asked me to take the lead

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on training this one crew and
it was the Apollo 11 Crew.

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So, one of the first people I ever
got to train when I was 22 years old,

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10 months out of Villanova, was Neil
Armstrong, which was pretty cool.

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It's become more cool, you
know, thinking back on it.

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I think my career had 2 basic halves.

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The first half of my career
was very technically oriented.

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And so, back when I first went to NASA,
shortly after I got out of Villanova,

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the day would consist of I would work on life
support systems, help test them, modify them,

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we would take astronauts put them in a space
suit, put the life support system on the back,

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train them in a vacuum environment,
put them in another vacuum chamber

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that had thermal capability so it could be
very cold like minus 200 degrees in there

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or plus 200 degrees and that's the
environment that the space suit had

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to operate in, and we did a lot of training.

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During the missions we were in the what
was called the mission evaluation room,

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the back room to mission control
and we would monitor the performance

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of both life support systems from
the 2 guys that would be out there

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and if there were any issues, we'd have to
respond pretty quickly, make recommendations.

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Obviously in hindsight now with the benefit of
history, the hardware worked incredibly well.

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The latter half of my career, the last 22
years of my career, I was the general manager

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for your Houston office which
was very rewarding.

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At times it wasn't quite as much fun as the
hands on technical stuff that I got to do,

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but it was a business environment.

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Challenges were not so much technical, they
were more business oriented, people oriented,

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hiring the right people to get the job done
and things like that, but very very rewarding.

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Certainly in our lifetimes, it
will go down as if not the most,

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one of the most incredible accomplishments
in the 20th century and beyond,

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so it was phenomenal to be
able to be a part of it.