13 Minutes to the Moon: 2. Kids in control

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I'm going to play you a recording of a moment of great drama during the final stage of the first mission to land humans on the moon.

Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin are squeezed into the cabin of their spacecraft Eagle and dropping at a rate of 120 feet per second.

It's a little short of halfway into their final 13 minutes of descent to the lunar surface.

You can hear them and people in mission control sitting in a room a a quarter of a million miles away who are tracking Eagles descent and communicating with the crew by radio.

There are lots of different voices and NASA jargon in this, but listen out for the words 1202 and program alarm.

Program alarm looks good.

It's looking good to us.

Both Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin call out 1202, which has flashed up as a row of of numbers on the limited display of Eagles onboard computer.

They're not sure what it means, but they know it spells trouble, possibly serious enough to force them to call off their historic mission and abort the landing.

Armstrong radios again to Mission Control, asking for help, this time with uncharacteristic urgency.

Back in Mission Control in Houston, all eyes fall on the solitary and youthful figure of Steve Bales, someone we'll get to know well during the course of this podcast.

It's his responsibility to understand the computer, its alarms, and to decide whether or not the landing can still proceed.

The mission, and very possibly the lives of the astronauts themselves, depend on his call.

Here's some 26-year-old kid, kid sitting here at a console who could stop the lunar mission.

We choose to go to the moon.

Captain, we're go for landing.

Eagle Houston, you're a go for landing.

We've ever had our heading on the 1202 program alarm.

Hold it at 18 foot.

We're going to make it a thing.

Roger.

Low level.

60.

60 seconds.

We've had shut down.

We copy you down, Eagle.

Tranquility base here.

The Eagle has landed.

The split-second decision-making that resolved the 1202 alarm crisis is a perfect illustration of why mission control was essential to the success of Project Apollo, and never more so than during the final 13 minutes of descent to the moon.

Over this series, we'll get to know the drama of those 13 minutes intimately.

So much so that at the end we'll give you the chance to listen to NASA's audio recording of the final descent in real time without my commentary.

So you can experience it the way Mission Control and the astronauts themselves would have heard it on that historic day in July 1969.

That'll be episode 11.

But in this episode, we're going to focus on Mission Control and the pivotal role it played in the Apollo 11 moon landing.

And to do that we need to move beyond the technology and get to know the people who underpinned it, their jobs and their personalities.

We'll come to understand how a remarkable team came into being to form NASA's iconic Mission Control.

Mission Control, the unsung heroes of Apollo, and that's true.

When we landed on the moon, the average age of the people in the control center and supporting the flights was about 27.

It was a young group in that control center, and I think it probably helped us because we didn't know what we didn't know and we didn't know we couldn't do it, so we just did it.

Mission Control saved the day on just about every Apollo mission.

It's tempting to think of the Apollo spacecraft as though they were like sophisticated but conventional aircraft with a crew of gifted pilots at the controls.

But the spacecraft were extraordinarily complex machines with a huge number of intricate systems, navigation, propulsion, life support and communication to name but a few.

The success of the mission and the lives of the astronauts depended on those systems and because of that, the astronauts relied on a highly skilled team of engineers, the flight controllers, who sat at consoles in the mission operations control room in Houston, Texas.

They tracked and monitored the spacecraft through every second of the mission.

They passed information to the crew to keep them on course for the moon and were always ready to fix critical problems as they arose.

In a sense, they were like a team of Earth-based co-pilots for the Apollo spacecraft.

But who were the people in mission control and what did they do to get Apollo 11 safely to the surface of the Moon?

I'm Kevin Fong, and from the BBC World Service, this is 13 Minutes to the Moon.

Episode 2 The Kids in Control

Okay, all flight controllers gonna go for landing.

Retro, go!

Khido, go!

Patrol, go!

Telecom, go!

GNC, go!

Ecom, Hill, surgeon, go!

Capcom, we're go for landing.

Eagle, Geoffrey, you're go for landing, over.

That was the chorus of voices in the mission control room just four minutes before Apollo 11 landed on the moon.

The last voice was Capcom, or the capsule communicator.

The Apollo astronaut, Charlie Duke, sitting in mission control, relaying the go decision by radio to Armstrong and Aldrin.

Ordinarily, he's the only person who talked directly to the crew.

The people saying go were the different flight controllers.

Each one responsible for tracking Eagle's flight path or monitoring a particular system, all saying everything looked good for the landing to go ahead.

And the voice leading that chorus belonged to flight director Gene Krantz, collecting information from his team and leading the decision-making.

Here he is in an interview about Apollo 11, which he recorded in 1999 with the Johnson Space Center History Office, talking fondly about his flight controllers.

Tell you a bit about the team I've got.

Incredible array of people.

Bob Carlton.

Bob is about as dry, iconic.

I think he comes from Carolinas and just a Carolina accent.

This guy, if you listen to this tape of the lunar landing, Carlton, it's like he's out picking cotton.

Hello, Level.

Hello, Level.

I mean, he is absolutely unperturbed.

There is nothing, and yet the thing that's interesting in the tape, Carlton is counting down to seconds of fuel remaining.

He's telling me we're running out of fuel, and he's just like an everyday occurrence.

Down in the trench, I've got Jay Green, who's a Brooklyner, and he's got the Brooklyn accent

that it almost drenches you.

Flight Photo converging on Delta H, Raj.

And cocky.

Oh, he is so cocky, it's incredible.

Flight photo Ricko looks real good.

Raj Fido.

Sitting right next to him is Steve Bales.

He's one of the original computer nerds.

I mean, he looks like one.

He's got these big owlish type plastic rim glasses you got in there.

I don't think any of them, they all look like they never needed to shave.

I mean, they're babyface kind of people.

As Gene Krantz says, one of the remarkable features of his team was their young age, and one of the youngest was Steve Bales, the computer nerd with the owlglasses.

Reading about Apollo over the years, it's his story which has always caught my attention.

Just 26 years old in 1969, Steve Bales was at the sharp end of one of the most critical decisions in the entire history of the moon landings.

And so, when it came to making this podcast, I just had to track him down.

Me and producer Andrew were heading down one of the US's busy highways in the direction of Steve Bale's home in rural New Jersey.

We were running late, and so I gave him a call.

Oh, hello, Steve.

It's Kevin Fong from BBC.

Just

letting you know where we've got to.

I think it looks, according to the sat nav, it looks like we're about 45 minutes away, so I'm sorry we're a bit late.

Okay, cool.

Well, I look forward to seeing you and, yeah, about 45 minutes, I reckon.

Cheers, cheers, Steve.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, good.

Be careful, guys.

Steve left NASA's Johnson Space Center, the home of mission control, 23 years ago, just a year before I started work there myself.

Now, 76, he runs a small business which has nothing to do with space with his wife Sandra in the wooded countryside not far from Philadelphia.

I hope we've got the right house.

Come in Kevin.

Hi hi, I'm sorry we're a bit late.

Don't worry, we feel bad for you guys.

Come on in, come on in, hi.

Steve, hi, Andrew.

Steve's move away from his former life in Texas and the hustle and bustle of Houston was in a way a return to his origins.

We began the interview talking about his early life and the 1950s television show that set him on course for a career in the Apollo moon program.

I grew up in a small town in Iowa, 500 people.

And the first thing I remember about space was when I was in high school, Walt Disney developed a one-hour special about how we might be able to go to the moon.

It was a cartoon, it was a blend of cartoon and actual people talking.

That was fascinating.

So I wanted to go be a space engineer.

That led Steve to university to study engineering and just before graduation in 1964, he seized an opportunity that would take him from Iowa to the heart of NASA's human space exploration activities.

This was three years after the United States had put its first man into space, Alan Shepard, and NASA was now gearing up for more ambitious space flights.

I was given an offer to go work in Houston as an intern.

And they were just getting started with the Manned Spacecraft Center, just building the mission control, just building the buildings.

And people were just moving in there.

And my job, believe it or not, was to learn enough about the new mission control center to give tours.

Now, not to the big shots.

They weren't going to let some little intern, and nor should they have.

But if you were a visitor and you were allowed to go on a tour, you had someone like me give the tour.

So I had to go around and learn about what all these people were doing.

I didn't know anything about what mission control was.

I didn't know who the people were.

I didn't know anything about it.

And so I was given authority to go when I had a chance to break free for a couple minutes and talk to people, like Glenn Lenny, who later became a flight director, later became my boss, hired me.

I talked to Gene Kranz.

I talked to people that were going to run the program in the first few missions, in the Gemini and then the first few Apollo missions.

And once I did that, there wasn't any place else I wanted to go.

Steve started work at Mission Control just as NASA began to launch missions in its Gemini space program.

Gemini was essential preparation for the Apollo moon program.

These missions took astronauts into orbit around the Earth so they could learn how to fly spacecraft in formation, get them to rendezvous and dock.

These were maneuvers that had to be mastered if Apollo was going to succeed.

As for Steve Bales, he'd work his way up from a junior technical job in the back rooms to earn a place as a Gemini flight controller two years later at the age of 23.

Steve's story wasn't unusual.

NASA was under enormous pressure at the time.

As we heard in episode one, in 1961, President John F.

Kennedy had gone to the U.S.

Congress and set his country the grand challenge of landing people on the moon by the end of that same decade.

I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

No single space.

By 1964, the clock was ticking and NASA needed a lot of people fast to work on spacecraft design, to plan missions, and to operate as flight controllers.

So the space agency found people with technical backgrounds in engineering and physics.

They hired quickly and then tested them out on the job.

As Gene Krantz recalled, there was no other way to do it.

Virtually everybody that we had was hired on a paper basis.

There were never any interviews conducted.

You just...

fired in your applications.

They'd look at it and say, oh yeah, this people fit here.

And they would just bring you on board.

And well, it was like, you'll go to training and you'll go to operations and you're going to go to engineering.

And it was that kind of a sequence.

A prime example of that rapid recruitment style was flight controller John Aaron.

Hired at the age of 22 without an interview, but with good college grades in maths and physics, John headed to Houston from his home in a remote farming community in North Texas.

He told me of his bewildering first few weeks at Mission Control.

I walked into an environment, I was fresh out of college, walked into an environment, everybody was standing around speaking a language I didn't even understand.

It was like I was in a foreign country.

I never heard so many acronyms in all my life.

And I thought, wow, now

what have I gotten myself into?

I moved into that big city.

I'd never lived in a big city.

Moved down on a place off Telephone Road, which at that time was a murder capital of the world.

So

time went on, you know, and about six weeks later, I went home one evening and told my wife, you know,

maybe we need to load up and go back to

North Texas and Oklahoma because I'm not sure I'm cut out for this.

She looked at me and she says, we ain't going back.

And so I just knuckled down and first thing you know, I kind of caught on.

And I soon sorted out this was my niche.

When it came to the Apollo missions, John looked after the spacecraft's electrical and life support systems.

In November 1969, as a flight controller for the launch of Apollo 12, his encyclopedic knowledge of the spacecraft's electronics and his split-second decision-making would save that mission moments from an abort after the rocket was struck by lightning.

The flight controllers came from all over the United States and from a range of of backgrounds, but they had one thing in common, youth.

Here's Glenn Lunney, a NASA veteran who helped to shape mission control from the earliest human flights during its first space program, Project Mercury.

Glenn played a central role as one of the flight directors during the Apollo missions.

When we landed on the moon, the average age of what I would call the operators, that is, the people that were working in the control center and supporting the flights, Our average age was about 27.

27.

27 years old.

Yes.

And it was populated with kids that had just gotten out of school in 64.

And they were doing what they did five years later in Apollo.

It was a marvelous thing to watch because they stepped right up to it.

They didn't shy away from it at all.

As a matter of fact, I think they thought it was normal.

Doesn't everybody have a job like this?

And the answer is no, we don't.

We didn't have any problem of washing away old experiences that didn't apply to where they now were.

Actually I had a few fellows that were a little bit older that had been around.

They did not work out too well.

And the confidence of youth came with a fearlessness that would prove essential for this great leap into the unknown.

This is Jerry Griffin.

He was the flight director on Apollo 11 during its perilous re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere.

This task had never been done, but they weren't afraid of it.

I know I wasn't.

But I think the people,

because they were young, they said, we got this task.

Heck, let's get about and see if we can make it happen.

And so

it was the lack of fear.

It wasn't the lack of knowing it was risky, but just weren't afraid of it.

And that sounds surprising, given the complexities of the job.

Steve Bales had the title of guidance officer in the mission control team and his responsibilities centered on the lunar module's on-board computer.

Devised and programmed by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it was a computer like no other in the 1960s.

We're going to devote an entire future episode to it because it was so important, but for now it's enough to know that it controlled Eagle's flight to the Moon's surface and the astronauts' lives depended on it.

There were six guidance officers, but we all had parts of the Apollo that we specialized in, and I specialized in ascent and descent.

That means I had to learn how to take the landing computer, which was not powered up when we got to the moon, get it powered up, send information to it so it knew where it was at and where it was going to be at landing.

and then monitor it during landing to make sure that it was doing the right things because for the first two-thirds of the landing, they were an autopilot.

That vehicle wouldn't go to the moon if that computer wasn't working and they knew it.

So my job was to make sure that computer and its sensors were working properly.

That's the guidance officer's job.

Fearlessness in these tasks was a vital attribute.

But as Steve discovered, it wasn't enough on its own.

During a mission, vital information had to be passed in real time across communication channels fed into the headsets that every flight controller wore.

Mission control people, such as Steve Bales, refer to these channels as loops.

For Apollo, during the critical phases of the flight, information and communication were everything, and that required an unusual skill.

One of the first things I had to learn how to do was listen to three or four conversations at once.

You listen to these loops that are going on all the time.

It took me quite a while to learn how to do that.

Then, once you do that, you walk into a room and people are talking.

You're hearing three or four conversations that you don't particularly want to hear necessarily.

And to give you an idea of just how difficult that is, here's some audio of just two of those communication loops running in parallel during the 13 minutes to the moon.

Okay.

So now 68.

Now, well, may be the problem here, and we can monitor delta H, Roger.

Flight side of

Let's hang with it.

Roger.

Just copy it.

Roger.

And you can track all of those conversations at the same time.

You can at least get the sense of what's going on.

And if something was really important

in a control center, you've got to know, you hear a few key words.

Communications were so important, words, how you said them, who said them, and you said certain words that caught your attention.

And that means I'm going to go over to that loop and talk.

But that was one where it was total shock.

That was one of the biggest culture shocks I had is how to do that.

Here's more of Mission Control's recording during the 13 minutes to the moon.

It starts with an exchange between Steve Bales, who's called Guidance, and the flight director Gene Krantz, who the flight controllers refer to as Flight.

At this point, Steve notices that Eagle is traveling faster than expected across the moon's surface.

Turn on on, we have 20-foot-per-second residual that is probably due to downtrack error.

Raj, about 20-foot residual due to downtrack error.

I think, and it was in radio.

We have data flight.

Flight Plato, GTC, go.

Once you get into a dynamic phase, like the landing,

it's just full bore talk because

you've got seconds to make up your mind.

You've got certain critical events that have to be monitored and either passed or not passed.

But you're talking fast, you're thinking fast, either go or you're no go.

Flight fighter, we have negative missment.

Rods, negative missment.

The lives of the astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, depended on the flight controllers' fast thinking as they rapidly processed the information coming from the spacecraft systems.

And as they gathered all that data, the flight controllers and the flight directors like Jerry Griffin had to be prepared to make decisions fast.

Mission Control attracted people that kind of like to be put in a,

I've got to make the decision mode.

I can't turn to anybody else.

I've taken all my inputs.

Now I've got to make a decision.

So many people fumble with it.

Well, I could do this or I could do that.

Well, yeah, but in the meantime, you've got to make it now.

You've got to make a decision.

And

I thrived on it.

Fast decision-making, accurate communication, and readiness for any number of emergency situations during the final descent to the moon were tested to their limit in simulation exercises.

For Apollo 11, these intense practice runs began three months ahead of the landing.

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would be in a lunar module simulator, while the flight director and controllers in the mission operations control room were tracking their virtual progress towards the lunar surface.

Here's Gene Krantz.

The

training process:

you have a team, a training team led by an individual we call Simsoup, Simulation Supervisor.

And the SimSoup's job is to

come up with mission scenarios that are utterly realistic and will train every aspect of the crew and controllers and flight director's knowledge.

It'll test every aspect of the procedures and planning that we have put together.

It'll test our ability to innovate strategies when things start to go bad.

And training was now in Apollo was about as real.

I mean, you would get the sweaty palms.

You would have the,

when the pressure was on in a training episode, it no longer was training.

It was real.

And the same emotions, the same feelings, the same energies, the same adrenaline would flow.

Apollo flight controller John Aaron remembers how grueling the simulations could be.

Oh,

in a day's work,

we would exercise this 10 or 12 times a day.

Run it, debrief it, turn it around, run another one, debrief it.

You walk out of that room at the end of the day, you are drained.

I used to tell people, you know, if you can survive the simulations, The mission is a piece of cake.

Because you're not usually working 20 problems at once.

Maybe one.

Simulation exercises and real missions filtered out engineers who weren't suited to the intense pressures of operating on the front line in mission control.

John Aaron and Jerry Griffin say those who survived formed close bonds.

The team was a very, very tight team.

And over time, it was molded into that team because the people who didn't feel comfortable in operations were purged out.

I mean,

there was a lot of turnover.

So the team that was left had worked together was like a military unit.

In some respects it reminded me of a fighter squadron that I had been in because you know we were all kind of thrown into the same risk bucket.

We knew each other well.

We trusted each other because you had to.

Our kids knew each other.

Our wives knew each other.

It was very similar to that feel when people do risky things.

Throughout Project Apollo, there was risk to human life, and indeed, lives were lost.

In episode 4, I'll be examining the spacecraft fire, which killed the crew of Apollo 1 in 1967.

But there were other costs, too.

Dedication to meeting President Kennedy's incredibly ambitious goal of landing on the moon before the end of the decade meant that many sacrificed their family lives.

Apollo flight controller Jerry Bostick told me about the personal cost to him and many of his colleagues.

A lot of divorces happened as a result of Apollo.

Astronauts, flight controllers, we just didn't spend enough time with

our families.

My daughter was

three years old, I guess, when we did Apollo 8.

And she recently saw a documentary about Apollo 8 and she said, oh, now I understand why you weren't at home that Christmas.

And we weren't at home a lot, and that was bad.

And a lot of of our wives, mine included, just said,

I'm tired of being

Mrs.

So-and-so.

I'm a real person by myself, and I'll see you later.

And that's tragic, but it happened too frequently.

A lot of the astronauts and a lot of the flight controllers.

You probably have an idea of what mission control looks like in your head.

It's been recreated in countless movies.

A big screen in the front, plotting the mission's course, and rows of consoles with intense-looking people in white shirts and black ties wearing headsets.

But what was it like to be there, down in that trench, as Gene Krantz called it?

And what was it like to be in charge of those kids on that momentous day in July 1969?

You can feel the atmosphere immediately.

This room is bathed in this blue light from this blue-gray light that you get from the screen.

So it's sort of almost like you see in the movies kind of thing.

And then the rest of the room atmosphere is it's it's the smell of the room.

And it's the

people been, you can tell people have been in there for a long period of time.

There's enough stale pizza hanging around and stale sandwiches.

Waste baskets are full.

You can smell the coffee that's been burnt into the hot plate in there.

But you also get this feeling that this is a place something's going to happen at.

Gene Kranz is one of Apollo's best known and best remembered flight directors.

Amongst the flight controllers, there was no shortage of talent and commitment, but somebody had to be able to pull all of that together in the moment and bring it to bear.

Being a flight director is about fast-paced leadership and the ability to inspire a unique team to follow you.

Gene Krantz had all these qualities and more.

His former colleagues, Jerry Bostick and Jerry Griffin, have these memories of him.

Well, Gene was an ex-Marine or a Marine.

He would say there's no such thing as an ex-Marine.

You're always a Marine.

He was always a pumped-up guy.

He hardly ever sat down.

He paced the floor,

changed smoking cigarettes.

He was that intense.

We playfully called him the Prussian general.

But Gene was a very, very serious, hard-working,

disciplinarian, and he was good.

could be pretty tough.

And that was okay.

We needed that sometime.

The whole system needed that toughness.

And he was the right guy probably to do the landing, the first landing.

He's a one-of-a-kind guy.

Flight directors were a breed apart with their own unique skill set, the need to somehow see the big picture amongst the torrent of technical detail.

This is how Steve Bales saw the role of the flight director.

No one person understands all the things you're going to get into.

You have the flight director who's sort of like a conductor.

He knows all the instruments, maybe could play one or two better maybe than some of the people in the orchestra.

He can't play them all.

And he doesn't know some of the subtleties.

So you have a flight director and he knows

all the systems to some degree.

But more importantly, he knows the people under him to a better degree, I think, than the systems.

You make a slight intonation.

All this noise sounds like garble on those loops.

You make a slight intonation differently than you normally did, and Gene or Glenn or Jerry Griffin would know instantly.

With me, I was shouting almost.

If one of the other controllers like Don Putty

or Jay Green

would have talked the way I talked, Gene would have come out of his chair and said, what's wrong?

With me, he knew I was going to almost scream in that loop.

Biden bothering.

So, knowing Steve Bales had a tendency to scream, listen out for him in this clip.

Four minutes after the engine started firing to to break Eagle's speed, Gene Krantz asks each of his flight controllers in turn if all looks good or go to continue with the descent to the lunar surface.

Okay, retro, go, Fidel, go, guide, go!

That's Steve Bales.

And now listen closely for Gene Krantz almost giggling as he continues with the other flight controllers.

Control, go.

Telecom, go, Ginsi, go, Econom, go, Surgeon, go, Capcom, or go to continue, PDR.

It was all about the people, and in mission control there was strength in depth.

From the leadership of the flight director to an array of flight controllers and beyond them to a large number of technical experts hidden away out of sight in back rooms but always on communication loops ready to provide help and detailed advice.

From that front room that you see all the time on television, we had the back rooms in the same building with us that were another level of detail of guys.

Every one of those those people in the control center in the front room had at least two, maybe three or four guys in the back room that were helping them look at everything.

So there was a hive mind of expertise at mission control and it was the judgments of the flight controllers with their backroom advisors that the flight directors relied upon, in fact, often deferred to.

We didn't make decisions at the highest level possible.

We shoved them down to the lowest level.

Now, the flight director, for instance, had to understand the inputs he was getting

but everybody had their piece of the pie

and we didn't try to share it too much because we didn't have time.

You make decisions at the lowest level where people know what they're doing and what they're talking about rather than elevating it everything to the top.

Let's build this thing from the ground up, not from the top down.

The notion of delegating authority to some of the most junior members of the team was essential to the success of Mission Control and the Apollo missions, and it's nowhere better illustrated than in the handling of one of the fiercest crises during the 13-minute descent to the Moon.

It's when Eagle is at 33,000 feet above the Moon and that 12.02 warning message appears on the display of its onboard computer.

This could be big trouble for Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin.

It's telling them that the computer is not happy, which is not good news because because at this point the computer is in complete control of the spacecraft's journey towards the surface.

Listen again for Neil Armstrong saying the words program alarm in amongst the mess of other conversations.

As you can hear, the rest of the team are distracted by another technical issue and Armstrong's words go almost unnoticed.

But then he followed by Aldrin, read out the number on their computer display.

1202, staying by.

At this point, the vehicle is falling toward the moon at a rate of 120 feet per second.

And there are only a few precious moments to resolve the question of what this alarm means.

Is the computer crashing?

What should they do?

Is it serious enough to abort the landing?

Are they in danger?

And as the flight controller looking after this computer, it's Steve Bale's call.

The crew sees it four seconds before we do.

We're running about four seconds behind them.

1202.

i'm frantically trying to remember what the blank is 1202 so at this moment no one knows exactly what the 1202 alarm means and in the 14 seconds that pass from when the crew first saw it their anxiety mounts in this brief audio clip caught by the voice recorder in the lunar module hear again the uncharacteristic urgency in neil armstrong's voice as he demands an answer on the 1202 alarm give it the

Steve Bale's response is only a second away, but to explain how he got there, he had to take us back in time to two weeks before the launch of Apollo 11, when Mission Control first encountered mysterious computer alarms during the final dress rehearsal for the landing.

The last simulation that we ran before the Apollo 11 mission.

Halfway down through the descent, we get a similar similar type of alarm.

It's called a 1210, which means two things are trying to talk to the computer at once.

I call an abort.

Steve called an abort because he'd never come across this or any other computer alarm before.

At the debriefing we have after every simulation, we got in a big argument with the simulation supervisor.

He said, I don't think you should have called that abort.

I said, you're not right.

We get in a big argument about it.

Gene comes up to me and says, Steve, I want you to have a new mission rule set that covers unexpected alarms.

A mission rule is like a tablet of stone for the flight controllers, telling them that if this particular thing should happen, then they must do this in response.

As Gene Krantz explained, they needed to set out how they should react if any of these alarms appeared during the actual mission.

We had never seen these before in training.

We had never studied these before in training.

I gave an action to Steve Bales

to come up with a set of rules.

Now we're literally about two weeks from launch.

A set of rules.

We've had our final training run.

A set of rules related to program alarms.

I want a total expose and I don't give a damn how long it's going to take him.

If he has to work all night or all week or every day from now to launch, he's going to understand these program alarms.

I didn't have much.

I said, Gina, I want to do it.

I've got time.

I've got too much.

He said, you will do it.

So Steve turned to one of the computer specialists supporting him in the back room.

This was a 23-year-old software expert called Jack Garmin, and Steve gave him the job of finding out every possible alarm message that might be issued by the lunar module's computer, the level of seriousness of each, and how they should respond.

So I assigned my backroom guy, Jack Garmin, who was an expert in software, and he got everybody together around the country.

MIT, anybody to build a computer.

He came back about a week later, as I was doing a bunch of other things.

He said, Steve, here are the rules.

I went through with them one by one.

I signed them off.

If we hadn't have done that, I don't know what would have happened I really honestly don't

so when 1202 appears on the spacecraft's computer display during those 13 minutes of Apollo's descent to the moon Steve Bales and Jack Garmin are equipped with a list of these alarm codes

Jack after about 10 seconds I'm sure he's frantically looking these notes I'm trying to find my it's the last thing in the world I think we're going to have.

I'm looking, it's under my console glass.

I'm trying to look for it.

Before I can even spot it, Jack says, Steve, Steve, it's one of those that if it doesn't happen too much, we'll go.

Here's Jack Garmin on the communication loop to Steve Bales.

It's executive overflow.

If it does not occur again, we're fine.

Yeah, it's the same thing we had.

Jack Garmin reassures Steve Bales that the alarm isn't caused to abort the mission.

And so, if all his other systems are working fine, the mission could continue.

I look up at my other displays.

We still know where we're at.

We've got the right altitude.

We know now how fast we're going toward the moon, how fast we're going horizontally.

I said flight, we're going that alarm.

We're going to flight.

We're going that alarm.

Roger, we got you.

We're going that alarm.

We caught it just in time because it took us 15, 16 seconds from the time it happened to the time we said go.

That's an eternity.

But we kept going.

And we kept going.

We'll come back to the story of the 1202 alarm in later episodes because it continued to plague the descent almost all the way to the landing.

The critical computer controlling the flight was struggling, and we'll explore why that was.

Throughout the Apollo program story, there are instances just like this, of a mission teetering on the edge of failure or catastrophe, and a lone individual somehow knowing exactly what to do.

But none of that was coincidence.

It was the result of years years of preparation and sacrifice, of flight controllers who are too young to be afraid of the challenge and of leaders who made them everything that they could possibly be.

The question of how mission control was made, how you make a flight controller or a flight director, how you get a crew of astronauts all the way to the surface of the moon and home again safely, is answered simply.

by saying that no one stood alone, that the team was far more than the sum of its parts.

There's a story which illustrates this point perfectly.

It's about an emotionally powerful address that Gene Krantz made to his flight controllers not long before the 13 minutes of final descent.

Steve Bales and the rest of the team were waiting for the Eagle landing craft to come from the far side of the moon, waiting to make radio contact with the crew and the spacecraft to make sure that all was okay to go ahead with the landing attempt.

About 15 minutes before acquisition of signal, we're sitting there because we're done.

We've done everything we can do.

We're getting ready to know

15 more minutes, they're coming around.

We're going to have to monitor for a while.

We have to go, no, go, and they're going to light that engine and they're off.

That's a tense time.

I'm 26, guy next to me is 26.

The old guys were the systems guys, they were about 30, 31, 32.

We're all sitting there.

Gene Kranz recalled this feeling of high tension in his team.

I mean the level of preoccupation in these people.

And these are kids.

These are the average age of my team was 26 years old.

I'm 36.

I'm 10 years older.

I'm the oldest guy on this entire team.

It's really starting to sink in and I have this

feeling I got to talk to my people.

And he does this on a communication loop that only the flight controllers and nobody else else could hear.

On the flight director loop, which you can hear all over the world, there's an announcement, all MOCAR flight controllers go over to the special loop.

It's called the Assistant Flight Director Loop.

Not monitored around the world at all.

I had to tell these kids how proud I was of the work that they had done and

that from

This day, from the time that they were born, they were destined to be here.

Even after 50 years, talking about Gene Krantz's message moves Steve deeply.

Gene comes on.

He says.

He says, look,

we're about to do something that nobody's ever done.

We've trained for this all your life.

We're going to do it.

But I want to tell you all something.

No matter how this turns out,

when we walk out of this room, we walk out as a team, not as individuals.

And then he said, lock the doors.

And we were going to be in there

until we either landed,

or we aborted,

or we crashed.

You can't imagine what that meant.

I can't even say it now.

In episode 3, our focus switches to the Lunar Module, the extraordinary spacecraft which took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the Moon.

It is crazy looking.

It's the weirdest looking thing that people would fly in.

And it did this amazing thing.

We meet an astronaut who flew it to the moon.

Basically, it flew like a helicopter with a rocket engine instead of a rotor blade.

But your first impression was, man, how did this thing ever come about?

And an engineer who worried it might not be ready for the Apollo 11 mission.

We had a lot of doubts about it.

We're always behind.

I mean,

we had a schedule that says we're going to land at somewhere around July 69.

But I think we're wondering if we're ever going to be able to complete it on time.

Thirteen Minutes to the Moon is an original podcast from the BBC World Service.

Okay, retro, go.

Fido, go, guide, go!

Control, go, telecom, go, Ginse, go, econ.

13 Minutes to the Moon is produced by Andrew Luck Baker.

Our theme music is by Hans Zimmer.

Additional research and production by Sue Norton and Madeline Finley.

The series editor is Rami Zabar, and the podcast editor is John Mannell.

Thanks to NASA and the Johnson Space Center History Office for archive material.

Thanks so much for all your comments and everything you've been saying about our podcast.

If you can, please do leave ratings and reviews.

We'd love to know what you think.

On social media, we're using the hashtag 13 MinutesToTheMoon.

That's all one word.

As a new podcast, we rely on recommendations, so thank you.

There are videos, photos, and documents on our website, and there'll be more as the series goes on.

Stephanie Constantine from our BBC World Service digital team has made a short film about the young workforce in the Apollo program, including some of those in mission control who we've heard from in this episode.

They talk about how they dealt with the enormity of the Apollo 11 mission at such a young age and what it meant to them personally.

Go to bbcworldservice.com/slash 13 minutes.

I'm Kevin Fong, and thanks for listening.

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