13 Minutes to the Moon: 12. Live from Houston

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This is Rice University Football Stadium in Houston, the very place in 1962 that President John F.

Kennedy chose to make his famous speech, rallying a nation to the great challenge of landing people on the surface of the moon before the end of the decade.

I can imagine the electric atmosphere here that day under the searing Texas sunshine with the stands towering above me, packed with 40,000 expectant Americans and the young president where I am standing now on the 50-yard line at his podium on this field.

And this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space.

We mean to be a part of it.

We mean to lead it.

We set sail on this new scene.

That speech set the world on course for the greatest feat of exploration in the history of our species.

So for the last podcast in our series, we thought Rice University was the perfect place to bring together a panel of people who've all played their part in the boldest adventure of all time.

We choose to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon.

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things.

Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.

Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win.

Welcome to 13 Minutes to the Moon live in Houston from the BBC World Service.

I'm Kevin Fong and we're at Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy.

It's just a few hundred meters from the football stadium where President Kennedy made his famous speech and it's 50 years with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the lunar surface.

We'll be talking about the momentous events of the 20th of July 1969 as well as the prospects for a return to the moon or perhaps journeys beyond.

And I've the great fortune to be joined by a wonderful panel whose lives have been central to the endeavor of human space exploration.

Apollo astronaut Walter Cunningham, a former fighter pilot and member of the very first crew to fly into space aboard any Apollo vehicle, Apollo 7.

John Aaron, Apollo flight controller, known to some as the steely-eyed missile man, whose quick thinking helped save more than one Apollo mission.

John looked after the electrical and life support systems of the command module.

Jerry Griffin, lead flight director for Apollo's 12, 15, and 17, and who led the landings for two of those missions.

He'd later become center director of the Johnson Space Center here in Houston.

And our final member of the panel is former astronaut Peggy Whitson, the first female commander of the International Space Station.

At 665 days, Peggy has spent spent more time in space than any other American astronaut, and she earned her doctorate in biochemistry here at Rice University.

This is our panel.

Now we've plenty to get through tonight, but let's start with that incredible speech made here in September 1962 at Rice.

And I want to start with you, Jerry.

Can you remember where you were when you heard that speech, where you learned of that speech, and what you thought about it?

Yeah, I had just gotten out of the Air Force and was trying to find my way to NASA because I knew that's where I wanted to be.

And when I heard President Kennedy say that we were going to do it in the decade

of the 60s, I thought to myself, I don't know about that.

I'm not sure that's doable.

But

when I became a part of it, we just kept plugging away at it, and he was right.

We made it.

And John Aaron, you were living in North Texas at the time, about a million miles away from the space program.

What are your memories of that speech?

What was your impression of it?

I was actually further than that because I had just graduated from a very small school in a very remote area, totally consumed by my studies.

So it hardly retrodoned me.

I was living in a cocoon, trying to

get the technical degree that I wanted to pursue.

And

you were a fighter pilot at the time.

You were in the Marine Corps.

Absolutely.

And you heard this speech, this call to arms, as it were, to get to the moon before the end of the decade.

What did you think of that?

What do you think the chances were of achieving that?

Well, I was a fairly practical thinker at the time, and I was into physics, and I remember thinking he was overly optimistic because of all of the things that you had to be able to do to go.

And frankly, I think it's one of the most amazing pieces of progress and objectives that we accomplished after announcing advance, period.

Now, Peggy, you'll forgive me for not remembering the precise detail of that speech because you were a toddler at the time.

But as a NASA astronaut during the shuttle era, you saw at least one attempt to reboot our lunar ambition, the vision for space exploration under George W.

Bush.

Why do you think it's been so difficult to get us back to the moon

in successive presidencies?

Why do you think we haven't been able to really engage ourselves in the way that we did with Project Apollo?

Well, Project Apollo, I think, had that political will motivating it and keeping it fresh the whole time, plus a considerable amount of the national budget.

I think since that time we've obviously been somewhat hindered by not being able to spend that much money to try and get a program off the ground and the political whims from different administrations tend to change those priorities over time and in a faster way than we can actually complete a project.

John F.

Kennedy launched something that had never been attempted before, an endeavor so wide-ranging, so difficult, that it required an entirely new approach.

So you people on the panel were the people controlling it, monitoring it, troubleshooting it when it got into problems.

For some of you trusting your lives to it.

So I wanted to really turn to you now, Jerry, as the flight director you were kind of like the conductor of this orchestra and to ask you what it was that enabled you to build a team of this caliber, people like John, who are able to orchestrate this complex technology and make it work so that you could achieve your mission goals.

I had been a flight controller in Gemini, and so when I was selected to be a flight director for Apollo, it was kind of natural, except I didn't play an instrument anymore.

Like you say, I was the director of the orchestra.

And you had to listen to all the parts and make sure they made the right sound and know when to tone this one down and bring this one up.

But it was a natural outgrowth, I think, of early high-altitude, high-speed flight test,

where our mentor was a guy named Chris Kraft.

Chris actually developed his initial skills at Langley in high-altitude flight test.

And so that's where he started as being an architect of mission control.

And I can tell you they made a conscious decision to go out and find some young people.

Bob Gilruth, who was a center director at the time,

said we want enough of the old heads around to kind of keep things calm, but we want some young people that

don't have too many preconceived notions about spaceflight because nobody's ever done it.

And so I'd like to start with their and work on their brains.

Well anyway, I can tell you in mission control, It was the way we were wired.

It was in our DNA that we liked the challenge.

It was, I know you see pictures of us, we look pretty serious at times, but let me tell you, it was fun.

In fact, it was a hoot.

We had a lot of fun

in getting through even the tough phases, but that was the way Mission Control was, and it was a team.

And we were teamed with the astronauts, those of us in Mission Control, all of our contractors, universities, played a big role.

Peggy, you flew as a shuttle astronaut on board the successor system, the shuttle, arguably the most complicated machine ever built.

And what I want to know is, what is it like to trust your life to something that you yourself cannot be in control of, you can't see all the moving parts?

What is it like to trust in a system like that?

Well, I think there is a lot of trust involved, but being part of that NASA team makes that trust work.

And having people that can provide that input from the youngest engineer up to the most experienced makes you able to trust in that team.

It was definitely risky in some senses, but it was the one in 68, what the engineers said at the end of the shuttle program was the risk of loss of life for one of those flights.

A one in 68 chance of catastrophic failure with the loss of the crew and the vehicle.

Yes.

But that was nothing compared compared to what these guys did in the Apollo days.

And I want to talk to you about that, Walt, because Peggy talks there about what sounds to me like a very high risk of potential catastrophic failure of a mission.

But during Apollo, we didn't think of the risks in those precise terms, but they must have been much higher.

What was your attitude towards the risks of the flights during the Apollo missions?

There's no question that over the years the safety and the attitudes we had had changed.

But

also the people that we were taking up that were flying in later spacecraft had a different attitude too.

When I was there, starting in 1963,

we were all fighter pilots.

Most of them were test pilots.

And we were excited, as all get out, to have the opportunity to fly a mission like that.

We wanted to fly the first mission, and we wanted to fly the landing on the moon.

And I don't remember anyone in those days being overwhelmed by the risk of his own life.

As a fighter pilot,

you always understand that's a possibility, but you also develop the kind of attitude that says

it's not going to happen to me.

There's a tiny little bit of you that knows that you might be wrong.

John, now you were a flight controller, and so your experience of the risk is slightly abstracted, not as direct as Walt's or Peggy's.

And as a doctor, I sort of have some appreciation for that, you know, what it's like to make decisions and take risk on other people's behalves.

But I wondered what it was like for you sitting in that seat in mission control as a flight controller to make decisions upon which other people's lives depended.

I got introduced to risk right up front.

The first night I

served on the Apollo program was the night of the fire.

So I was introduced to risk in a very vivid way.

My approach to risk being a flight controller was that

the best way to prepare yourself to handle the unforeseen is

to learn everything you can

about

the design, the environment you're in, the operational situations that we're in, like the launch phase, and be there and feel prepared that if the worst thing happens, that

you can act and you can come up with the answer when maybe there's not an answer.

That is the way I felt comfortable walking into the room to do a launch phase, knowing the high energy situation that's involved.

And of course we will come to some of your stories of knowing what to do when the impossible has happened later.

Now, we talk here really about the need for teamwork, but Walt, every account of

Apollo astronaut selection is one of the fierce competition there was between you as fighter pilots, and fighter pilots were already competitive people.

Just tell me what it was like to try and put aside that sense of competition and to work as a team, I guess, within Project Apollo.

Well, I have to confess to you, we weren't trying to put aside competition.

We were trying to make sure that we could could operate and operate decently.

Back in our time, while we had that individual attitude that fighter pilots, everybody was a fighter pilot, that we had in those days, when we became part of a crew, whether it was two or whether it was three, it was the same as the militaries of working together in the same squadron or in the same group of people you were flying with.

Believe me, we all had a commitment for the total success of those missions.

And we thought it was probably easier if there was just one of us involved in it because everybody tried to work together.

I just feel fortunate to have lived when I did and be able to join that group.

Peggy, you flew at a time when the Astronaut Corps looked very different but you don't get to become a NASA astronaut without having competed in the first place.

Tell me about how you balanced the competitive spirit that gets you into the Astronaut Corps against the need to be the best team players that you can possibly be once you get there.

Well, it was really an important question.

When I led the selection board, we actually changed the emphasis of the crew members we were looking for.

We had thousands of applicants that were technically competent, and we started looking more for those that got the box checked from the report card that says play well with others.

Because for long-duration missions, that had much more of an emphasis for us.

But yes, there was always the competition of thousands of other applicants to get in.

I think once we were in, obviously everyone still wanted to be the first in their group to fly, but there was much more of a camaraderie and team spirit.

It's now time for me to turn to our audience for some questions.

So we'll take one or two questions.

Do we have any questions from the audience at all?

Yes, my name's Ernie Seifert.

I live in Friendswood, south of here.

The question I have is,

50 years later,

We've got a lot more technology.

I hear you hear people saying you've got more technology in your watch watch than you had going to the moon.

Is that going to make it easier for us to get there this time?

Or do we have more hurdles to overcome because we've got too much technology in the way?

Thank you for that question.

I'm going to turn to John for that one.

John, you sat behind a desk managing the environmental control and life support systems, the electronic systems aboard, the Apollo spacecraft.

What do you think about operating a spacecraft now versus what it was like in your day?

The main difference is the technology is much improved.

There's a much improved foundation to build the next generation systems on.

There's a much better way of including artificial intelligence into those technologies.

We did not have

the computer technology to automate anything.

It was slide rules and big chief tablets almost.

And

that's the primary thing that's changed.

But the problem hasn't changed.

The basic problem of

how to have power and how to have environmental control and thermal control and all that,

the physics is the same.

But

there is one caution that I would apply that I found as we evolved into later

space stations and so forth.

Just because you have the technology to make a system complicated doesn't mean you should.

We'll take one more question from the audience here, and we've got a young gentleman there on the right in the green shirt, second row.

Thank you.

What do you think NASA's biggest holdback currently is?

Is it funding?

Is it politics?

Is it the current public insight, how NASA works?

What do you think it is?

What do we think NASA's biggest holdback is currently?

I think that's one for Peggy Whitson.

Well, I think

NASA has to have, obviously, as you mentioned, you've got to have that political will.

And it needs to be followed up with some money.

But the other thing that is most important, I think, in our future development and future exploration is the fact that we're going to have to change how we do our processes to some degree.

In order to do it in shorter periods of time, doing it with international partners and with these new commercial providers, if we can set up collaborative work that will allow both the government and those collaborators to benefit from those experiences, then I think we're going to be able to do things faster.

And I think that'll be a huge step up in the future.

And I think that we are really on a precipice of change.

We have that potential that exists right now.

And if we can push hard enough politically with enough money, I think we can really start and get back there where we need to be.

Thank you, Peggy.

Could I just ask you to identify yourself, tell us what you do, and how old you are?

Yeah, my name is Jason.

I'm 14.

I personally just love space, and I probably think right now that a lot of kids don't, you know, for my example, my father, for him, it was always space.

You know, it was what everyone was into, but now you don't see that at all.

Like, kids just, you say, NASA, oh, now it's more of a thing you wear for clothing, not something you think that's cool or you're actually hoping for the moon or anything.

It's just something, oh, yeah, NASA, that's a thing.

A future NASA administrator, there, I think.

Excellent.

Thank you so much for your question.

That'll be the end of the questions for now.

There'll be more opportunities to ask questions later.

Thank you so much for your contributions there.

Now, our focus for this series has been on the final 13 minutes of descent to the moon, which Neil Armstrong himself said was rampant with unknowns.

And it was the culmination of all the hopes, dreams, and efforts of a nation over the previous decade.

So let's just hear some of the mission audio now, about four minutes away from landing, because it's this audio that gave us the idea for the series in the first place.

That sound is unique, it can't be mistaken for anything else, and so we're just going to play you a clip.

Okay, all-flight controllers, gonna go for landing.

Retro, go!

Control, go, telecom, go, GNC, go, Econom, Hill, Surgeon, go, Capcom, we're go for landing, Eagle Houston, you're a go for landing.

Over

10, go for landing, landing 3,000 feet

alarm

1201 1201 Roger 1201 alarm 1201 alarm same type we're go flight okay we're go same type we're go

flight federal right on real good 2,000 feet into the egg 47 degrees Roger 47 degrees how's our margin looking Dodd

it looks okay with four and a half Roger Eagle looking great you're go

House of 2008 and eggs looks good Roger

Roger 1202 we it.

How you doing, control?

We look good here, fine.

Right, how about you, Telcom?

Go.

Guidance, you happy?

No, Fido.

Go.

700 feet, 21 down, 33 degrees.

540 feet down at 30 and a 15.

Attitude home.

Okay, at hold.

I think we better be quiet.

Roger.

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

Now, those last voices were Apollo 11 flight director Gene Krantz and Capcom Charlie Duke just two and a half minutes before touchdown.

Now, I'd like some of our panelists who were actually there that day listening to that audio live in the mission operations control room to put themselves back in the moments.

So Jerry, Jerry, I'll come to you first.

Put us in that room.

Well, I was plugged into the flight director console.

Gene was actually running the...

the team then.

For one thing, it was very quiet.

It was a very disciplined room most of the time anyway.

But it was extremely quiet that day.

We had been very close to landing on Apollo 10 and intentionally didn't.

But we got down to 47,000 feet.

But at that point, we came back up and rendezvoused with the mothership and came home.

It was a dress rehearsal.

And the point I want to make in that is that until that final phase, we had done it all.

But from there on, from about 47,000 feet on down, it was brand new.

And the tension was there, but everybody was ready.

And it was calm, I think, confident until it got a little bit squirrely on fuel there.

We made a 60-second call, and then we made a 30-second,

and about to make a 10-second call.

when he touched down and shut the engine down.

And they went back later and calculated, they think they had about 17 seconds of fuel remaining.

That was by far the closest we got in any of the landings to running out of fuel.

But it was a momentous step, but there was still no celebration, not yet.

And John, you were there.

You're plugged in as a flight controller for Apollo 11, monitoring your systems.

What's it like for you in what sounds like a frenetic last few seconds before the landing?

Well, I had the best seat in the house.

My responsibility was to watch the command and service module, which was orbiting the moon 60 miles overhead

and doing just fine.

And then the drama began.

There was trajectory concerns about were going to be long.

There was the alarms were going off.

The alarms were going off.

And I got to watch that.

I knew enough about everybody's position to know what they were working, why they were working, and what they were saying, what they were doing.

And then it got down to the real terminal phase, and then the concern became fuel.

It was a drama that pointed out

nothing like any simulation we had ever had, although we had hundreds of simulations of just that phase.

The touchdown happened.

There was a sense, there was just kind of a hush and a sense coming to that room room that was kind of awkward.

And then there was the reaction, almost to start the cheers.

And then we were reminded, we just touched out.

We may have to lift back off.

Let's all pay attention to business.

I got to watch that from the vantage point of not having to suffer the drama, but to watch it.

Now, Walt, for you, of course, these are not just the crew, but your colleagues, people you've trained alongside your fellow astronauts.

What was that like for you listening to that on the loop, seeing how much trouble they were almost getting into?

Well, those of us that had already flown on Apollo, we were very much aware.

Everybody on the flight cruise in those days, everybody was aware of the kind of exposure you were at, done a lot of simulations.

Some of the simulations we carry down to failure, so you kind of get used to it.

But those of us

at that time that had flown earlier in it, we were there listening to the crew coming down, and we might have been more impacted mentally on it than the crew because the crew was involved in doing it.

I mean, so you had to log those things, but you don't want to ever get hung up on what is going on.

You got to keep operating.

I was very much impressed when they touched down with less than 20 seconds of fuel remaining.

But at the same time, it's hard for the public to understand

that

unless they were really ordered by the ground, which is what they talked about doing, they would have continued a little bit farther.

They were aware pretty much also.

And as long as they felt like they had a control of Ableton board, they would keep doing it.

So

I was thrilled to death that they had what it took to keep pushing to it.

Thank you, Waltz.

Now, as we all know, Armstrong and Aldrin landed safely, but let's remind ourselves of that moment again.

We copy you down, Eagle.

Cliffin,

Tranquility Base here.

The Eagle has landed.

Roger

Tranquility, we copy you on the ground.

You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue.

We're breathing again.

Thanks a lot.

Now, Jerry, you were all breathing again, but it wasn't time for feet up and cigars out.

Tell me why.

Well, being the first first landing, you know, some people had said the dust will be so fine and so thin or there'll be a crust and you'll break through it, you could turn over or start to turn over.

So we had to be ready for an immediate abort on the ascent stage, the second stage of the two.

And we also then had what we called a T1 stay-no stay.

That was about a minute after launch.

And the flight director would poll all the positions.

If we were still okay after sitting on the surface, then they could do some additional powering down.

There was a silence right after touchdown, and then a little bit of rumbling in the room, no yelling or standing up or anything like that.

And Kranz said, Okay, hold it down.

And it went right back down to zero.

So it was exhilarating, but the mission wasn't over.

In those days, they were landing on another body in in the universe,

and

so little was known about it that it really came down to the field there at the end.

We now talk about going to Mars, and the public may not realize that we know probably, I don't know, a hundred times, a thousand times more about Mars and the Mars surface today than we knew about the moon.

in those days.

So I'm absolutely amazed with how much we know about Mars

So, six and a half hours later, Neil Armstrong opens the hatch, climbs down the ladder, with an estimated one billion people on Earth watching or listening.

Here's the mission audio with some of the most famous words of all time.

Surface is fine and powdery.

I can I can kick it up loosely with my toe.

I only go in uh

small fraction of an inch, maybe an eighth of an inch, but I can see the footprints of my uh boots and the treads and the

fine

sandy particles.

Now Peggy, you were nine years old, but you have a memory of this.

Tell me about that.

Well, my parents let us stay up late.

That was a big deal.

We didn't get to stay up late for any reason.

And

they actually, I remember being in my pajamas and watching on a black and white screen as Neil took up first step onto the moon.

It was very memorable.

I'm not sure that at nine you can really understand the significance of it, but you know, it was obvious that this was something special and unique and made me want it to be an explorer too.

And you, in your career as an astronaut aboard shuttle and on space station, became one of the most experienced spacewalkers,

I guess, of all time.

Spacewalk doesn't quite cover it, does it?

I mean, it's the most dangerous thing we do in space.

Explain to me why it's so hazardous.

Well, obviously, we're basically in a spaceship built for one, and so we have all those life support systems inside.

We have a suit that protects us, but maybe not as much as a spacecraft would.

But

we are out there and we're working with the pressure of the suit against the pressure of the suit.

That pressure protects us, but it also makes it much harder to work in that suit.

So it's just, it's one of the most,

I would say, difficult from a mental and physical perspective, but at the same time, that's what makes it one of the most special parts of the job of being an astronaut.

And John, what was your memory of seeing Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon?

You know, as I sat there and I watched and I listened

as it came down the ladder and planted his foot, personally what it meant to me, I felt, you know, kind of a cold chill kind of come up on me and pride just welled up.

I mean you're going to get me kind of going here.

But then

the pride of the whole team, the 400,000, probably felt the same way.

And then afterwards, I started thinking about what it meant to the country.

You know, in the late 50s, in the late 1950s, I grew up in the duck and cover training.

The Cold War was raging.

The mood and morale of the country was down that, you know, our technical and engineering prowess wasn't perhaps what it should be.

And I think that was a watershed event for how people felt about themselves to be Americans.

From that moment on, we were not only caught up with the Soviets with respect to the space race, we have made a leap ahead.

Jerry, you're in mission control.

Apollo 11 are on the surface of the moon.

At what point can you, as a flight director, relax and say, that's it, job's done?

Well, never,

is probably the way I'd answer that.

Something that Peggy said about being this the spaceship for one, I was always nervous in EVAs.

There were a lot of single-point failures that and we didn't like single-point failures.

We always tried to drive them out of the system.

But

you put a person in a suit, pressurized suit, you could snag it, hurt it, hook it, do something that that could be really bad.

Now the Apollo 11 crew didn't get very far from the lunar module later.

You know, we had people miles away from the lunar module.

And I don't know,

every time you opened a hatch, it kind of bothered me.

You got to close the door, you know, and pressurize this thing and get it going.

But

that moment was

historically

meant a lot more to me than it did in the moment when he

stepped out.

Now, much of this series has explored the jeopardy of the Apollo 11 landing, but none of the Apollo missions after 11 were without their problems.

And by way of example, two of our panelists were intimately involved in the next mission, Apollo 12, just four months after the first moon landing.

And that mission was struck by lightning very shortly after launch.

Now, I'm going to ask Jerry to put me into the picture of this.

So this is Apollo 12 launching, and all hell breaks loose.

Tell me what happened.

Yeah, Apollo 12 was my first time to be on duty for a Saturn V launch, which was an experience in itself.

About 35 seconds after liftoff, all of a sudden our data on all of our computer screens froze and jumbled.

It didn't make any sense, and they stopped.

Pete Conrad was commander, and almost immediately he started calling out the master caution and morning lights, which were essentially all of them on a panel about this big, my first thought was, we may have to abort.

We were still gaining altitude, so I said, let's keep going.

And about that time, I said,

Ecom, what do you see?

And John, you said, white, tell them to try XCE to aux.

I looked at John.

John had stood up and looked at me, and I said, what?

And he said, he repeated it, S-C-E to aux.

So I turned to the Capcom, who was now looking at me, and I said, Capcom, SCE to aux.

And he looked at me with this, what, look.

But he went ahead and made the call and called it up to Conrad.

He said, try SCE to aux.

And Pete repeated it, SCE to aux.

What the hell is that?

And

so we had this comedy of errors running around through all these comm loops, but Al Bean, the lunar module pilot, knew where the switch was that John had made the call on.

It was right in front of him and he went from the primary to the auxiliary position.

When that happened, we got all the data back in the control center.

And John at that point stepped in and said, Tell him to reset the fuel cells, flight.

So Capcom reset the fuel cells.

And Al Bean

was going to do that maneuver.

There were three switches and he was very slow in doing it.

He told us both later that he didn't like that idea.

That

when you start fiddling around with the power, the fuel cells produce power.

And

he said he just didn't feel right doing that.

So he put on one and John said, he's got one.

Tell him to get the other two.

So he did.

and when it did, it restored all the power back in the space crew.

And this is one of the remarkable stories of Apollo.

And John Aaron, you are 26 years old in your first job out of college, I guess.

How do you know that this is the right thing to do?

Apollo 12 has been struck by lightning.

Every light on the console is on saying you should really abort.

But you say no.

Make this bizarre switch throw SCE to aux.

How do you know that?

Well, the first thing that I noticed about the data and listening to what the crew was reporting, and by the way, we didn't know it was lightning at that point.

We just knew that I sensed there's probably a major brownout of the power system that was going on in the spacecraft.

The thing that I saw,

I realized quickly

I had seen it before.

Zoom back in time one year, I was sitting in mission control at that same console in the middle of the night after a long day of pad tests, and they made an error in a sequence.

This is on a live spacecraft.

They made an error in the sequence and set up the condition.

Bang.

All the lights came on.

The thing that happened, I just happened to be the right person on the right console at the right time to see a pattern that I had seen before, and it was a pattern I had memorized a year earlier, but totally forgot about it.

But what had happened was this lightning strike had kind of tripped out one circuit, and that simple switch through from SCE to AUX put in a second circuit that meant that the whole mission could continue.

It did that.

That was the reason I was trying to get to it, because I knew the data was fake.

Was I looking at the cause or was I looking at the effect?

That's always the first thing you have to figure out once you troubleshoot something.

So, as soon as we got it to auxiliary, then the data came live, and I said, said reset the fuel cells.

Okay and the next flights of course get into even bigger trouble.

Apollo 13 on its way to the moon suffers an explosion which cripples its life support and its source of power with a very real risk of seeing an astronaut crew being marooned in space.

Now Walt

one of the things that really struck me when we interviewed you for the podcast series was that your

Your statement that nobody seriously expected us to complete all the flights to the moon without losing at least one crew during a flight.

When you became aware of the Apollo 13 crisis, did you think that this might be a crew that you were going to lose in flight?

Well, it's an interesting question, but it wasn't an official kind of policy that said we're going to lose one at a time.

I'm just talking about the crews themselves.

Everybody thought we had utmost confidence, which we did.

We had self-confidence, what have you.

But I can remember in conversations, even when I'm just flying with some of our guys and the crews, we

well maybe I'm the only ones willing to say at the time but

we all thought that there would probably be some loss of at least one crew in there and it would just take another mission to do it and that has to do with the attitude that you have when you're in this kind of a position

And I'd have to say this too, probably every one of us that might have a little talk from time to time and say, oh, we're going to lose some crew, nobody thought it was going to be their crew.

Everybody realized that there were things that could cause it, but they all had the confidence, the same confidence that I had, Wally Schrod, Don Eisley had, is if we get an emergency here, we'll be able to handle it.

Now, is that correct?

Probably not.

But it's the way we felt about it.

It's an attitude.

Jerry, Apollo 13...

by all accounts was chaotic really from the moment you have that problem with the explosion and you're losing almost every critical system on board the vehicle and they're headed away from the Earth 25,000 miles an hour or so.

Tell me about what it was like to try and manage that chaos.

Yeah, I had just gotten off shift

and I told Gene Kranz happened to be on shift when the tank exploded.

told him I turned over a perfectly good spacecraft to him and he blew it up.

But

I actually came back in the room about the same time John did,

40 or 50 minutes probably after the explosion.

And

I was out playing a softball game.

Somebody had to come get me.

But anyhow,

the room was calm.

It was not chaotic.

There were more people in the room.

About the time I got there is when they made the call to get over into the lunar module and use it as a lifeboat.

Now, remember about 13, probably the most fortunate thing that happened.

If it had to happen, it happened at the right place.

We still had the lunar module.

Had that happened after they had separated the lunar module and landed, it was curtains.

It wouldn't have worked.

We could have probably gotten

swaggered home.

But

that would be about it.

So it was a

chaotic time, but that's when the training kicked in.

And one thing else, and I'll make this quick, one of the secrets, maybe the primary secret of Apollo was the training.

And I am amazed at the fidelity of simulations we had 50 years ago.

When I think about it, we had the astronauts in one building and a simulator.

We had the control center in another building.

We were connected.

The data that we saw inside the control center looked just like a real flight.

And the simulation guys were in between us, and they could throw in failures, and they did, and they would drive us to our knees and we sometimes have to abort and sometimes we wouldn't.

But

eventually what we did through that process

is the training taught us not only about the systems, it also taught us how to face a serious problem.

So I think that was one of the big things that we had to do in 13 then was really stay focused.

And John, you yourself play a key role in the rescuing of the Apollo 13 mission.

Just tell me your recollections of that.

When the problem happened, I was home.

I didn't know what was going on, and I got a call.

They said, John, they've got a problem out here, and they're chasing it, trying to diagnose it, and they're chasing it, convinced it's some kind of instrumentation problem.

It's just a bunch of bad measurements coming down to the spacecraft.

So

I said, walk behind the consoles and read me some measurements because

I knew all the electronics that

aggregated those kind of measurements and

they read it, read them out to me.

I said, well,

read me these.

They read them out to me, read these.

And I said, that is not an instrumentation problem.

That's a real problem.

And I'll be right there.

I then walked, I would then thought on the way driving into the control center, I ran through my mind, what could that be and what.

so forth.

And so I went to the control center and looked at what people were trying to diagnose and chase.

And then we began the process of making the inevitable call that you had to turn the command module off.

Very traumatic call to make because that had never been done before in orbit.

We didn't know how to really turn it back on.

But it was time to stop the troubleshooting and

focus on the lifeboat.

And

you're not going to fix this.

You've got to turn it off and save the batteries because if we get back in the vicinity of the Earth by some miracle, we're going to need those.

Almost everything that you've been talking about here about

the problems with 13 or

12 or what have you,

they may seem unique now, but at the time, those of us that were training for all those missions, sometimes backup, what have you,

there was always, in my opinion, a built-in capability to adjust and handle it at the same time.

There was always that piece of that that said, if we can't get this done, we've got the ground down there that can try to do it.

For example, Apollo 13.

I lived across the street from the Johnson Space Center.

And when I heard TV covering it, I was getting ready to go to bed.

I put my clothes on, I went across, went into mission control.

When I got there, I was listening to Jack Swigert, who who was the last-minute substitute or replacement on there on Apollo 13.

I sat down there, I stayed there for about 15 minutes, I listened to what was going through Jack on the air-to-ground, the other guys who were in the lunar module, already trying to open it up and get it set to cover for them.

And I went home and went to bed.

And I went home and went to bed because I felt like they had done, I was on the track for everything they could possibly do.

And then from that time on, it was going to have to be a function of analyzing other things.

And it's an epic story, and perhaps a subject for another podcast series, but an incredible story of triumph, really, for NASA, yes, again.

But, Peggy,

what's miraculous to me is that during the whole of the Apollo program, we didn't actually lose a crew in flight.

And yet, you yourself, as an operational astronaut, flew through the shuttle era.

We lost two vehicles and their crews.

You yourself were in the astronaut corps when we lost Columbia in 2003.

I wanted to ask, you know, we know the risks, we know the numbers mathematically, but when you experience a risk at closehand like that, does it modify your attitude to the risks?

Well, definitely it's going to have an effect.

Obviously,

knowing people that you've lost makes a huge difference, I think, in maybe how you perceive it.

But I think I knew there was risk before I was at NASA.

I was still here at Rice University in my PhD postdoctoral phase, and that's when Challenger happened.

And so even then, I knew there was risk.

And maybe I didn't understand the

minutiae of how we got into that problem, but obviously when I got to NASA, that's one of the things as a manager you learn and they teach us about the Challenger accident because they want us to not fall into the same traps that management fell into as part of that disaster.

So risk is part of the job.

I think you can't deny that it's there.

But I think the fact that we have a day of remembrance every year to actually acknowledge it and understand it and think about it so that we don't repeat it is important.

Now, the United States is of course thinking of going back to the moon in the near future, but as we've heard, that involves a huge amount of risk.

We've talked about Apollo 12 and Apollo 13.

Apollo 15 itself had a hard landing.

16, 17 weren't straightforward.

The whole endeavor of human space exploration is always fraught with danger.

I guess I want to ask our panel: if we're going to take on these missions into the future, is society as a whole prepared to accept those risks?

Walt?

My personal opinion is is that today

I don't believe that the public at large is oriented towards accepting risks, physical risks like this, as we used to be.

That's not the total solution, but it does change a lot about the reaction to it.

Jerry, we want to go back to the moon.

You've been part of an operation that got us to the moon once before.

What do we need to do today to get back there?

Consistent funding

extremely important.

And we've got to get, I think ultimately we're going to have to have the Democrats and Republicans talking to each other.

In Apollo we had three presidents.

Two of them were Democrats and one Republican.

And with all the problems we had, the fire, Apollo 13, and so forth, we said, let's go, let's keep going.

And we had a commitment.

It's been 50 years since we've flown in deep space.

And I can tell you, it's different.

It's different than Earth orbit.

Peggy, we've seen some false dawns in our efforts to return and reinvigorate our desire to go back to the moon, embark on deep space exploration.

Do you think this current initiative has a real chance?

I think it has more of a chance than it has maybe on some of the previous instances.

And largely, that's because I think we have a demonstrated capability as with international partners, You know, 20 years of human presence in space on the International Space Station is not trivial and there were lots of hurdles in that process.

But I think the important thing is that we've also added in the commercial providers for cargo and hopefully crew in the near future.

And if we can keep adding in more and more commercial providers to give us have them help us get that innovative flavor back into NASA a little bit faster, you know, to make things happen a little faster.

And I really do think we have

a chance, but we do need that political will and consistency with the funding to go with it.

Thank you.

We're going to have to move on to our last set of questions from the audience now.

So, if there are any questions from the audience, I'd be very happy to take them.

There is a lady in the middle of the third row here, polka-tot top there.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Laura Glean.

I live here in Houston.

And Mr.

Aaron, you spoke of sort of the pride that swirled within you at the big public moment of the landing on the moon.

I'm wondering if there are smaller, more private moments, either in the build-up to Apollo 11 or, Peggy, that you sort of taken from there, sort of everyday moments when you've thought, this is NASA, this is what we're about, this is everything that's sort of the culmination of all our efforts, this is the good.

that perhaps you want to make public now?

Well,

the other team that I worked with, in addition to what I thought was the Apollo team, which I thought was the best team in the world to work with, I found another one, and that's the ones who built the space shuttle.

The first time we tried to launch the

space shuttle to orbit, we didn't go.

The two computers decided they did not want to talk.

Fortunately, we were able to sort that out in a very short period of time, and then two days later, we launched some very brave men on a manned vehicle for the first time.

That was a great achievement at the building of the avionics

system for the space shuttle.

NASA can put together great teams and that's what I take great pride in that.

I've always said I think NASA's motto should be making hard things look easy because we do it routinely.

you know, little instances, you know, broken toilets or there's big instances we had a torn solar array, and it was a heroic effort, you know, of multiple teams working 24-7 to come up with a solution to fix a torn solar array.

And in four days, it was done.

It's just amazing to me that, you know, so many people can split off these problems and work them and tack them, come back together, and that teamwork is just phenomenal.

It makes me proud all the time.

I think everybody knows we had a tragic fire on Apollo 1 and three of our good buddies were killed in that and

right after that, before Apollo 7, which was the first manned flight, I was made a flight director and I think one of the proudest moments I had was when 7

worked and splashed down.

And Walt Cunningham was on that flight.

It was one of the most important flights that we ever had.

Because had it not worked, the program was over.

And the Apollo 7 solution put us on our way.

It worked.

And well done.

Thank you, God.

Thank you, Dad.

We will take one last

question here.

Actually, hey, a gentleman just there, yes, thank you very much.

Liz, give us your name.

My name is Aprit Singh.

I'm CEO of a local biotech company Collidmatics working on cancer research.

First of all, let me express it's a true privilege listening to such a group of pioneers and heroes.

Thank you very much.

Here's my question.

Being out there, literally in outer space, is probably the biggest change of vantage point a human being can experience.

What does that do to the human mind?

What does being out in space do to the human mind?

We've got two people on our panel qualified to tell us.

Peggy,

what are the effects of you've flown in space more than any other American?

I think from

myself, from the psychological perspective of being in space that long, the biggest message, the biggest lesson I think that you take away is this perspective, this perspective of what our planet is.

We're up there orbiting the Earth, trying valiantly to recreate the life support system in a very mechanical way that's provided by this planet below.

And that the atmosphere is so thin and it just gives me a huge appreciation for the fact that spaceship Earth needs to be taken care of because there's only one atmosphere and we're all going to eventually be sharing all of that.

But the other part of the perspective it provides is when you look out to the stars and you can see so many stars, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands, and knowing that there's billions of other galaxies, just like this one.

And that perspective goes from, you know, thinking how important our planet Earth is and having that perspective, the importance of this place and who we are.

And then, you know, being just less than a grain of sand.

on the beach of this cosmos.

It's pretty amazing.

Perspectives.

Thank you so much.

That brings our discussion to an end.

Thank you to Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy here in Houston for hosting us.

And of course, a massive thank you to our fantastic panel, Peggy Whitson, Jerry Griffin, John Aaron and Walt Cunningham.

And that's our very last 13 Minutes to the Moon podcast.

For us, it's been a voyage of discovery in its own right.

It saw us crossing the United States looking for the people who made Project Apollo happen.

And it gave us a chance to bring their epic story to audiences across the world, old and new.

I'd like to thank our many contributors, some of whom are here in the audience, who so generously gave up their time to help tell this incredible story.

It's been a labour of love for me and my brilliant producer, Andrew Luck Baker, and series editor Rami Zabar.

Particular thanks to Sue Norton, who's here with us in the audience today and who opened so many doors throughout this documentary series.

And finally, to those of you listening to the podcast, thank you for sticking with us throughout this series.

I'm Kevin Fong.

This has been 13 Minutes to the Moon live in Houston.

I can't go until I've mentioned some of the others who've helped make this podcast possible.

Huge thanks to the Johnson Space Center Oral Histories Project for the archived material we've heard throughout the podcast and of course to NASA.

As well as the series producer Andrew Luck Baker and series editor Rami Zabar, alongside us in the trench at Mission Control, were producer Chris Browning and assistant producer Madeline Finley.

We're eternally grateful to Hans Zimmer and his team at Bleeding Fingers Music for creating our theme music.

I hope you've had a chance to look at the fabulous videos and photos on our website.

That's bbcworldservice.com slash 13minutes.

A shout out to the BBC World Service digital team who did all that.

Stephanie Constantine, Catherine Campbell, William Swigart and digital editor Anna Dobel.

If you discovered this podcast as a result of hearing a beautifully made trail somewhere, that's down to Ben Motley.

Amelia Butterley is the World Service Podcast Producer, and the World Service Podcast Editor is John Mannell.

And most of all, thank you again for listening.

And do please continue to share this podcast with anyone you think might like it.

On social media, the hashtag is 13 Minutes to the Moon.

That's all one word.

I'm Kevin Fong.

Thank you so much for listening.

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