NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Steve Bales, former NASA engineer and flight controller, part 3 of 3

of the computer. The computer would have to act on right in the middle of the decent and make it stop doing some of the instructions that it needed to do. Okay, we have to get this. Tell me about, so the irony is the most famous landing. Right, the irony of this situation, the irony is the most famous landing in the world was almost aborted because of a piece of hardware that wasn't even used for the landing. But thank the Lord that it was not failing that much that we were allowed to go on. Now, how about the crew in this moment? How good like, a guy like Buzz Aldrin, for instance, how good was he at operating that onboard computer and making things happen? The crew put yourself in the cruise place. They're in a cockpit, all in a suit, bulky suits, gloves, they're trying to hit hundreds of switches, different switches at the right time. They've got a computer that only information they have out of the computer are three little numeric keys, three little pads, like your little handheld calculator.

That's all they have, plus an eight ball and some guidance signals. And they're doing all this, they're whizzing along at 5,000 miles an hour, their backs are to the moon. The only thing they have between them and the moon is the engine and the computer guiding them. And yet, they're able to respond and understand and throw the right switch at the right time and take the right action. And ultimately, as Neil Armstrong did, fly across the moon manually with all this perforay on them. It was quite remarkable. Now, tell me about the moment that it landed when you finally got down to the surface. We got, we get down to the surface. We're having the program alarms. Finally, we get so close, the crew is taken over manually. And my big job is almost done for the landing. And we get down to the fuel and we're counting the fuel because we have better instruments on the ground than the crew has in the air. You hear 60 seconds and you hear 30 seconds. And we ever get to zero, we're going to call on a board on fuel and

the crew knows it and we know it. And I see the, I see the vehicle going across the surface of the moon like I have never seen it do in simulations. And I say, what has gone wrong? What is, what's going on? It's going five times as fast, horizontally. It's never supposed to do that. It's just supposed to gently hover down. I say, what did the crew do? And I have no idea. And the fuel is going lower and lower. And then finally, here, contact light. 413 is in. That's a little computer thing. It says, I've told the computer I'm on the surface. Then he says, something I will never forget. Houston tranquility base here. I didn't know what tranquility base was. They have never used that term when we were doing simulations. They always called themselves Eagle. So what is this tranquility base? And then I think, what a wonderful name. I mean, all that in a matter of two seconds. And incredible relief, but still incredible tension, because we

almost had to do in a boat two minutes after we landed. Had a problem with the overpressurized line. I had to quickly get a bunch of key instructions up to the crew so they could take off. And so we're still a lot of tension. There was this relief, but there was tension. And just praying that everything would be all right for the next two minutes. Why were they moving so cross the cross? Turns out the crews were going across the ground so fast because the computer had targeted them unbeknownst to anybody right in the middle of a boulder field. And if Neil Armstrong hadn't flown over that boulder field, it crashed the vehicle. So he had to do it. He absolutely had to do it. And on top of that was dust coming up all around the windows. So here he is, flying across low and fuel, dust coming up all around the place. What a cool man, you know, landing in a place that was safe. You imagine? I can't. I can't imagine.

Still can't. What was the mood after they finally got down in two minutes or two minutes were up. And then it was just absolute for me, absolute relief, unbelievable relief, almost unbelievable accomplishment. We've made it to the moon. First time we'd tried. More problems when we ever imagined we would have almost enough for the kinds of problems that we'd had in simulation to give us a real big problem. But we overcome those and just incredible sense of relief and almost wonder. It's got to be some of the happiest moments you can look back on. Yeah, the happiness came about an hour later, I think. It took about an hour to get happy. What about how quickly after Apollo 11, did you feel like things began to change almost immediately, the public's interest and so on? How

did that make you feel, having lived through this? The Apollo 12 was a very interesting mission. So I think we held public interest clearly not as much on 11 on 12 as 11. But still, how do you give interest? I mean, we're going to land by a surveyor. That was exciting. Here we are landing by a piece of equipment that other men had put on the moon a long time ago. We had an interesting personality commanding the flight who captured the attention of the public. People, I think, we're wondering, were we really lucky the first time, and would something happen, or were we lucky to have made it, or was it, you know, probable that we'd do it again? So even the second time there was probably some concern, could we do it? I think after the second flight in a general public's mind, the concern almost evaporated. They thought, guys, these guys can do it every time. That wasn't of course true. We found that out in Apollo 13. But I think even after Apollo 13, in a public's mind, this was

something they could do. They've done it. And they didn't have the enthusiasm obviously that they'd had in previous missions. I assure you that the people that worked in the control center did because it was just as hard, or 95% as hard, the second time as it was the first and the fourth time as it was the first. But clearly there was a change in public mood. Do you think that the whole thing ended too soon? The Apollo program into soon. It's a very interesting question. Did it into soon? Well, if you were on Apollo 18, I'm sure you thought that the guys that were going to like that, but it did. From a scientific basis, I'm sure that the people that that work that problem every day would love to have had more data. From humans, from from the public spaces, from a public basis, they probably thought it went on too far. It's too long. From my basis, I was so young that I

didn't even have it probably in a period because I thought I really thought that we would go on fairly quickly to a space station and that we would build a new way to go to the moon and it would be back on the moon by now. I mean, that was that naive. And I think many others, perhaps, an agency where that naive, I don't know, but I was that naive. I thought we'd be back on the moon in 10, 15 years. And so I wasn't heartbroken. I was disappointed, but not heartbroken to see the program come to an end. Clearly that didn't happen. Clearly it's not going to happen. In fact, it's going to be interesting when they write to history books and they say, man landed on the moon from 1969 to 1972 and then did not go back for at least 30 years, maybe 40, maybe 50. I hope not, but maybe that long. It'd be sort of hard to explain, I guess, as a historian. So think, if it's that hard for a historian to explain, how hard it is for a kid 25 to explain. So it

was an interesting time. If not for the space program, not for Gemini and Apollo, what would happen to Steve Bales? I would have probably been a design engineer, maybe not a good one. I don't think I would have been a good design engineer, design and spaceships. I suspect I'd have done that for a few years, found out that there were many, many better than I was, gone back and gone to some sort of business or probably even some other profession. But I was good at operations. I was good and I liked being in the middle of something that was happened fast and where you had to make up your mind quickly and you had to decide what you were going to do. And it was exciting. I loved it. And I just loved it. One of the quick things you did that reminded me the 12-2-12-1 decision had to be made quick. 12-1 alarm came up and it took us 15 seconds to make the decision and that was

too long. Probably should have made it in ten. You don't have any time. You're hurtling toward the moon. You're going 5,000 miles an hour. If you don't tell the crew what to do very quickly, you're going to get in big trouble within seconds. And in mission control, if you take more than three seconds in that type of phase to make up your mind, something really, really difficult has come up. And people say, 15 seconds, you did wonderfully. And I say 15 seconds, I did bad. It should have been five.