Like so many in the “space community” I was saddened to hear of the passing of Reg Turnill. He was the BBC’s aerospace correspondent but is best known for covering the American Space program throughout the 60s and 70s that he documents so well in his book Moonlandings: An eye witness account.
He was the BBC’s representative in Moscow at Gagarin’s post flight press conference and told me in episode 41 of his experience when I went to meet him in January 2011.
Reg captures the ambiguity of the brilliant Wernher von Braun who he got to know so well that he called him a friend and yet believed that he was a war criminal and should have been hanged.
In this 30 minute podcast , the first a six minutes is telephone conversation recorded on 3rd November 2011 followed by extracts from his talk at the UK Space Conference 5th July 2011 “The von Braun that I knew”. Reg shares three of his audio interviews with von Braun, the audio quality of the 2nd and 3rd is better than the first.
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Grappling with the Unintelligible: the autobiography of Reg Turnill
As a young journalist, Reg Turnill met most of the prewar political personalities and later became the BBC’s space correspondent being the only one in the press room when the historic Houston we have a problem message came from Apollo 13.
This is the autobiography of Reg Turnill and tells of his involvement as a journalist in the early days of industrial journalism, aviation and space exploration.
You can buy “Grappling with the Unintelligible” on Amzon in both paperback and Kindle formats.