>> 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 in the moon.
And more recently, over the last 30 or
so years, we've made the space suit,
the life support system that's used
when astronauts do space walks.
We use to say that the space suit is not
a large garment, it's a small spacecraft.
And so everything that you would have
in the spacecraft short of propulsion
and now we've actually had propulsion
for emergency return to a vehicle
in case you were disconnected is in that
life support system, that 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,
we call it the thermal environment
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 seven days a week
and 12 hours a day plus, you
know, those kinds of things.
And so assignments for trying hand it out,
like who's 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 two 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 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 we
can operate in, and did a lot of training.
During the missions, we were in 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 two guys that would be out there.
And if there were any issues, we'd
have to respond pretty quickly,
make recommendations obviously and in
hindsight, now, the benefit of history,
that hardware worked incredibly well.
The latter half of my career, the last 22
years of career, I was the general manager
for our Houston office which was very rewarding.
At that times, it wasn't quite as much fun as
the hands-on technical staff 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.