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

I just want to ask you about what the last question was, the moon, should we go back? I want your opinion on that. And then we just want to take a couple of both. The effect of the lunar orbit rendezvous scheme here in Mission Control. I think it made the operational operation more complex. It made it safer. It made it better from an engineering point of view and a design point of view. But doing rendezvous around the moon was certainly something when we made that decision. We didn't know how to do. So from an operational point of view, it was more complex. It was something we learned in Germany and became comfortable with when we did, after we did Apollo 10. But certainly it was more difficult to do than a direct ascent or doing going from the earth direct to the moon. Certainly safer, however, from an overall point of view to do lunar orbit rendezvous. Going back to the moon, I'm not worried about the spacewalking question. Should we go back to the moon?

Would it be worthwhile in your estimation having gone there once yourself? Could we even do it again in the same kind of way that we did? Well, I said after Apollo that we would not go back to the moon until it became easy to go back to the moon. Apollo was risky. Let's face it. We had a lot of single point failures, a lot of things that could have happened that didn't happen similar to Apollo 13. Either we were fortunate or great people. I think we were great people. We did a good job. We planned for everything that might happen. I think we did a very good job of keeping it from happening. So when you go back to the moon the next time, it ought to be easy to go back to the moon. Going from flying airplanes in Lindbergh's time to flying 707s in the 40s or et cetera. So I think that will be the case. We certainly should go back to the moon. It's a great place for a scientific expedition, much the same as Antarctica.

It's a great place to look at the universe because of the noise associated with the Earth as opposed to the moon. If you go to the backside of the moon particularly, you could shield all of your instrumentations from the crap that comes from the Earth. So we should definitely do that. If you're going to go to Mars and have men living on Mars, people living on Mars, a great place to try all that out is to do it on the moon. On the moon, you're only three seconds away in voice communications. When you go to the Mars, you're 40 minutes away. So you want to know what you're doing at times when you're on the moon relative what you do on Mars. So it's a great place to go to prove that capability. Plus the fact that if you can go to Mars, it becomes easy to go to the moon. So the two join in hand pretty well. I would think that you would not go to Mars without having first gone to try out all that hardware on the moon. Now maybe I'm conservative, but that's the way I look at it.

I think we ought to do both. You You

You You You

You You You

You You

You