Flying The Apollo Missions, Part 1

my name is Dan nebrig I'm the executive assistant to our Senate director and on his behalf I would like to welcome you to this the third in a series of 20th anniversary of Apollo lectures and discussions that we've been having the first two dealt with uh what we knew about the moon before Apollo and then yesterday with the technical planning for the Apollo missions today's sessions cover an aspect of our work here that is unique to the Johnson Space Center that of Mission Control and more importantly about the planning for the operation of those missions that are so essential to the success of the missions each of our panelists today is eminently qualified to discuss the topics because they have all served as flight directors or Mission controllers during the Apollo program now of course later in their life they went on to other ancillary positions like Center Director and program manager and a few unimportant jobs like that but I'm sure they would all consider their time in Mission Control to be among the highlights of their career our moderator today is also eminently qualified for this subject Dr Joe Allen received his PhD from Yale University and in 1967 was selected as a NASA astronaut Joe was the on the um uh support crew for Apollo 15 where he served as the mission scientist he was Capcom for sts1 and then flew as a mission specialist on sts5 and 51a so he has qualifications from both the ground and flight to serve on this panel I'm sure you've all seen pictures of Joe tooling around in space in his juny emu rescuing distressed satellites as we did on 51a he is currently the president of Space Industries Incorporated in here in Houston so please welcome Dr Joe Allen thank Dan thank you very much and welcome everyone I'm uh pleased to be the moderator today uh every group of flight directors needs moderation and I've been uh I've been given that assignment and I welcome it I appreciate it very much as Dan said um I was at uh at Nasa here at the Johnson Space Center for a number of years and I think my main qualification to serve as referee today is the fact that I was uh also privileged to work in the mission control for number of years it's a very interesting demanding and um more often than than not an enjoyable assignment I worked for these gentlemen on the panel who were Chief flight directors during the Apollo years and their assignment for today over the next couple of hours or so is to recollect and I I quote the instructions given to us recollect important aspects of the missions themselves they're eminently qualified to do that and if they don't remember the important things I guarantee they'll remember some of the Intriguing things and I hope some of the amusing things that occurred from the perspective of the flight directors during the Apollo missions we're gathered really to observe these Miss and to celebrate the remarkable success of them the main intent of today's panel is to is to celebrate and to enjoy and to that end if uh you are curious about one or two things they don't quite explain please hold up your hand and starting very early I think we'll begin with questions from the audience and I know if you don't have questions there are numbers of things I've wondered about that uh I will begin to ask about my panel members uh are starting here uh Dr Glenn Lenny Glenn is from Pennsylvania from Old Forge Pennsylvania he comes uh to the space business by way of the University of Scranton in Detroit uh Glenn began not with NASA but with NACA the predecessor of NASA in Believe It or Not 19 58 he was with the space task group from 1959 to 62 he came here as one of the original founders of the man spacecraft Center in 1962 he was the chief of the flight directors during many of many of the Apollo missions um and through the Apollo years uh went on to serve in many other capacities at Nasa and he is now the head of the Rockwell International oper operations here in Houston Texas on Glenn's right is Cliff Charlesworth from I'm told originally Minnesota I don't quite believe it but uh it's true but uh only briefly probably spent uh really much time in Mississippi came to uh the man spacecraft Center also in 1962 prior to that he had been uh with the Army at uh at KSC yeah and it was it it was uh Canaveral then or or what okay I don't remember back that far the uh uh Cliff was a flight director here uh 1962 through 1970 and uh also since that time had many other duties including uh the assignment of deputy director of the then Johnson Space Center and he retired uh from JSC last year next to Cliff Jerry Griffin oh no it's Jerry yeah um from Athens Texas uh Jerry uh went from Athens and spent an enormous amount of time at Texas A&M uh I think he's still receiving remedial instruction from there was a flight director beginning U um with gmany 11 having come to JSC in ' 64 and then worked most of the Apollo missions if not well I think probably all he was the the lead flight director uh on 12 15 and 17 uh he went on to many other assignments uh since that time including the director of the Johnson Space Center and he's currently with um with a u uh head hunting firm here in Houston Texas uh not yet successful he's not found gainful employment for me as yet um finally final panelist uh Steve Bales uh believe me Steve is the youngest of the group he was uh he was 20 years younger when Apollo landed weren't we all but Steve was uh in his early 20s at that time he's originally from Iowa um went to school in Iowa um came here immediately thereafter I guess in' 60 4 was a flight controller during Apollo known as GAO so I it was years before I knew his name actually was Bales uh he's now the assistant director program support in the missions operations directorate and with that I'll turn back to Glenn who was the lead flight director on Apollo 7 that really got the Apollo Mission started Glenn thank you Joe uh I I've been asked to start with Apollo 7 because it was the first uh Mann flight that we flew with the Apollo spacecraft uh but perhaps more General than that uh I would talk about it in terms of the events that led up to uh Apollo 7 I think in the minds of everybody here up through and including Apollo 7 uh we were Earth orbit people we were figuring out how to fly spacecraft and I think starting after a Apollo 7 with the very dramatic Apollo 8 that Cliff will tell us about uh we began the assault on the moon uh leading up to Apollo 7 we had a number of things happen in the program that were planned that don't don't get much attention and haven't been talked about much in these events uh they were a series of unmanned shots that we had uh we started off with a set of uh boilerplate Vehicles out in White Sands out in the desert where we shot up solid Rockets to about 30,000 ft and then we blew them up and separated the Command Module and tested the Escape system we probably had half a dozen shots out there in the desert some worked and some by the way were spooky as the devil uh because some of them wanted to come back over the team that was launching them because of the Winds so it was kind of an exciting time and we learned something about uh the Apollo Escape system and how it was going to work and how indeed we could trust it we never actually had to use it in a man flight but the Apollo Escape system was uh very reliable and proven by those tests we had a series of unmanned flights called 2011 and 202 which were on the Saturn 1B which was the smaller Saturn rocket used for Earth orbital flights and used on Apollo 7 those flights were designed to test the heat shield there was a lot we didn't know about the aerodynamics and the heating that would go with a uh return for the moon and we exercised those uh parameters on a couple of flights that we called 2011 and 202 in the mid-60s and we had had a lot of fun with those because they were unmanned and we had a lot of things to do from the control center later on WE flew the Saturn twice unmanned Apollo uh 501 and 502 they also were very exciting flights and the first one went by the book that was the one I had the next one the cliff head uh almost came unglued a couple of times and uh it was kind of a u a scary flight and I'm sure you'll hear more about that during the course of the day before I then moved on to Apollo 7 I would one more thing that I think is important about the team and the way we got to the Moon uh we had about 10 or a dozen Gemini flights man flights two people in the cockpit uh and when I look back on that uh I think what I realize is that the people who plan the Gemini program in between the one man Mercury capsule and the Apollo mission where we had to do so much other kind other kind of work going to the Moon they it really was a stroke of Genius because out of that program came not so much space Hardware we used different hardware for Apollo but what came out of it was the operations team uh if you look at the astronauts that flew the Apollo missions I think to a man almost to a man they had all flown in Gemini uh we did launches uh Rendevous we didn't use the ejection seats in one very hairy sequence on the pad uh we did Rendevous every way there was to do it we did Evas docked with the genus uh we rode around on chairs or at least we tried to the man maneuvering chairs that we uh use a derivative of on the shuttle today when I look back on that and realize all the different things that we did that were necessary to know how to do when we went to the moon uh I would say that we came into Apollo with the flight Crews and the ground Crews like Gang Busters it's the word that it's the word that occurs to me we came into the Apollo program with a set of people who who had done almost everything you could do in man Earth orbital flight and frankly uh we were cocky we thought we know how to do this stuff and we were looking forward in this assault to the moon the events had a a tragic and wellknown halt with the Apollo fire and uh in the 18 or so months that intervene between that fire and the first manf flight of Apollo 7 a great number of changes were made to the space graph and again the program came out of it much stronger than it otherwise would have been in the race to the moon to finish up this scenario then as in uh extending our abilities to operate in Earth orbit we had to know that the command service module which was kind of the mother ship for the Apollo missions worked Apollo 7 was flown in October the fall of 1968 with only one more year to go to meet the president's deadline it was about a 10day flight in Earth orbit we did everything we knew how to do to the command service module with the uh with the three astronauts and the ground people to test it uh and out of that flight came eventually the plans for Apollo 8 actually a little before the flight we decided we would do Apollo 8 which was the uh Frank Borman trip around the Moon on Christmas uh but when I look back on it I see that all of those events of the unman Apollo flights the things that we did in Gemini and the confidence that we gained in ourselves and our ability to master problems we had we had problems out the Galore on almost every Gemini flight out of that kind of a background came the teams of people here and at the cape but I will speak to the teams here the astronauts and the ground controllers in MCC and uh we really felt confident in going into Apollo Apollo 7 was successful as you know uh we tested the vehicle very well in uh Earth orbit and then began the exciting phase of the Moon project where we began to test the really big Hardware that is the new rocket and the lunar module and eventually made our assault upon the on the moon in terms of completing the lunar Landing Mission with the team of people that we had built during those early years and that team of people was just a crackerjack outfit I have always been to this day am overwhelmed with pride at the uh at the opportunity I had to be a part of that team so with that I'll turn it over to Joe and the rest of the guys to tell you after we learned how to do things in Earth orbit what we did to go to the Moon uh Glenn thank you uh to take us out from Earth orbit uh Cliff yeah I'd like to uh start before I get into Apollo 8 uh go back to the thing Glenn mentioned about the second unmanned Saturn 5 launch uh that flight occurred I believe in April of uh 68 I may have lost a year or two but anyway we had a few problems that day the uh we lost two engines during the second stage of flight uh we also had pogo which nobody knew at the time because we didn't have real- time data on it but we had pogo to the extent that uh the crew wouldn't have been able to read the cockpit gauges and would have probably required an abort we had a number of other problems in the spacecraft but we did stagger into orbit and I say that is pretty an accurate description we we flew all over the sky but we made it into orbit and finally got settled down a couple orbits later to do the uh s4b burn to drive the spacecraft up to come back in and simulate a a lunar return and lo and behold it didn't light so we aborted off of the uh s4b and burned the SPs engine some tremendous long period of time and got all we could out of the the flight but we didn't meet the objectives of the flight so that as a background uh a meeting occurred over at Marshall uh in the fall and I knew there was a meeting and I got a phone call one night to early to come out to Craft's office he want to see me well my first thought was oh boy we're going to fly another one of those unman deals with a boilerplate on on it and you're elected that's what my thought was so I walked into his office fully expecting that and he looked at me and says uh what do you think about taking Apollo 8 to the moon and I said well I haven't thought about that but on uh thinking about it for a little bit it sounded like a fun thing to try to do so he said I want you to go get certain group of people together and we need to go get some answers so we fanned out into a team and started looking at all the reasons why you couldn't and all the reasons why you could and this had been going on for some time in the background it was uh initiated by George low and others in any event NASA made that decision and while Glenn Was preparing to fly Apollo 7 we had a small team off in the center and many of you probably were on that team uh trying to figure out how to do that because we had to accelerate a number of things that we had not planned to do that early primarily in the software World some of the trajectory kinds of things the spacecraft people had a heck of a job trying to go figure out whether they could stamp this Hardware which we hadn't even flown really uh ready to go to the Moon well all that came together uh and we did in fact make the commitment to go uh as Glenn said leading up to that we we had pretty well proved we knew how to get into Earth orbit and operate there but this was the first time we were going to leave Earth orbit and go to a place that's 3 days away in terms of getting back if something happens not only that we were going to do it without the lunar module so we would wind up with a one engine in lunar orbit to get us back home uh which was eventually what we had to do anyway but it was a little bit spooky if you sit and think about that for a while uh the preparations were difficult uh we spent a lot of hard hours working on that but the day finally came and uh we launched uh the launch phase was fairly uneventful as I recall and we did our two orbits of uh preparation to get ready to go to the moon and burned the s4b successfully for tli and from that point on we had a different ball game on our hands for example in Earth orbit is most of you or a lot of you know you key everything that you're trying to do uh on the console wherever your console is to when is the next station pass because you got to get you got about 5 minutes to 7even minutes to get information up and down to the spacecraft well here we were in a situation where we could talk to them anytime we want to and that was a strange thing as a matter of fact uh I thought about that during the flight because I got to the point where you'd almost forget they were there because you know you you could talk to them anytime you wanted to but anyway the trip out was not uneventful uh and these guys feel free to hop in here because you were involved too one of the things that we had decided to do clever Devils that we are was that we would test that engine on the way way out to be sure they it'll work great and I think we're going to do a small out- of plane maneuver just to burp the SPs and be sure it was working right well we did that and it didn't work right and not it did not and there was a little funny in the uh thrust chamber pressure so now we've got 3 days to look at data and talk to everybody that you can find in the world to talk to to satisfy ourselves that we can indeed commit to put the spacecraft in lunar orbit knowing when we do that it has to work to come home well there are an awful lot of smart people today some of them are smarter than we were I think uh but there were some smart people in and they gathered them uh whether they be contractors at a BS of a plant somewhere or uh the guy that designed it whatever it took and satisfied all levels of management at the Johnson Space Center and headquarters that yes indeed we understood what was going on with the engine today I couldn't explain it uh but that we were satisfied it was okay to use it and commit to lunar orbit either you guys got anything to add to that you some of you were involved in in looking at that problem I would just add this to it Cliff uh in retrospect that was a major systems problem that had to be dealt with and was dealt with right uh and the situation we were faced with was there was the possibility that after the first burn we could have done another little one and then another little one later to take it out but we had to do those fairly quickly so there was an urgency to deciding whether we would try another test on the engine or not and it fell to me on my shift to deal with that problem well at the same time and I don't even know if this is public knowledge but at the same time uh there was a report from the crew that one of the crew members was ill was Ill uh so this seemed to attract all of the high Management's brains everybody that I thought I could get some help from they were all off working on the fact that this guy got sick which I didn't really care about because it wasn't a bloody thing that we could do about it that I knew of so just be sick and be quiet about it for God's s so he was he didn't so anyway uh while everybody else except the propulsion guys are over here worrying about this so-called U sick astronaut it fell to me to deal with this issue of well are we going to burn this thing another time and see if it works and can we get it and then do a burn after that to get us back on the trajectory want and we couldn't do too much because we were running out of fuel if we did too much of that fooling around and if we're going to do anything we had to do it in a big hurry so after a whole bunch of deliberations with the people that the cliff talked about I just took a deep breath looked around one more time for the sick astronaut committee and they were nowhere in sight uh and said well you're right it sounds all right to me we're going to go ahead and we didn't do any Burns and we set the track for the Apollo 8 mission but uh boy I sure felt like The Lone Ranger uh for quite a while there well can I add I'll add something to that the U it so happened that I was kind of riding shotgun on on Apollo 8 and without a lot of detail to so I was put on that sick astronaut committee for for you and um and and but you got to one thing to put in context here we had never left the influence of of Earth's gravity and uh there was a worry amongst the sick astronaut committee that my gosh this means that we there's something that we don't know about uh heading out of the Earth's uh influence and it's caused this astronaut to get sick well as most of you know later on we've had some some of that almost on every flight but it was a very serious concern and and here was Pearl Glenn wrestling with all the technical stuff and but we did get finally solved and in fact the astronaut did fine a little later which is the typical pattern once uh once you get into orbit go ahead there has the advantage of being the lead play director you see you just delegate all those tough ones to these other guys in any event having waited through all of that uh we pressed on to the moon and the next big milestone of course was the first lunar orbit insertion burn and the long wait as they were behind the moon to find out what happened uh fortunately everything went very well but I was one worried individual the the first time they went behind the moon uh and I know Emil chetra wouldn't agree with me but it always spook me to scale at 60 nautical mile orbit to the diameter of the Moon and see how near that really is and wanted to know whether you really figured that all out right we did uh they came around the Moon uh in just about the orbit that we had predicted uh and then they settled down to uh about what was it about 10 orbits I believe of extremely hard work uh we really had some tired crewman on our hands by the time they left lunar orbit uh but we did that we uh went ahead and made the burn ah head for home uh and there was a very relieved group of people and I think Glen Lenny was one of the most relieved when we came out from behind the moon and indeed that engine had worked very well uh I would point out that as an aside uh prior to going to the Moon with the flights so we had budgeted quite a bit of propellant to do midcourse Maneuvers because we didn't know how well we were going to be able to navigate how well the systems were going to work as it turned out out they worked very very well and uh we we had programmed midcourse Maneuvers but they were very small and in some cases we skipped them all together and as I recall on 8 that's pretty well the situation we were in both out and back and here is the first time we've done it so that was very encouraging uh we had some tired crewman as I said coming back uh they had elected to try to keep one man on watch at all times uh during that particular flight and as we knew we we proved once again that you can't really do that because with the size of the cockpits uh somebody awake keeps the other guys from sleeping very well so they were pretty well beat by the time they got back to Landing Landing was U uneventful as I recall and uh I would just summarize Apollo 8 in my mind uh I think it was probably as far as I'm concerned the the highlight of the Apollo program uh the commitment uh the the decision that was made to to take that step uh was fantastic in my mind I don't believe you could make that decision these days but to think that you're going to take the second spacecraft out of the shoot send it to the moon and commit to that sort of endeavor is uh it took a lot of Courage on some people part to do that it was a great flight uh one of the more thrilling things to me was the uh reading of the uh biblical passages when the guys were around the moon at Christmas time uh which was something that they initiated nobody knew they were going to do it but I can tell you this there were some tears in people's eyes when that was going on it was a great flight I really enjoyed it anybody else in Cliff thank you uh um already I'm hearing stories I didn't didn't know about before I flew in space I'm glad I'm learning about them now and that Jerry well I'll uh kind of pick up where Cliff left there and and and step quickly and kind of bring maybe me and Steve up to the Apollo 11 uh time frame when we landed on the moon um and incidentally I agree with what Cliff said the Apollo 8 mission was um was kind of scary in a way and the reason that it was kind of scary is that it in in the courage that he mentioned to take that step is that everything we had done up to that point with the possible exception of the Eva that we did in gmany we had built a very careful building block approach add one thing at a time and and take the next step and Apollo 8 kind of kind of jumped out of that for a for a good reason it pushed the system I think to to go on faster uh and well within constraints of safety but it showed a an ability to take risk and I I think that's where when it's measured and when the gain is worth the risk and I think that's where cliff and I really agree that that those kinds of things are getting harder and harder to do uh and but let me get to that building block approach Glenn kind of brought you through what built up to get us to Apollo 7 and for the most part Apollo itself had that same building block approach after after eight the next thing we did was Apollo 9 which was a low earth orbit back in Earth orbit again but we added additional step to it we added the lunar module and the lunar module and the Command Module docked together just like it would be uh at the moon were in Earth orbit and we undocked them and separated them first time we'd ever done anything like that and had two two people in the limb the lunar module without a heat shield it was the first time we'd ever had anybody in or orbit that didn't have a protective heat shield to get down and that that was a significant step but we also proved that we could rendevu redock transfer the crew back in discard the limb and reenter The Command Module now that was had to be done to return from the moon so that was another step in the process Apollo 10 came right after that we had already been to the moon on Apollo 8 to go into orbit Apollo 10 was another let's go into orbit around the moon but it had the lunar module with it which was that another additional step and we did the same thing in Earth or I'm sorry in lunar orbit that something like we had done uh in Earth orbit on Apollo 9 we separated the crewman Tom Stafford Jean cernon went down very low to the surface but didn't land but they were close in fact some of you may remember Jean cernon saying we're really down amongst them and that was because he could see the mountains higher or at least at least appearing to be higher like most airplane pilots think they're higher than they are and they probably weren't but but they really got down low and then they didn't abort and came up just like they would have had to in the event of an emergency but this one was planned it wasn't planned to touch down so here we built another block they came back up Rend deed with the uh the Command Module Command Module did its maneuver and brought them home so you can see this step by step creeping up on the the problem and by the time we launched Apollo 11 as Glenn said the control team was ready the launch people at Cape had been through it several times um the astronauts very well prepared but there was a difference about 11 uh and I think some of us probably that were involved in it dayto day and I'd like to get the reaction of these guys um I don't think we felt the importance of it then like we did in later years this was and I get back to that building block process it was just another it was another step on a goal we had been pursuing for so long that many of us didn't think of it I don't think as being this profound step we saw it as a as a great achievement that we we wanted to make happen but we didn't understand maybe what the rest of the world how they felt about it and we started I can remember and I've thought about this a lot in the last week or two cuz I've had people ask me about it and reporters wanting to know what it was like I can remember and although I on Apollo 11 I was I was just uh I did a trans lunar shift a sleep shift virtually on the way out and one on the way back because I was already assigned Apollo 12 as the lead flight director and was already starting to think about that flight but I can remember being although we were on a high step and ready to do it just like we had on 10 I didn't feel a great difference in the start uh I I didn't have that that uh a different feeling than I had from 10 and I took it kind of as one step we've done this we've been here we keep going and I can remember very clearly where the difference came now Steve for him he'll probably talk about some of the alarms that we got on Paulo probably started there for him uh it didn't for me because I knew he had that under control and it was a piece of cake but what I really remember is when Buzz said we're start to pick up some dust and I can can remember to this day that I had the realization he's talking about dust being blown off the Moon by The Descent engine and that was a step we had not taken yet and from there on that flight had a great different feeling for me and uh and then surprisingly once we got off the moon and back up to the uh to the lunar orbit point I felt well we've done this before and it should be okay but that interim period was that last step of that building block that we hadn't done yet so it it put that great uh difference to it the um I think the mission control team's reaction to to The Landing is is kind of understandable while there was uh great Euphoria I think probably individually there was no wild screaming or or anything like that in fact uh commandant cran was the uh flight director and as those of you that know Jean cran and those of you don't I'll tell you a little bit about him probably one of the toughest disciplinarian kinds of guys in the world very extremely thorough uh right on top of the situation Jean cran was and is a National Asset uh and he was just the right guy to be running the control center that day he kept a calmness to it we had some abort opportunities playn there early I think we called them T1 and T2 and we didn't know if when the limb touched down it might start to one of the gears might start to sink and we might have to punch off immediately but we did also have some windows pointed out where we would do these systems check quickly and if if there was an opportunity to abort we had the Command Module in the right space for him to get back to it so it was a very business-like atmosphere um um and kind of a calm sort of thing on a personal note as soon as we touched down and I realized we had done it and it was all very exciting I started thinking about Apollo 12 uh actually before they even had done their Eva because we had already started talking about what we were going to try to do on Apollo 12 which was a pretty exacting test and um but that that built on and and uh the control center throughout that entire period stay was uh was a very subdued professional kind of atmosphere I can remember and while I can't tell you exactly what it said I can remember one humorous note that since I was kind of working the night shifts I came in one night and one of our flight controllers had put up on one of the big screens about the size of this thing over here uh some comment not too kind about the Russians and um and other than that I didn't see any uh F frivolity in the control center uh uh throughout that whole period great great opportunity and a great day for the country to uh think about now 20 years later one final thought and we were talking about this as we were standing up here before this started today one of the things that just amazes me about that whole period leading up to the lunar landing and even now uh to some degree was the youthfulness of that control team uh if I'm not mistaken I think at that point man to my left here was uh in his mid-30s and he was the oldest flight director I want I won't pin it down to you I think he was the oldest flight director even older than crayons uh um but we were all a bunch of young people Steve Bales in his 20s uh and uh when I think about marshalling that kind of energy and vigor and the interest that was shown and we still see signs of that today obviously we did have a team of of management on top of us some of the older than that that uh were very very supportive and and very Visionary and very very good but I think back to the to the young people that that made that happen and U and uh kind of Marvel that it could have been done by people so young we had Glenn and I know have talked about this we probably had more responsibility at about age 30 than most people will have in a lifetime and uh we had that opportunity because NASA gave it to us Joe Jerry thank you uh Steve you're uh uh kind of the cleanup hitter and feel free to correct what uh any of these oldtimers have intended to say I had to correct them all the time when we're flying I guess just continue on I'm actually here representing Jean cran Jean is on his way to Washington today and I think uh I'd like to say talk about two things uh because he would want to talk to you about two things one was Apollo nine jerck mentioned that was a very difficult Mission and Jean was the lead very difficult because it was sandwiched between probably the greatest mission of the Apollo program Apollo 8 and if you didn't work on Apollo 8 I think you had heartache I certainly didn't and excuse me but I just can't let that go without commenting to the audience you have to understand Mr CR whatever flight he was working on was the toughest flight we ever yeah go ahead and on the other side was Apollo 10 where we were going to take the two vehicles and go right down among them as as Jerry said and here's Paulo 9 and it's going to stay in Earth orbit and it's going to do things that are very very important we've never checked out the Rendevous systems uh we've done Rendevous in Earth orbit we've never used the systems however that we're actually going to use on the uh on the moon to to get the two ships back together and that was a mission that it took someone very special I believe to keep inspiring the team and keep them going and be just as excited about Apollo 9 as they would be about Apollo 10 and 11 and I uh I think it's important that uh that you all realize that between those two outstanding missions there was Apollo 9 and it was just as essential as a building block to go on to 11 as as the others were the other thing I would like to do is take you back through uh Apollo 11 uh the landing and the activation and then leave it on the moon and then maybe turn it over to Glen Lenny who actually got them back uh back off the moon back up to the Command Module we had done a number of things in Apollo 8 Apollo 8 was very essential to us because we had uh a lot of unknowns about how we were going to navigate not just the fact we're going to come so close to the moon but we were really precisely uh having to put down a ship later when we we're going to fly Apollo 11 within a few uh miles within less than a mile of a precise point on the moon we wanted to put it and the Moon is not a nice spherical place to navigate it has concentrations all over in fact they call them mascons for short and they affected our orbit and we weren't quite sure what techniques we were going to use to actually do the final targeting for the landing module Apollo 11 Apollo 8 taught us how to do that and we actually were able to use those things on on 11 uh the activation uh of 11 went so well because we had practiced it on on 10 and the new thing and a new part of the game was was the actual descent as Jerry talked about uh now go back to a personal a personal moment uh before the final descent and the crew was still on the back of the Moon uh the timeline ran we would come around the side of the moon we'd have 15 minutes to look the spaceship and then we were going to fire the engine and we were going to land 10 minutes before acis ition of signal Jean CR gave a speech that General Patton would have liked to have given and I can almost remember it chapter and verse but the one point that will always uh stay in my mind is he says I don't care how we do we've trained we know we're where the best there is and whatever happens I'm going to stand behind you and if you think that doesn't mean a lot to a group of flight controllers and a point like that you just have never been in that situation it really means everything to you but then right after that he says I'm gonna lock these doors now I never was sure if he meant he was going to keep everybody else out or he was going to keep everybody else in but he locked the doors uh during the actual descent there were five at least five times when we could have stopped and and we were uh very lucky I think we were lucky we're prepared but in the end uh we managed to make it through let me just go through the the sequence a bit we came around the side of the moon we were expecting nice clear Communications and every other piece of data was was garbage we uh we about had uh rough Communications with a lot of noise we couldn't hardly hear the crew and we the Telemetry was was there one minute and it wasn't there the next minute and right away Jean has to decide do we have enough data to keep going on fortunately that's what we've been trained to do the simulation people had driven us right to that point many times and and uh Jean pulled his flight control team and and collectively uh they they tried to tell him you know what we were seeing what we weren't he had to he made a judgment that we had enough information to to keep going on we start The Descent and right away we find out we have another problem uh even though we'd done the very best we could on on targeting our able to our ability to predict where the L Landing module was going to be was an error it was an a at about four miles the guys were coming in about four miles down range from where they thought they were from where we'd hoped we were targeting them we find that out and not only that we have a velocity air and altitude about 2third of the way to where we would had to abort we're sweating this one out for a couple of minutes and during The Descent uh the way we set up 11 the crew actually rolled the vehicle around oh about 58 four or five minutes into the Descent Landing radar locked on corrected the velocity problem there wasn't anything we were going to do about the downrange problem we're through that we're starting to relax relax if you can call it that and the crew says I've got this computer alarm now there is no way you're supposed to be getting computer alarms during descent there's absolutely no way you're supposed to uh they're put in there to debug check out and do everything else but they are not put in there to that kind of alarm to have during descent uh fortunately again our training came to our Aid we had been given those kind of cases a couple of weeks before and and in fact when we were given that case in the simulation I was ready to write it off and say what are we doing spending our time on this uh on this kind of nonsense because it's not realistic and I've got other things to worry about and Jean said you will not you will not write that off you will form a team you will get with the folks and you will go through every possible alarm I don't care if they're realistic or not and you will make up a game plan how you're going to play it so due to the training and due to genes and assistance we had a uh we had a game plan and it was pretty good now the experts in this case this alarm happened to say computer's got too much to do in this last second and the experts uh had been of some help but not a great deal of help in this one they said uh look uh this isn't supposed to happen we talked about that for an hour after we got them through that after they told us for an hour it wasn't never supposed to happen and we said finally got through to them that yeah but it has happened what what do we should we do they said well it's a very bad situation uh patient but uh if it doesn't happen too much uh you're sort of if it doesn't happen too much uh you're sort of left to come up with your own judgment about what you should do next and our own judgment had been it wasn't happening that often and everything else looked fine navigation looked fine guidance looked fine no more alarms and we made a decision to go on now the crew was distracted by the alarm so much that they were apparently and at this time I didn't know this they were looking inside the cockpit and they were trying to figure out maybe left a switch out of configuration what have you uh and by the time that Neil looked up and saw where we was going this Four Mile ER that I told you about had propagated in the fact we weren't coming down in this nice smooth place we were supposed to come down we were coming down to boulderfield and he is flying the flying the ship as he'd been trained to do over the boulderfield all the time the gas is getting lower and lower and and if you listen to the other ground you hear the 60 seconds that meant that's what it really means 60 seconds and you're going to have to leave and then you hear 30 seconds the same thing and then there's a long pause even then after the 30 seconds we're getting down to the 175 uh second frame uh and most people don't realize that I believe we're about 15 seconds give or take a couple from having to stop The Descent and then the famous I hear I see the dust crew touches Dan and my personal reaction was one of of intense relief and gratitude and then it was a one of Wonder because the crew said something I'd never heard them say before all during a training they called themselves the eagle never used any word but eagle and then on the day of January 20th at 3 :00 in the afternoon they used the word Tranquility base and that changed the mission entirely for me because we really had a base on the moon a forward Outpost if you will and that was uh to me the most dramatic event and the most dramatic saying that was done during that mission and we still had a lot of problems we really didn't know where we were I mean clearly we knew within a a some diameter of where we were on the moon but uh we landed Downstream didn't know where we were we were going to have to find out before we took off the next day we left all those problems with Glenn Lenny who had about 10 different sources to tell him where we were on the moon I don't think any agreed and he finally uh decided and and we kept going so I'll turn that back to him go ahead it's right by the interstate Steve yeah I I recall once going to one of those chains of shift press conferences and I I was having a terrible time trying to explain how anybody that could figure out how to go to the moon and land didn't know where we were on the moon but that was a situation for a while well once uh Mr cran and Mr Bales and Company uh and and and Mr Armstrong and Aldren got the machine on the surface uh we we set out to do something else that we hadn't done before we had we had played around I shouldn't use that word we had done Evas in Germany but of course that's under weightlessness environment here we're in 16g so there were a lot of things that we needed to learn about that how well can you move around uh how fast can you move and so forth and so on and and let me put in one one story before I get into the surface activity itself there had been a raging debate go on for months amongst the doctors and the rest of the world about when we land on the Moon uh what are we going to do next that is are we going to take a rest cycle with the crew or we going to go ahead and uh prepare to get out well the doctors uh in their judgment felt that certainly we should have them go to sleep there were a number of us who felt that that was going to be very difficult for anybody to do having landed on the moon for the first time in the world to immediately go to sleep without some help so anyway uh the doctors won the debate and it was basic lined uh that we would in fact have a sleep period before we did the Eva now they pointed out several of them Mr Griffin has pointed out that I'm the Elder of this group and I was also clever enough to believe that they weren't going to do that when they got there so we had prepared for that uh eventuality also that if a decision was changed and they decided to go ahead and do the Eva we'd be ready to support well sure enough not too long after they had landed and got all the switches taken care of and settled down a bit we get this radio uh message that Houston uh we think we'd like to go ahead and do the Eva and I'm smiling you know because I knew that was going to happen and I'm kneeling the doctors and of course we said yes well the only thing in my mind that I did wrong was I had been up uh like everybody else for this whole preparation for descent and lunar descent now I had fixed myself where now I had to pull a whole shift on the moon so it made for a long day but anyhow it took a while being the first time we did it and the limb was very cramped to get all that gear on and checked out and as I recall it seemed like forever to get the cabin to finally depressed to the point where they can open hatch that last 2/10 of a PSI or something would seemed like it took forever but Neil got out uh and I recall my own reaction when he got out and and onto the surface of the Moon and looking at it on that TV I said this just doesn't seem real you know and here I am sitting here in the middle of all this and uh it it just didn't seem real but in fact it was they set about to do their job and as usual we had over programmed the timeline we had put more stuff in there than three people could probably probably do but they did the best they could they also had to stop and take a phone call from somewhere down here in the White House area uh and we had a carefully laid out plan that we were going to have a I believe they were two types of samples documented samples which took quite a bit of time and what we call grab samples where you just grab Rock uh now we only had about 2 hours and 30 minutes program to uh to be out on the moon for this first flight and again we were playing it very conservatively uh we we could have stayed longer but we felt let's do what we have to do that is of significance which was deploy a scientific package and gather some samples and get back in while we're ahead so I think the guys did a fantastic job of of uh doing the best job they could in a new environment in a very compressed uh timeline and with the distractions which were not of their doing I still think they came out of it with a with really a a wealth of information and they did they really did a great job uh the lunar surface thing again was entirely new to us uh it uh we spent many hours practicing it's difficult to simulate that but but we could in some ways and uh we even had uh practice astronauts that would would get on the on the phone with us and we'd play the what if games on the moon just like we would do in Rendevous or any other operation uh again we spent about 2 hours and 35 minutes I believe it was I was very very relieved uh to see that cabin start to pressurize to get them back in there uh at that point I felt like we had done it because I had complete confidence that that we could in fact Rendevous with the mother ship and we had done those things before and I was very confident that that we had it made at that point I was always very nervous when they were outside the spacecraft in Earth orbit or on the moon because when you stop and think that that one seems like flimsy suit that you guys wear uh and unluckily as a flight director I seem to manage to have to terminate most of the Evas in G so I was kind of nervous about that whole operation so I was very glad when they got back in and pumped that cabin up and you had two very very tired astronauts at that point and a heck of a lot of tired ones on the ground too and with that point I think we we did in fact manage to get them to sleep for a while and Glenn's shift was to get them back to the command service module um getting ready for asent and lunar Arbor Rendevous there was one thing about asent it was uh the there is there are no other Alternatives the asset engine the separation sequence from The Descent stage which represented sort of a platform from which to launch the asent stage uh was just one way there was just one way to do it and it had to work uh for that reason the ASN engine got a lot of attention like a lot of other things did but a lot of attention and there was a great deal of worry about it etc etc uh in terms of getting off the moon for me and probably for the control center uh for the flight control rers in the MCC our job is kind of outlined by what decisions might we have to make uh for example during the launch phase there's a possibility of all kinds of uh abort decisions or other kind of decisions have to be made and it kind of loads you up with a set of possibilities a set of options a set of dealing with them countdowns are like that too but for us at least and especially for me on the lunar surface we didn't have any choices to make we just had to get the thing all set up right be sure all the navigation was right and then go for it there weren't any decisions to make the thing had to work um and that's what happened the ASN engine worked fine and when we finished with it uh we were in lunar orbit at that time I felt we were on the downhill side of the mission because this team of people here and the astronauts we had done Eva every way from Sunday uh not Eva Rendevous every way from Sunday during the Gemini program we did them upside down backwards left-handed right-handed and we really uh we really felt like we knew how to do that and besides that we had Buzz Aldren on board who had invented the major part of the techniques that we used so we were very confident about our ability to uh do the lunar orbit Rendevous Apollo tan of course had added to that in the lunar environment uh so getting through the ASN phase was was just no choice no decisions to make just hang on to the console for six minutes and pray uh and we did that the lunar or orbit randev went well uh and then the guys started transferring back into CSM for the eventual return back to uh uh this planet that we live on called Earth thank you uh We've we've gotten ourselves back into lunar orbit do you want to continue the mission uh or do you want to start skipping around to other missions Jerry well I I I think it's probably time to skip around a little bit um understandably we have focused on Apollo 11 because that's what we celebrate uh at at this time but I think what we did after 11 uh in a very summary way can just a was nothing short of fantastic uh we went back as you know one flight we aborted and let me tell you about in in keeping with what Steve said about Jean cren uh it was the mission that he was the lead on that was always the toughest the really tough mission was Apollo 12 um that's because I was the lead flight director on Apollo 12 um and it was an interesting flight we and it a kind of an example of every one of these flights had a very every one of them we could sit and talk particularly uh This Crowd uh up here and some of you could talk about every one of these flights in great detail because they they all had their own personality Paulo 12 is the one you may remember we got hit by lightning about 50 seconds after after launch with an Aggy flight director yeah says with an eggy flight director um and uh we handled that we thought we were I thought we were going to have to abort but thank God the uh the uh Saturn 5 kept working and got us into to uh Earth orbit it was a very interesting mission in that we went and landed did a Pinpoint Landing uh next to the surveyor spacecraft which had been sent up there unmanned 7 years earlier and the crew of uh red and bean actually got out and got some pieces off of that spacecraft and and picking up on what Steve said with our uncertainties about uh the moon's uh homogeneity the the the idea that it's not a good uh sphere until you know all of the where the mascons are and we weren't sure we could do it now I was the lead flight director for that flight and Cliff Charlesworth uh did the uh Landing phase and he's never forgiven me we had a custom in those days when you were lead flight director the first time you got the NASA exceptional service metal and I got my metal and the uh salutation lods me for performing the Pinpoint Landing that Clifford was the flight director for and he's never forgiven me for it one of these days I'm going to give you that metal just so so you can have it but anyhow 13 turned out to be a a a real excitement because of the problem that we we had with the oxygen tank blowing up on the way to the Moon we had to abort 14 15 16 all had their their problems and their successes and um I think celebrating Apollo 11 like we are at this time is a is a great time to reflect on every one of those missions because it it's the only time that we can talk about the whole program and kind of celebrate it together because we don't celebrate those other flights the way we did it will this one but I think uh I just wanted to get that plug in there uh for those other missions that came after thank you Jerry uh I'm going to jump in here for just a moment uh and say you've heard a lot from from cliff and from the others about the the moral strength and courage uh that was required on the part of the flight directors and their team of U literally hundreds of individuals many of whom most of whom were very young to make the decisions necessary to go to the moon and successfully carry it out and I'll share um a story with you that actually comes it's a personal story but it comes from that time my um son was um uh two and three years old in those years and one day he he U was discovered uh in the kitchen with a large box of dirt and Pebbles from our backyard which he had dumped on his mother's kitchen and and I inquired of three-year-old son