The apollo 13 mission. This hour long interview was part of the oral history project. Oral history [ inaudible ] date is march 12, 1999. You cut your teeth in Mission Control as a Flight Controller responsible for spacecraft guidance and navigation. How did you manage to get in on the ground floor of a program like this . And what was your secret . It was not easy. I had actually tried to go to work for nasa in 1962 and the guy that interviewed me was gene kranz. Kranz and i couldnt get together on money so i said to heck with you and i went off and did something else. I went to General Dynamics in fort worth. But i knew i wanted to get there so bad. Finally two years later in 1964 i took a pay cut and went to work for kranz, with melbrooks and started out as a Flight Controller. The reason that i did, agina was what we were going to join up gemny with. I worked at the Satellite Test Center in california right after i got out of the air force in 1960. We flew those early flights from vandenberg and i knew something about it. And finally i swallowed my pride and my wallet and came to work in houston. And at that time we werent even at the center. We were all over in offices all over houston. And best step i ever made in my life was to do that. The interesting thing, too, was that i only worked the agina for about a month and then moved immediately to gem nias Guidance Navigation and control officer. I never worked in flight at nasa. I started out as other people came on. In those days we were short of people. There was a shortage of Flight Controllers. And the fact that i did know something, i had been a part of unmanned Space Operation was a reason kranz decided to move me to the manned side fairly fast. I was a little bit older than real youngs administers, i was only 30. So it was an interesting time, best step i ever made. You kind of alluded to this but there was no preexisting flight directors, there was no curricula for flight directors in college. So trying to put together people to fly these missions. How do you do that . I think i give most of that credit to the two people you mentioned particularly to craft in the early days and then gene kranz. I think they were uncanny at picking out people that could respond to this kind of environment. It was very unique. Nobody had been in that Pressure Cooker split second Decision Making on the ground. Plenty of guys had been on airplanes doing that but there was not many people that had done it from the ground standpoint where it had to be an instantaneous thing. I think craft was particularly adept at testing people in simulations and all of that sort of thing and picking out the ones that he thought could cut it and those that couldnt that might not. Gene i think got better at that as time went along. In washouts in Mission Control. By the time we got to a real mission, with all the simulations we had done and all the hours we had spent together, it was pretty obvious that the team we had on the floor for the actual flight were all performers. And i had flown in the air force. I had worked the unmanned side with agena for the air force after i got out. And i think i took to it like a duck to water. It was a fairly easy transition for me to make because i had been in that splitsecond Decision Making position before. And i think the other thing that comes to mind when i think about that is how fortunate i was to be a part of that organization. There were so few of us, and we were all kids, young people with life and death decisionmaking capability probably much before we really had ever been tested with that. So it was a very unique time and a unique setting. Even though a lot of it was just judging personality and abilities, there were also some criteria that went into the kinds of people they were looking for, werent there . Yes, there was a big criteria, i think was the fact at we were all engineers or technical people. There were scientists involved, too. For the most part, most of us were engineers. So you had to have a very good technical grounding. The second thing i think is the personality trait. It was as close to being like a Fighter Pilot organization as i had ever seen. It took a bit of cockiness measured and confidence measured. In both cases if you didnt have the confidence to speak up and get the job done, you wouldnt last long. It just didnt work. So i really think that at the end of the day the confidence and the technical skill was what was the most important aspect. And then the other thing is that final thing of not being bothered by being out on the end of the diving board, fully exposed so that all your errors showed up. You know, ive often said that astronauts, Flight Controllers, and all of that kind of you know, they really didnt mind dying nearly as much as they minded screwing up in front of their peers. And you had many opportunities in that environment, both in simulations thank god most of them happened in simulations but sometimes in Real Missions where you were out there by yourself and you had to make that call. And the real fear was screwing up. Ive heard stories. I dont know if theyre apocryphal or true, early on kraft had a Bulletin Board with all of his Flight Controllers pictures on it. If anybody screwed up badly enough, there would be a big, black grease mark through their picture. I never did see that. I heard that story. Chris was fast to scratch if he and in fact, on at least one or two occasions at least one occasion i can remember we talked him out of it. We thought he scratched one too fast. He had a strong faith in his own intuition. Yes. And i would say 99. 9 of the time he was exactly right, too. One of the things you also alluded to this, when visitors come through Mission Control, even today, its certainly true back then, the thing they would tend to comment on is how youthful all these people were. And almost no other field of endeavor would you find young people making those kinds of life and death, nationally significant decisions. And it seems to have been something that happened almost without a great deal of forethought. Those were just the people that were available. They were given the responsibility and trusted with it. And i wonder how that felt as being a part of that kind of a cadre. Well, you know, two things come to mind. One is when it was happening in all of that era, i dont think any of us really recognized how significant what we were doing we knew it was significant. We didnt realize, i dont think, at the time how fortunate and what kind of capability did we have to have to ever even get into this position . In many cases i think i go back again to the analogy of the Fighter Squadron. You go into a Fighter Squadron today, just like then, and one of the things that always shocks you is how young these people look. And they are young. I mean, f15 and f16s and f22s that are coming along now, they look like kids flying them. And im sure that we looked that way, because in many cases and ive discussed this with gene kranz he was looking for people with flying backgrounds because he thought that skill would transfer and there was no other place to go find them, and he thought that skill would transfer. And so i really think we were young, but it was a Young Persons business. Now, the big difference i see today, which is, of course, a big improvement, is that we were all guys, all men. And now, of course, we have men and women in Mission Control. We should have then. But we just didnt have the skill base at that time to do that. The rest of the country hadnt caught up either. Thats right. We were right along with the rest of the country. Some of krafts proteges, that first tier of flight directors john hodge, gene kranz, glynn lunney were all people that you worked closely with. Id be interested in your kind of thumbnail sketches of each of those and what do they pick up uniquely from kraft, what do they bring to it themselves . You know, the guy that probably became more kraftlike was lunney. Glynn lunney had many of the same traits as kraft. He was quick to make a decision. He was a little blustery every once in a while, confident as all get out. And i always thought that glynn had a lot of kraft look to him and feel to him. Kranz was had some kraft kind of features to him, but he was his own guy, as you know. We always called him the prussian general. He had that military bearing, the preciseness that kraft didnt do. Kraft, i think, went more on gut feel and emotion, where gene was more of a do it by the numbers, by the book, by the john hodge i dont think matched any of the others. He came from a different he was a technical guy. Hodge came out of the Cape Canaveral group. Averill group. And john brought a different set of skills to the table. He was a very strong technical guy. And i think operations was not his first choice or first love or anything like that. And i think thats one reason he didnt stay in it very long. I think he had other talents that went to work somewhere else. And, you know, i think as i recall, he went into advanced programs when he left. And he was very good. He was a visionary almost. Flight operations didnt have much room for visionary. You had to make the hardware work that you had in front of you at the time. So i think john did fine as a flight director, but he just didnt stay in it very long because i dont think it was his bag. But they were all very capable people and all fun to work with. Which of the bunch, if you were working as a Flight Controller, member of the team, which was the easiest for you to work with and to work for of that bunch . Oh, i think when i was a Flight Controller the guy that i probably related to the fastest, and of course he was an icon to me even though he probably shouldnt have been, but he was, kraft, always felt honored to work with him when he was flight director. But gene kranz was always easy and so was lunney. They were none of them difficult. They were all demanding to the point that they wanted you to be prepared, and that was not an issue in those days. We all worked so hard at what we were trying to do. As i said earlier, nobody wanted to screw up in front of their peers so it was the best motivation we had was the peer pressure. Kranzs organization always struck me as being helpful because he worried every little issue and problem, communicated them so thoroughly, that everybody knew what was going on. Right. And it got over and over and over again, so the problem and the approach that was being taken was so clear. Yeah. Gene was, by far, the most detailed guy and all that, but everybody knew what he was trying to do and where he was headed. Kraft and lunney, more gut feel, strong technically also, but had that gut feel that could most of the time they knew the answer already. So did gene. Even when i became a flight director, by the time you elevate to that point, you pretty well know whats going on. But you got these great guys that could help you. I never had the pleasure of seeing kraft operate as a flight director, but the one trait i sensed all of you had from him was the tendency to make the Flight Controllers take the responsibility for the decision. Amen. That is what we learned, all of us learned from kraft, watching him. He would never, ever try to do your job. I recall on apollo 12 after we got hit by lightning, and i was i was going to ask you about that. Maybe i should wait then. Go ahead. I was just going to say, i can remember we got hit by lightning right after liftoff and it tumbled the spacecrafts platform. And thank god the saturn 5 continued to work just fine. And i was the flight director and it was my first job as a launch flight director. And i thought we were going to have to abort. I never will forget that feeling. My heart was in my throat. But the train came through. Ive gone back and listened to that voice tape a lot of times. And nobody was ever hurried. Nobody was panicked. The first thing i did was i looked at the plot and asked the fido, the flight dynamics officer, were we still okay. And we were gaining altitude. I remember it flashing through my mind very fast, if were going to abort, lets dont abort too early. Get some altitude and punch off this thing if we have to. To make a long story short, we got everything back under control but the platform was still rolling. The inertial platform that measured your attitude and this was in the spacecraft. It was in the spacecraft. It was tumbling. It was in a gyro gimbal system, and it was tumbling, and i knew that could damage, particularly when you got under high gravity, high g forces, that you could damage the platform if it continued to do that. So i asked the gnc, Guidance Navigation and control officer, what he wanted to do. I knew what needed to be done. There was a Circuit Breaker there was a Circuit Breaker you could pull called the imu breaker. You could pull that and it would automatically cage the platform, it would stop it where it was. And he said, stand by. And if you listen to the voice tape, you can hear my impatience. I knew what to do. I wanted to tell the capcom, tell him to pull the imu Circuit Breaker. But because of krafts leadership and training and what i had seen him do in similar situations before, i just let the situation go on. I figured we were not going to hurt it too bad even if it kept going. And so i asked the gnc, i asked him about three or four times, what do you want to do about this imu . About this tumbling imu . He kept giving me the standby, stand by, im checking with my back room. Finally he said well, i said, you best hurry because i knew we were getting up to the point we were going to be under very high gs. And he came back to me in a minute and said, have him pull the imu Circuit Breaker, and then i told the capcom, tell him to pull the imu breaker. I was standing up by that time. And i was ready to just about scream, but i let him make the call because i knew thats how it was supposed to work. How quickly did you realize that the vehicle had been hit by lightning . We didnt get the first hint of it until pete conrad said it. He said, and this was after we had at least gotten the power restored back you were either on orbit or close to it by that time . Yeah well, no. Because actually this thing happened about, as i recall, about 50 seconds or so after liftoff. And in only two minutes we had the fuel cells back online that provided the power to the spacecraft. Incidentally, made on a call by a young Flight Controller named john aaron who i think at the time was 23 years old. So we had it didnt take us long to get the power restored. We did have systems that were still offline, but we at least had lights again and all of that. And so it didnt take too long and then kind of in a quiet part there, pete said Something Like, i dont know what happened. Im not sure we didnt get hit by lightning. And later we found out, even after they got on orbit, that he saw a flash. You know, there was a boost protective cover over the windows while the launch escape tower was still on there, so you couldnt see out real well until that was to protect the windows from getting covered up with soot. Thats right. And so he but he thought under all of that he saw a flash. And so thats what started us thinking it may have been a Lightning Strike and its what worried, us because at the point that, when we got into orbit, we werent sure if wed fried Something Back in the back end in the Service Module, because we didnt know where it had hit the lightning, if it was lightning. They got quick pictures out of the cape. I think we might have already even started on our way to the moon by then. They got some pictures out of the cape that showed some lightning discharges. We probably created our own lightning is what we finally figured out months later, weeks later. But we were afraid we may have fried something so badly that we jeopardized the mission. What we essentially we took an extra revolution in earth orbit. We didnt go the first chance we had to go to the moon. We did it on the next chance. And that gave us a little more time. We essentially, in that time, checked out everything we could in the rear end, the Service Module. And that proved to be a good call. We went on to the moon. We still had that worry about the heat shield. We had a worry about the heat shield. And the reason that we did is because we didnt know if it had done any if the lightning had hit right back in that area, it might have cracked it or damaged it or something, and of course that played out later during the entry phase with the late but it wouldnt have made it any worse if youd gone on to the moon before coming back. Thats right. Once we got into orbit, i mean, we had that trip to make anyway. Thats right. I dont know how many vehicles have been struck by lightning in launch, but i know at least two atlases that were struck by lightning. Really. That we lost. One a couple years after well, several years after, in fact, it was fairly close to the challenger era, after the challenger accident, and an atlas was launched in very similar circumstances at the cape, hit by lightning, and it tumbled the Guidance System and it was lost. You know, we were so fortunate in apollo 12 that, you know, we had the separate Guidance System for the launch vehicle, the saturn, and then we had the spacecraft Guidance System. And during the launch phase the spacecraft Guidance System was just along for the ride. And somehow that lightning when it hit got this Guidance System but it did nothing to the saturns Guidance System. If it had been the other way around, that could have been a it could have been a real disaster. A real tragedy. We were extremely in fact, a couple people were in a position, the commander pete conrad and you and the Flight Controllers, to have made an abort call on the information you had. Yes. If you had acted immediately, didnt you . We did. The thing as i alluded to earlier that made that, and this all happened it was happening very fast. But i remember, i had two displays on my console. And one of them was a display that had five circles. It was the five saturn engine representation. And in the middle of each one it had a Chamber Pressure that was read out digitally so that you could see what the Chamber Pressure was. And as soon as the first hint of something, when he said, weve got a main he started reading off the caution Warning Panel which had just pete did it just was going crazy. I remember looked i remember looking down at those five engines and they were all still right on the money pressurewise. So i knew the engines were burning. I glanced up and looked at the front board and we were gaining altitude right up the flight dynamic officers preplanned plot. And immediately i said, we dont have to do anything. I was thinking to myself, we dont have to do anything right now. Were gaining altitude. Were okay. And, you know, it seemed like it took forever for john aaron to get that call back up to say having reset the fuel cells the first thing was sec to ox. There was a little switch. Sce was signal conditioning equipment. There was a little switch in there. You had two positions. Normal and alternate. It was in the normal position and he had seen a similar thing happen during a pad test on apollo where he had lost all the telemetry, all the data and they had gone, the cape did, and he was just watching. The cape went to the ox position and it restored it because it put a new line of signal conditioning equipment into the loop. So he said, have him go sce to ox. When we this was a funny time because a lot of this happened on the air path. We werent talking on the radios. He said sce to ox, and i yelled over the top of the console, what . Id never heard of the switch. Wed never touched it, never used it out of all those hundreds of switches. He said, sce to ox. So i turned and i said, sce to the capcom, have him turn the sce to ox. I said that on the radio. He yelled back at me, what . Same thing i had said. Sce to ox. That was jerry carr, i think. So he yelled he radioed that up, sce to ox. And bain knew where that switch was. He thank goodness because he didnt say what . He didnt say what. He had remembered it. And as soon as he did, it restored our data. And then we could see john could see that the fuel cells had been kicked offline and the reentry batteries were the only Thing Holding up any voltages at all, the crew was in the dark for part of that, werent they . Well, they almost the dark. The lights, main cabin lights were out, but he still had the caution warning lights and there were some minor lights. They never did go completely dark. But it was a touch and go situation. When i listened to that on tape now, from the time the thing started until the time we had power restored, i think is something a little less than two minutes. At the time it seemed like it was forever. But all that time we were gaining altitude, and so i figured, lets dont do anything here until we it was obvious that the saturn was steering okay. As i recall it, you got the tape from the internal crew conversations in the cockpit at that time. We did. Very quickly. And you had those in Mission Control. We did. Ive still got a copy of those and theyre very funny. It was a little bit those three guys were a little bit like you know, sometime in a car accident or near car accident when you have a close call and then you and you talk about it and everybody gets kind of giddy and, woo, boy, that was close. These guys between themselves pete had that giggly laugh anyway, and he started laughing. He said, good lord, he said, i had no idea what was happening there. They were they sounded like three kids. But it was because of the giddiness of damn near dying and getting by it. They were also going step by step. A methodical way. Step by step. Putting stuff back online. Getting stuff back online. When you listen to the airtoground voice tape, it was very disciplined, click, click. I have to say, every time i hear it, and ive listened i had reason to listen to it several times, it kind of makes you proud the way the whole thing got carried off and was respond a lot like the apollo 11 landing. You listen to that and it will make those team members should have a lot of pride over that. One of the things, of course, the press pointed out at that time was president nixon was in the viewing stands and there was a suggestion if the president had not been there, nasa might have been a little more conservative about launching into overcast with lightning potential. Yeah. I didnt buy that. Didnt no. In fact, i think that day we learned so much that it we had launched in conditions not maybe not quite that bad, but in the clouds, we had never worried about that too much. The walt kapryan was the launch director, cappy, and it was his first time as launch director. It was my first time as flight director. He and i have laughed about it on several occasions that we were our start in those new jobs was a little bit dubious about our ability. I think we would have made that call anytime. I didnt the fact that i never thought about nixon being there. Im sure he didnt either. We just didnt know that a vehicle that big with that ionization capability of all that heat and fire out the rear end could actually trigger could actually make lightning happen and i think thats what happened. I think we actually created the Lightning Strike. And from that day forward, as you know, weve never launched again into clouds and particularly if theres any lightning anywhere near, its a nogo. We learned that that day the hard way. It was a real tribute as you pointed out to the saturn instrument unit. Yeah. The ibm built instrument unit that it withstood that and didnt tumble. Yeah. I will not forget calling the people at marshall after we got on orbit and telling them how glad i was that that iu had instrument unit had held up. Before we get too far beyond it i wanted to talk to awe little bit also about apollo 8. And get your reaction to what to a lot of people seems like an audacious decision at that point when wed never flown the saturn 5 with a crew on it. The apollo command module had flown only once since it had been extensively redesigned after the apollo fire. Yet on apollo 8, second flight of the spacecraft with a crew on it, first flight of saturn v with a crew on it, we say were going to the moon. Not only are we going to the moon, were going to go orbit the moon. Right. How did that i get ever since the Apollo Program ended, in Public Forums and in private, ive gotten a lot of questions about what i thought which mission stands out in apollo to me the most. And i know everybody thinks ill say apollo xi because that was the first landing, but it doesnt. Apollo 8 was the biggest step we took. And when we to leave the earths influence and come under the influence of another heavenly body was a big step. And i dont i can remember, it was almost later we got a little better about this, but on apollo 8, when we did the apollo 8i, when we did the trans linear injection burn, you could have heard the burn that sent us toward the moon you could have heard a pin drop in that control center. I mean, there was nobody even breathing hardly. It was almost like a religious experience. And then when cut off the engine cut off, trajectory we did a quick check on the trajectory, it was good, we were headed out, we all kind of looked at each other and said, well, weve done it now. Its a little bit like the solo you do in an airplane the first time when you get off the ground and youre really happy, and then all of a sudden you say, good, gosh, i got to get this thing back on the ground again. But it was you know, it was a very quiet period going out there. And then right after oh, shortly after , got sick, our first thought was that theres something we dont understand about going toward the moon or something. Its going to make them all sick and we have a disaster on our hands. Of course, that proved not to be true, but it was just it was a kind of a gut check time. And then i remember when we went behind the moon, we lost signal behind the moon, they were going to do a maneuver back there so they would go into lunar orbit. The backside the backside i never will forget how quiet that room was, the backside the backside took 45, 50 minutes, and nobody, hardly nobody hardly anyone moved that entire time. And when they came around the corner on the other side and started reading out what theyd done, everythings right on, the moon looks like this, this, this, its brown, its gray, great relief. Great relief. And then but then we stayed that way, got a little lighter until they were going to do the transearth injection burn. And when they went around that corner the last time to do that maneuver that was going to bring them back home, again it got very quiet, almost churchlike in the control center. I dont think theres any doubt that apollo 8 it did accelerate the program. I think it allowed us to get the Program Going fast. It clearly stuck a knife in the russians and, lets face it, we were in a race with them. Getting men in orbit around the moon at the same time they were trying to and then later with their vessel trying to land on the moon but all in that same time frame. We werent eaten up with that in the control center. We werent eaten up with the core or anything like that but it made us all proud. And we knew we had taken a step that was going to get us to the moon and land on the moon faster. But i was not a part of the decisionmaking process at that time. That happened at headquarters and at the director level and the flight director level at Johnson Space center. It probably took place with id say three to ten people. I dont know how many were on that but, boy, it took guts to make that call and get us there. I never except for one occasion remember kraft looking visibly nervous and agitated. Yeah. That was when he was waiting for the spacecraft to come out from behind the moon after they had supposedly fired their engine to start them back to earth. Yeah. And, of course, that was on his shoulders. Right. So he was and that was a single engine, had to work. Of course, we did that every mission after that that went to the moon, but that was one engine, one engine bell. A lot of redundancy in the piping and all that, but there was only one Rocket Chamber and only one set of fuel tanks. And it had to work. And it did. Thank goodness. Well, the crew must have had a lot of confidence in Mission Control by that time to trust those sets of numbers. Yeah. To put them into an orbit that was just 60 miles above the surface instead of 60 miles into it. Right. In fact, they all said, you know, every one of them said the impression they had when they got a look at the moon up close, that they were going to hit it. Because they had watched this little bitty circle get bigger and bigger and bigger. And then all of a sudden they were right up against it and couldnt see the horizons even. They all had the feeling they were going to hit it. 60 miles is not very far. Did they ask you to double check the numbers . No. They never asked us to double check. I can recall and i think it was apollo i think it was apollo xiv. I think it was ed mitchell. You guys sure youre right with those numbers or Something Like that . He meant it as a joke. But i think the message was there. As i recall, from the questions at the time, the crew didnt really get a good visual look at moon until they got very close to it because of the attitude of the spacecraft. That is exactly right. They saw it fairly far out, and once they started getting closer and got into position for the injection burn and all that, they didnt see much of it. And so it was a leap of faith. A lot of people dont understand, ive explained this to folks, that this problem was a little bit like a guy shooting a shotgun, shooting a clay pigeon moving across in front of him that the moon was in orbit. In our vehicle we actually had to aim out this way and let the two collide, rendezvous, if you will. And it just intuitively you think there could be a lot of room for error and it turns out that we had learned early on in ranger and some of those voyager and things like that well, voyager came later, but some of the ranger stuff, we figured out pretty early that we could navigate to the moon. But it im sure some of them thought they were going to hit it. Knowing your precise orbit once you were in orbit was a little different question because you didnt understand the lunar gravity that well. Thats right. The lunar gravity is not consistent, caused by these concentrations of masses, and we did see some early indications that we didnt understand the moons gravitational pull as well as we thought we had. But we learned what those were later. Refined it. Before we get completely away from gemini, that program seemed to have a tremendous bearing on the success of apollo, and id like to get your thoughts on what you and the Flight Control team and the astronauts, the operations team, got out of gemini that made apollo successful. You know, actually when and i suppose somebody thought it out this way but when i look back at mercury, gemini, apollo, i think we could have just as easily called them all apollo. It was actually one program. The mercury capsule, and it really was a capsule, about all it did was you could put a man in orbit. You could put a person in a pressurized volume. He can eat, sleep, and that was about all mercury did, get him through the atmosphere and land him. Gemini was just a slightly bigger version of that same thing, except we learned not only how to stay in orbit longer, but we learned how to rendezvous and we learned how to do an e. V. A. , an extra vehicular activity, go outside a spacecraft and do work. So when you think of mercury, gemini was really then this precursor to a real command module, a difference in a real working environment. By that time we had done the major task it was going to take to go to the moon. We had done e. V. A. , wed done rendezvous, and we had stayed in space long enough that we knew the tenday mission told us we were okay. So gemini, i think, was a and mercury ended just about the time i got here. I think they had i cant remember when ma9 flew but it had flown not too long before i got here. And gemini was a superb program. It had a great spacecraft. And it worked well. We had some thruster problems throughout the program that it was always on my systems that i was dealing with. But other than that, the thing worked fine. And mercury had worked so well and gemini had worked so well and they were both built by a contractor that was not building the apollo command module and Service Module. And i can recall one of the interesting transitions from gemini into apollo was wondering whether we had a contractor that knew how to build spacecraft, because the only one that had ever been flown had been built by mcdonald douglas, mcdonald at that time. So but that proved to be, gosh, i can remember on apollo 7 when we finally flew the first mission, it was clear that that was a fine piece of machinery and worked extremely well. The fire had obviously set us back. That was no fault of that module. It could have happened in gemini or could have happened in mercury even because we were flying the same kind of pressurized system, 100 oxygen. And we got kind of faked out i think in those two early programs, and were going right on with apollo just like we had always done. I think that flight hardware we went to the moon with was just outstanding. And the lunar module, outstanding piece of hardware, and it really came to its fore not only when it landed but when it pulled us out of the fire on apollo 13. Had it not been for the lunar module, we would have lost that crew. And so i think all of those programs fit together in a nice, integrated kind of fashion and like i say, i assume somebody sat down and thought through all of that before we did it. At the time we were pulling it off, it all felt like we were kind of doing the next step and the next step. And im sure somebody was back there saying, yeah, this is all going to fit this big puzzle before its over. Certainly all fit. It did. Whether somebody planned it that way or not. Right. A couple things that gemini advanced on, of course the rendezvouses as you mentioned, and the space walking e. V. A. Yes. But both of those were not without their difficulties in gemini. Right. I mean, there was a period as i recall where rendezvous was almost counterintuitive, what needed to be done. Right. There was some once people understood what was going on, they said, well, of course. Newtons laws of motion explain that. Yeah. But it wasnt apparent to the Fighter Pilots who were flying those spacecraft at first. Right. In fact, gemini 4, mcdivet youll recall was trying to chase the booster, and he kept thrusting toward it. And it was just the worst thing he could have done at the time because of the dynamics of the setup. But when we actually got to doing a real, you know, real coelliptic rendezvous, they all worked just fine but it had to be set up correctly that the training paid off finally that you cant just start thrusting and manhandle your way into a rendezvous. It is a very delicate maneuver. Im amazed even today when weve had zillions of shuttle flights with all the rendezvouses, never one has been blown. It just it works. The e. V. A. Was a bit problematic, the Early Missions it was. It didnt go well. You know, there was a reason for that. Gemini really wasnt designed to be an e. V. A. Vehicle. But when leonov did his thing, the first russian that did the spacewalk, we kind of, i think, said, well, we can do one of those, too. Leonov didnt do anything much except get out. That is essentially what ed white did on gemini 4. And then later missions, you know, they did do a little better work, better handrails, better foot restraints, actually tried some tools and that sort of thing. And so we learned a lot. I think by the time we got to apollo, the gemini rendezvous the e. V. A. Work had been very helpful, but we didnt start gemini with a big e. V. A. Thing in mind. It was more of a rendezvous, longer duration kind of purpose. But we added that e. V. A. Stuff in there and it worked okay. It was just not easy. It wasnt designed for it. Well, wouldnt apollo have been a much more difficult enterprise if you hadnt had the e. V. A. Experience . Absolutely. As a matter of fact, i think the thing we learned is that you had to have proper foot restraint if youre going to do any work. You had to have the proper foot restraint and you had to have the proper hand holds. And you also had to have the right kind of tools that were easily accessible and easy to use. So, yeah, i think gemini made had we not done the e. V. A. Work in gemini, we would have been way behind in apollo. And likely, you know, the first real e. V. A. Work we did was apollo 9, where we put the lunar module and command module in orbit, earth orbit, and separated them and then rerendezvoused and did an e. V. A. And all that. That went extremely well. Ill never forget dave scott in his red helmet standing up and doing all that work out of the command module hatch, and it was a piece of cake for him. So, yeah, gemini paid off in lots of ways. By the end of gemini, you also discovered the training tools of the zerog aircraft and the water tank. Right. To simulate partially at least. Right. Zero gravity. Yeah. And the everybody says the zero g airplane, you know, was worth its weight in gold many times over in terms of a successful e. V. A. Endeavor. And the water tank, you know, we had one here. We also had one in marshall. And they made big use of those. And its one of the best training tools still. How we doing on tape . We have about ten minutes left. Okay. Well keep going. I think the next segment id like to spend a little time on is apollo 13. We may have dodged a bullet on 12 with the launch getting through the Lightning Strike. Things had gone very well with apollo 11, apollo 8. Yeah. Suddenly perhaps the accidents we had braced for in mercury, gemini and earlier apollo, jumped up and almost bit us on apollo 13. And, you know, the thing that about 13 that i didnt think about at the time. I thought about this in later years. How fortunate we were that that accident happened where it did. If it had happened after the lunar module had started down for the descent, if it had just been after it undocked and started down to land, we would have bought it because we needed the limb to get home. We needed the oxygen in it, we needed the water in it and we needed the propulsion. We never checked out the Service Propulsion system again after the oxygen tank exploded. It might have worked but we werent sure because we knew something had let go back in the back. So we were so far we were 200,000 miles from home, about 50,000 from the moon, when this thing happened. Thank goodness we still had the lunar module with us. When that accident happened, i dont think anybody at first recognized the severity of it. You can hear it in the voice tapes if you listen to much of it again, which ive had to do, mainly to review when i was doing the movie apollo 13 as a technical adviser. People were still talking about the landing, after the you know, in the early stages, first few minutes after the they knew something had happened, people were still saying, well, we cant land if we dont do so and so and so and so. So even the first reality check came when they saw the second oxygen tank losing its oxygen. They could see the first one losing it and the second one started losing it. This was with the second of three. The second of three. And so at this point it was clear that the program or the problem wasnt trying to get to a landing on the moon but to try to get home. And so i think, and ive heard it said, it was used in the movie even, that this was nasas finest hour. Certainly from the standpoint of Mission Control and the astronauts and the contractors and all of that working together as a team i think it was nasas finest hour. Because it was a reaction to something that had not been planned. I mean, we really never had looked at that. We had looked at using the limb as a life boat but it was a very low probability so we didnt pay a whole lot of attention to it. And we never thought wed have to do it and, b, never thought wed have to do it in a situation where we knew it was going to be close. When we first looked, we thought that oxygen was going to be the shortest supply and that that would be what we were going to have to conserve. Turned out that water was our most critical consumable. And we used water to cool things. We used water to drink and eat and so forth. But it turned out that as i recall we had about six hours of water left when we landed back on earth. So if the flight had been about six hours longer wed have run out of water, and then the thing would have really started to deteriorate. I think it is not only a tribute to the people but to the hardware, the command module even though the fact that the Service Module had its problem, the command module worked fine the whole time. And the lunar module came through. And then the people and the systems all came through. So i really looked at apollo 13 as a damn close call, but we learned a lot from it, and it again, as i mentioned earlier, a little bit of the this may be a little bit of this measured cockiness im talking about. People have asked several times, in fact for the people who made the movie they wondered, werent you guys scared . Werent you guys in Mission Control scared . I said no. We all in fact, they were asking a group of us at the time, and we kind of looked at each other and said, no, we were never scared. We had been trained that as long as there are options remaining just to keep plugging and it would be okay. And we never ran out of options. We used up a lot of them, but we didnt run out. And i dont think any of us ive also been asked, did you think you were going to lose it . No. Thats an honest answer. I thought we could get them back. But i thought we could do anything, and that was kind of our makeup is that we thought theres nothing that can be thrown at us that we cant figure a way out. Now obviously, we knew under power flight like the challenger that something happened there. That was a different story. But if you give us a stable condition in orbit or in translunar or travel or whatever, we figured it was a way we could work our way out of it. That may have been a little bit of bravado, but it was honest. We really did think we could get them back. And so thats what we set about to do. And i never will forget the it was, again, gene kranz, the prussian general coming through with, you know, click, click, click. We took his team offline and let them develop all the power up procedures and reentry procedures and all that. And when they came back in it just, click, click, click, right down the line. In the meantime, the other three teams were trying to cut power, cut power, cut power to save water and everything else. Of course, the astronauts almost froze to death, but we got them home. So at the end of the day it turned out to be a great it was an experience id just as soon not have had, but it was great experience in telling us that, yeah. We could handle some very, very we were talking about apollo 13, and there was one aspect of that mission that also was the first for nasa. It was the first time nasa management had agreed to let reporters where they could listen to the flight director and hear all the decisions and discussions that were going on, and the decision was made before the mission launch. When, in your view, did that contribute to the fact that this mission, which in many respects was a disaster, ended up being perceived as one of our greatest moments . I dont think there was any doubt that having the press in there was a big plus. And i have to admit, earlier in the program, i wasnt sure having the press in was a good idea, because i was always a little bit skittish theyd take away the wrong message. I learned, and this is way back even in gemini when i was thinking that way. After i became a flight director and dealt with the press a lot, i dealt with them some when i was a Flight Controller, but when i was a flight director and the press in those days, of course, we had our tough guys that took us to task all the time, but they were a very fair bunch. And i think they reported very factually what they saw, what they heard. And i grew, in fact, ive got some of them have been lifelong friends as i dealt with in the press that i still am very close to. And i dont know who made that decision. I dont know how it all got made. I remember gee wiz, i dont know if this is the best thing to have these guys in here, but apollo 13 showed it was. And the later missions when they were in there and we got to the missions where we were taking rover around on the surface of the moon and doing that, some excellent silence, having the press right there with nobody filtering what they were hearing or doing and all that. I think it was great. They could listen to all of our conversations. They knew what was happening and so i think having them in there was a big plus. Of course, the argument against doing it earlier in the program was that you guys who had the responsibility for making the decisions might not make good decisions if you knew you were being second guessed, you might not have a full and frank discussion of something. You know what happened, though, and it was very much you may remember, well, i know you remember. We always had photographers in the control center. We always had movie, guy with a movie camera in the control center. And after about probably gemini 5, we flew the first gemini 4s for the first time in parallel with the cape and then on 5 we went to this control center fulltime. We forgot about the nasa photographers and the movie guys even being there. Never saw them. I never saw him once. Same thing happened with the press. The first time that they were there, gee wiz, theres roy neil or whoever up in there. You forgot about them even being there. They were never intrusive. They never bothered us a bit. Never said one thing different had they been there, had they not been there. So i dont think it had an effect at all and it opened up what we were doing to the people i call the shareholders of the Space Program, thats the public, american public. And so i think it was a good thing to do. Brian duff was the Public Affairs director at the center at the time, and he recalled some years later when he went over with one of the flight directors for a press conference after the accident had occurred that this individual in starting off the press conference said ladies and gentlemen, you know everything we know, only thing you dont know is what were going to do about it, and thats what im here to tell you. Id like to find that in the transcript somewhere, but it illustrates the confidence that the media had that nasa was telling them the truth. They knew nothing was being covered up. Right, right. That was the big plus out of it. But i do add the footnote, maybe it was the time and maybe it was the people. I think we had, perhaps, the best group of press that had ever covered any major activity of any time in this country, and even the Foreign Press. The Foreign Press was very fair to us, caught us when we were wrong and lauded us when we were right. So i think we had a very unique time. And maybe that period from ive always said apollo in some ways got lost in the vietnam war and some of the social change going on in this country. And there was a lot of kind of bad things happening, unpleasant things happening, and the Space Program, or at least these little glimpses of something very positive happening and something that the whole world could understand and get behind. And i think the press, in their accurate reporting, caught those good parts. Yeah, they caught us in bad parts, too, but they really emphasized the good and the Space Program kept kind of poking up out of the mud that was going on in the rest of the world with vietnam and social