NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., NASA engineer and manager who helped establish NASA's Mission Control Center, part 1 of 4

You So how good were they were the astronauts engineers were they any good did they contribute most of the astronauts were engineers and they were test pilots and therefore they understood basically what flying qualities of airplanes were and what aerodynamics did what to airplanes and what caused the airplanes to be poor airplanes and good airplanes so they were engineers in that regard I'd say as design engineers they were not because they not had that experience with anything in the past I think that most of them graduated as aeronautical engineers maybe but I don't think they ever practiced aeronautical engineering so I think they were engineers in that they had a degree they understood physics they understood what was required to do something they understood temperatures and volumes and et cetera which was an absolute requirement but how much did they contribute to the actual design of the spaceship very little they contributed in an in an operating operational sense that mean they participated in the design of the

cockpit in the caution and warning system in the kinds of things that they were going to see and have to react to they were very much a part of and we wanted them to be they also were assigned to different parts of the program some to the rocket part some to the spacecraft some to operations some to recover operations and so forth and they kept themselves informed by that process and it was very well done but you know we we all heard the famous story about Gus for instance Gus Gus's input to the door when it came to Gemini after what happened to him in Mercury do you think he undid himself with getting to involve in the door and getting involved in the design and asking for a design on the door that was was so difficult no I don't think

you really know Grissom I think Grissom was a an engineering test pilot and I think Grissom wanted to make sure that there were any booby traps in the next door that was designed for spacecraft and I think he was very cognizant the fact that he got blamed correctly or non correctly not correctly for the hatch blowing off in the in the first flight that he flew in frankly I never believed he had anything to do with the others that believe he hit the damn plunger so you go you can be anywhere in between I always believe Gus myself and so I think from that point of view he just want to make sure that there was no operational booby traps in that thing and I'm sure he did and I think he contributed very much to that now as to the what happened in the fire there's no question that the redesign of this of the hatch had a great deal to do with the fact that they couldn't open that hatch in my opinion I doubt that they would have survived even if they've gotten the hatch open because I think by the time they got that hatch open and got out of there I still think they would have

suffered greatly and they may not have been killed instantly but I think they would have been close to death just from the inhaling of the fire you have to recognize that President Kennedy had a number of agendas that he was dealing with at the time that he made the decision to go to the moon and the first place he saw the reaction of the world to Shepherd's flight I think that was a surprised him I think it was surprised to the world that they reacted the way they did that was number one number two that I think that we did it in front of the world on real-time television that impressed Kennedy a great deal also so Kennedy was looking at the time for something to ace the Russians he was being beaten about the head and shoulders by the Russian they were not responding to him he was frankly afraid of them and so he was looking for some technical thing that he could beat the Russians with that's what prompted him to make the decision to go to the moon

I think that he egged NASA or into going to land on the moon because I think NASA given their their brothers at the time would probably have done a circumlinder mission landing on the moon with something else now when you start thinking about landing on the moon there are all kinds of ways you can do that in an engineering sense you can go and go in orbit and then go down you can go direct from the earth launching direct and going landing after you get there as we did with the surveyor unmanned spacecraft or you can do through the kinds of things that we did that is do lubricate lunar orbit rendezvous now why would you think about doing it those different ways well there are different design problems the biggest problem in my mind that forced us to send a lunar orbit rendezvous was landing because if you think about a rocket at that time here was a long slender thing and you think about putting a man on top of this long slender thing and he's maybe a hundred a hundred and fifty feet away from the from the touchdown on the moon being up on top of this thing on a

cockpit that's a ridiculous thing besides the fact that the landing gear that you'd have to build a land such a device is almost ludicrous that's really what led people to start thinking about doing other things then landing a great big tall rocket on the moon let me start very good maker what did you think about Hubell he was the he was the advocate for this thing he gets the credit for it's hobo john hobo john hobo was an advocate of lunar orbit rendezvous but the people in invented it were people that worked where he worked they came up with the idea of using a bug that is a small one man spacecraft that would allow you to go down a land on the moon simply take one guy down get down there and get the hell out of there and that's what they had in mind it was a good idea what we did was expand on that idea in terms of how many people were going to go out on the moon how much weight we could get to the moon all of those were factors john hobo got the credit for it because

he was an advocate of it and he went from a management sense to everybody to try to get them adopted but he didn't invent it he had p other people at the blindly research center that invented it I want to ask you about Von Braun for instance last time I interviewed you talked about Von Braun Von Braun of course wanted to do earth orbit he had had that vision for a long time was Von Braun the genius engineer was he a great salesman we talked about this before well I think Von Braun was both I think that he had great vision about where you might go in space I think he was a starry-eyed space cadet like many of us became I think he was that before he became to the United States so indeed he was a man with a lot of ideas and he knew how to go to the moon he knew how to go to Mars he knew the orbital mechanics he had thought a lot about the machines that would be required to do it so Von Braun and his people were very prominent in thinking about those ideas and he gets nailed I think sometimes for saying well I the way to do it is

do earth or at rendezvous well if you think about the big vehicles and all of the mass it's required to do it you come up with those kind of ideas but then when you start thinking about how the hell to land this thing now you start coming up with better ideas different ideas novel ideas about how to do it and as I've said previously trying to land this long finest ratio body that would be maybe 150 feet tall that would go all the way to the moon and then come all the way back to the earth in the same vehicle when you stop to think about that that doesn't make a lot of sense and when you start thinking about well you're making it more complex by having more than one vehicle you have to do a trade off and remember that the CSM the land service module had to go to the moon and come back and therefore it had to go off the surface of the earth and be prepared to deal with all the aerodynamics it had to come back and deal with all the aerodynamics now to put all that clap trap on the vehicle you're going to land them on the moon doesn't make any sense when

you start to think practically about it so there are all kinds of reasons why you end up using a separate vehicle to land on the moon that drives you then to lunar orbit rendezvous so those are the kind of practical things in my mind that drove the team of the space task group and eventually the the major part of NASA to choose lunar orbit rendezvous now when all this is going on Chris they're talking about this incredible machine you're displaying mercury I mean what's the least absolutely and I think that at the time that's the reason many of us who were in operations thought that going to the moon was too big a jump unfortunately you might say engineers are like that engineers are very very prone to overestimate what they can do in a year and grossly underestimate what they can do it in ten I mean engineers don't have much vision they're like they're like financial officers and companies if you go more than three years in investment terms they don't like to think about that and I think engineers are somewhat the same way it fortunately

we had some guys with with that were not limited by that kind of thinking Max Fajet, Cadillac Johnson those were guys with great ideas always had an idea about how to do things and they weren't stuck in the present they were thinking in the future those of us in operations had to be stuck in the present I mean we had to fly the man we had to do it well we had to do it safely and so our big job was how do we do it operationally it did they didn't need us in the beginning in the end they needed us greatly they needed the operational requirements what did we want to do how did we want it done what experiences had we gained from Mercury and Gemini that ought to be plowed back into Apollo that's when they came to us that's when we became a team together again but they went off to do Apollo and we were stuck with doing Mercury and Gemini great terrific how's our footage probably the end when Kenny said that we were going to go to the moon in this decade I thought he was a little

loony because at the time we still hadn't put a man in orbit and that was a very complex thing back in those days just getting something in orbit knowing it was in orbit was very difficult to come by we didn't have the computers strength we didn't have any kind of capability to look at short arc solutions of radar and so that was a step several orders of magnitude beyond my comprehension at the time so I thought it was a very difficult thing to do in retrospect it's probably the way you do all to do a lot of things you ought to challenge the industry you ought to challenge engineering and science and see what you can get out of them you might get more than you then you bargain for but nevertheless it turned out to be a good thing to do and the politics of the situation had to be taken into account and that's what he was doing it for and let's face it nothing has been done in space program that wasn't based on some political decision one way or another so as far as I'm concerned post facto it was a great thing to do at the time

it was extremely complex it took us a long time to get around to doing it we killed three men getting there and so you can't say that we done it perfectly but we certainly did it well once we got going people don't understand Gemini I think what Gemini is one of the most fascinating programs and people don't understand its origins when you originally planned were you thinking Mercury Gemini Apollo well when we looked at the lunar going to the moon there were several things that were required that we could see had to be done first you had to navigate back from something that was 35,000 feet per secondment and energy earth's atmosphere we didn't know how to deal with that thermally you needed an inert inertial guidance system which we didn't have at the time we needed a variable thrust rocket to land on the moon we didn't know how to do that at the time we we needed a fuel cell that would operate on its own with a heck of a lot less

weight than that much batteries that kind of battery power which is what we have been using for the Mercury program and so we needed to try out all of those things we needed to know how long man could go in in zero G and and after we got through Mercury we we had been up there a day we're going to take 14 days to go back and forth to the moon or possibility of that so we didn't understand any of those things that was the purpose of Gemini number two we didn't know how to do maneuvers in space all we could do in Mercury was put it up and fire the retro rockets and bring it down we couldn't maneuver the vehicle we couldn't change its inclination couldn't change its altitude couldn't do any kind of operations in space so Gemini was our lead to get those kind of things done and learned how to do before we could take the step of really doing them on Apollo now we could design the vehicles together and we had to do that or we'd never gotten there

but Gemini was our lead into operational understanding of how to go to the moon terrific what was the most memorable Gemini mission as far as you're concerned the one that made you say we can do this well unfortunately I think there were a lot of things that we did in Gemini that had to be done and that gave us the capability to do Apollo and they didn't happen all on on just one flight if you're going to choose one I'd say it was Gemini 76 because what happened there was we launched seven and then launched six later so we'd call out Gemini 76 seven seven was a 14 day flight and it was to determine man's capability to survive in space for a long period of time if you ask Bournemon and level today they'd say they barely survived but living 14 days and that thing at gym level seven is like 14 days in a men's room and that's what it was no question about it was very tough living but they survived and did okay but

then we had previously done up to the flight to that we had we went rendezvous with an Agina the Agina blew up on the pad so we decided to launch that vehicle after we launched seven and rendezvous with seven so we did the whole program there except for EVA on Gemini 76 now the complications of what we did in docking with an Agina spacecraft of maneuvering with another rocket engine to learn how to do EVA we're also a very important part of what we learned in the missions to follow in Gemini in Gemini eight nine ten eleven and twelve so 76 was a very important mission to to the overall Gemini program and to and to Apollo but the follow-on missions were also very important we got a little ahead of myself what did you think about the mark two the mark two mercury describe it to me mark two mercury uh well what I know about it is that Jim Chamberlain who was one of the engineers that came to to us from Canada had the idea that

you could take a mercury spacecraft and put enough heat protection on it put enough capability to keep men alive for 10 to 14 days and send them around the moon and I think that he he thought that that would make might be an answer a quick answer to the country's demand that they do something that would ace the Russians I think it could have been done I don't think it would have answered the questions that were being asked relative to the technology required to go the moon because after all that's what Apollo was it was a challenge to the technology in the country so I'm glad we didn't do it uh but I think we could have if we'd have put our minds to it at the time do you think we could have made it to the moon with the Gemini capsule yes I think we could have gone around the moon and back in the Gemini capsule I think we would have had to worry about how we would do reentry more than anything else I think that the navigation and guidance to the moon

I think we probably could have done from the earth I don't think we could have done it at the time but I think if we had taken the time then we could have done the navigation guidance to the moon and I think we could have gone around the moon and come back with with Gemini we couldn't have gone and orbit around the moon that would have taken another great step in the Gemini capability which we didn't have but certainly I think we could have done a circumlunar flight how we thank you Gemini was the place where we cut our teeth on operations really I mean we it had everything that Apollo needed being done in earth orbit now we didn't go to the moon we didn't navigate to the moon we didn't go in orbit didn't land but indeed we had a very complex and very sophisticated spacecraft in Gemini it may not have looked like it because it was looked much like mercury but it could do a guidance during entry it could fly a footprint on the earth so it could

go about 300 miles if we needed to that was exactly what we had to do in Apollo on the way back it had a basic computer for doing this and that's what we had to have on Apollo although much more complex it had fuel cells it had capability of doing rendezvous and maneuvering the spacecraft because it had its own engine and we learned how to do all kinds of ways of rendezvous which were basic requirements for doing the Apollo program and we learned that man could survive for 14 days very well and do a job and all of those things were absolutely central to the Apollo program and that's where we learned to do it just paint a picture for me of the difference in mission operations between mercury and Apollo I mean what was the difference if I looked in these the two mission control rooms from those two those two areas they were relatively close together yes well mercury to give you an example in mercury we started with a IBM computer to have 32,000 word storage

capacity we doubled it got to 64 and that was pretty good at the time we had 5 million words in the computer system the first floor of this building was covered with computers in order to do the job of going to and from the moon of how to navigate to the moon how to do orbit determination around the moon as well as around the earth and go there how to do lunar orbit rendezvous all of those things had to be in the computer so to say it there there is no comparison between mercury and Apollo in terms of control center control center is when we started out had gauges that were driven meters that looked like what you go to see today in a power plant they still haven't learned how to do it with computers but irrespective of that and we used teletype 20 you know the best we could get in Africa was 20 words of teletype in in Apollo we had real-time communications continuously from the moon so there was just no comparison between

mercury and june it was it was like a toy compared to a very complex machine and how much what what caused that to happen what in your estimation made that believe that that's an unheard of I think the advancement in the state of the art was driven by the demands of the space program the IBM knew we needed the computation capability general electric new we needed the power capability the draper laboratory at MIT who had been working already and in a inertial platforms knew that we needed that sort of thing for Apollo they knew we needed a much more complex onboard computer at MIT which they ended up designing and having built on and on and on the materials the heat shield everything we did was sort of a step function in the art of science of space flight and that's what was required to go from mercury to Apollo and it was quite a challenge to the country now that was what the payoff of the Apollo program it was the

advancement in the state of the art and almost every field of science and engineering in this country that benefited from that demand from that step function as I call it computers communications communications satellites the whole complex of software requirements the development of a control center commanding control