Original subtitles

Roger, we see it, Jack.

And, uh, we got a reading of, uh,

minus two degrees in the docking index.

We'd like to know if that's 2.0 precise or if it's 2.1 or 1.9.

No, it's minus 2.0 precisely.

CAPCOM looks like the last item we need to hear is a stir on the H2 and O2 at their convenience.

Okay.

13, we've got one more item for you,

when you get a chance, we'd like you to stir up your cryo tank.

In addition, have a shaft in front of you...

Okay.

...for a look at the center if you need it.

Okay, stand by.

Hey, Houston, we've had a problem here.

We've got more of a problem.

Okay, listen. Listen, you guys.

We've lost fuel cell one and two pressure.

Uh, Houston, we've had a problem,

Stand by. They got a problem.

Main B bus undervolt.

Roger. Main B undervolt.

Stand by, 13. We're looking at it.

We had a pretty large bang

associated with the caution and warning lamp.

What was going through our mind is,

"We're a long ways from home".

We were hit with something we didn't expect,

we were hit with something that we just,

in our wildest imagination or what if thinking, they never expected.

That damn room was in serious confusion.

And it took me a while to come to that conclusion, but it was true,

and I'm not sure that Mission Control knew what to do at that point.

I says, "Chris, we're in deep shit".

We were still trying to grasp the total scope of this problem.

One of our fuel cells had died,

the second one was dying,

and from a standpoint of everything we had...

You know, that's not a possibility.

I mean, that's not a survival situation, yet the crew's surviving.

The key thing to me was time.

We needed time to think.

We needed to pull this team together

doing something that had never been done before.

And, Tim Peake, as you work your way

around the mast caster there,

feel free to look at the load path

and get some situational awareness...

When I'm trying to describe to somebody

what I do for a living, I always have to ask,

Have you ever seen the movie 'Apollo 13'?

You know, that big room where all the people sit?

That's, that's where I sit, that's what I do.

When you describe your job,

they ask, "What do you do at NASA?"

And I said, "I'm a Flight Director",

and they look at me kind of quizzically,

and I say,

"You know, the guy with the vest and the buzz cut?"

I, uh, have had a chance to meet a few of those guys.

I really admire everything that they stand for

and what they were able to achieve.

I think it's kind of amazing that, um,

out of nothing they built this great institution.

Okay understand that. It's the ventilation tube in the middle.

We wouldn't be here today

without the achievements that those folks made

and the strides that they took

in getting us down the path of human space flight.

Yeah, we'll leave you there.

Okay. Copy that.

The people that have worked at NASA

and particularly the folks in the Apollo era

make it a point to come and speak to us

to make sure that we truly understand the job

that we are getting ready to undertake,

and share their experiences with us.

So all of us are very grateful to our founding fathers.

I grew up in both Oklahoma and Texas,

and I used to sit outside at night and I'd gaze at the moon.

Never occurred to me...

that we would land people there.

I still go out and I like to enjoy gazing at the moon,

but I don't look at it the same way I did when I was growing up.

It's a different moon to me now.

My childhood was directed by my father who was a drunk,

and he was a womanizer, and he was a gambler.

I left Philadelphia where we ended up living,

and when I turned 18, I said, "I've had it".

"I'm getting out of this hellhole", and I joined the Army.

And they made me a weatherman.

Of all things.

When I was a senior in high school,

I guess I took an aptitude test,

and it said that I should either be a funeral director or an engineer.

And so I went to the library and checked out a book titled "What Engineers Do",

and it really intrigued me, and I said,

That's what I want to be. "I wanna be an engineer".

I was born in a little town in Pennsylvania,

coal-mining town.

My dad worked in the coal mines for a while.

But growing up, I was really fascinated with airplanes,

so I built a lot of model airplanes

and I hung em from the ceilings.

Little balsa things,

learned how to put the paper around them and shrink it.

Uh, and, you know, they got to look pretty good.

Aviation plants need men to design the planes of the future.

I went to Virginia Tech during World War II.

I was studying mechanical engineering,

but I wanted to be a baseball player, not an engineer,

but I knew I wasn't good enough.

I thought I was gonna be this great baseball player,

which I wasn't.

You know, I was going nowhere.

Somehow I ended off going to this junior college,

studying merchandising.

The two years I spent there,

I really didn't learn a lot, even about merchandising.

I learned how to smoke cigarettes, smoke cigars,

drink whiskey and chase girls. That's what I learned.

And I did a good job of learning that.

And then everything changed.

There is something new in the heavens,

something that has never been there before.

It circles the Earth once every 96 minutes.

It's called the Sputnik.

I can remember Sputnik.

It was in an English class,

the speakers came on

and the principal announced what had happened,

and the Russians had put a spacecraft or object into space.

I remember I was driving along the road,

and when I heard that on the news

and I thought, "What? What is this?"

And we said, "Holy-moly", you know,

these guys are ahead of us.

They've gotten a man-made satellite.

And then shortly after that, uh, when Gagarin flew.

It was the propaganda coup of the year.

And obviously we all knew we were in a race.

After the Russian flight, US plans were accelerated.

Commander Alan B. Shepard was sent in a suborbital flight,

unlike the Russian...

And when Kennedy laid down the gauntlet

that let's go to the moon and back and do it in a decade,

I can remember, I wasn't even in the space program,

but I remember thinking, "Can that be done?"

No single space project in this period

will be more impressive to mankind,

or more important for the long range exploration of space,

and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

President Kennedy had charted our course.

The landing of men on the moon...

...before the end of the decade.

We didn't know smuts about going to the moon,

about the environment we were going into,

or the mechanical aspects of what was gonna be required of us.

These things are pretty complicated.

They maybe not seem complicated today,

but they were complicated as hell back then.

The background of flight control really was

what we initially did in flight tests, testing airplanes.

At Edwards Air Force Base, the NACA where I worked,

were responsible for testing the X-1.

And so, it was almost natural to have somebody on the ground

monitoring the X-1 systems, making sure it was ready to fly

from the bottom of the B-29.

And they were able then to monitor the performance of the vehicle,

but also the performance of the test pilot.

That was my concept of flight test

and that became my concept of flight control.

Okay, now what does that mean in space flight to us?

How would we concoct that kind of a system

that would allow us to get that kind of information and talk to the crew?

That was a very big job.

We didn't have any buildings, we didn't have any radar,

we didn't have any telemetry,

we didn't have any voice communication.

And we ended up then saying, "These are our requirements".

We gotta tell 'em it's got to have a computer.

What the hell is a computer?

It was almost that much we didn't know.

It isn't something that we suddenly decided.

We've got a control center, we've got these stations,

and so we're gonna fly.

That isn't how it happened.

It developed with time.

It sort of was an evolutionary thing.

Chris is the creator of Mission Control.

His was the very first voice that we heard,

and he was the foundation for what Mission Control became

and its relationship to the crews and the flights themselves.

There was never any question who was in charge...

because he had the persona, he had the demeanor,

he had the quickness, he had the mental skills

necessary to pull this team together.

He had a way about him that he could kinda see

what was happening, what was needed,

and think through what we had to do to satisfy that need.

...Two, one, fire.

Oh, that view is tremendous.

At the Cape, it was a kinda old steam engine

kinda display.

You had a bunch of little meters.

For reading pressure and temperatures,

and quantities of fuel and things like that.

When we got the goal of going to the moon,

that was a really much bigger step than Mercury.

So the pathway to build the Control Center in Houston,

equip it for the digital age, and make it work that way,

was a big step for us from what we had done

at the Control Center at the Cape.

Fifteen hundred miles west of Cape Kennedy,

the heart of the entire project,

the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston, Texas.

And this building behind me where all major decisions are made throughout the flight.

Mission Control.

From launch to splash down,

in this room 17 key men whose average age is only 30

will watch and control the Apollo Mission.

They'll be aided in their task

by a continuous flow of information

pouring into this room 24 hours a day from space

and from tracking stations all over the world.

From these display panels behind me,

they'll be able to call up anything

from a live television picture of Cape Kennedy,

or a recovery ship,

to moon maps, like that one,

to a circuit diagram of the smallest transistor

on board the spacecraft.

All the controllers in this room will be helped by six rooms

full of back up staff.

So, we need a lot of people.

We were looking for people with certain kind of capabilities:

math capabilities, systems capabilities,

communications capabilities, on and on.

I had become an air traffic controller.

One day the phone rang

and it was a gentleman out here in Houston

and he started telling me they were hiring

every engineer that walked in the door.

And the next thing I knew,

I was driving to Houston in my Austin Healey sports car

with my black and white TV and my clothes.

* Come and take a trip *

* In my rocket ship *

* We'll have a lovely afternoon *

* Kiss the world goodbye *

* And away we fly *

* Destination moon *

* Travel fast as light *

* Till we're lost from sight *

* The Earth is like a toy balloon *

* Well, the thrill you get *

* Riding on a jet... *

I worked at McDonnell Aircraft doing electrical design,

so I got set up with an appointment

and filled out an application form

to work for NASA.

About three months later,

I come home one day and there's a telegram

under my door,

job offer.

See, I thought when I applied

I would just get an interview maybe.

Maybe, that's what I told my wife.

But when the telegram came it was an offer,

and it was an offer for more money than

a country boy had ever seen,

$6,770 a year.

My first job was to give tours of Mission Control,

and the Control Center was just being outfitted with consoles.

As I was a tour guide,

I had a chance to meet people that were going to

man those consoles,

and I say "man" because there were no women, they were all men.

And they were going to run those consoles and make the decisions,

and they didn't have much time

but they had a little bit to tell me what they were gonna do,

at least what the basic job was of each position.

This front bank of consoles, known locally as the Trench,

possibly because it's in the front line,

is where the Rocket Men sit.

It's their job to watch and check that every engine

on board the space craft

is firing correctly and pushing Apollo

in the right direction.

Right behind them here, the Flight Surgeon.

His console has two normal screens like everybody else's,

but here in the middle, on this screen

he can monitor the physical state of the astronauts

second by second throughout the flight.

Next door to him sits the Capsule Communicator.

An astronaut himself,

he's trained with the crew and speaks astronaut jargon,

and so acts as a kind of interpreter

when a particularly difficult order has to be passed from Flight Control to the crew.

Next to him, along this bank of consoles,

the men who check all the systems

on the space craft.

And behind them all, the boss, the Flight Director himself.

He co-ordinates everybody's effort

and uses that to assume responsibility for minute-to-minute decisions

on the state of the mission throughout the flight.

And hey, we got a new program called Gemini.

Why have we got Gemini?

Well, with all these things we gotta do to go to the moo and beginning to figure it,

we gotta do some testing.

We gotta do some stuff that proves we can do this stuff.

Five, four, three, two,

one, fire.

And there was a side benefit

that was very important too

in that the ground had to learn how to operate.

Gemini became the proving ground for this Chris Kraft approach to Mission Control.

So for the team in the Control Center, Gemini became the big step up.

Each one of the missions had a very defined set of objectives.

First of all, you can survive in space.

Second, you can stay there for a long time.

And then, the rendezvous in the EVA.

Space walks and all this kind of stuff.

By the time we came out of Gemini,

we had a very well tested group of people.

And when we got to Apollo, we just had to blow it up.

You know, make it...it just had to be bigger.

So, we were ready to take on the rigors and the difficulties that Apollo presented to us.

The moon is a necessary first step

for exploration of the planets.

To fly men there and return them safely in this decade

is the goal of NASA's project Apollo.

The early missions of Mercury,

and the experience from Gemini,

have brought this country to the next major milestone:

the first Apollo three-man space flight.

These are the men to fly that mission:

Command Pilot Virgil Grissom.

I knew Gus Grissom extremely well.

I knew Ed White pretty well.

I didn't know Roger Chaffee very well at all.

I knew their families,

I knew their capabilities,

I know their...what drove astronauts.

The Saturn rocket, the Apollo spacecraft,

and all the component parts have been tested and retested.

Everything is nearly ready, including the crew,

for this country's first three-man space flight.

On Apollo 1, we were trying to get the first manned flight off,

and it was a push, it was obviously...

That usually happens at the beginning of a program,

and we were having trouble with the space craft.

We knew that there was bad workmanship.

We knew that the wires were exposed.

My introduction to the Apollo program

after I came off of Gemini

was that they were conducting a live pad test

with the crew in a flight condition

on the pad at the launch site in Kennedy.

Most of that activity was directed by the Cape.

I mean, they were in charge of it. We were just monitoring.

But the Cape was really responsible for it,

so I don't know if they felt any pressure to get that test done or not.

The way the hatch was designed, it sealed from the inside.

They were buttoned up in a space craft

at 16 pounds per square inch of pure oxygen.

I don't think any of us recognized the seriousness of the danger

we had put the crew in.

If you got anything that'll burn, and if it ever catches fire,

it's just gonna be a holocaust.

So I was sitting there watching all the data coming in,

listening to the dialogue, absorbing this stuff, learning.

I was back in my office doing paperwork,

but came back to be the flight director,

and Gus says, "I'm ready to go",

finally after bitching like hell about the fact

that he couldn't hear somebody or he couldn't talk to somebody.

And so, we were taking a break.

They were going to see if they could fix the comm.

And some of the guys stood up and went outside the room,

but for some reason, I hung back for a second.

I had something to do, and I still had my headset on.

And all at once,

you know, I heard it..."Fire".

And then there was some silence, and then there was a bunch of noise.

Just noise. I couldn't tell what it was.

Wow, it all happened just right quick.

We were sitting there and we hear the crew.

We heard the shouts from the crew.

Egress, egress".

I said, "Hey, get back on here. There's something going on".

And then, from then on, it was...

impossible to do anything about it.

Uh, of course...

you're just in shock.

Because I'd been in the flight test business

for quite a while of my life,

I've seen death happen in various ways,

but not like that.

And so you had that feeling of guilt,

you had that feeling of remorse,

you had that feeling of, "My God, why did we ever let that happen?"

I think that, uh, we killed those three men.

It's almost murder.

A short period of time after this all happened,

we were called to an all-hands meeting in the auditorium,

and we were called in there by Gene Kranz.

Here we had a group of very young engineers,

most of them just fresh out of college,

who had never gone through this type of an experience.

The first thing that you do

is to identify what your part in this failure was all about.

And Gene commenced to tell us

that we were all responsible for killing the crew,

that we had not done our jobs.

We could have gone to the program manager and said,

"Look, we're not ready", but we didn't.

So therefore, we will never do this again.

Our teams in Mission Control will be known by two words.

He said to us, I want you to go back to your offices,

and on your blackboard, white boards that we had,

I want you to write 'tough and competent' on that board,

and I don't want you to ever remove it.

Tough: we were never going to shirk our responsibilities

because we're forever accountable for what we do,

or in the case of Apollo 1, what did we fail to do.

Competent: we're never going to take anything for granted.

We'll never stop learning.

From now on, as a team, we will be perfect.

I think it changed the entire attitude

of who we were, what we did,

and how we progressed into the future of space flight.

It's my opinion and an opinion of many others,

had that not happened,

we would never have gotten to the moon.

That interim period following the fire

was the only thing that saved our ass,

because we were able to then step back and say,

What's wrong with this thing?

What do we have to do to fix it?

And it brought together the whole organization from top to bottom in NASA.

Without all that happening, we'd have never gotten there.

We had leaders, actually, all the way from the top

that told us, you know, "Get the job done",

and they didn't try to do it for us.

We worked for people that were great leaders.

It started out with the Krafts and the Gilruths and those guys,

and they mentored their people,

and you learned to mentor your people

as you became a manager.

To be a leader,

you have to be willing to accept the responsibility

that requires you to do that,

and that's what people don't understand about management.

They don't understand that it takes a commitment...

that you're willing to accept.

I became notorious for saying what the hell I thought.

I want to hear what you have to say,

and I might give you hell if I don't like it,

but that's tough.

Go away and come up with another idea

that I might like.

And I expressed those kind of thoughts to people.

That's where I got my management forte.

People liked it.

Apollo 8 was going to be an Earth orbital flight.

Uh, we were going to fly the Lunar Module for the first time.

And we'd go and do various maneuvers in Earth orbit.

Well, they delivered the Lunar Module to the Cape

and it was a horrible piece of hardware.

They couldn't get the damn thing checked out.

And as a result, it was way behind schedule

and it was not gonna meet the schedule now of the Command and Service Module

which was coming along very well.

NASA management came up with this idea of,

okay, let's take the flight opportunity that we have,

let's assume we can get the fixes into the Saturn V,

and let us think about going around the moon.

I said, "My God, that's a hell of a different proposition".

The risk involved there are many manifold.

And the first thing I did was call my people

who I thought were necessary to deciding whether we could do it or not.

So we all got together, there was about eight or ten of us,

talked it over, and I told 'em what we were thinking about.

I thought, really, he's got to be crazy.

You know, we're a long way from being ready to do that.

And I said, I want you to go away and I...

Here's what I see the problems are.

Now, you go ahead and think about this

and you tell me what the problems are,

and whether you think you can do it.

So that was an intense weekend,

and we went back on Monday, and says, "Yes, we can do it, with these limitations".

So we walked off from Apollo 7

after we got that all wrapped up,

and bang, they made that announcement.

It was like,

"You're gonna do what?"

We're gonna send a spacecraft out on a trajectory

that's only gonna miss the moon by 60 miles?

It was incredible.

So, if all goes well,

at ten minutes to 2:00 on Saturday afternoon,

that's ten minutes to 8:00 in the morning here,

Borman, Lovell, and Anders will be sitting up there, one minute from launch,

on a mission that has more risks in it than the Americans have ever tolerated before,

and on a rocket that has only flown twice.

Apollo 8, you're looking good.

We're looking good.

Apollo 8, Houston. You're a go for staging, over.

Roger that.

There was a real sense of the magnitude

of what we were doing within the Control Center.

We quadruple checked every number that we

sent up to the crew.

You know, nobody said anything to each other,

but you could just tell,

you know, by looking around

that yes, he's having the same thoughts that I am.

This is no simulation, this is for real.

Trans Lunar Injection, TLI,

when they did those things, you knew you were on your way.

I mean, there was no time to come back

except to go around the moon and come back, you know.

Now he's counting for two...

...one.

It put us on a course to the moon,

25,000 miles an hour, all the way,

and we could actually, if we wanted to,

coast all the way to the moon.

Trajectory, guidance, flight dynamics,

everybody in the front, what's called the Front Trench of this control center,

says they're happy, and that includes the booster.

During the Apollo 8 Mission,

I was not directly involved,

so I had the luxury, and it was a luxury,

of feeling the emotions that

I'm sure the people in the viewing room were starting to feel...

the emotions that the people out in the world were watching.

I mean, they were watching this crew go to the moon and basically describing it.

And instead of having to stay focused on the next event,

the next thing, when is the next call we got,

I could say, "God, this is beautiful".

I mean, I cannot think of any place I'd rather be in my entire lifetime

than to be here in Mission Control.

Uh, this is Apollo Control Houston

at 68 hours, 52 minutes into the flight of Apollo 8.

At this time, Glynn Lunney has gone around the room

taking a status check with his flight control team.

We look go, we continue to stand by,

and this is Apollo Control Houston.

Here we go.

I was on duty for the Lunar Orbit Insertion,

and we start falling towards the moon,

and, uh, it's getting bigger.

There's a two hour orbit around the moon,

and when you go behind the moon,

you have about maybe 50 minutes of

where you can't see the vehicle.

Well, that was a very eerie feeling.

You know, we had...here we're going to the moon,

been talking back and forth with the flight crew all of the way.

And then we have loss of signal,

you know, LOS, and we can't talk to them.

Mission Control said, You're gonna lose communication with us at such and such a time,

and to the second, that's where we lost communication.

You could've heard a pin drop in that Control Center.

I mean, this was the first time we gone behind the moon.

You can't see it and we can't...you don't have any data,

so we're depending on the space craft working perfectly behind the moon,

because it can come out from the backside of that moon, it can go anywhere.

It might be headed into the damn lunar surface.

It might be headed into deep space

if that engine screwed up or the computer screwed up.

So I'm up pretty tight.

They had to do a maneuver on the backside

to slow down to stay in orbit around the moon,

and if they didn't do that maneuver,

they would come out back into view of the Earth at one time.

If they did do the maneuver, then they would come back in another time.

And we had two countdown clocks setup

so that we could countdown to both of those.

Apollo Control Houston,

mark one minute from predicted time of acquisition.

Apollo Control Houston,

Jerry Carr has placed a call, we're standing by.

We've heard nothing yet but we're standing by.

We've got it. We've got it.

Apollo 8 now in lunar orbit.

Sure enough, they came around the corner.

The burn had gone fine, they were in orbit.

So, there's a cheer in this room.

Uh, this is Apollo Control, Houston

switching now to the voice of Jim Lovell.

Big sigh of relief

'cause we knew at least they were stable.

Now, whether we could get 'em out of orbit that was,

that was another question.

I would say that all of us,

we probably spent the whole day

that we were in orbit around the moon, in the Control Center.

Everybody was so keyed up.

Then, you know, towards the end of this day,

Frank Borman comes on, says, you know,

they have something to say.

So I was just watching what was going on with the space craft,

everything was nominal.

And then Frank Borman...

just started, said, in the beginning...

"God created heaven and Earth".

It hit me like a ton of bricks,

and then it hit everybody in that Mission Control Center,

I think,

whether they were faith based or not, like a ton of bricks.

It made the hair stand up on my neck.

It was, uh, such a moment.

None of us knew that was gonna happen,

and, uh, you know, I'm not ashamed to admit I was crying.

It just rang the right bell for everybody,

and if you thought about it for 40 years

and asked yourself, "What could you have said that was better than that?"

there wouldn't have been another answer.

And God saw that it was good.

We engineers are not poets.

We're not good at that but, uh,

I mean, it was a profound effect

on everybody that was in the Control Center.

A screenwriter couldn't have done a better job.

The year of 1968, in the US, a very disastrous year,

with the Vietnam War going on, and the elections going,

and the riots going, and the killing of two prominent people.

To end the year by going around the moon on Christmas Eve,

it all just fell into place.

Spider Gumdrop, I can see your jets firing

just as clear as a bell.

We used to work just crazy hours.

We would run 10 or 12 launch sims a day.

And it was grinding.

We were so consumed with these flights

and exercising them and so on and so on

that we never really had sufficient time to savor them.

It took a toll on the family, you know.

We weren't around that much.

The wives took over. They did all that.

And, uh, they managed the checkbooks,

they did everything.

If I could go back and do all over with again,

I wouldn't do it.

It was that much of an impact on my family.

NASA consumed my time.

The simulation team had a little room

right off the front of the Control Center

with a glass window, they could see us.

And when we ran a simulation, which was a training exercise,

it included the Control Center,

it included the crew, the actual crew usually, over the simulator,

and we were all interconnected both data and voice-wise.

So it was really a way to check out all the ground systems

and, uh, develop procedures,

'cause if the didn't work in the simulator, they weren't gonna work for real.

My nickname for the sim guys

those who are out to get us.

They just kept throwing problems at you all the time.

And they were trying to push us to our limits and see where we were gonna go.

We were about half way through the landing simulation...

and we get this program alarm in the computer.

1201, 1202, you know, uh,

and everybody's wondering, "What the hell is a 1201, 1202?"

Program alarms was the computer's way of telling us,

"You're asking me to do too much".

I mean, we were very unfamiliar with that, at least to me.

I call my back room,

Jack Garman was an expert at computer programs, and he didn't know.

So I said, "Flight, something is happening. I don't know what. Abort".

In Mission Control, when we wrote the Mission Rules,

you need two cues to call an abort.

And that was when we started the debriefing,

the simulation supervisor came in and said,

"Well, you had one cue, what was your second one?"

And there was total dead silence in that room.

After the debriefing was over,

Gene said, I want you to get that team together

and you tell me which alarms you're going to continue on and which ones you're not.

So I said, Jack, you pull together MIT,

the people that built this computer, and anyone else you can,

come up with the list, brief me on it,

and that's what we'll write as a rule.

And that's exactly what Jack did.

Cape Kennedy's dreaming towers, launching pads for lofty ideals.

Collins, Armstrong and Aldrin,

the three men chosen for mankind's most historic mission,

to reach a new world and return with a handful of dust.

The scientists were not very happy

that we hadn't done everything they wanted to do,

and I had said to them,

Look, I'm not gonna listen to anymore of the things you want to do.

I said, "We are going to the moon".

We're going to land on the moon,

we're gonna get our ass off of the moon as fast as we can,

and still picked up some samples,

and make sure the space craft's ready to go, and we're coming back

because we want to prove to ourselves

that all the things that we thought about

to fly there and back are correct and done well.

It was time for Apollo 11.

There was a lot of emotions in the Control Center.

The team was comfortable.

The team was satisfied that we had done everything

we knew how to do,

to be sure that this was as safe as we could make it.

We had a security guard.

This guy here is exuberance,

and he comes up and says, So we're gonna land today, Mr.Kranz,

and all of a sudden, that was different.

The room was already starting to fill up,

not just in Mission Control, the controllers on that shift were coming on duty,

but also, there was a visitors viewing room

and it was filling up with every NASA manager

that had ever had anything to do with Apollo.

I was anxious, you know. It's a big deal.

So I was really focused on it and was really excited, actually.

This meant today's the day, you know, we're gonna do this.

Everything was on track.

We're ahead of the Flight Plan right on down the line.

We had a private conference loop

that was accessible only to the people in the control room.

The outside world couldn't hear it, the managers couldn't hear it.

He just talked to us.

And basically I indicate

that I believe we were born for this day,

we were meant to be here.

We did a great job preparing for this mission.

And then I said, "I will stand behind every decision you will make".

We came into this room as a team and we will leave as a team.

I can remember that today as well as if it was a second ago.

I can remember the words, I can remember what he said,

and that made all the difference in the world.

And then I said, uh, GC, go to battle short,

and he went up and locked the control room doors,

and these doors would not be reopened until we had either landed, crashed, or abort.

This is Apollo Control

at 102 hours, 12 minutes into the flight of Apollo 11.

We're now two minutes 53 seconds from reacquiring the spacecraft.

Twenty-one minutes, 23 seconds

from the beginning of the powered descent to the lunar surface.

Fine control with the burn attitude.

Rog.

Here's the moon and here's the orbit you're in.

And here you do PDI, Powered Descent Initiation.

And Kranz goes to every position, "Are you go or no-go?"

You got to be "go" or we ain't gonna start that burn.

Okay, Retro? Go.

Fido? Go.

Guide? Go!

Control? Go.

Telcom? Go.

GNC? Go.

EECOM? Surgeon? Go.

CAPCOM we're go to continue with PDI.

The principle challenge was,

"Did I have enough information once we started down?"

And we have to update the computer's knowledge

of altitude above the lunar surface.

Okay, we got data back.

Radar, Flight, looks good.

Rog.

Good news.

The landing radar catches on at 39,000 feet.

I thought my big problem for the day was over.

Unfortunately, it was just starting.

Stand by.

1202. Oh, my goodness, one of those codes that we had during the sim.

It was like the...the sim wasn't exactly that, but it was close,

and I was frantically trying to remember which code that was.

Well, when that came, I thought we were dead in the water.

Yeah, the same thing we had.

We get the information that it says 1202,

but I'm still trying to remember,

and Jack Garman is screaming, "Steve, it's on our little list!"

And I just finally...by the time I see my list,

he was about several seconds before I was and I said...

We're go on that, Flight.

We're go on that alarm?

If it doesn't reoccur, we'll be go.

And that took us all of 20 seconds maybe,

but that's a lifetime in the middle of powered descent.

Bales knew that it was still flying the machine,

and we were still going.

Delta H is looking good now.

Okay, all flight controllers, hang tight.

Should be throttling down pretty shortly.

Okay, all flight controllers, go/no-go for landing.

Retro? Go.

Fido? Guidance? Go. Go.

Control? Go.

Telcom? Go.

GNC? EECOM? Go. Go.

CAPCOM, we're go for landing.

Same type. We're Go, Flight.

Okay, we're Go.

And then, as he pitched over,

there was a big boulder field down there, and he can't land.

There's craters in there, there's big boulders in there.

Somebody said that Armstrong's thought he just got a 50-50 chance

they would get to land on it or have to abort.

And I think he was probably the coolest hand out there on that day,

and he had thought about this a hundred times or more, in terms of landing it.

He had to level off,

then he had to fly horizontally to get over this boulder field.

Well, that took a lot of extra gas.

As we kept going down, the low level sensor tripped,

and said if fuel dropped below this point...

Low level. Low level.

Now we're almost run out of gas.

Fuel critical.

I started the stopwatch.

We're down at one lunar G hovering,

and I know how fast that uses fuel,

and I know how many seconds are left.

I was giving a running, uh, commentary for Mission Control,

and Deke Slayton was sitting to my right.

He was Director of Flight Crew Operations,

and he punched me in the side

and said, "Shut up, Charlie, let 'em land".

I think we better be quiet now.

Okay, the only call outs from now on will be fuel.

Okay, Bob, I'll be standing by for your call outs shortly.

On my stopwatch,

I put a little piece of Scotch tape and said,

Okay, at this point now, we'll have 60 seconds left.

And a little up further, we got 30 seconds left.

And a little further, we got zero.

We were set up so that the astronaut knew

when you reached a point,

either he's going to land or he's going to abort.

I am convinced that within 100 feet of the moon,

I'd have called "abort", he would've continued his descent.

Sixty. Sixty seconds.

And that control room got quiet.

It just felt like everybody was just glued to their consoles and holding their breath.

The last 10 or 12 seconds of that landing was very tense.

You know, are we gonna do this or not?

And I was looking at the altitude

and I thought we're not gonna make it.

There's no way. There's too much altitude for us to drop,

but I didn't know we were in a crater.

And when they come up to the lip of the crater,

you only come along here,

and I'm showing this much altitude.

When they come over on the plateau, bam,

it did a step jump.

And shortly after that, Buzz said, "I see dust".

Ah, it was a sigh of relief.

Putting feet down. Two and a half.

Picking up some dust.

Three feet.

Two and a half down. Big saddle.

Four forward.

Four forward. Moving it to the right a little.

Thirty seconds and a half.

Thirty seconds.

Contact light.

Okay, engine stopped.

ACA out of descent.

Prepare to shut down.

We landed with 18 seconds left

on the stopwatch.

We copy you down, Eagle.

Okay, standby for T1.

Tranquility Base here, "The Eagle has landed".

Roger, Tranquility. We copy you're on the ground.

You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

We're breathing again. Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

You're looking good here.

Okay, we're gonna be busy for a minute.

Then it finally dawned on us,

you know, we just landed on the moon.

And we're not talking about landing in an airport or something here.

We're talking about landing on the moon.

Okay, keep the chatter down in this room.

Everybody's applauding behind us in the control room,

but we've got to stay totally focused.

Is it safe to remain here for the next two minutes, yes or no?

Is the space craft going to tip over, fall over?

Are we in a crater? Are we sliding down?

So we had a variety of questions we had to answer.

Okay, T1. Stay/no-stay. Retro?

Stay. Fido?

Stay. Guidance?

I remember Kranz went around "stay/no stay".

Of course you couldn't say "Go/no-go".

You had say "stay/no-stay", and so we said "stay". Everybody said "stay".

Right after this, the final stay/no-stay,

somebody grabs me by the shoulders.

And I looked up and I said, "Oh my God".

Chris Kraft was also in charge of the software,

of the computer software,

managing it before the first Apollo flights.

And so he knew what could have happened.

He knew the rules pretty well,

and yeah, that was really..that was really quite a thing.

To finally get there and to be down there is...

First time, you know, in the history

of the human race,

that anybody has done something like that.

And it's like, the team delivered this.

It was impressive.

This was the ultimate, ultimate, ultimate

testing of the teams in Mission Control

and the culture established there.

And eventually, we did a shift change,

and I stopped to get something to eat,

some breakfast.

And as I walked in, I bought a newspaper.

Well, that newspaper's about three inches thick.

I still happen to have that newspaper by the way.

And, uh, I sat down at the counter

and I ordered my scrambled eggs, and I'm drinking my coffee,

and I'm looking at all of this, we've landed on the moon, all the things.

Two guys walked in and sat down next to me,

and one of them said to the other one, he said,

"You know, I landed in Normandy on D-Day".

And I'm listening,

and then he said,

I was never prouder to be an American than yesterday.

We landed on the moon.

It then hit me what we had done.

The man that has been selected tonight

to receive this group achievement award

for the whole 400,000 who, in one way or another,

have contributed to the success of this program is a young man.

Steve Bales, when the computers seemed to be confused

and when he could have said "stop",

or when he could have said "wait", said "go".

Thank you, Mr. President.

Apollo 12...

started off just like any other mission.

The countdown for Apollo 12 still going at this time.

Project officials are still keeping a close eye on this weather front

that has moved into the area more rapidly than anticipated earlier this morning.

I got a flight awareness award.

So I got to go down to watch the launch.

T-minus 20.

I'm sitting out there in the rain,

three miles away.

We have guidance internal.

Ten, nine, eight...Ignition sequence start.

Six, five, four, three, two, one, zero.

All engines running. Commence liftoff.

We have liftoff at 11:22 AM. Eastern Standard Time.

The Saturn V was a powerful vehicle,

and once one lights off, you can feel your clothes pulsating.

Tower clear.

I'm feeling pretty spunky.

You know, here's my first time as a lead flight director,

a launch flight director, you know.

Pete Conrad reporting the roll and pitch program

to put Apollo 12 on the proper course.

Thirty or so seconds into the flight...

Roger, Pete.

I see two streaks of lightening down each side of the vehicle.

Wow, the crew came alive.

All the data went blank.

All my console lights, I mean, just lit up

like a Christmas tree.

And I watched John. John just sat there.

I don't remember him talking to the back room.

The thought that I had first is,

I'm going to be the first guy that has to call an abort.

I looked at my data...

And he just stared at the data and stared at the data...

I said, "John", I said, "Talk to the back room",

and John ignored me.

And all of a sudden,

there was some patterns and stuff on the screen.

I wasn't too sure at first what they were.

but then, then I said, you know, I thought to myself, I've seen this.

Bang, I've seen this before.

And it turned out he had seen what the data would look like

from a ground test which he remembered.

And that's when it clicked.

The Signal Conditioning Equipment, SCE.

And then John Aaron said, "Flight, tell 'em to go SCE to AUX".

And Jerry Carr said, "What?"

What is that?"

John came in over top of both of us and said,

"Signal Conditioning Equipment to Auxiliary".

It went to the space craft.

Al Bean knew where the switch was.

He reached down, he flipped it,

and as soon as he did, voila, we had it all back.

We got it back, Flight, looks good.

Okay.

Now, it's that SCE to AUX fixed the problem.

SCE to AUX was the thing that allowed me to get the data back.

But the one thing I kept looking at

was the trajectory plot, which we had on a big display in the front.

It was right on.

And that's when I told Gerry, I said,

Look don't put yourself under so much pressure.

We don't have to go to the moon today.

We can just do some tests, and the three of them

will come home, and go the next time .

And all he was really saying is, "Your call", you know.

I said, "Well, it's your job.

You know, that's what you guys know better than I do,

how to do this.

I just want you to know that you don't have to be under the hammer,

or the pressure of making a bad decision,

so you make a good one...

and I'll accept it.

But we kept checking things out, and sure enough,

it was okay, so we...let's go for TLI.

So here we went.

And, you know, the mission after that was

one of the cleanest we ever had.

And we had a hell of a party, I remember that.

After splashdown,

we would go down to 'The Singing Wheel' and all have a beer together.

We would party and just have a great time.

Splashdown parties were, uh,

a lot of good-natured joking back and forth with the other disciplines.

Like, you know, "Boy, you really screwed that one up today".

It was eyeball to eyeball, pointing fingers and shaking fists at each other.

You didn't pull any punches, but everybody was friends.

There's no doubt about that.

I mean, we were all in this together.

Drank a lot of beer.

It was really a terrific time.

Made us all a better team for it, I think.

I got to the Control Center

and I was due to go on shift an hour later.

Uh, everything seemed to be going fine.

Normally, the last hour of the eight-hour shift,

we would prepare the crew for their sleep period.

And there were certain things that we had in the checklist that had to be done.

One of the items was stir the cryos, oxygen and hydrogen.

Initiate EECOM.

Go ahead, COM.

You got your stir now in the O2?

So we stirred the cryos.

And all hell broke loose.

What's the matter with the data, EECOM?

We got more of a problem.

Okay, listen, listen, you guys,

We've lost, uh, fuel cell one and two pressure.

We lost O2 tank 2 pressure.

GNC, you wanna look at it?

Okay. Stand by, they got a problem.

Well, basically, I had a whole bunch of problems reported to me.

I was wondering which one he was talking about.

I came in and plugged it back in.

Sat down next to Gene.

The first reaction was, well, look maybe we're having an electrical problem here

and it affects the telemetry and the instrumentation.

You see an AC bus undervolt there, EECOM?

Negative, Flight.

We may have had an instrumentation problem, Flight.

Rog.

I said,

I think we've had an instrumentation problem flight and that was probably the biggest understatement

in the history of manned space flight.

I mean, I couldn't have been more wrong.

Well, let's get some recommendation here, Sy,

if you got any better ideas.

Naturally, I got a little panicky.

You know, when you begin to panic, this gorge comes up in your throat

where you get to the point of fight or flight,

and a fleeting thought of getting up and going home did pass my mind,

and of course, that was not an option and I knew that.

Can we review our status here, Sy,

and see what we've got from a standpoint of status?

What do you think we've got in the space craft that's good?

Stand by, Flight.

So, and then when I got settled down,

I said,

You know, it does appear we've actually lost two fuel cells and I really don't know why.

We didn't know what happened.

It wasn't until I looked out the window...

that I realized how serious we were.

When I saw that oxygen being expelled,

I realized it was not just oxygen

but the electrical power and the propulsion system.

It was beginning to dawn on the Control Center

that maybe this is a real problem that we got here and, uh, it's not gonna go away.

Uh, Flight, we're gonna hit 100 PSI

in and hour and 54 minutes.

That's the end, right there.

And that is where, basically, my frame of mind changed to survival mode.

I call my controllers and say,

Okay, all flight controllers, settle down, quit your guessing.

Let's start working this problem.

Okay, now, let's everybody keep cool.

Let's make sure that we don't do anything

that's going to blow our electrical power with the batteries

or that will cause us to lose fuel cell number two.

We've got the command module system,

so we're in good shape if we need to get home.

Let's solve the problem but let's not make it any worse by guessing.

Here is a bulletin from ABC News.

The Apollo 13 spacecraft has had a serious power supply malfunction

that could cause the lunar landing mission to be terminated early.

You know, we all came in

to do what we could to help out.

People came from everywhere, all across the country.

When I got there, of course, I went to the back room, it was chaos.

They were still trying to recover their sanity from what had happened,

and they were beginning to regroup.

I didn't even initially put on a headset.

I just walked behind the consoles

and listened to them over the voice ways, what problem were they working.

That damn room was in serious confusion.

And it took me a while to come to that conclusion, but it was true.

Failure was, for quite a while during that period of time,

may have not been an option,

but it was out there lurking, uh, in a dark sky.

It was just...it was just almost daring us to make a mistake.

They were slowly losing electrical power,

and it wasn't going to be long until all the fuel cells were offline, so now we're on entry battery.

I walked up and sat down next to the EECOM.

Sy Liebergot, he was on there, I said,

Sy, this problem, you're not gonna fix this one.

So I said, "You gotta shut the Command Module down".

And you can imagine the reluctance to do that.

Flight, EECOM.

Go ahead, EECOM.

The pressure in O2 tank 1 is all the way down to 297.

We better think about getting in the LM, or using the LM systems.

We were in serious, serious trouble,

and the only way that we could possibly save ourselves

was using the Lunar Module.

Ordinarily, when you're going out towards the moon,

you can turn around and burn the big engine straight at the Earth and get back.

However, the big engine just had a big problem back there

and we didn't know how bad that was.

We could actually do a big burn

with the descent engine on the Lunar Module.

There was not that much longer to go around the moon.

So my input was let's get on a free return right away.

This is Apollo Control, Houston,

here in Mission Control, we're looking... now looking towards an alternate mission.

Swinging around the moon and using the Lunar Module power systems,

because of the situation that has developed here this evening.

I had to maneuver to get back into an attitude

which Mission Control figured out.

And there I learned something very important,

because the Lunar Module had never been designed

to be maneuvered with the Command Service Module

attached.

So I literally had to learn, in a short period of time,

how to maneuver the space craft,

but I got that technique, fired the Lunar Module engine,

and that put us back on the free return course.

We are about 70 hours from home,

and we have a plan for carrying out the rest of the mission,

but there is gonna be no relaxation at all

as far as that goes, from now until splash.

I did not appreciate how much reaction we were getting

from the outside world.

It didn't sink on me till later how connected everybody seemed to feel

with these three guys.

Uh, you know, they didn't even

know them, didn't know their names or anything,

but the whole world seemed to be united

in pulling for this to come off well.

The situation is extremely critical

and we are monitoring it at all times.

We'll be back with another report at 12.30

and then you can see a full analysis of what's happening at 1:00.

We all smoked.

And when I say smoked, we really smoked.

When you went into the Control Room, you came in that side door,

and when you opened that door,

a cloud of smoke came out the door.

That's how much smoke there was.

Apollo 13 brought out some very interesting things

because it wasn't like you got cleaned up and dressed to come to work

and put on your shirt and tie

and brushed your teeth, and used your underarm deodorant,

you went running, right.

We were there for 35 hours... straight.

I think I wore the same set of clothes for at least three or four, five days.

I slept in SSR on the floor.

I was under a table back then.

It was pretty ripe.

Sleep meant nothing, change of shifts meant nothing,

personal problems meant nothing.

There was only one thing for 48 hours...

that the entire team of people, led by Mission Control,

the guys could not solve their problem up there in space.

There was only one thing on their mind,

to get those guys home.

We had been trained to think,

don't ever give up as long as you've got options.

And we never ran out of options.

The team was just non-stop.

The whole way back, people just kept inventing new things,

new innovations and new ways to do things.

It's a question of having this incredible ability

to basically make sense out of things

that were almost beyond our comprehension,

and find the piece parts where we could start

fitting them together

and start pulling this puzzle back.

I could see the Earth starting o get bigger and bigger really,

realized that we had to have instructions

of the best way to power up the Command Module.

And so I kept asking, very politely at the time,

"Do you have those instructions?"

And they said, "We're working on it, we're working on it".

The original power-up document

started off with John Aaron and I on a blackboard.

We kinda drew some things on the board, some rough ideas,

that was the beginning of the document.

I knew basically what equipment you had to have on to do a certain function.

That then started the whole process

of how to build all the detail switches and circuit breakers,

what sequence you had to do this in,

and it's all very compressed.

From there it just started growing,

and people would start inputting their piece of their turf, their territory.

And one organization wanted this.

Well, that had to come back into the document,

and actually through John and I to say,

"Hey, can we afford to do that power-wise?"

And we worked out all the bugs, all the procedures,

and the final document was, of course, then approved and read to the crew.

Tomorrow morning, Eastern time,

the space craft will approach the Earth looking like this.

This is the way it looks now.

About five hours before it reaches the Earth's atmosphere,

the men in the Command Module will jettison this part here

called the Command...The Service Module,

and it'll float away in space.

That will leave these two parts of the space craft,

the LM here and the Command Module here.

I don't remember saying, "Hey, man, we've done it",

because we hadn't yet, okay.

There were still so many variables involved

that, you know, I was just hoping what we did was right.

We didn't know whether the explosion that we now knew had occurred,

what the entire effect was on the Command Module.

We don't know whether the heat shield's been damaged or what,

and has everything we have done to save the crew going to work.

Well, on all of the returning flights,

we have what we call "blackout".

There's a period where they blackout

because of ionization, the heat.

And you couldn't communicate through it.

So they couldn't talk to you and you couldn't talk to them.

At this stage in the space program,

we could compute when blackout will start and when it will end within a second,

and we've never missed.

Well, in this case, it started right on time,

and then when the time came to come out,

uh, it didn't happen.

You know I started thinking, "Oh, my God", you know,

here we've done all of these things to get them back home,

and, uh, something's happened to the heat shield.

The thoughts going through my mind at that time is, "They're gone".

There were concerns relative to the management chain there

buzzing around that we might have damaged

heat shield or all that kind of stuff,

and that's to the point where I just...

And I think this is true of every controller.

You put out of your mind those things you have no control over.

Don't worry about them, that's the breaks of the game.

If that's it, so be it.

So we sat there and we sat there and we sat there,

and I forget how long it actually was late.

CAPCOM, why don't you try and give 'em a call?

And all of a sudden, we got the word from a down-range aircraft

that ARIA has acquisitioned a signal.

Bang!

We almost all fell out of our chairs.

All of a sudden, it came alive.

And then the aircraft carrier reported radar contact.

then they reported a sonic boom and we said,

"Boy, we're re-entering that sucker".

Crew was talking.

The relief of, uh, that they were okay.

And then once we got contact, we heard from 'em,

it went to pure elation.

And there was this television camera view

looking up at the space craft

from the deck of the carrier,

and there were these three big, old balloon chutes.

You know, the most beautiful sight I'd ever seen.

The key things is until that crew is on the carrier deck

and we hand over responsibility from Mission Control

to the aircraft carrier task force commander,

and when that is complete,

then we can start our celebration.

Here they are.

James Lovell, John Swigert, and Fred Haise.

And celebration is always in three phases.

We light up the ceremonial cigar,

you pass the thing lit up right along the line.

And now you open the Control Room doors

and our back room controllers can come in and join us.

Those are the real heroes of 13

because they're the ones who gave... They're the people who gave us the answers.

And the third phase in celebration

is pass out an American flag to every controller,

and this is one that traditionally Jerry Bostick started,

back when we set our first space flight record as Americans

and rendezvousing two space crafts.

So the end of the mission is, is one of total exhaustion,

total feat, total exuberance...

that yes, our crew is home.

They're safe and we did what we set out to do.

After the flight, in discussions with the control people,

I said,

Well, we thought we would deliberately not talk to you... so that it might make a good movie one of these days.

Three, two, one, ignition.

We're on our way, Houston.

After the Apollo 1 fire,

"tough and competent" became the mantra of the flight control team.

Those are still the core of the principles and the foundations that we live by.

Uh, I don't think that has diminished at all.

Guys, you can start opening your cuff checklist to page seven.

We are in a terminate case.

Our key priorities are always

crew safety, vehicle safety, mission success.

And those don't alter,

but what "mission success" means changes over time.

Those folks that flew the early missions,

they set the standard.

They went through the fire for us,

um, and we try to live up to uh, the excellence

that they demonstrated every day.

It's amazing.

I think it's amazing that we were not only able to do it technically,

but the country let us do it,

the public and the congress and the leadership and the White House.

Everything collided and lined up correctly.

I had the feeling of what it meant,

you know, we're making history.

I think all of us did.

And realizing that, there was a sense of pride

in what we're doing,

and a great feeling of gratitude that I happened to stumble into it at the right time.

It was just a golden opportunity to be a part of it.

Somehow or other, when we came together,

we were greater than the sum of our parts.

We became capable

of doing what, in most cases, would be considered impossible.

We were better than we ever expected to be.

We were more successful than we were expected to be.

And really, with the exception of a bad accident

on the launch pad,

we brought every crewman home.

We the astronauts,

we were always the tip of the arrow,

but Mission Control were sort of like the feathers.

They pointed us in the right direction.

They made sure we were gonna get where we wanted to go

and get home safely.

I'm just proud of the people that were involved.

They never let me down.

They never let the system down, they never let NASA down,

they never let the country down.

And if you're looking for patriots, they are they.

Every one of them.