NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Gene Kranz, NASA Flight Director, part 3 of 5

You're talking the actual mission here. During the getting Apollo 11 down to the surface was literally a fight from the very beginning. When we cracked the hill, we have about a 30 minute period from the time we first acquired data until we should be on the surface. Coming through my mind was a very simple equation in here. Today we're either going to land, we're going to abort, or we're going to crash, and it would broke down to those three elements. I had come from aircraft light test. I was familiar with the risks over the cruise. I think most of the odds were given for success in this mission were probably about 50-50. But in my mind, I never doubted that we were going to land that day. I believed that we had the right team and the spacecraft, we had the right team and the ground. We were incredibly well prepared.

As soon as we acquired data, we couldn't believe how poor the communications were, to the point where we kept trying to work this, and we would, now this is for the real landing, we're relaying information through a second party. My Collins onboard the spacecraft is to what needs be done. In my tracking people, my trench comes up and says, hey, we're not in the position that we expect to be, we've got some velocity errors, and the one that really got your attention were halfway to our abort limits. It's a holy cow, things are mounting in here. Then they had a electrical problem, a meter problem onboard the spacecraft, which we determined was limited to the meter itself, that the power systems were good. In each one of these problems continued down to the point where we would be making our go-no-goes on data that was stale, it might have been 20, 30 seconds old, but I had no choice. Again, my mission role said, hey, we're committed.

We're going to give it the best shot that we can, and at the last minute, I may have to wave off, but I've only got one more wave off opportunity, and I like to keep all of my options out in front of me. It was a question of really making sure that this team hung tight, and I would use this word several times during those 30 minutes, hang tight, okay, and then make your call. You're go-no-go, and the last set of data you saw, and we just continued to work with this crew to the point where we got them, gave them the go-no-go to initiate power decent. We went into the power decent. By this time, the guidance officer had determined that this problem that we had with our navigation system was not growing any, so this was the good news. We would still be within the landing footprint, although now we knew we were going to be landing near the toe of this footprint. We continued into the power decent, communications were ratty, but we kept working it, and all of a sudden we got a series of computer program alarms.

This was very almost fortuitous for us because our final training run and getting ready for this mission, we had that identical set of program alarms. These alarms occurred right as we were looking at incorporating the radar information to give us the proper altitude, what was our real altitude now, as opposed to the one that we had placed in the computer from the ground. It's almost like a train coming to a different set of tracks, a Y in the road, where I had half my team trying to respond to this program alarm we had, and then the other half trying to go through the incorporation of the radar data. It took about 20 seconds before it finally soaked in that the most important thing was to address these program alarms we kept getting out of the computer, and we had two kinds of alarms. We had what we call a bailout, where the computer was telling us it didn't have enough time to get all the jobs done, and we had to try to intervene to try to give the computer

more opportunity to work the things that had to be worked. Other alarm was what we call a PUDU, or go to program 00 and wait for further instructions. If that happened, and we were up on a way, it'd be a bad day for all of us. We'd have to abort, if it were low down, we had the opportunity to take over in the abort guidance system and attempt a landing. We had to prevent these bailout alarms from occurring, so we kept working with this thing here. At the same time, all of the other controllers were reporting in, and then right in the middle of this very dense set of problems, somebody comes to the loop and he says, hey, this is just like a training run, and everybody mentally relaxed, and it was like a training run. We had learned to work with this kind of a pressure, and dog on it, we had brought the crew to landing and training, and now we're going to bring them to the crew to the surface right now. We just kept working this process, and it was really amazing how this team completely lost sight that this was the day of the lunar landing, that we were really going for the

moon. This was just another problem that we had to solve. As we got close down, the one thing that really started getting to me, you watched the clock. Normally, we landed on the surface of the moon about 10 minutes from the time that we had started the engine on our way down. We were now 10 minutes and we weren't even close to the surface, so we knew it was going to be a horse race. Are we going to run out of fuel? That started becoming an ex critical issue, and at the time that we got the 60 second call from my controller, we still weren't close, and we don't have a fuel, a very precise fuel gauge, what we have is a controller who is eyeballing how much the crew is throttling up and throttling down. Once we get this, what we call the low level discreet, we got pretty good at eyeballing that thing. We got the 60 second call, we got the 30 second call, and about the time we got 30 second call, the crew said, hey, we're kicking up some dust, and we knew then that we were close,

and there, I knew that no matter what I would say or do from now on, this crew was going to go in for the landing, so we just shut up here in the ground, and all we were doing was letting them know what their fuel status was. We landed somewhere with about between seven and 17 seconds if you were remaining, and that's the size of uncertainty that we had in our ability to measure fuel at that time. It was a horse race. How did you feel when they finally touched down? And they finally touched down, this was probably the one, the most unexpected thing that happened to me that day, because as soon as we got on the surface, I had to go through a series of stano-stay decisions. We called them a T1, T2, T3. We had to look over the spacecraft very quickly. Make sure the spacecraft was safe, it wasn't toppling over. We hadn't damaged any of the fuel systems by blowing rocks, maybe, up into the lunar

debris, up into the soft underside of the spacecraft, so I had to do this very quickly. As soon as we got to the surface, the crew had shut those engines down, the people in the viewing room behind me started cheering. My instructors started cheering over in the SIM control area, and this sound very muffled seeped into the room, and this was the first time I realized that we had truly landed on the moon that day, and I choked. And I had to get going, and I just couldn't get the words out to start the stano-stay process. And in frustration, after a couple of seconds, I wrapped my arm and my right arm on the console, and I had a pencil, and I had to broke the pencil into, and then got over that, it was just pure frustration, and got through it, and got on with the T1 stano-stay, and then eventually the T2, and eventually the T3 stano-stay. So basically, we were locked into this room for two hours, just constant work, until we could finally get off shift, and say, my car, today, we landed, and then it was a incredible

day. Great. Okay. Oh, boy, you want to talk about the speech to the troops? Yeah, I didn't see him change, okay? I like to talk to him. I feel very close to my controllers and control team. I think that is part of the chemistry, and I think it occurs with each team, each flight director has their own unique capability. I like to just open up my heart and tell the controllers how I feel, and then this we were... The nervous energy, the adrenaline in this room, causes everyone as you approach critical events to have to go to the restroom. That's all there is to it. And every flight director feels it, every flight controller feels it, and we had taken our break out, we had come back into the room, we locked the doors in mission control, this is so that no one is going to come in or out now, and disturb a controller at a critical time.

In mission control, we have a very private intercom loop, and this intercom loop is only used for mission for debriefings, and it's used for chewing out people. It cannot be heard in the viewing room or anywhere else in this building. It's right within the room itself. And I just felt when we came back that I had to talk to these controllers. I had to tell them how I felt about them, about the job they were doing, how proud I was doing, and how capable I believe this team really was. And I went through that kind of a dialogue, finishing off with, hey, whatever happened here today, and whatever calls you may make, be aware that I'm going to stand with the team. And at which time, I then said, okay, return to your normal loops, and we started the process of getting ready for acquisition to go down to the minute. Good. Good. How important was that landing? What was the objective on Apollo 12 as far as that land?

Well, the objective, from a standpoint of all subsequent missions, what we wanted to do is to get to a very precise location so that we could follow the traverse plan that had been established by the geologists. And this type of the pinpoint landing got you to the right place to start this traverse, because these traverses, the route plan that the astronauts would take, were designed to get as much accomplished in the very few hours we had for the surface excursions with the crew. So landing at the right point allows you to maximize your performance during the surface extra vehicular activity. Was the controversy about the selection site for this landing? Again, this is one of the things I really don't know. Okay, that's right. You don't have to go into the space. Yeah, I mean, just, we had a job to do, and we wanted to do it. At the end of 11, Chris was pointing about this yesterday. Could you feel we got there, the country said, oh, we got there, now what's next? Kind of like the enthusiasm died.

Did you feel that almost immediately after 11 success? I didn't feel that immediately after 11, but the process had been started because I was by this time division chief, and we were already in a reduction in force. They were taking resources away from us at the time we had the major portion of the lunar program ahead of us. We had this scientific, we had the emotional, we had the technology, we had all these objectives. Now we got to do it with fewer people, and to me it was absolutely ludicrous that within our country everything seemed to be all messed up, except for the space program. This was something that we were doing that we all could be proud of, and this was the one thing that within just a few missions, it seemed like everyone had forgotten. We were nation that seems to be distracted very easily. It's not obvious that we always have our priority straight. Here we had a dream that something the entire world could look up to, the entire world

wanted to do. It was something that captured young people and brought them into colleges and allowed them to do tough things, and now we were giving it away, we were surrendering it. We had won this battle of the Cold War, and now it's on to something else. To me it's crazy. Back to 12 more seconds, we don't have to go to the moon today, young man. Describe that takeoff, describe that launch. I was a spectator, and this was a good time, Apollo 12 was a good time to be a spectator at launch, because I had the opportunity to look at my team in action through an entire entirely different set of eyes. We had Jerry Griffin, he was the flight director, he was launching his first Saturn mission, and he had again this relatively young but now quite experienced control team working for him. As we left the launch pad, we were stuck twice for lightning, and literally the power system on the spacecraft had dropped off line, the batteries had picked up the loads.

We had the navigation system acting crazily, and a young controller, John Aaron stepped forward, remembering a very obscure event that he had seen only once a year earlier, and had the crew restore, pushing the right circuit breaker to restore the instrumentation, then with the instrumentation restored, the rest of the flight control team could get to work. Literally, we had a crew inside a dead spacecraft hurtling up towards orbit, and this team put it all together in just a few minutes, got the system secured, and by the time we were seven minutes into the flight, the crew was joking about it onboard the spacecraft, and the batter between the crew and ground was the indication for the first time that said, hey, it looks like we might have been struck by lightning. Well, the mission progressed, we now had to determine, is this a safe spacecraft to send out to the moon? And again, the very epitome of leadership, Kraft and his deputy, St. Schoberg, came down and worked through the ranks of the mission control team.

Schoberg would talk to my trajectory people, trying to find out what were their concerns. Did they have any concern about the spacecraft, Kraft leaned over and talked to Jerry Griffin, the flight director, and he said, you know, young man, we don't have to go to the moon today. And this made Griffin's decision purely technical, any political considerations were removed by Kraft's call, and that was the miracle of leadership that we had during the Apollo program. Great. Cut for a second. You like it? The proverbial dung hit the fan. Why was this, why was this one not simmed for? You guys were so careful about that stuff. We felt that we pretty much uh, simmed every case that we felt was survivable. And training people generally would not give us cases that were considered non-survivable. They were off limits because if you can't come to a successful conclusion, if you can't

work through whatever crisis you have, why train the crew in the disaster scenario? We had near disaster scenarios, in fact, all of the tools that we used in the early hours of Apollo 13 came from other missions. As a result of a training run on Apollo 9, our training people came to us and said, hey, when you were doing that lunar module rescue, why did you leave the lunar module powered up? Why didn't you save the power? And we said, gee, that's a pretty good idea. Why didn't we save it? So we developed the power down checklist. Over the next several missions, we developed more of the bits and pieces that we put into our toolkit here in mission control and it was very, it was confidence, it was the kind of confidence you need. My first thought at about 20 minutes when the crew said, hey, we've had an explosion on board the spacecraft, came down to the controllers very firmly and it's okay flight controllers.

Quit your guessing, settle down, make your calls crisp. The lunar module is attached, we can use that as a lifeboat and don't do anything to screw up our electrical power system right now, batteries good, leave it alone. And this thinking back to all of the piece parts that we had as a result of previous simulations was really the key. That's what allowed us to get through this initial hour without making a disastrous mistake. That is what gave us our way out of the box we found ourselves in. What was your call to Chris Kraft that day to let him know? All of the Chris was, Chris, we got a hell of a problem. His wife had answered the phone and I said, you better get in here quick. And then as he came up to the console, it was very succinct, Chris were in deep shit period. And I think he understood that, went back to his console, plugged in and let me keep working the problem.

What would have happened on Apollo 8 if the same kind of cryogenic mishap had occurred? It really would depend upon where it was in the mission, but with the same kind of a mishap, if we had identical case where we lost everything, I don't believe we had sufficient electrical power to get this crew back home. This was Apollo 13 was a unique case where with the lunar module attached, we had options. If it had been detached, we wouldn't have had it. I think the only option we would have had in Apollo 8, if it had occurred early enough, we would have tried to pull off a direct abort, we would have had no other option but to give it a shot. What was your tensest moment in 13? I think the tensest moment was really in the first, well there was tensest moments. I would say it was for about the first 20 minutes when we really didn't know what we were fighting.

You had this very gradual realization and it might have been very quick onboard the crew, onboard the spacecraft, but within the ground team, it was really trying to sort out the instrumentation artifacts from the real problem that was in there and separate the two so we could figure out what was the problem we were facing. The key came when the level said we're vetting something and as soon as that happened, I knew we were in a disaster scenario that it was a survival situation we were in and that sort of queued my thinking down an entirely different direction. I was gradually coming to this but that was the one that finally set the bit and with this bit set, my path became very clear. Up to that, it was trying to fight a delaying action until we could get the data back online and figure what onboard the spacecraft was believable. How many days was it and how did you feel at the end of it? It was basically 24 hours from the time we had the explosion until we passed behind the

moon and then the 60 hour return after that, so it was a three and a half day exercise. If we hadn't made this maneuver behind the moon, it would have turned into a four day exercise. This was one where you need to think very, I won't say straight forward, but that's exactly what it had to be. You had to, you had a finite group of people. You had resources that existed only on board the spacecraft and you had to come up. It's sort of like camping in a survival situation. You're stuck with what the peace parts are at hand and those are the only peace parts that are going to pay a place or have a place in the solution. The first job was to figure out how to power down the spacecraft. Then you figure out what is the course back home, direct abort or go around the moon.

After that, you got to find some way to get confidence back in your navigation because we've, Lenny and I made a very difficult decision in here that was again against the odds and made it tough for our people and we said, hey, until we get this maneuver accomplished, to get back home, we're not going to power down our navigation system. This would put the crew in almost literally an ice box for the remainder of the trip home, but we believed that we had to protect our ability to maneuver and cut our return time down. So it was worked through those kinds of scenarios. Then we had the scenario or the crew suffocating. We had to come up with answers for that. Let me change film. We're getting right down to it. That's all we needed. The job was our life and we lived this literally every day and this room has a, it's marvelous leadership laboratory. And I would say it's a leadership laboratory of the first order.

If you can survive the first few months, and if you can learn to say, I don't know, but I will find out. If you can learn to work in the most effective fashion with a person next to you, you will survive. Our leader in building this, this capability is what we call SimSoup. He's the boss of the training team. And this boss has got the responsibility to look at the controllers, figure out what they need and how do we put these piece parts together. Great leadership laboratory. That is great. Terrific. You had another role in film. Hey, how about a drink? You want a drink of water? Yep.