11, and what a thing to go back over, thats a big project. The theres many things that stand out, a person says, where were you when . I had sure had an awful lot of great breaks in my life, i mean, whether they be in college, whether they be in flying airplanes, but one of the ones that i remember that is related to apollo 11, in a very direct fashion was the day that i got the assignment to do the landing phase. Cliff charlesworth was the lead flight director and one of the responsibilities of the lead flight director is to identify which flight director is going to cover which phase of the mission. The and moving in there, this was the First Mission where in apollo now, where lonnie, charlesworth and myself, who had been flight deck or thes on gemini, were actually coming back together again. So, you had probably the three most experienced people at the console and it was a question f of, who is going to get to do what . The and lonnie had been to the moon a couple times. Charleswor
This interview is from nasas oral history program. Apollo 11. You were the Lunar Landing flight director. You were in charge of that. But you also took part in the whole thing, didnt you . Yes. Lets go back over apollo 11. What a thing to go over. That is a big project. There are many things that stand out to you. When a person says, where were you when . I had sure had an awful lot of great breaks in my life. Whether they be in college, whether they be in flying airplanes. But one of the ones i remember that was related to apollo 11 in a very direct fashion was the day that i got the assignment to do the landing phase. Cliff charlesworth was the lead flight director. And one of the responsibilities of the lead flight director is to identify which flight director is going to cover which phase of the mission. And im moving in. This was the First Mission where, in apollo, where charlesworth and myself were actually coming back together again. So, you had probably the three most experienc
senator nelson. senator hutchison i think that is a good point. space is a very unforgiving kind of environment, and nasa has always run the programs being built by contractors, not contractors running the programs with oversight by nasa. that is a new way of doing business dr. holdren. needless to say, there are some people who question the wisdom of that, but the fact is that, if it doesn t work or if it gets extended way out, then we don t have a backup system safe for our partners, the russians. but they have a limited capability of getting stuff up and back with the size of the soyuz. i want to get into i want to get into the normal decision-making process, because normally what happens is nasa sends to the office of management and budget by november their budgets, their suggested budget, and normally omb then send it, their iterations, back to nasa for nasa s commentary, but that didn t happen this year. instead, the pass back from omb came right at the time of the