Never accept failure, NASA speaker says

Never quitting and never accepting failure were the themes of talks given by NASA engineer Jerry Woodfill Monday at Clarendon College.

College and public school students attended motivational and informational presentations by Woodfill, who was a warning systems engineer during the Apollo 11 moon landing and the Apollo 13 mission depicted in the movie of the same name.

Woodfill said he grew up in Indiana as student with average marks and that coverage of one good basketball game got him a scholarship to Rice University where he prove himself to be a less than stellar athlete.

“I had the lowest scoring percentage in university history,” he said and related tales of failures or embarrassments, including making an F- in one course of study.

Woodfill said he was near quitting engineering school when John F. Kennedy made his famous moon speech at Rice, and at that instance he recommitted himself to his studies so he could go to work for the space program.

Once at NASA, he witnessed failures that built a foundation for success, including the deadly Apollo 1 fire that took the lives of three astronauts but led to changes that would help keep Apollo 13 astronauts alive.

A morning speech at the Harned Sisters Fine Arts Center focused on motivational speaking and working for your dreams, and an afternoon speech at the Vera Dial Dickey Library focused more extensively on the Apollo 13 mission.

Woodfill went through 13 things he believes that saved the Apollo 13 astronauts. Chief among them was the time during the voyage to the moon when the explosion of the oxygen tank happened. If it had happened any earlier in the mission, it would have meant the astronauts would not have had enough resources to return home – or possibly met certain death if the explosion happened in earth’s atmosphere. If it happened later in the mission, the lunar lander would not have been available to use as a life raft.

Woodfill mixed humor and personal experience as he corrected what Hollywood got wrong in the movie and as he pointed out numerous occasions where Providence protected the spacemen.

Woodfill will mark 49 years working for NASA this June and says he plans to be around for his 50th anniversary on the job.