Apollo 13: Bonus 2. John Aaron

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Hello, I'm Andrew Luckbaker, the series producer of 13 Minutes to the Moon, standing in again for Kevin.

This is the second of our bonus episodes released in the week of Apollo 13's 50th anniversary.

And this one has dropped 50 years to the very day of Odyssey's return to Earth.

This is an edited interview with flight controller John Aaron, which Kevin and I recorded at John's home in Texas Hill Country.

If you need a reminder, John was one of the Ecoms responsible for monitoring the command module's electrical power and life support systems.

And Gene Krantz put him in charge of stretching out what remained of Odyssey's meagre power reserves to get the crew through the final couple of hours to splashdown.

Now, of course, no one person in mission control can be singled out or should be singled out as the one who brought the crew back home.

But we're featuring John Aaron in this bonus episode because he's a bit special.

Have a listen to fellow Ecom Summer Liebergott and Apollo flight director Jerry Griffin.

John Aaron is an amazing story.

From a little university in Oklahoma.

physics major.

Wanted to come to NASA long enough to make enough money to go buy some cows, go back to farming.

Ended up spending about 30-some odd years, I think, with the agency.

It could be said that John was probably the best flight controller that we ever had.

John was gifted with, what is the perfect memory?

Didetic memory?

Didetic memory with good common sense.

He was something else.

It's like my manager told me one time when I was complaining about how good John was.

He says, sighed.

He says, get over it.

He says, We've all had inferiority complexes about John Aaron, so

get over it.

But that's the that was our standard with John.

The flight before this, he was my e-com

when the lightning hit us on Apollo 12,

and he came through like a champion there.

Made the right call, we saved the mission, and then 13, next mission, here he comes again.

Now I want to take you to April 1970 and the night of the accident of Apollo 13, the explosion.

Where were you when you heard that there'd been a problem?

I was standing in front of a mirror shaving

and Arnie Aldridge, who was my supervisor, called

and he said, John, we've got a problem out here and I need to talk to you.

He said,

these guys are chasing a problem out here, and they are chasing it like it's an instrumentation problem, but he says, I don't think they're going to get there.

I said, well, Arnie, if it's an instrumentation problem, let me ask you to do something.

Would you walk behind some consoles and I'm going to tell you some parameters to give you a reading?

Because one of my specialties was the instrumentation system.

So I said, read me these two or three measurements.

He'd walked behind the console and he'd find him and say,

oh, okay, Arnie, those are, I understand that one.

Now go over and read out these five measurements.

He'd read those to me.

And we did that for about five minutes because

I had the pattern of how all the measurements were processed to get down to the ground.

I had it memorized.

I said, Arnie,

Tell those guys

this is not an instrumentation problem.

Tell them to start working as a real problem and I'll be right there and from that moment then you are getting in your car and on your way into the center yes tell me what happens when you arrive and what does the room look like what's going on it took me about 30 or 40 minutes to get there I walked into the room and when I sized up the situation I didn't even plug into the cob loops I just watched what they were doing a little bit, walked around behind each of the console.

They all kind of had their head down, kind of in silo silo mode, I call it, and

was working their problem with their back room.

It was all, it was all being worked vertically,

not horizontal.

Why do you think your colleagues found it so hard to accept the possibility that this was a real failure?

See, the ground, they were all just in silo mode, kind of talking to their back room and not listening to what the crew was saying.

And the crew says we've got a problem.

The crew says,

you know, we felt a bang.

The accelerometers on the spacecraft registered a big lunge.

But they missed that.

If that had all registered on them, you know, you would not be chasing for instrumentation very long.

Did you think, when you realized that you'd lost fuel cells, you were losing oxygen, you were losing power, did you think that the crew might not survive?

I did not at that time think they might not survive.

I mean, my focus was on getting command module powered out and save the battery power,

because

there was always the whim.

At that point, the limb is the thing.

Now,

what the problem became later is, well, how do you make the command module work when you get back to, first of all, get back to the Earth?

And then...

How do you get this thing all powered up and re-entered?

Because we've never turned it off, and therefore we've never turned it on in flight.

Normally when you power up the spacecraft you go out to the pad and take two or three days to power it up very systematically you know and check everything on the data stream and all that and sit there for three days and then launch.

That's not the power up we could do.

There were some things I was concerned about.

I knew that particular mission was not on a free return trajectory

and

That started the whole miracle process about, well, how do we get in the whim and how do we get the whim fired up and with all the clouds around the thing?

How do you find stars to line things up and how do you computer maneuver that will put you back on free return?

Yeah, that all was going through my head.

So we, I stuck around very close to the console and walked them through a lot.

You know, I mean, I'm kind of a pushy guy.

I actually just kind of took over the console at that point and walked them through how to power it down order week because it turned out saving the alignment we had in the spacecraft, the command and service module was absolutely critical we had power down without hurting that

and so here you are the command module is bleeding to death it's using the battery power it needs to re-enter the earth's atmosphere and you're saying you've got to shut it down yes

and you know if i hadn't said that i i can tell right ready that the mother nature was going to shut it down for us

because she's eventually going to run out of battery power power real quick.

And so how urgent was that?

How long did you have to shut down the command module?

By that time, you could tell we were close to losing the equivalent of one battery, 20 MHz.

But we couldn't just go quick and shut it off because

to make the one maneuver to a non-free return viable, we had to capture that alignment.

That took some time.

That took a whole sequence of how to power it down and

shut down the alignment support last.

Took about an hour.

And by alignment, that's the guidance platform.

That's the...

Inertial measurement unit.

The inertial measurement unit that's responsible for telling the spacecraft which way it's pointed in space.

And you had to come up with a set of procedures to get that information to the lunar module.

Not me personally.

I had to protect the IMU as we powered every stuff down.

The guidance officer was the one that was an expert on how to take those

angles because the two spacecraft were budded nose to nose and so the angles would be different if you were going to put them in the hooder mod.

You had to transpose them to the fact that you're nose to nose.

And the guidance officer came up with that procedure.

So we came to the point where they were happy with they had calculated this procedure yet.

Jim Welmer called out and said, you know,

you give me the angles and I will try to stand frozen, but I've been known to make arithmetic errors doing that and I want the ground to double check it.

So we already kept powering everything down to make sure we, first of all,

didn't lose attitude control because we didn't want to move.

And so we had to protect that and then we had to protect that IMU.

And then it got down to the point where the last circuit breaker to be pulled was the Immercial Measurement Unit Circuit Broker.

I was standing next to Gary Cohen, the guidance and control G and C, Guidance Navigation Control.

He was responsible for that hardware.

He said, John, don't pull that circuit burker.

If you pull that circuit breaker, that IMU may never work again.

He says, well, it's only half an amp.

I said, Gary,

we're probably 100 hours from home.

Do the math.

100 times a half, that's 50 amp hours.

That's more than two of my batteries.

And he looked at me and he said,

Okay, John.

We pulled that circuit bird.

There wasn't any option.

So after you've successfully powered down the command and service module,

your role becomes, well, you become the power broker.

Tell me a bit about what your your responsibilities become after that.

Well, I also need to describe a very important thing that happened.

And it was really a fundamental star in terms of leadership.

Gene Krantz.

After you turn the command module off, the command module operators, of course, don't have anything to do, right?

There's not much to look at.

So we kind of assembled downstairs somewhere on the second floor.

And we were all sitting around the table, the command module guys, we were all sitting around the table and some other guys sitting around the table and went, you know, kind of commiserating.

I was sitting there thinking about

what had just happened and what kind of situation the command module was in and could we ever get it powered up and didn't have enough power.

So we were sitting around basically commiserating about this thing.

And if you just do some quick math, it looks impossible.

Gene Kranz came down there.

He was the flight director, General Savage, we call him.

And he came down there, and

I think he probably could read the mood in the room.

And so he started to give the pep talk.

He said, gave him a raw raw talk.

He knows, guys, we've got this thing powered down, we've got the web guys in there, everything's going good.

We're going to be able to get this thing all set up and we'll get this thing back on a free return trajectory.

We'll loop around the moon, come back to the earth, and we get close to the earth, we'll power up the command module, come home.

And I raised my hand and I said,

Gene, you you can't do that.

He said, well, why not?

He come.

I said, you don't have enough power to do that.

In a flash,

he did something that probably was more instrumental in allowing that plan to get developed and converged than anything he could have done.

He said, okay, John,

you're in charge of power.

Anybody needs any power, got to talk to John Error.

Well, what that allowed to do is it says, you know, rather than having a whole huddle of committees all around the center and around the nation trying to get their version of what the power sequence would be,

he appointed one man to manage that critical resource.

That's a brilliant maneuver on his part, and he did it in about 30 milliseconds, I will say.

So then he left the room.

And so then we were sitting there, and the rest of the guys looked at me and said, okay, well, John,

how are we going to do this?

I said, well,

I got some thoughts.

I've been sitting here thinking.

So I got up on, there was a blackboard there, I believe.

I started growing kind of a block diagram of functions that we would turn on for about this long and about this long and about this long.

And

they weren't, you know, it was pretty austere.

And that started the discussion.

They said, oh, no, you can't do that, John.

I got to have this stuff on, or I got to have this stuff on on there.

I guess this is stuff on there.

And Jim Kelly was sitting there.

And of course,

I may have had the instrumentation system memorized.

He had all the power demands.

He knew every piece of equipment in that spacecraft and how many watch it drew.

And so he was listening to all this.

And

finally, I said, okay, guys, why don't we take a break here?

You guys go get some coffee, give us 45 minutes, and then Jim.

And you come back, Jim and I will have a little better plan.

Jim and I scratched our heads and so forth and

that's what the whole thing began.

It became a brokering between

how much we have versus how much you want

and do you have to have it.

Anyway they came back and that started the process and so we then went from conceptual

blocks of our power utilization on the backboard to options.

And then you finally when you get down to the point you've got an option that works that everybody kind of likes then you start to converting it from a conceptual state

into circuit breakers and switches and tieblings.

When I first thought about how to do this, I thought, well, how long is it going to take?

Because

time is money.

Time is amp hours because anything you turn on, it may only draw one amp, but if it goes for six hours, that's six amp hours.

When we did an assessment of how much was left in the batteries, we assessed that about a half equivalent of one battery was gone.

So instead of having three times 40 amp hours, 120, we had at best 100.

You said you had 100 amp hours in the batteries and the command module.

Give me a sense of what you can...

run on that.

You know, in an everyday house sort of appliances, what could 100 amp hours run?

Well, 100 amp hours,

you know, if you stretch it out over time, it's about like a car battery.

A hair dryer puts out 1,000 watts.

Well, that's 10 amps at 110, but at 28 or 30 volts, that's 30 amps.

So you can run a hair dryer for three hours.

So, I mean, is this the sort of energy you were talking about?

Enough energy to run a hair dryer for three hours.

Yeah.

Yeah, 100 amp hours.

If you had a typical hair dryer that was a thousand watts, that's pretty typical, right?

You could run it for three hours.

All the way for three hours.

But here you are relying upon that amount of energy to power an entire spacecraft, its life support, its re-entry systems, its thrusters, through the most dangerous re-entry in the history of human spaceflight.

Right.

So

I said,

how can we make this work?

And when you look at where you use the power, you know, you normally think the first thing you ought to turn on is the comm system, the instrumentation system,

you know, and that way you can watch everything as you sequentially do it and so forth.

And so I said,

I said, well, why don't we just invert the sequence?

Why don't we just say

we won't turn the comm system on?

We won't turn on the instrumentation system.

And we'll just turn it on to last minute and see if the crew's got the configuration right.

That saved about 10 amp hours to do it that way

and that would give us 90 hours, 90 amp hours would probably, 90 or so amp hours would would get us to the water and we'd have about 10 amp hours left for a post-landing.

So we presented that and everybody went to work, figured out how to throw the switches, how to set the switches up, and we could then send that out to the whole community as here started coming to comments about how to, is it correct?

Here's how I need to prove it, here's how we need to flush it out and embellish it, and all that.

By the time it got read up, it was everybody's plan.

It had been smoked over really close.

You know, we had thousands, the whole country was working on that plan.

When you suggest your plan that you power up the command module with no communication with the ground ground and no telemetry, so the ground can't see what switches are going on, all to save power.

What is the reaction to that?

Well,

that was a little risky, particularly considering what the crew's state of mind was in this environment that they were in.

That was a little risky.

But I never heard a single...

Now, wait a minute, John.

Now that's pretty amazing.

I don't know how to read that.

Did they have that much confidence in me?

Because I was the one who came up with that crazy idea.

The idea had never been posed in the past.

But of course, that's the way we were trained.

We trained so much together with the flight directors and so forth.

that you instinctively knew what your peers were good at

and what they might be kind of weak at.

And so you build that rapport that you can assign somebody a job.

You know, it's like the old joke, give somebody a piece of short rope and they'll bring you a pony.

That's the way we thought of each other.

But it is in this case

kind of interesting that they they would hand this thing to Jim Kelly and I and we were the the embers of the fire that was going to get eventually built under supporting this whole thing.

So there are so many stages in getting that activation procedure right.

But Ken Mattingly, who should have flown on this mission, was a key part of that.

Tell me a bit about his role.

The key thing was: we got this sequence really compressed.

I wonder if the crew can do it.

You know, can you do all these steps in the time available?

Ken Mattingly,

Fortune Winter Force, did get to file that flight, but of course he knew a lot about the crew data file.

He knew the crew and so he was my go-between

between the procedure getting developed and handed it off to the simulator to get the simulator all set up.

So

he would take charge of getting what we were putting on paper actually to the traitor, get the crew set up to test it in the simulator and actually simulate the entry sequence.

And,

you know, it was a very important thing.

Now,

I've talked to him about that and he said, well, yeah, I didn't do anything, John.

Well, you know, a lot of people feel like that.

That's kind of their response.

You know, I didn't do much.

Come on, come on.

John, the other thing I wanted to ask you about is

by the time they're leaving the command module, they've depleted the entry batteries somewhat and you came up with a procedure to recharge those batteries.

Tell me what that involved and how difficult that was.

Well, not me personally.

Bill Peters is the guy that's responsible for this.

He's the one who got the change implemented that allowed you to be able to transfer power from the command module to the lunar module.

And you just

there's a sneak way you could just do it the other way.

So when they got ready to charge the batteries, you set up

the lunar module to send you a little power, you know, do a couple circuit burgers and a couple switches and now you can charge the batteries.

It takes a long time.

So

by then

Jim Lovell, you know, famously, they had told Jim Lovell that we were working on the sequence about how to power this thing up and who was in charge and how it was going and so forth.

Well

they kept wondering where it was.

The thing I remember that was absolutely classic because the crew never

complained.

And I'll talk about that later as to how

that kind of caught us off guard.

At one point, Jim Lovell said, You know, while Houston, I've been noticing the spacecraft that's rolling around and I saw the Earth go by.

He said, You know, the Earth is getting pretty big in the window.

How's that checklist coming?

What a subtle way, not so subtle way to say, come on.

Well, the batteries got charged.

We finally got the sequence done.

And

myself and a couple of the people walked into mission control with it, and it was a stack of stuff, and waited on the flight directors on the Cap console and said, okay, here it's ready, read it up.

And the first thing I heard in the room, and I think it was from Craig's, where's my copy?

You know, copies in 1970 were not as easy to make as they are today.

And I said, this is it.

He said,

time out, go run 25 copies of it.

That turned out to be another brilliant management thing because we went and ran those copies.

took a while, came back and passed them out to the operators that were sitting at the console.

And then the Kranz told them, I believe it was Kranz,

may have been wanting, he told them that, look, guys, you're on the console, pay attention, and I want you to understand this procedure

step by step as we read it up.

That was brilliant in that it got everybody on the same page as to how this was going to be done.

It took extra time, but it saved time doing that.

Do you know we started reading up at 125 hours?

And

it took two and a half hours just to read it up.

Two and a half hours of just reading instructions up to the crucial answer.

Okay, yeah, I got that.

And they might ask a little question here, and they need to read the next one.

And it was switches and circuit breakers and comments.

Two and a half hours.

Now,

what's the likelihood that

you can get that up and down error-free?

Read it up over a scratchy radio system, you know, with the static and noise and scratching and

it's amazing.

It is amazing.

Well

in about 128 hours it was up there.

We started the power-up sequence, what, 12 hours maybe?

10 hours later.

That's how close this thing went down to the water.

John, you as a mission control team were very, very focused on this and the re-entry and what was going to happen.

But were you also aware the whole country and the whole world were watching?

We knew the whole world was watching.

We trayed in the open and flew all of our missions in the open.

But this one especially, I think we knew the whole world was watching.

Didn't think about it much.

I mean, it was just, didn't have time to watch anything about what the world was doing, but we knew the whole world was watching.

And we knew the whole world was worried.

They were emotionally caught up in this drama.

And it was such a surprise because this was a mission that we'd already been to the moon twice.

This was a mission that when it took off from Florida, it wasn't even broadcast live.

The first thing the world heard about it was Jules Bergman came on TV and he says, there's been a disaster in space and they're not going to make it back.

He didn't use quite those words, but he basically counted us out.

So that with the drama candle,

everybody around the world, independent of language, could identify with it.

Well,

sure enough,

Jack started to power the thing up.

The thing that we didn't realize and didn't react to much was

the condition of the crew that was in this obscure environment.

They're cold and damp.

They didn't have very many clothes to put on.

They couldn't go get a coat and put it on.

I mean, they couldn't sleep.

So

I still have nightmares about this.

Jim Kelly and all of us put put together this very complex, incredibly compressed sequence

that there was no time to redo if it got screwed up.

Handed it in all its complexity, complex robenquature, so easy to miss one.

And Jack, we sent Jack Swagger

down in the cold command module, which was about 35, 38 degrees, which is the same temperature as the refrigerator refrigerator you keep your milk in,

hand it off to somebody who had any sleep to go sit in the refrigerator and do it with a flashlight.

And we depended on that.

The thing I didn't take into account when I built that sequence is the fact that this person may not be fully awake and

100% cognitive skills when this was going on.

I still,

it's amazing.

It's absolutely friggin' amazing.

You got to hand it to the crew.

They didn't complain.

They just did it.

So a couple hours later, bang, the celebrity came on.

And there it was.

Everybody soaked that up to see how well Jack had done.

And Jack had done perfect.

So then the control came on about 1.39.

And

he was in the final throes of alighting the IMU

and

the IMU started looking good.

The inertial measurement unit.

Yeah, inertial measurement unit.

It came alive.

It looked like the thing was not drifting very bad, if at all.

It was amazing.

Did you worry that the inertial measurement unit might not come on correctly?

Well, you remember I told you Gary Coyne said, John, this thing may not ever work again?

I didn't know.

I knew what the IMU was.

I knew up its power drew and how it worked.

I had no idea what its history had been with respect to testing.

Now,

I think some of the guys in the back room had got to feel really better about that.

I heard a story about the guy from MIT

that he reported in, you know, one time I was off in another lab somewhere and I had an IMU with me.

I brought it back into the parking lot in my car

and he said that we had a major blizzard over the weekend and I had forgot to take that IMU out of the car.

And so we sat out there in the parking lot and was subjected without any power to very low temperatures.

And so we took it back into the lab on Monday morning and it worked pretty good.

So

that just gives you a feel for the level of people.

We had

everybody working on this thing.

So by then the IMU was up.

And the platform was aligned and it checked out with the stars pretty good.

and so we were starting to feel pretty good about entry.

You managed to dump the lunar module safely and the service module and you finally get to the moment of truth, the point of entry.

Tell me what that was like for you.

Well

for one thing

you're just sitting there waiting at the atmosphere.

It gets very quiet.

There doesn't get to be much communication between the spacecraft and the crew.

You know, there wasn't much to do,

just a little chit-chat back and forth

to the spacecraft.

And so it, but it's

you're very

anxious and tense to make sure you've got everything all zipped up, and all bunches zipped up,

and then there's nothing left to do, and you just got to sit there and watch the quack.

And then finally,

you know, they hit the interface, they hit the entry interface,

blackout starts,

calm goes off,

and then you sit there again.

And that's with any spacecraft, even in Earth orbit, that's the tenth time, that's the tenth time because you can't talk to them.

You don't know what's happening.

You know they're embroiled in the plasma stream that's going by the windows with all the funny colors and all that.

But

this one was particularly

tense because we knew that there had been an explosion at the base of the command module.

We all wondered for three days, you know, what might be the condition of this heat shield.

Never really worried about it because why worry about something you can't do anything about?

So you sit there and you go into blackout.

And there's quocks on the wall.

You know, there's a quack counting down to blackout, and then there's quocks counting to when you come out of blackout.

So the first quack had counted through zero.

It hit the atmosphere on time.

So that's kind of refreshing.

That tells you the trajectory guys

are not too far off.

And then you start watching this other clock count down to when you're going to come out of blackout.

And it's generally pretty accurate.

And then that quack counts down and goes through zero.

It starts counting up.

You don't think much about it until it gets up to 10 seconds or 15 seconds.

Then it gets up to a minute.

Well,

then you start doing soul searching.

Soul searching, what's happened.

We did everything we could, I think.

What could we have missed?

Was the trajectory so shallow that they're skipped?

Was it somehow

they came in too steep, too many Gs and too much heat?

Did the heat shield crack?

I mean, you're coming back from the moon at 35,000 feet per second.

That is haul in the mail.

You got to do it just right.

And so you start thinking,

all those things.

I can tell you everybody was holding their breath.

You forget to breathe.

And I forget exactly what that quark said when they finally came out.

You hear the crew.

And then not long after that,

you see the most beautiful sight in the world.

You see these

beautiful, very large parachutes with the command module hanging under them.

gently kind of floating down and splashing the water.

You know, we were sitting there watching video live

from the deck of the ship.

Beautiful sight.

So, you know, you splash down and you get the crew on board, you light a big cigar, and then usually you're off to a big party.

They call it a splashdown party.

That was the tradition.

And, you know, they kind of almost closed the highway.

NASA Road 1 there, the crowds and

all the hospitality things are opened and so forth.

And

that's what you go.

You go there and celebrate.

You know what I did?

I got in the car and went home, went to bed.

And I'm probably not the only one that did that.

I went home and went to bed.

I was totally exhausted.

But, you know, a couple of days I went back to work and we started redesigning this command module.

and service module to see, okay,

how can we make it better?

And we redid the whole architecture

of the fuel cell system.

We added two extra tanks, put another hydrogen tank, put another oxygen tank, put a 400 amp hour battery, added incredible weight to the spacecraft.

Thank God that Saturn V had a lot of margin.

And we were on our way back to the moon on Paul 14 in nine months.

It's It's just amazing.

That was back in the days when you could really do something.

Nowadays, NASA can't turn around in a parking lot for nine months.

So

that's the kind of team that contractor, industry, government team

that we had in those days.

And we had the exact trust of the political

system and the public.

I'm just going to.

You shouldn't feel shy about split marketing.

But you think we caught that without your glass.

Even if it's caught, it doesn't matter.

Well, it was a wonderful time to work at NASA in that environment.

And over time, it's just inevitable that bureaucracy sits in and makes it harder to do things.

And by taking longer, I don't think you necessarily do them better.

Sometimes you do them not quite as good as you can do them in real time with a go-go team.

John, what was the secret?

How did you and your team get that crew back?

Because at the outset, it looked totally unsalvageable.

It looks like they're going to die.

That crew is doomed.

How did it work?

What was the secret?

You know, I'll tell you, I was sitting there as I was commiserating around that table that night.

And I started to get a negative thought.

And

that's not something you want.

And so I forced myself to say, quit dwelling on this being impossible.

Ask yourself, John, what would make it possible?

What do you have to do to make it possible?

And that completely switches your whole lot of thinking.

You have to accept what you have and quit commiserating about that.

And then how are you going to get yourself out of this?

You know,

as a manager, I became a program manager later, and in fact, it was kind of an extension of what I was doing, but I found out a very something that's a truism to me

that as you build programs and as you fly programs, there's always a set of problems that you run across.

And it's always important when you work those problems in a program

to separate them into two categories.

One is that problems you can manage, you can keep flying,

and problems that you have to fix.

It's a major important decision that you separate them into those two categories and you don't overestimate your ability to manage a problem

because you can seduce your, incrementally seduce yourself into accepting the risk.

Thank you, John.

Well, now I've gotten totally philosophical.

It's probably time to end, right?

No, no, no, that's fantastic.

John, thank you so much.

You're happy?

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you so much, John.

It's absolutely fantastic.

No, really.

You know,

it helps me to go back and revisit this stuff.

What if you could get a piece of advice from one of your heroes?

It's really nice to be able to talk to the man who cut the cord off the telephone.

What would it be?

You don't have to know what you want to do, but just don't let anyone tell you that you can't do something.

And how would it make you feel?

I don't think I've had anybody say that to me, like just to keep pushing.

And it's really, it's really great to hear that.

In our new podcast, World Wise Web, teenagers like me get to spend time with technological innovators who have already changed the world.

I'm just somebody who is in the right place at the right time and asking the right questions.

That's all.

That's World Wise Web from the BBC World Service.

You gotta make it happen for yourself.

You can't just wait for it to happen to you.

Grab it.

Go for it.

Search for World Wise Web wherever you get your podcasts.

I will never forget what he said.

This is history's heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, Don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunselmann, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be heard.

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.