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Iowa's Apollo Connection

NASA Public Domain

Iowa has a connection to the Apollo moon landing, which happened 48 years ago.  The communications equipment in the command module was designed by Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids.  In this portion of River to River, Mike Wilson joins the conversation. He is former VP of operations at Collins Radio and also worked for Rockwell-Collins once that company was formed.  Wilson says they had two sets of equipment in the case.

"If one quit the other would take over, but to my knowledge we never did have a failure of any sort or kind, which is great, although that's kind of what we expected.  We were pretty proud of what we did."

Wilson says originally, there were no plans to have a television signal, but Collins Radio engineers convinced NASA there was enough bandwidth.  He says that as they built the equipment, there were visits from astronauts and a lot of excitement.

Ben Kieffer is the host of IPR's River to River