13 Minutes to the Moon: 9. Tranquility Base

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We pick up just short of where we ended episode 8, more than halfway through Apollo 11's final descent to the lunar surface.

7.30 coming up.

That's Neil Armstrong marking the time elapsed since they started firing the engine on the lunar module, committing them to a landing.

That thrust has slammed the brakes on their spacecraft with a dramatic loss of speed and altitude, taking them from 50,000 feet to where they are now at 16,000 feet.

Remember, until now Eagle has been flying on its side, feet first, with the astronauts lying on their backs looking out into space.

But now the lem's beginning to tilt, bringing Armstrong's head up a little, and he catches a tantalizing glimpse of the moon at the bottom of his window.

They're in the thick of the fight, having already battled with patchy communications and an overloaded computer.

And they know they're going to overshoot their planned landing site by several miles, taking them into hazardous territory.

But the greatest challenge is yet to come.

Time and fuel are running out and Armstrong will be forced to fly the lunar module like it's never been flown before.

There's a lot of concern about running out of fuel, and I was very cognizant of that.

When I started my stopwatch, I didn't think there's a chance in the world of us landing.

Eagle Houston is decent to fuel to monitor over.

1201.

1201.

Roger 1201 alarm.

1201 alarm.

30 rocket area.

Okay, the only call outs from now on will be fuel.

Low level.

Low level.

Picking up some dust.

30.

30 seconds.

30 seconds.

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

Episode 9 Tranquility Base

As Armstrong catches his glimpse of the moon's horizon through his window, a quarter of a million miles away in mission control, there's this exchange in the background between flight director Gene Krantz and Bob Carlton.

Bob is the flight controller monitoring Eagle's engine and its fuel tanks.

His call sign is control.

Descent to fuel.

Descent to fuel correct.

Descent to fuel only.

Too critical.

He didn't want to say critical.

Raj, descent to fuel.

Eagle Houston is Desent2 fuel to monitor over.

It's a fascinating exchange because it illustrates just how carefully the mission control team crafted every communication with Armstrong and Aldrin.

At the end there, you could hear Capcom Charlie Duke telling the crew to keep their eyes on the second of two fuel gauges in their cabin.

On the ground, Bob Carlton has decided that this gauge is giving the most accurate reading of their fuel state.

Krantz gets ready to tell Charlie Duke to pass the message as, Decent two fuel correct, underlining that it's critical to monitor the right fuel gauge.

But Carlton cuts him off and offers a correction.

Decent to fuel only.

Too critical.

He didn't want to say critical.

Raj, Descent to Fuel.

They're not to use the word critical, which could easily be misinterpreted.

It's all about accurate information.

There's no place for added emphasis.

Carlton knows that fuel is scarce and might later become an issue, but at this stage in the descent, he's not not worried.

Before we ever made the mission, we did simulation after simulation and analysis after analysis, and they sized those tanks to have a margin left.

When you landed, you had to have a good bit of gas left in the tanks.

You didn't want to run out of gas, in other words, before you landed.

And before we run this mission, all of those

analysis and simulations said that we'll have a goodly margin of gas left in the bottom of the tank.

Eagle's braking phase, controlled precisely by a computer program called P63, is coming to an end.

A new program, P64, will now take over to guide Armstrong and Aldrin through the final phase of their approach.

Buzz Aldrin asks Mission Control when they can expect that to happen.

Give us an estimated switchover time, please.

You.

Roger, stand by.

You're looking great at eight minutes.

Got an estimated, what's our T go, guidance?

Guidance officer Steve Bales has the answer.

30 seconds to P64.

Roger, 30 seconds.

So you've got 30 seconds to P64.

Okay, we still got landing radar guidance.

Okay, is it converged?

It looks beautiful.

Has it converged?

Yes.

Okay.

Flight photo, we go look real good.

Roger, Fido.

Things appear to be settling down.

There's a precise fix on Eagle's altitude, and Jay Green, the flight dynamics officer, or Fido for short, confirms the spacecraft's trajectory is exactly as it should be.

The final phase before landing is about to begin.

364.

Okay, they got fleet power.

Armstrong and Aldrin are almost passive in this maneuver.

The computer is in the driving seat, firing a flurry of thrusters, rotating Eagle from its near-horizontal position almost to the vertical.

For Armstrong and Aldrin, it's a dramatic moment.

David Mintel, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.

The lunar module rises from its back and tilts up upright.

And at that moment, the astronauts are, it's almost like they're rising from the dead.

They're lying on their backs and

they're raised upright.

And that's the moment where they look out

and they see the landing zone or the landing area for the first time.

The cratered plane of the Sea of Tranquility lies before them.

With the prize now in sight, Eagle continues to swing upright, falling all the while.

Armstrong checks their altitude and rate of descent.

5,000 feet above the lunar surface and dropping now at 100 feet per second, Eagle is now deep into its descent.

It's looking good, and in mission control, perhaps they dare to hope that their worst troubles might now be behind them.

Gene Krantz checks that his flight controllers are ready for the final act.

Okay, all flight controllers gonna go for landing.

Retro, go, Ido, go, go, patrol, go, telecom, go, GNC, go, Econom, Hill, surgeon, go, Capcom, we're go for landing.

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

But Buzz Aldrin barely has time to confirm and read back their altitude before a familiar foe rears its head.

Roger Underton, go for landing, 3,000 feet.

Program alarm.

Again.

The computer signaling it's in trouble.

A warning alarm buzzes in the crew's headset.

1201.

1201.

Roger, 1201 alarm.

1201 alarm.

Guidance officer Steve Bales.

Bang.

Here's another one.

Called 1201, but the same kind of a thing.

1201, 1202 are just a subset of each other, really.

The computer is overloaded with tasks.

Is it a problem?

Do they need to abort this time?

As before, Steve's backroom support, Jack Garmin, has the answer.

And this time, he's spring-loaded.

I remember distinctly yelling, same type, and he yells, same type, and the Capcom says, same type.

I can hear my voice echoing.

Boom, boom, boom, going up.

Same type, we're alarmed.

Same type, we're go, Fly.

We're at, we're going, same type, we're go.

Bang, happens again.

We have another 1202 alarm.

Browser, no slip.

Run your 1202 with drop yet.

We have several more.

We're getting closer and closer to the surface.

Eagle's guidance computer is working so hard it's becoming overloaded.

To cope, it sheds all of its non-essential tasks and functions, everything that isn't vital, including its display.

For a few seconds, the readouts remain blank while the computer focuses attention on keeping Eagle on the right trajectory.

They're at just 2,000 feet, still falling at 50 feet per second, so close to landing now that they need to start looking for a safe place to set down.

At this point the computer is still doing all the flying, controlling Eagle's thrust, direction of travel and rate of descent.

But Armstrong and Aldrin need to know where it's going to take them.

And in the 1960s, with no video display units, this was something of a challenge.

The computer could only show a set of numbers, and these digits somehow had to tell the astronauts where to look.

The problem was solved rather elegantly using something called the Landing Point Designator, or LPD.

A set of markings like a ruler positioned very precisely on the spacecraft's triangular window that measured the angle of the astronaut's view in degrees.

It sounds ridiculously primitive, but not so, says David Mendel.

LPD, landing point designator, was an ingenious and I think underappreciated, quite brilliant way for the astronauts to be able to know where to look when they were looking for their landing zone.

On the one hand, it was a old-school very simple set of etchings on the window.

All they were were a set of gradations that were calibrated for the astronaut's eye level and he could look out and at minus 28 degrees or whatever it would

show him where to look.

What was cool about it was coupled to the computer and so the computer would actually give him an LPD angle and it would say you know LPD you know minus 15 and if he looked through the minus 15 line it would point his eyes right to the spot where the computer thought it was landing him.

The LPD becomes all important in the final few minutes of the descent.

At 2,000 feet, with the surface of the moon looming, you can hear Armstrong concentrating hard, trying to work out where the computer is taking them.

2,000 feet.

Give me an LPD.

Enter the egg.

47 degrees.

Give me an LPD.

47 degrees.

47.

Give me an LPD, he says, twice, and with some urgency.

47 degrees, replies Aldrin, reading off the digits in front of him on the display.

Armstrong finds the corresponding line marked on his window and looks through it, seeing their intended exact landing site for the first time.

But that good impression doesn't last.

What's the LPD?

says Armstrong.

Aldrin updates him with a new number, 35 degrees.

Armstrong keeps looking, but he doesn't like what he sees.

Pretty rocky area.

They're heading for the boulder-strewn edge of West Crater, a gigantic hole in the lunar surface nearly 200 meters across.

Some of the boulders are the size of cars.

This is Armstrong describing what was going through his mind in an interview with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project in 2001.

We could have tried to land there and we might have gotten away with it.

It was a fairly steep slope and it was covered with very big rocks and just wasn't a good place to go.

There were some attractive areas, far more level, far less occupied by boulders and things, half mile ahead or so.

So that's where I went.

I wanted to make it as easy for myself as I could.

Armstrong has this crazy calmness where, as he said before the mission, I'm, you know, keep my right to be wishy-washy about where I land.

Space historian Paul Fjell.

So as he comes down and he sees these boulders, he actually says, I'm thinking about, you know, it'd be neat to land here.

The scientists would love it.

But maybe it's a little, you know, dangerous.

Smart thing to do, extend.

So Armstrong takes the LEM out of autopilot and puts control over its course into his own hands.

In this final phase of the landing, Armstrong can control the attitude, the angle of the spacecraft, which it's like a helicopter.

It also controls how rapidly it's moving across the surface of the moon, and then also the rate of descent.

And he has a little switch that just says descend faster and descend slower if he flips it up or flips it down.

The computer helps Armstrong make all those changes, and yet the software combines it in a way that is intuitive or at least trainable for the astronaut to control.

And so, in the end, it becomes a critical partnership between human and machine, with each party making up for the other's shortcomings.

300 feet down, 3.5, 47 forward.

Hold up.

Armstrong is now flying over the crater at 47 feet per second.

To Flight Director Gene Krantz in mission control, it's an unnerving spectacle.

Armstrong has to pick out a landing site.

And he's very close to the surface.

And instead of moving slowly horizontally, he's moving very rapidly.

I mean, we'd never seen anybody flying it this way in training.

50 down at 2.5.

19 forward.

There was a price to pay for Armstrong's exotic maneuvers.

With all the extra thrust, he was burning fuel much faster than expected.

And this unveiled a new threat.

Knowing how much fuel was left in Eagle's tanks was far from straightforward.

The amount of fuel being consumed was changing from second to second as Armstrong increased and decreased the engine's thrust.

But the team in Mission Control had to make their estimates based on the readouts from a few rudimentary gauges and sensors.

Here's Bob Carlton, Control, talking about that challenge in 2001 in an interview with the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project.

We had two ways of telling the fuel in the tank.

One was we had a level just like a gas gauge in the car.

And the other is we had a low-level sensor.

and this low-level sensor is right down the bottom of the tank.

And if you uncovered it, you had around 120 seconds of fuel left.

If you continued to burn at a one lunar G, in other words, a hovering kind of a thrust level,

you had that much time left when you uncovered this low-level sensor.

At this low-level point, Armstrong and Aldrin will have just 120 seconds of fuel left before they have to abort and return to Mike Collins in the command module.

If it's tripped, Armstrong will have to find a safe landing site and set Eagle down in that remaining time, otherwise it's all over.

Charlie Chuke, meanwhile, is doing his job as Capcom in Mission Control, feeding information up to the crew.

But fuel and time are running out.

Dick Slayton, the director of flight crew operations, was sitting to my right.

And so I'm giving them just all this information for mission control.

And finally, the last couple of minutes, Slayton punched me in the side, said, Charlie, shut up and let them land.

So, yes, sir, boss.

I think we better be quiet.

Okay, the only call-outs from now on will be fuel.

So I advise controllers, no more calls, because we're now operating in what we call negative reporting.

We're not saying a word to the crew because they're just busier than than hell right now.

And the only thing, the only reason for us to abort is fuel.

I mean the tension in mission control was through the roof.

I'd never felt that

tension before in mission control.

Okay, Bob, I'll be standing by if you're call out shortly.

Three and a half down, 220 feet.

13 forward.

11 forward coming down nicely, 200 feet.

4.5 down, 5.5 down.

Carlton calls out low level and it's like he's out picking cotton.

Well normally by the time he calls out low level we have landed in training and we're not even close to landing here.

Low level?

Low level.

But he calls out low level just like it's

everyday occurrence.

Despite appearances, Bob Carlton knew what was at stake.

We had tripped low level, which no one ever expected to happen.

When trip low level things really got quiet in that control center and we were nervous sweating.

100 feet three and a half down nine forward.

The spotlight fixes firmly on Bob Carlton and his backroom team engaged in the difficult task of calculating as accurately as possible how much fuel is left.

This takes great judgment and skill and the mission, indeed Armstrong and Aldrin's lives depend upon it.

Now in his back room, he has a controller by the name of Bob Nance.

And Bob Nance is looking at a recorder, which is

tracing out the throttle position that Armstrong's using.

And above hover throttle, below hover throttle, above hover throttle, below hover throttle.

And he is mentally integrating now how many seconds.

He is above hover throttle and subtracting that from the minutes below hover throttle, throttle, trying to give us a new number for how many seconds of fuel we got.

And Nance got so good at this thing in training that he could hit it within 10 seconds.

Now this is a guy who's eyeballing fuel remaining, and we're getting ready to call an abort on it, Bob Cowlson.

I had a stopwatch that started when that little level tripped.

So I clicked my stopwatch and started it.

And as the hand went around, I'd put a little piece of scotch tape, very scientific thing here, you know, a little piece of scotch tape and a mark on it that said, when you hit this one, there's 60 seconds left.

And when it comes on down to this one, there's 30 seconds left.

And then when it comes down to the point we need to abort, we don't want to be empty at that time.

You know, there's some uncertainty in this measurement process we're doing.

So we need to put a margin in there to be sure that we don't run into that uncertainty.

So we put a little extra in there to account for that.

And when I started my stopwatch, I didn't think there's a chance in the world of us landing.

I was looking at the altimeter, and it was, we had a heck of a way to go.

Armstrong goes flying past West Crater.

He picks out a spot he thinks will work very well.

It's just short of this little baby West Crater.

And as he starts flying to that, he goes, you know, no, I don't really feel good about that one either.

Now,

Carlton calls out 60 seconds.

And back for 60.

Gotcha.

60.

60 seconds.

And we're still not close to the surface yet.

Aldrin is doing his job all the way through, which is to be calm, clear, read the numbers, help his commander figure out that they're in good shape.

And so he's maintaining his position.

I know from a fact talking to him later that, you know, he was kind of saying, come on, land, land, land.

And now I'm thinking, okay, we got this last altitude hack from the crew,

which now means that we got to average roughly about three feet per second rate of descent.

And I see he's at zero.

So I say, boy, he's going to really have to let the bottom out of this pretty soon.

Nobody has ever landed that spacecraft.

Nobody has ever flown that spacecraft.

He's the first person in the world to fly it the way it's supposed to be flown.

So he wants to do everything he can to just make sure he's nudging the controls.

He nudges the spacecraft forward.

You can see in the data traces afterwards, the way he uses the hand controller.

The jets are firing like crazy, just making little tiny maneuvers, little tiny changes.

Forward.

Forward.

Buzz, between a couple of reads, he said we're picking up some dust.

Flight director Jerry Griffin.

For the landing, an off-duty and awestruck spectator.

I thought, good God, we got an engine blowing dust off the moon, the exhaust.

But Armstrong, as he gets closest to the surface and the dust starts flying out behind him, my God, you know, what's going on here?

I can't see the surface anymore.

Worse, the dust is moving in a way that gives me the illusion that I'm backing up.

I don't have a proper solid reference.

And you can see in his controlling, Armstrong flies in what he called kind of a jerky fashion.

He starts drifting a little bit to the right, as Aldrin says.

He over-corrects, he comes back.

Carlton now hits 30 seconds.

30.

30 seconds.

30 seconds.

Came to 30 seconds.

And my eyes were just glued on the stopwatch.

I didn't see that.

If the system could have fell apart at that instant, I wouldn't have known it.

I was just watching the stopwatch.

And Carlton was just ready to say 15 seconds.

Contact light?

Contact light.

Contact light.

Contact light.

Well, what happens?

We have a three-foot-long probe stick underneath each of the landing pads.

That when one of those touches the lunar surface, it turns on a blue light in the cockpit.

And when it turns on that blue light, that's lunar contact.

Their job is to shut the engine down, and they literally fall the last three feet into the surface of the moon.

Okay, engine stop.

APA at a detent.

Host control, both autos and engine command override off.

They're shutting down the engine at the time that Carlton says 15 seconds.

And then you hear Carlton come back almost immediately after that to say engine shutdown.

We've had shutdown.

We copy it down, Eagle.

We'd been burning 12 minutes or something on that order.

10 eternities.

And it came down to about 18 seconds of abortion.

We were lucky we made it.

It had taken nearly a decade of effort on the part of 400,000 people across the United States.

Years of relentless toil and real sacrifice.

The confidence and fearlessness of youth, the creative genius of scientists, and the innovation of engineers had created a marvel of technology, the likes of which the world had never before seen.

On the 20th of July, 1969, 12 minutes and 49 seconds after the powered descent began, all of that had come together to see a human crew land for the first time on the surface of another world.

We copy you down, Eagle.

Neil comes back in the coolest, calmest calmest voice you could possibly imagine.

Listen,

Tranquility Base here.

The Eagle has landed.

I'd never heard the word Tranquility Base.

I think, what a great name.

I think the only person in the control room that knew they were going to call themselves Tranquility Base was Charlie.

I was so excited.

If you listen to the transcript, Roger Twank, I corrected myself.

Roger Twank, Tranquility, we copy you on the ground.

You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

We're breathing again.

Thanks a lot.

Fantastic.

Do it every day.

Now the viewing room behind me, and this is again one of these other things in training, there's nothing that training ever prepared you for that second because the viewing room behind me starts cheering.

Our instructors, which are over in the sim room over to the right,

they start cheering.

But we got to be cool because we have to now go through all of the shutdown activity

But we have to go through a series of what we call stay-no-stay decisions

Because 40 seconds after we've touched down on the moon we have to be ready to lift back off again despite the jubilation for mission control the drama was far from over They had to make sure they were safe to stay If eagle was damaged, if the ground beneath them wasn't stable, if there was some unanticipated emergency, they would have to leave in a hurry.

And so, having arrived, they now had to make a firm decision to stay.

And I was so hung up

by this cheering, the coming in, the sound from the room, that I could not speak.

Pure frustration because I had to get going in the staino stay.

I just wrapped my arm down in the console there.

Okay, keep the chatter down in this room.

Just absolutely frustrated.

I broke my pencil.

Pencil flies up in the air.

Charlie Duke's next to me, and he's looking and wondering what the hell has happened here.

And all of a sudden, it hurt so much that I got back on track and started go, KO flight controller, stand by for T1.

Staino, stay, retro.

Stay, Idol, stay, titan, stay, control, stay, telecom, stay, and see, stay.

Ecom, stay, surgeon, stay, Capcom, or stay for T1.

And we went through this, and I think every controller went through his

climax at that second.

And then as soon as we finished that we had another staino stay, T2 staino stay

we had to do I think it was 10 or 12 minutes later and these were opportunities for liftoff and go back up an immediate rendezvous.

Once we went beyond T2 then we had to go through a T3.

We're trying to get everything re-synced for the next liftoff, and it's just the time, which is almost two hours between T2 and T3 stay no stay.

It just goes through incredibly quick.

And throughout this whole period of time, except for the instant you hear the cheering, you never got a chance to really think we've landed on the moon.

And

we get handed over to Charlesworth's team and it was then I'm going over to the press conference and it was walking over to the press conference was the first time you actually really had the chance to unwind and think about today we really landed on the moon.

On his way to the press conference, Gene Krantz grabs the youthful Steve Bales so he can explain his role in troubleshooting the computer alarms.

After the adrenaline storm of the 13-minute descent, the 26-year-old engineer is exhausted.

I am so tired I can't even see.

We get in a press conference.

I'm probably the only guy that ever almost falls asleep at the press conference.

The press doesn't ask a lot,

and I would have been afraid to tell them anything anyway.

I didn't know why this stuff had happened.

I mean, what was I going to tell them?

I knew, I didn't.

Look like a village idiot, I guess.

I'd say, yeah, I know why the

1202 happened.

I could say something happened.

We didn't understand it.

And we said that.

They actually didn't talk too much about that.

They talked more about, you know, what were our feelings.

They didn't talk too many technical things.

There were a couple, but I remember one reporter, I wish I knew who his name was, but he looked at me and he looked at everybody on that stage and says, you guys are tired.

Why don't you go?

First time I've ever heard a press guy take the opportunity to help the people on the stage.

That was really nice of him.

And so we left.

And I walk out, I'm so tired I can't even see.

But we all walk over to this room in the mission control.

There was one of these briefing rooms.

And there were several of us from the descent team that were there when Neil stepped out on the moon the first time.

We watched that together as a team.

I'm going to step off the lamb now.

That's one small step per man,

one

final week per man.

Neil Armstrong takes his historic steps.

But that's not the end of 13 Minutes to the Moon.

In the next two episodes, we're going to wind back the clock and replay NASA's recording of the 13 Minutes once again.

Both episodes, 10 and 11 will be released together.

In episode 10, I'll be reflecting on the 13 minutes and pausing the tape at key moments to give you some of our thoughts about those events and the way we came to see them in the making of this series.

And after that, some of the men and women who we've got to know through the series will talk about the legacy of what they've achieved.

And you're now so familiar with the sequence of events of Eagle's Final Descent, episode 11 will be the 13 Minutes Uninterrupted.

The recording of Capcom Charlie Duke's Loop, so you can hear the drama unfold in real time the way he did on that day in Mission Control.

But stay with us now for a little longer because there's one last story coming up that might make you smile.

Flight controller Bob Carlton's stopwatch, the one he used to time the fuel reserves for Apollo 11, is perhaps the most important timepiece in the history of human spaceflight.

But have a listen to what happened to it next.

This is a little aside thing.

When it got down and stopped, I had 18 seconds showing on my stopwatch.

I'll never forget, I looked at that and I thought, you know,

this watch, I'm going to encase this in plastic and never touch it.

So I took it back to the office

and put it in a desk drawer.

I thought I'll save this for posterity.

And then I got to worrying about it.

I thought, you know, somebody steal this from me.

So I wrapped it up in a handkerchief and carried it home and put it in a box to save it.

And

sometime later I got it out looking at it.

And I thought, I remembered that needle was sitting on 18 seconds.

Now it's on 22.

I thought, man, I'm losing my mind.

Well, a few days later, I got it out and looked at it again, and it had changed position again.

I thought, uh-oh, something's wrong here.

And so I jumped my daughter's, and one of my daughters was a twirler, and she'd been coming in and taking that watch and using it to time her.

So it lost its position.

Well, later on,

I brought it in and sent it to the Smithsonian, and that's where it is today.

I don't know what they did with it.

Probably lost it.

I run it back to where it's supposed to be and lift it with a needle on the right thing.

They probably think it's just like the mission lifted, but it ain't.

In fact, the Smithsonian didn't lose Bob's watch, and it's on display at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia.

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

Okay, keep the chatter down in this room.

13 Minutes to the Moon is produced by Andrew Luck Baker of the BBC Radio Science Unit.

Our theme music is by Hans Zimmer.

Extra production and research is by Sue Norton and Madeline Finley.

The series editor is Rami Zabah and the podcast editor is John Minnell.

Thanks to NASA and super thanks to the Johnson Space Center Oral History Project for archive material.

And of course, big thanks to you for telling us what you think of the series.

It's fantastic to see so many people are enjoying it.

If you haven't done it already, why not share your thoughts?

Get in touch with social media.

Our hashtag is 13 Minutes to the Moon.

That's all is one word.

Or give us a review or rating.

wherever you get your podcasts.

Don't forget, there's a bunch of Apollo videos, photos and documents to enjoy on our website.

That's bbcworldservice.com slash 13 minutes.

I'm Kevin Fong.

Thank you for listening.

Before I go, here's another podcast you might want to check out from the same team that brought you 13 Minutes to the Moon.

That's me drinking millions of viruses.

Crowd Science is the podcast that takes your questions and turns them into audio adventures.

My question for crowd science is: why and when did humans first start cooking food?

It's over!

I'm Marnie Chesterton, and each week we put your questions to scientists working at the limits of human knowledge.

I want to know how cells, how do they know what to do?

They're yanking on their neighbours, they're pushing on their neighbours.

We also try and demonstrate exactly what they're telling us.

What are the limits of human endurance?

You've just run a marathon and been hit by a car.

How are you here?

That's Crowd Science from the BBC World Service.

So if you'd like to inject a bit more science into that, just search for Crowd Science wherever you get your podcasts.

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We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.