NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Gene Kranz, NASA Flight Director, part 1 of 5

fb and for a lot that make your job easier time for me is that a lot of time talking about which which moat to the moon from ai fly control a flight director standpoint yeah we were too busy trying to a good man into space and to demonstrate that he could perform out there were too busy trying to pull in that work together in the teens and talk build the technical database we needed so from my standpoint i could have cared less about that was a given in the program was somebody else's job to do my job was to get permission to enter jen a big story like people i refer to as like a forgotten program how important is gemini to get into the mood on talk and meet with a laundry list of things that we had well i think it was proper alleviate the essential step brothers no question we could've gotten we couldn't enter mr hodgman i was essential step brothers no way we would have gotten the moment

unless we went through the gemini program at a big thing for me and i think for the majority of teams most of us were typical dinosaurs we were unfamiliar with the new technologies we needed to go to the million computers and cryogenic cinema fuel cells and multiple rocket engines each of these technologies was just emerging from a laboratory so we had to get our hands on experience we had to figure out how to apply these new articles to the business of a mission operations a space flight control how we had to get confidence and in fact there are times when we'd sit down and talk about what is a cryogenic in somerset what so it's just a super dense vapor it's called vapor a fog in the tanks mr weitz it upsets me now often i we used to say how do we take this off a minus four hundred degree of liquid and nine we warm up so we would ask the most rudimentary the most fundamental questions and the thing that was really about if we had these are engineers it just had the mercury experience and now we find ourselves in this new

world so we brought in a young college kids were learning about all of these things we needed to know in the laboratory so we took this infusion of youth and merged them with the mercury veterans and we built this chemistry that we needed to a move further