NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., NASA engineer and manager who helped establish NASA's Mission Control Center, part 3 of 4

El Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Sol Thank you. Well, when you stop to think about Apollo 8, the reason we did that program was George Lowe's proposal that we tried to do something that would move the program fast ahead, not

with lacking the capability of the lunar module. That flight was going to be flown with the lunar module, the flight after Apollo 7, and it wasn't ready to fly. So he suggested the possibility of going in a circle lunar flight around the moon. When he made that proposal, after thinking about it a while with myself and others in my organization, we wanted to go and orbit around the moon because we were having trouble doing orbit determination. We did not at that point have the mass-con theory in our heads. And so we needed to have a look at how you do orbit determination around the moon. So we suggested that if you're going to go this far, if you're going to be that kind of mission, then we want to go and orbit. We just don't want to go around the moon. That was maybe a big step forward on top of going in the first place. So we came in to our first real meeting with Frank Borman on what the flight plan was going to be, on the basis that we were going to go in orbit as opposed to just flying around

the moon. I think that Frank, given his brothers, justifiably so, would have probably said, well, let's just fly around the moon and come back. We said, no, here's why we want to go around the moon, here's why we're going to go in orbit. These are the problems we've got. Frank immediately understood that. So he from the get-go said, okay, if that's what you think has to be done, that's what we're going to do. So we sat there and said, well, what is the minimum we can do within the context of what you want to do, and that's where we came up with a game plan of going into orbit, spending 10 revolutions there, coming out of orbit and coming home, and made it that minimum of mission that we could still go to the moon and get something out of it. I think that's what Frank refers to, because we were able to say, okay, it takes us three days to get there and three days to get back. We want to be in orbit around the moon, here's what we want to do. Let's make a game plan and a flight plan on that basis. And that was pretty, that was that straightforward.

Were you guys nervous about it? Was it a huge step? Well, I don't think there's any question, it was a huge step. But nervous about it, hell no, I don't, if you've got nervous, you're in the wrong business. You know, you just get the hell out of flying to the moon if you've got nervous, and I don't, and where we concerned about it, always concerned about it. Did we all ever worry about it, always worried about it. But, you know, not to the point where we thought those kind of thoughts. What we did was make sure we could do everything we possibly could to make it a safe flight, and that's when you stop worrying about it. If you thought differently, you were no go. I mean, if you ever had any doubts about it, you said, I want this fixed. And it got fixed, or you had some work around for it. And I think that was the creed that we came up with when we started Project Mercury. We never flew with a known problem. If we knew something was wrong, something needed to be fixed, we didn't go.

And we were to done the same thing in Apollo 8. Now, how about the unknown, unknown, well, that's what we were flying for. Excuse me, I want to talk to you about about Apollo 10. I don't want to talk about the mascots. Very important. You, particularly I read in the book, were concerned about the mascots. I'll set you up for that, though, by saying, why didn't Apollo 10 land? It was there, 50,000 feet off the surface of the moon. Why didn't Apollo 10 go down? Well, I think that the reason Apollo 10 didn't land was very simple. In the first place, I don't think the lunar module itself was ready to land. I don't think we had the software ready to land. I don't think that we understood how to do good lunar orbit rendezvous yet. We knew how to put the principles where we had never done it. We wanted to have those things all in a row and ready and no knowledgeable so that we knew how to do that and when we got ready to land, we didn't have to do anything else

but land. That in itself was the hell of a step. But having done this thing in a step fashion, we were confident we knew how to do navigation to the moon. We knew how to do orbit determination around the moon. We knew how to do rendezvous around the moon. We knew how to use the lunar module. We knew how to do communications from the earth after separation. We knew how to use the high gain antenna. We knew how to approach the landing so that everything was in order when we made the final decision to land. And that's what we were up to. Engineers maybe were too methodical but that's what we were up to. What about the mascots? You know, I know when Neil went to land on 11, he didn't land exactly where he wanted to. Talk to me about that. Well, when you do, when you have a gravitational model of the moon, that says you're able to take the effects of the forces of gravity on the moon and predict where you're going to be when you come around the moon each time.

As we did that with the lunar orbit, the lunar orbiter information, the lunar orbiter being the vehicle that we took pictures with around the moon, we tried to do orbit determination with their data and we could not do it. We would predict where we're going to be and use our computations using the gravitational model of the moon that we had and we'd be off by as much as several miles. And so when you started the descent, you didn't know really where you were within several miles and that's not good enough, you want to land at a point on the moon. So we began to look at that and said there must be something wrong with the way we do orbit determination. Is there any way we can empirically do that instead of having to totally understand it? And that's what we did on Apollo 8 by looking at the traverses around the moon in orbit. We were able to empirically predict where we were going to be. The mathematics would not predict it but we could do it empirically. In other words, we'd draw a straight line and say we have to make this amount of correction

to the data we have just by doing it on Apollo 8. So when we came to Apollo 11, we'd use that information to predict where we're going to be and then make that correction. However, after Apollo 11, we were able to even do it better based on the information we had from Apollo 11. So we learned from the orbit determination each time how to make a correction to the computer as we started the descent. After Apollo 11, we literally made a correction in the computer for that information. That's the other reason, by the way, we had to have the landing radar operational because we couldn't predict exactly how far we were above the moon. We knew within probably several thousand feet but that wasn't good enough if you're going to land on something exactly. And so we needed that rendezvous radar, excuse me, the landing radar on the limb to be operational in order to land on the moon.

That one piece of equipment had to work. What happened right there at the end on Apollo 11 on the landing? What went wrong? Nothing went wrong. It's just that we didn't have a good enough photography of the point in which we were going to land. It turned out to be a large field of boulders in the landing point where the spacecraft was going to come down. So Armstrong had to maneuver the spacecraft away from the point where he had originally intended to land and that happened to be several thousand feet. And that's what took him so long to get down. He got down to a point where he could see, he could see he was going to land a bunch of boulders. He didn't want to take that chance, that risk. So he was trying to move further away from that field and get to a point where the boulders disappeared and all he saw were craters. And craters are things on the moon that you see more of, the closer you get to it, no matter how close you are to the moon, you keep seeing more craters. So it wasn't anything you'd do about that, he figured that was something he had to live with.

That's great. Okay. What about the Mascons? Well, the Mascons are probably overstated in terms of its effect on the Apollo program. It is true that they were the things that were causing us to have perturbations in being able to determine the orbit as we ran around. But we also had other things that were going on in the spacecraft that it was venting. And those small vents as we flew around the moon were just as bad in making orbit determination as the Mascons were themselves. We just had to have an empirical measure of what we were doing. It was later that we found that all these masses under these very large craters indeed did have a major effect on the lunar gravitational model. But in truth, after we had done Apollo 8 and then Apollo 10 and then Apollo 11, we became pretty knowledgeable in our ability to determine orbits around the moon just on the basis of the empirical information that we, on the information we had to get to allows empirically to do this job.

Did you sense after the success of 11, Chris, that the party was over in terms of the public, in terms of the enthusiasm, this is incredible ten years we got? No, I don't think any of us in the program had any idea that the public would become as, and you say the public. I don't think you had to, you say, the public so much is the people that were responsible for carrying the news. I think they became Blasey about it. We seem to have this thing in this country which we cannot get away from, and that is what have you done for me lately? Once you've done something, then, well, what are you going to do next time, and how the hell are you going to top being around the moon or landing on the moon the first time? It wasn't until you got to Apollo 13, we frightened them to death again, that people came back to the program. So yes, I think we were very surprised that we would have somebody on the Earth, from the Earth, go to the moon, be walking on another planet, and the three major networks in the country, except for PBS, would be showing that soap operas at that time, and that's what happened.

We didn't become Blasey about it. The press became Blasey about it. Well, thank God Nova is on PBS as all I can say, because that comment will stay in there. Well, it's the truth. It is the truth. I mean, I had two TV sets here, and I was turning them on, and I said, well, what is ABC saying at this point, ABC is showing that soap operas, NBC is showing that soap operas, CBS is showing that soap operas. It was only PBS that was carrying this horrible situation as far as I was concerned. Before we got men walking around the moon, doing all this science, and only PBS is showing it in real time. Mercy about the site selection. The geologists never seemed to be happy, and that really came to fruition in 12, but what was your take on the site selection and the geologists unhappy? Well, in Apollo 11 through 14, we had a certain capacity to maneuver around the moon and still get back to the Earth. It's dependent on the inclination that we were able to fly at the moon somewhat limited. We could fly inclinations as much as 25 to 30 degrees.

If we stretched it, we could have gotten to 40 degrees. We did not want to stretch it. We still wanted to have some pad on the velocities that we were dealing with or the fuel that we were dealing with. So the scientists felt like they wanted to go to various places on the moon, just like you want to go to various places on the Earth, and you're going to determine the geology. They desperately wanted to go to Tyco. Tyco is located way down in the bottom part of the moon as you look at it from the Earth. Its inclination is probably around 50, 55 degrees, it was just too far to go. And as we looked at the other places that they wanted to go, they themselves are the people that chose the sites to go to. We didn't choose those. After Apollo 11, we said we were willing to depart from a free return trajectory. We wanted to be able to get back to it if we had a problem as happened on Apollo 13, but we still wanted to do whatever the scientists wanted to do within the confines of the performance

of the machine. And our mind, that was something like plus or minus 20 degrees of inclination around the moon. And we said to them, what can you do that you want to do within the confines of that performance, and that's what they did. So the argument after Apollo 11 was not between the engineers and the scientists, it was between the scientists and the scientists, and they are the people that chose the sites to go. The people that didn't get to go to Tyco certainly got most of what they wanted by landing in the rays that did come from Tyco when we landed at other places on the moon. Well, explain that to the audience. What do you mean by the free return, getting the right degree, because they want to do that? If a free return trajectory means that if you take off from the earth and don't do anything, but minor modifications to the trajectory you're on, you'll go around the moon and come back without any further large changes in trajectory that might have to be done with

the large engine. Now to get to various places on the moon, you had to depart from that to go to higher places in the north or south latitudes. So when you depart from the free return trajectory, you still had to make that much velocity back into the spacecraft in order to get back to the earth. We were willing to do that after Apollo 11. On Apollo 12, we departed from the free return trajectory. There's a big argument from the scientist as to why we might not want to do that. I'm not sure they totally understood what we were telling them at the time. But in my mind, we did everything they asked us to do within the performance capability of our machines. Well, you know, shoemaker and Hess left after 12. They were upset after 12 because they felt like, you know, you guys just go landing close to surveyor. You want to prove that 11 was just a flute. The landing on 11 was a flute. You want to get the landing right on 12. Was that accurate? I think that's very inaccurate.

I think that we did 12 because the people in the engineering and lunar science wanted to look at the Apollo 12 spacecraft. They wanted to see what had happened in that area. And they wanted some ground truth. In other words, they had all this information about the moon at the point where the surveyor landed. If we could go down there and give them the information from that particular site in lunar soil in Iraq and put some instruments there that would verify or unverify, in other words, prove that it was not correct, that was a very important piece of information. It's like flying over the earth from 100,000 feet and saying, that's what's down there. You want to go down there and look at it and say, that is what we saw, or that isn't what we saw. So that was one of the major reasons for going to where we landed on Apollo 12. That was their choice. It was the scientist's choice, not an engineering choice. We knew at that point that we knew how to land at a given point on the moon, at least within 500 feet. Apollo 17.

Did you think they were trying to cram too much science into 17 by the time the 17 came along? Did you think that they were just one too many things going on there? No. I never felt uncomfortable about the amount of work that was going to be done on Apollo 17. After you're adding Jack Schmidt, Jack Schmidt knew as much about geology as any geologists was telling him how to do. And I think he knew how to shape the traverses, how to shape the time on the moon, to get the most out of it, to benefit everybody. So as far as I was concerned, it was up to Jack to say what could be done and what could not be done. And I think whatever was done was done between the scientists and Jack Schmidt. How interesting. And I got that question from watching Hank's movie, where there's a scene between you and Gene. Cernan, saying, Gene, I think you're trying to do too much on this thing, I think you ought to knock it off. Well, I said everything they showed in that movie was bunk, and it still is. That's one of them. Kirk, what about Jackson running operation? Well, what did he do, do you run it?

What do you mean? What was that? Do you call him Sean Trump? Schmidt? Yeah, of course he was. In terms of geology, I mean, he was a free Lance geologist on the moon doing what the people in the science support room wanted him to do. And it was a cooperation, cooperative effort between the people on the ground looking at what they saw through the television and what they were describing on the lunar surface. And Jack Schmidt was their eyes ears and nose and snuffing out what the geology was. And I think that that was extremely important. It was a godsend to have him there, because I think we did get the most out of Apollo 17. It could possibly have been done by having a geologist there. And I think you can, you know, I don't think we did too much science at all on Apollo 70. I never had that in mind at all. What I was concerned about is, is that saying I was always concerned about it, you got some test pilot that's going to try to land when something's wrong with the machine he's landing.

After he got it there and we were doing the lunar science, that was strictly up to the scientists and and Jack Schmidt, because I think he was there, a man on the moon. Terrific, cut for a second. Mike, did you have a discussion with Surname? Yeah, I had a discussion with Surname before he went and I just wanted to make sure that he did not know that he did know that we on the ground were satisfied if he got back safely. We wanted to make sure that he had that in his mind that he didn't try to do something that couldn't be done with the machine that wasn't prepared to do it if something was wrong with it. It had nothing to do with the overload of the science and nothing to do with the overload of the flight plan. What I want to do is make sure that he did not do something that he didn't feel could be done comfortably. After he got there, what he did on the lunar surface was strictly between the scientists and Schmidt and Surname.

Was that always a concern with yours, with test pilots, that they were just going to push it beyond its capabilities? Test pilots are test pilots. They're always thinking about trying to save the machine rather than save their lives. So you have to be very careful. They have to be very careful that they don't make decisions which are not good engineering decisions. To get out and leave the machine and try to save it when it comes down to the nitty-gritty. Too many test pilots have been killed trying to save the machine when they should have saved their lives. It would have been better off from an engineering test point of view if that could have come back and told us what was wrong with the machine rather than us having to figure out what the hell caused the machine to fail. You find that today in the airplanes that crash in the commercial world. You have all this trouble trying to figure out what happened and you don't have a pilot to tell you. So I would much rather have had the pilot get out of the airplane in my time and tell me that this is why the airplane was failing rather than having him killed and then having

me try to figure out what caused it. That's what a test pilot is all about. In summation, what was Apollo, what was it to you, what do you, how would you, what would you do? Apollo was the proof that if you had the right dedication and commitment of the country, of the Congress, of the political world and the engineers and scientists, you can do anything you said your mind to. It gave us something that we never had before in this country, an ability to look into space and say it was real, something, someplace we can certainly go to and think about in the future. Has an engineering feat, as a technological feat, how would you summarize it? Well, it was probably the, in this 20th century, I don't think that there was an engineering feat that was as great as Apollo or had the effect on technology in this country.

I think that the challenge to the world of technology, the challenge of the science was such that you would not have done it that way, it would not have been, spent that way, the money wouldn't have gotten spent that way and therefore you wouldn't have benefited from it. The country got a great deal out of the technological investment in Apollo. A lot of people don't realize there were 18, 19, 20 missions that never happened. How did you feel about that? Did you think, well, we did what we needed to do or were you pissed off that we didn't get to finish it? We didn't finish what we did. No, we had budgetary problems in this country at that time and budgetary problems in the space program. We had to justify spending the money between Apollo, between the Skylab and the coming space shuttle and the country couldn't stand the monies involved in all of those programs to do everything we'd set out to do. So I think that the scientific community knew why we did what we did and we justified

in getting everything we could out of the last three Apollo missions, Apollo 15, 16, and 17, where we had the advanced capability. I thought it was a good decision.