The following public affairs program is made possible through a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> Hello, I'm John Burlington, and this is 930 newsroom from Kennedy Space Center, Florida.

This is our last program before Sunday's launch of Apollo 16.

Regular editors, Bruce Mollient and Tom Fowler are with me today.

Linda King is on assignment.

We'll begin tonight's show with a progress report on the Apollo 16 countdown, and for that.

Here is Tom Fowler.

Tom Fowler> Well, there are no significant problems in the Saturn 5, the spacecraft, which might delay this Sunday's launch at 12:54 p.m..

The astronauts now have no specific schedule until liftoff.

They're setting their own schedule, working on simulations.

Yesterday, the Apollo 16 prime crew of Young, Mattingly and Charlie Duke practiced lunar orbit experiments in the command module simulator at the Flight Crew Training Building.

Charlie Duke rehearsed in the lunar Module simulator, and then in the afternoon, Duke and Commander John Young practiced deploying the Lunar Rover vehicle, and Mattingly had an afternoon science briefing on lunar geology.

On the technical side, engineers prepare the spacecraft to load super cold liquid gases called cryogenics.

Before that, they'll clear the pad of unnecessary personnel.

At 1030 tonight, the flight battery will be installed.

And at seven tomorrow morning, the launch crew will stow away all gear in the command module and prepare the giant structure beside the rocket, the mobile service structure to move back tomorrow night.

The crew is in good health and the rocket has no major problem, which might delay the launch.

Some of the VIPs this Sunday include the Vice President, King Hussein of Jordan, and Julian David Eisenhower.

The Highway Patrol expects over a million people this Sunday, and the weather calls for partly cloudy skies.

John> Thank you.

Tom, you just stole my lead line.

There will be, or people expect there to be, as many as a million people here to watch that launch.

A large number of them will be from the Florida area, since this is the first weekend launch scheduled for midday.

There's also a large contingent of South Carolinians coming to the area to watch as the rocket takes a former South Carolina resident on his way to the moon.

We talked about that with the chief of public affairs for Kennedy Space Center, Gordon Harris.

John> Mr. Harris I hear, there is a large contingent of fans, relatives and neighbors of Charlie Duke who are coming down for this launch.

Can you tell us about that?

Gordon Harris> Indeed, there are.

I understand that someone has dubbed them Duke's radars.

At last count, I would guess, or at least 500 residents of South Carolina, here in place, waiting for the launch.

His parents, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Duke, attended the church, which I attend last Sunday.

Mrs. Duke is here.

She's not available to the press until after the launch.

Governor West is due to arrive Sunday with two busloads of people are flying into Orlando.

So I think your state will be heavily represented in the crowd of, some 30,000 people we expect to have on Saturday for this event.

John> How does that, that overall figure for people to view this, launch, compared to previous launches and the Apollo program?

Mr. Harris> We'll have as many, if not mor as guests of NASA for this event than any launch, including Apollo 11.

The press attendance, the accreditation today is about 2200, which compares favorably with the highest mark and Apollo, with one exception.

That was Apollo 11 when we got up to 3400.

Press 152 coverage.

John> How do you handle the VIP situation, you have a lot of dignitaries coming in this time.

Maybe you want to enumerate some of them that are coming in.

Mr. Harris> Yes, indeed we do.

These are guests of the NASA administrator, Dr. James Fletcher, our Vice President Spiro Agnew, who is coming down.

The vice president, by virtue of his office, is also chairman of the National Space Council, a high level body which advises President Nixon on matters pertaining to space.

Mr. Agnew will come down with about 60 guests.

We expect to have a total of about 6000 distinguished guests, including several members of the president's cabinet.

About 150 members of the Congress.

Governor Reuben Askew of Florida will be here.

David and Julie Eisenhower are coming and representing the president's family.

There are many of the astronauts and the astronaut families who will be with us.

Scientist educators.

We have, four busloads, for example, of scientists from Great Britain here for the event.

And we have two busloads from Germany.

We cover a very broad span of, all the various disciplines in the sciences and engineering and politics.

Other federal agencies.

It will be, quite a representative body.

John> Missions to the moon are generally taken for granted by most Americans nowadays.

There have been enough missions so far.

There almost satisfy the imagination of people in this country.

But occasionally somebody turns up and doe man has even gone to the moon.

That was the case this week in Brazil.

The United Press International says the owner of a small Brazilian store has taken his eight year old son out of school because he is being taught that man has landed on the moon.

Severino Silvano de Silva told newsmen they teach things that don't happen.

He added that the space trip was an invention of newspapers and professors who do not believe in God.

The space trip is not a myth to the three American astronauts who will fly to the moon aboard Apollo 16, and it is also a very real thing for their families.

We talked about that with astronaut Charles Duke.

John> Is it really that glamorous?

What part of it is glamor and what part of it is, is rough?

Charles Duke> Well, most of mine has been, sort of working hard.

I guess after the flight, you get to meet some very important people, and you get to represent the United States in various countries.

This could be considered glamorous, but if you look at the schedule that those guys keep even, that's not glamor, because it's hard work.

Our training, we put in about 80 hours a week in training.

It's a, it's a backbreaking, schedule, and it's physically and mentally, the, the physical part is the practice for the EVA exercises with the pressure suit and the backpack and, the tools that we use when, we have a lightweight backpack that we use for earth training 1-G gravity Earth gravity training.

And in my suit in my pressure suit in my backpack, I weigh out at 323 pounds, which is twice my normal weight in street clothes.

We try to endure that for 4 or 5 hours, twice a week on, during our EVA training.

So the schedule is really strenuous and, we have our physical training.

We try to stay in shape and...the, you just don't go down to the rocket and say, hey, man, here I am in my pressure suit.

Launch me to the moon.

It's not that way at all.

It's.

I've been working on this flight hard for two years now and have seen my family very little.

Just weekends primarily, but in the last two years.

And it's been, with just a few weeks out for, vacations with them.

It's been a hard schedule.

It doesn't say that we don't have a party or two or, get to break in the schedule, but it's, it really is time consuming to learn to 17 million different little details that you're expected to know.

John> How does your family feel about, your getting involved in this?

You said you worked awfully hard for the past two years in preparation for this kind of thing.

Charles> Well, Dottie, my wife is very excited about the flight.

She was apprehensive, two years ago or three years ago, when we first knew that we were going to fly.

And, but she's come around and seen how excited I am about the flight, and she's become equally as excited.

The two boys we have one is six now, and one is four are typically "Well, just daddy's going to the moon type thing."

And, what upsets them is I'm not in town enough to satisfy their desires for, attention and all, but they are, becoming excited about, watching me run around on the moon.

So that part of the flight is, is exciting to them.

John> That interview was filmed several weeks ago, in Washington.

Astronaut Charlie Duke is in isolation here at Kennedy Space Center awaiting the launch of Apollo 16 on Sunday.

We have a guest here today who can tell us about the area around Kennedy Space Center, how the towns nearby have prospered due to the space boom.

We'll get to him in just a moment.

But first, Tom Fowler will give us a quick look at tourism and the growth of the towns near and around the space center.

Tom Fowler> Thousands of people visit the every year, and most people go to the visitor information center on the main causeway leading to the NASA complex, which is run by TWA, not NASA.

Actual spacecraft from Apollo 4, Gemini 9, and Mercury 1 are on display outside the building.

Inside, their models of unmanned spacecraft, Surveyor 1, a lunar orbiter, Ranger and Mariner.

Small displays feature models of Skylab and the Space Shuttle.

Anywhere people go on vacations these days, they're going to find gift shops.

And if you sightsee, you're going to find gift shops.

And here at Kennedy Space Center, there's a gift shop.

Space visitors can buy inflatable astronauts or Apollo pennants.

They can get NASA flags, NASA bumper stickers, Apollo slides, movie film, or any badge from a couple of dozen manned space flights long since splashdown in the Pacific.

Badges from Gemini 9, Mercury 7 and Apollo 8, any of those series.

Since NASA security gates are open to the public only on Sundays.

Visitors usually take the tour bus.

The last six years, almost 5 million people rode tours through the Kennedy Space Center.

Adult tickets cost $2.50 children, are $0.50, and students are $1.50.

So if you want to seat Cape Kennedy, most of the time, you have to take a bus and wait, workers at the visitor center said, during the week before Easter, over 12,000 people rode the tour each day.

The first stop on the tour is the Air Force Space Museum, built next to the first pad on Old Cape Canaveral, behind a row of sand dunes where America's first satellite, Explorer 1, was lifted into orbit on a Jupiter C rocket.

The old Mercury pad seemed a lot larger 11 years ago, with crews milling around servicing the bird and news men talking about the first manned space flight.

Alan Shepard rode Freedom 7 into space from this pad on May 5th, 1961.

His Mercury spacecraft weighed only 4,000 pounds and was in space for 15 minutes, boosted by an Army Redstone rocket.

This particular mock up here is a boilerplate mockup used before Shepard's flight to test the capsule's buoyancy in open water.

It tested right off this beach about 200 yards out near the first concrete blockhouse.

There is a real Atlas rocket, the workhorse of America's unmanned space program and booster for the last few Mercury flights, the Atlas is now coupled with a Centaur second stage for more power.

Now there's Delta, the rocket used to lift communication satellites into synchronous Earth orbit.

Both Atlas and Delta are standard equipment for launching any satellite into earth orbit.

About 5000 workers do maintenance on these two pads to prepare Atlas and Delta satellites for the event.

This is the Air Force Space Museum.

There are over a dozen rockets and missiles which were not used for space, but for national defense.

Some of these are anti-aircraft missiles.

Tactical missiles could carry small nuclear warheads, and some of the early rockets of the 50s, which use ramjet engines and were really just unmanned jets.

Most of these are obsolete now, replaced by more sophisticated and more costly hardware.

There's also an odd looking rocket that never went into production.

It looks a lot like models of the space shuttle.

This strange machine was developed in the mid-fifties as an ICBM, but was scrapped.

Its first stage was a rocket and the second used a round jet engine.

This was called a piggyback configuration.

In the 50s, this would look like science fiction, but in the 70s it looks a lot like the space shuttle.

There's also a mock up of NASA's experimental lifting body, an aircraft with no wings, which stays aloft by the shape of its fuselage.

Someday, the space shuttle will be able to land like an airplane, thanks to NASA's research on this craft.

At the end of the tour, the bus was stopped about a half mile from Launch Complex 39.

Visitors get out of the busses and take a look at the bird.

Apollo 16.

The tour is in about two hours before sunset.

At night, tourists go to what's called the strip for entertainment.

When the boom hit in the early 60s, strip cities grew up around Cape Kennedy and the Kennedy Space Center.

Cocoa beach, south of space complex, there's about six miles of motels, restaurants, shopping centers, and service stations.

It looks a lot like Ocean Drive Beach, but it's not quite as large as Myrtle Beach.

There are other commercial strips along causeways, or even from Cocoa to Cocoa Beach, and along 13 miles of U.S. 1 between Cocoa and Titusville.

Cocoa is the largest town near the Kennedy Space Center, with about 12,000 people, and Cocoa was a good size small town before NASA, Apollo and the Kennedy Space Center moved in ten years ago.

There's the old downtown with buildings from the 20s and 30s in Spanish stucco but the old section almost decayed in the late 50s and early 60s, until concerned business leaders got together to renovate with plaster and new paint.

The old buildings are attracting specialty shops, boutiques and bars.

And there's still old homes, too, on quiet streets away from the rush of four lane highways on the strip.

On streets like Valencia, it's right alongside the bank of the Indian River.

The houses are kept up, the lawns are thick with green plants and shrubs.

This is the upper class neighborhood.

Blacks and poor Whites live two blocks away and houses from the 50s, cinder block homes common throughout the block.

Cocoa and Brevard County were hit hard by cutbacks in NASA's budget two years ago, but now people in Cocoa say it's booming again.

And our guest today is Mr. Hubert Griggs.

Cocoa and Cocoa Beach and Cape Kennedy are in Brevard County.

Mr. Griggs is Brevard County bureau chief of the Orlando Sentinel.

He's a native of Brevard County and is married to a Hartsville, South Carolina native.

He's done newspaper work in Brevard County since 1960 and been with the Sentinel for the last two years.

So Mr. Griggs has seen the impact.

Kennedy Space Center has had on Cocoa and Brevard County.

Mr. Griggs, what was it like to live in Brevard County before Kennedy Space Center?

Mr. Griggs> It was a very pleasant place t but the pace was much slower, of course.

The cultural life was not quite so varied.

We had...two bars that pass for nightclubs, but, well, the entertainment wasn't as garish.

The, living was nicer in many ways.

The crime rate, of course, wasn't nearly so high because with progress, you inevitably pay certain prices with growth, with economic prosperity, with, a substitution of the space program for what used to be primarily a citrus based economy, has gotten an increasing crime rate.

All kinds of urban sprawl problems, zoning problems that you wouldn't believe, old sections of the city getting left behind and being a problem as to exactly what to do with them.

All in all, the, average everyday life is, not changed, except that everything has gotten bigger.

Tom> Mr. Griggs, in the last two and a half or three years, the Kennedy Space Center has lost about 50% of its employees.

How is this affected the local economy?

Mr Griggs> It had quite a strong effect.

In the beginning, of course, it, vacated an enormous amount of housing, back when the space center, when Cape Kennedy first began to build, the first great influx of population was, centered around construction people.

They were long construction jobs.

So, they were, I guess you'd say semi permanent residents.

Many of them were here for quite a few years.

They, for the most part bought homes.

Those few rentals that were available in the area were taken up very quickly.

So a great deal of home construction, sprang into existence, the first great flood of it being in the south.

And with the county gradually spreading into the central area.

After that, then, of course, came the, people who moved in to man the programs, those research programs for the Air Force and missiles, and then ultimately into the space program.

John> What kind of an effect was, this large influx, the influx of highly trained, highly, educated people had on the educational system, on this county?

Mr. Griggs> Well, that, that caused problems.

I think we felt very much in Brevard County, like, Alice through the looking glass.

We felt like we were running at top speed to keep from losing ground because, naturally, the educational system, along with the roads and nearly everything else in the county simply were not prepared to take on that kind of a sudden, mushrooming population.

We embarked on, a rather fantastic school building program.

And, the school I went to, had been the school my father had gone to and was still adequate when I graduated from high school there, with very little enlargement.

But, just a few years later, we, we had, new schools in every direction, areas that had not had enough population to have their own school.

From as far as 10 or 15 miles away from the school and, suddenly acquired their own schools because the people involved in the, those areas, it, caused an enormous problem, of course, in teacher recruitment.

And, we probably stole teachers from South Carolina along with every other state we could pirate people from, because, we had to have somebody in those bathrooms.

As a matter of fact, I met my wife when she came down from Hartsville to teach at a school here on Merritt Island.

John> What's the average teacher salary here?

Just wondering.

Mr. Griggs> Well, beginning teachers start, at slightly less than 7000.

It, goes up through years, increments, experience returning to the county, continuing kind of track classifications to, I think around 12,000, going into somewhat higher brackets, of course, as you move up through the masters degrees and doctorate degrees and, of course, the administrative, salaries being on top.

John> What's the educational level of the, of the children themselves at this point?

Are you having a large output of people going to big universities?- Mr. Griggs> Very much so.

I haven't checked in the last several months, really to, see what the status of it was.

But, our percentage of high school graduates going on to college, in recent years, has been really fantastic.

It's been almost unbelievable.

And it's understandable.

Brevard "County-ians" always, certainly, so long as I've been around, I have, have been very concerned about higher education.

I think quite a healthy percentage of my, graduating class, went to college, but, we had at that time, of course, a much smaller percentage of people who were parents who had graduated from college.

Now, the percentage of parents who have graduated from college is enormous, because of all the highly qualified, highly educated people that come in because of the space program and the, satellite economic development that has occurred, the various contractors, financial institutions, the educational level in Brevard County is really almost unbelievable.

An example might be that, we captured something like, 80% of the recent state level science fair winners in Brevard County schools.

We've got about 80% of those winners in the entire state.

Bruce> I'd like to get into two other aspects of the economy.

One, Disneyworld and the second, the retirement population.

I've been told that in the last 3 or 4 years, most of the homes that were vacated by space workers were bought out by retirees.

Could you comment on this?

Mr. Griggs> I think this would be true.

The majority of them, I think, have been.

It's a relatively new thing to Brevard County.

We've always had some retirees.

I suppose every Florida community has some.

But, and the numbers that we now have, is a new phenomenon in Brevard.

It was because of the opportunity, the large number of homes, the reasonable prices at which they were available.

There were so many, VA and FHA homes.

The down payments were relatively reasonable.

While we think that property values in Brevard County have escalated, like one of the rockets that's out here from the KSC they have been worse in other areas.

And Fort Lauderdale, for instance, which has been for many years one of the meccas for retired people, property values have gotten so out of sight that we have had actually some people come to sell their homes in Fort Lauderdale at a profit, at a substantial profit, usually, and move up here because the home prices were so much cheaper.

John> We've learned today that, Kennedy Space Center will be one of the locations from which, the space shuttle will be launched.

Some projections from you on what that might do to this area.

Mr. Griggs> And then, well, needless to sa it is beautiful news.

There are, as I said, always some unpleasant things come along with growth and progress and being busy.

But, I think most of us, Brevard "County-ians" are, not eager to see this, exciting thing out here slow down any more than necessary.

We are very happy about it.

I don't expect ever to see, at least not, prompted by the space program, the kind of boom that we had a few years back.

That was, an explosion, literally, population growth, economic explosion.

That probably will almost certainly will not occur again.

The shuttle will be good for the area.

It will help with the economy.

It will keep under the economy, some footings that we were beginning to wonder if we would lose all together.

But it will be, a much more conservative thing, thing that, frankly, I, imagine the, leaders, the governmental leaders with their problems of, zoning and trying to get roads built and, various facilities that the public needs, will find much easier to keep up with.

Tom> Mr. Briggs, what would happen if the Kennedy Space Center was ever shut down completely?

And what would happen to Brevard County?

Mr. Griggs> Well, Brevard County, would partially revert to very much what it was before.

I think, there are efforts being made, to build tourism.

And I think, some of those efforts will bear fruit.

So, I don't think Brevard County will dry up and, blow off the map.

It will remain, perhaps if the Space Center closed, citrus would again, seem a little more important, having been pushed in the background in recent years, and tourism would, become a much more important factor.

And, certainly if, any area of Florida ever was blessed with, the natural facilities for tourism that is Brevard County with the enormous amount of water we have, with the lagoons, the ocean, the fresh water, the swimming, the fishing, the boating, the surfing and sailing.

It would be hard to find any place that is better equipped to give tourists what they expect to find when the come to Florida.

Bruce> And the position of Disneyland less than 50 miles away.

>> I wouldn't say it was perfect for Brevard County's economy.

The exact effect of it is uncertain at this point.

It is, of course, having an enormous effect over in Osceola County and Orange County, where it is located, At this point, the prime effect, I suppose has been, Disney Corporation's purchase of some land in the south of Brevard beaches area, which has, of course, driven, land prices out of sight and enormously stimulated land buying and, speculation and investment in line in that area.

Tourism has been a relatively minor affect up to this stage.

I think it will increase.

John> We're almost out of time.

But I've got one quick question for you on another topic.

Do you people here ever get excited over a regular Apollo space shuttle?

Mr. Griggs> Yes.

We do.

We, I may not sound like it.

I guess I'm a little tired at this point.

Along with you, I suspect it has been a long, hard week, but, Yes, we get excited.

You never lose all the thrill of, seeing that big rocket and, that, that trip with the men aboard.

John> Mr. Griggs, Mr. Griggs> That drama never gets lost.

John> Thank you very much for coming on, but we're out of time.

That is today's program.

This is our last show before the launch of Apollo 16 this Sunday at 12:54 p.m.. We'll be back in our ETV Studios on Monday night with a wrap up of our coverage here at the Kennedy Space Center.

And until then, this is John Billington.

Good night.

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