NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Glynn Lunney, NASA engineer and flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, part 4 of 4

So you got 13 all the way back, what was your final question and was it a big one? Yeah we had big questions about the health of the command module. Command module of course that little comb-like vehicle with small batteries that we were going to use to get the guys home and then of course land on the parachute. By that time we'd figured out that there had to have been some kind of explosion in the back end. We didn't know whether any trappineler or something might have damaged the heat shield of the command module. The command module was in a very very cold environment because the side wall of the vehicle was gone. We didn't know whether that would have an effect on the performance of the command module heat shield or whether it might not work very well at all. We didn't know how the batteries were going to be. We didn't know whether the systems would power up because they were left in 30 degree temperatures for four days.

So mostly the command module was unknown, it was mostly unknown and then during the separation sequences of course the crew reported and took some photographs of the side, the whole side of the vehicle haven't been blown out, which kind of added to our, oh my goodness, I wonder how well this thing is really going to work. But the command module powered up, as a matter of fact on the return path some of the guys had figured out a way to get around some circuitry and recharge the entry batteries from the lunar module, which had never been planned for or designed for before, they'd figured out a way to do that. So we felt the batteries were going to be okay, but we didn't know about the rest of it and on the other hand we didn't have any choice but to press on. And I would say that sort of throughout my experience in the flight business, yes, this sounds perhaps a little strange, but I always had to feel that we were being looked after a little bit, even when things didn't go quite so well.

And in the case of Apollo 13 I think we were being looked after a good bit and I've always been very thankful for that, but somebody was smiling on us in that the spacecraft worked so well being exposed to such strange conditions. That's credit to the designers and the people who built it, but there's probably some other credit to do around, do around our various points of the compass and I always feel like some should be given there. Let me ask you about the whole couple of times, yeah. Let's see, Apollo 11, as I told you, was a land and be there and get out mission. Apollo 12 landed by the surveyor, Apollo 13 didn't land at all, Apollo 14 was getting back to landings and doing some exploration and hitting a golf baller too along the way. Apollo 15 was the first flight where we had the lunar module equipped with this little moon buggy where the astronauts could really get a good ways away from the lunar module

in terms of their exploration and the need for a focus on the remaining missions, we eventually flew three, but at the time there probably could have been five or six flown and we didn't know it would be three, but we wanted to concentrate on the return that we were going to get from the lunar surface. Dave Scott and Jim Irwin, two traversers on Apollo 15, spent a lot of time with the geologist and I and some of the flight control people went on, both went to geology classes where the crews were being instructed and then we went on some trips with them where they would go through one of these training exercises that the scientists ran for them, geologists and geologists and I suppose it was kind of like they ran their field trips for the classrooms that kind of go through what are you seeing and what are you looking for and why is this like this and that like that.

And for me it was kind of a window into a brand new world that I hadn't thought very much about and it was a lot of fun, I actually got to the point where, and I think Jerry Griffin will tell you this too because Jerry really got into it. We all got kind of excited about geology and what we were finding and what we could look for and how do you know what to look for and how do you know what to look under and so on and so on. So it was a window opening for me and I enjoyed it. Jerry did it now. Why do you think it was important for your flight controllers to go through it? Well, so that we would have a better sense of what the crew was trying to do because what they would be trying to do on the surface of course that would then be driven by a set of priorities. And in the business we're in, we'd like to understand what the priorities are so that we can better know how far to take things, how far to stretch things and so on and what might be a real big payoff compared to a small payoff. So we kind of wanted to have some intuitive little better than that understanding of what was going on, what were the priorities, what were they trying to accomplish so that we

could best take care of the systems and take care of the astronaut support things while they concentrated on doing the exploration that they were intending to do on the surface. Now that's known as a J-Mission. What's a J-Mission? That was just a designation that we had for the last several missions. It was a longer-lived lunar module in terms of its stay on the surface. It had the lunar module buggy. We laid out a set of these things called ALCEP. I think we had some in the early flights but then we got an a fairly sophisticated systems that we laid out on the moon, microphones, et cetera, so that we're left there that could listen to core samples that were dug down, I can't remember, five, ten feet into the lunar surface. And all of those things, we gradually then began towards the later Apollo missions. We began to have time to appreciate. We began to have the opportunity to understand better and then so that we could better plan and support the lunar surface time to accomplish everything that we possibly could, and still

what became just a few days on the lunar surface. Do you think, were you disappointed when they cut off 18, 19, 20, do you think we were just bowing out? Could you feel the public not being interested? There was, I had a sense that we'd accomplished the original state of goal, that we could have gone back many, many times to various places on the moon and learned some more. It probably would have, as a layman, perhaps, rather than scientists, but it probably would have added incrementally to our knowledge, but it didn't seem like there were any profoundly significant things that we could have done or added. We didn't see any cities or modelists or anything on the moon that we would have gone back to, so it would have, this is not fair to the scientists, but it had the feeling of a little bit more of the same. I guess I was not too surprised when we ended up with flights through 17 and then got on with the rest of the things that we were trying to do.

Looking back on it, this whole thing, the 60s, all the way through Gene Cernan's flight in the 72, early 70s, this whole thing of getting to the moon and the place Mercury played, and then Gemini came along to fill in the hole for building a team of people with experience to go to the moon and then the moon missions. While I was going on, I had the sense that that was going to be the way it was forever. I couldn't imagine it being any other way than doing that kind of activity. Then the real world caught up with us a little bit and then we came back to the Skylab missions, building the shuttle, I was in charge of the policy use project when we docked with the Russians, but you had the sense that the grand adventure and meeting what President Kennedy laid out in 1961 was complete and now we were doing some other things and that would lead to other kinds of things for the future.

But again, the dawn on me that, well, as a matter of fact, I moved out of the operations business, I moved into program management and it was like, gee, I'm now beginning to change my life, I was always involved in these things in a very intimate way and derived tremendous reward, you know,cess of action from being a part of it and now I was moving on to other things and indeed, you know, sometimes people would say that it has slowed down, certainly the space program is not as dramatic perhaps as it was when we were doing the lunar missions, but that's not unusual either, usually periods where there's a sort of a burst of energy and people sort of are doing a lot of new things, there's then usually followed by a period of consolidation where people are sort of building on that plateau and figuring out how to take advantage of it. And we've been a little bit of that mode almost ever since. I don't think Grant's last thing, Grant's will ask me to say, get you to find wine

before it's time, wine before it's time, wine before it's time, I think it was John the Wellan who said that first and we had this, it was just, I can't remember the origins of it, but it was just one of these things where everything had its own time and it had to be there when it had to be there and not before and it would come when it had to come and so on, but it was one of those sort of sayings that we evolved that said say lovey sort of, that's the way life is. Great. Okay. Okay. You got it. Okay.