First on the Moon: The American Space Race

H. Nealley Gene Kranz 13 February 2012

Table of Contents

Statement of Purpose……………………………………………………………………...3

Release Form…………...…………………………………………………………………4

Interviewer Release Form…………………………………………………………………5

Biography………………………………………………………………………………….6

Historical Contextualization: “Doing What is Hard: The Race to the Moon”……………8

Interview Transcription…………………………………………………………………..30

Interview Analysis……………………………………………………………………….57

Time Indexing Recording Log…………………………………………………………..62

Appendices…….…………………………………………………………………………63

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………...68

Statement of Purpose

The space race of the 1960s was a period that transformed American scientific knowledge, technology, and culture. When we landed on the Moon in 1969, the United

States had asserted itself as the leader in space technology and space vehicles, a dominance that would continue for almost another half-century. The purpose of this

American Century Oral History Project is to understand in detail the events that transpired during this decade through an interview with a man who played a pivotal role in the process, Mr. Gene Kranz. Many know about this period and about the moon landings but Mr. Kranz’s testimonies will serve to elucidate some of the lesser-known aspects of this period as well as convey the emotions that he and his colleagues had.

Eugene Francis Kranz was born in Toledo, Ohio in 1933. Grandson of German immigrants, he was raised in a boarding house by his mother along with his two sisters.

His father died when he was only seven. After graduating from Central Catholic High

School, he attended the Parks College of St. Louis University until 1954 when he was commissioned to the United States Air Force as a fighter pilot. Shortly after joining, he married Marta Cadena; the couple would eventually have six children together. Kranz flew F-86 Sabres in Korea. After his service had ended, Kranz worked as a flight test pilot at Holloman Air Force Base. In 1960, Kranz joined the Space Task Group at

Langley Research Center in Langley, Virginia. After joining he was assigned to be a

Procedures Officer at Mission Control in Cape Canaveral, Florida. Kranz remained a procedures officer until after Mercury-Atlas 6 when he was promoted to Assistant Flight

Director. He remained in this position for the final Mercury missions and the early

Gemini missions, at which point he was promoted again to the position of Flight Director.

During the Apollo Program, he served as Flight Director on odd-numbered missions

(starting with Apollo 7). He is perhaps most well-known for being flight director for both

Apollo 11 (the first to land on the Moon) and Apollo 13. He has been heralded for his calm and effective leadership during these missions to ensure their success. After the end of the Apollo Program, Kranz was promoted to Deputy Director of NASA Missions

Operations in 1974, eventually becoming director in 1983. He held this position until his retirement in 1993. He has written his own book, Failure is Not an Option, detailing his experiences at NASA. He and his wife live in Dickinson, Texas.

Historical Contextualization: Doing What is Hard: The

Race to the Moon

October 4, 1957: That was the day that astronaut Buzz Aldrin describes as the day that, “…the Russians had beaten America at its own game, modern technology” (Aldrin

25). It was the day that the Soviets had launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, into

Earth’s orbit. That event precipitated a rivalry that would fuel the race to the moon. Being in an arms race with the Soviet Union, the United States was disturbed by this rash display of Soviet power and quick in its attempts at reciprocation. These efforts were in vain, however, as the budding organization that would later become the National

Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) faced countless accidents, setbacks, and failures. Eventually, after many trials and tribulations, the United States landed on the

Moon before the Soviets, winning the space race. Many people made this triumph possible: engineers, controllers, physicists, astronauts, and countless others whose efforts would culminate into one of the greatest achievements in the history of the United States and perhaps the world. Therefore, to understand the early American space program, one must examine the factors that made success possible, the challenges that were faced, and how those challenges were overcome as well as gain a first-hand perspective from someone who was there.

The origins of the conflict that would begin this race can be found at the end of the Second World War. The United States had successfully used atomic weapons in wartime. The Soviet Union, using information gathered by spies in Los Alamos (the facility where the atomic bombs were being developed) successfully detonated their first

nuclear bomb four years after the Americans in 1949. This entered the world into the atomic age, an era characterized by an arms race between the United States and the

Soviet Union to see who could develop the most extensive and sophisticated nuclear weapons arsenal. When these respective nations began developing Inter-Continental

Ballistic Missiles, they were required to develop new and extremely powerful rockets.

Scientist on both sides realized these rockets’ potentials and began to advocate for their use as space-faring vehicles. The only question that remained was this: who would reach space first?

It was a one-foot wide, one-hundred-eighty-pound silver sphere with four antennae protruding from it. This was enough to strike fear in the hearts of all Americans.

It was Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in space. The reason it caused such a stir in the

United States is because it demonstrated the Soviet’s ability to launch a satellite and have it see any place in the world at any time. Some even worried that Sputnik carried an atomic bomb aboard, waiting to drop it on the unsuspecting world below, not an unreasonable concern during an arms race. The Americans, in a state of shock and awe knew they needed a reply to this display of Soviet power.

The Germans had hoped for an opportunity to fire their Jupiter-C missile into space for over a year. It had been put in storage because the United States’ government rejected the Germans’ request to launch it into orbit. Prior to this, on September 20, 1956, the Germans, who were building missiles for the United States at the time, had launched a Jupiter-C, also known as Missile 27, to a height of 600 miles. After this incredible test, they requested permission to try to put their next missile into orbit. The government denied their request. Had they been allowed, the Germans could have launched a satellite

into orbit a full year before the Soviets launched Sputnik. After the launch of Sputnik, the

United States’ government authorized the launch of the Germans’ Jupiter-C, as well as a small rocket from the “official American space program,” the Vanguard (Barbour 19). It seemed that the Soviet Union would not dominate space outright; that the United States still had a chance. The Germans were not the ones to launch first, however, and on

December 6, 1957 just over two months after the launch of Sputnik, Vanguard was sitting on the launch pad, ready to go. Writer John Barbour described the launch:

The countdown reached zero. The rocket seemed to rise slightly. Then with a roar

it collapsed on itself in a blossom of orange and yellow flame. And with it

collapsed any hope of a quick recovery from the sting of Sputnik. The smoke that

lingered over the Cape seemed to cover America (Barbour 24).

The United States was not deterred by this failure, however, and continued with plans to launch a Jupiter-C into space. Eventually, on January 31, 1958, they were able to launch. The launch was a resounding success and proved that the United States had the ability to launch satellites into orbit. Until after the launch, the satellite atop the rocket had no name. During the flight, Secretary of the Army Wilbur Brucker instructed the controllers to call it Explorer, and with that, “Explorer was in orbit, and so was America, at last” (Barbour 26). Head German engineer Werner von Braun seemed to have a premonition of this event, saying in 1956, “Vanguard will fail… We can put a satellite up in sixty days…” (Von Braun qtd. in Brzezinski 167). Von Braun was able to see the flaws in the Vanguard’s systems and was confident in his team’s ability to outperform it. It is this sort of confidence from the German engineers that allowed the American space

program to advance so rapidly. Unknowingly, the United States had entered itself into the race that would define the next decade and a half: the race to the Moon.

Now that the United States had proven its ability to launch rockets, the next step was to get a man into space and bring him back alive. The project that was created in order to pursue this goal was called Project Mercury. Officially commissioned on

December 17, 1958 it was symbolic in the sense that it was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight, and now the United States was beginning its efforts to put a man into space. But there were specific requirements for men who wanted to become astronauts. They would need to be short, as the capsule in which they would fly would be very small. They would need to be between the ages of twenty-five and forty. They would also have to be experienced test pilots, as they would not be just passengers, but pilots as well. After a lengthy selection process, seven men were selected:

Walter Schirra, Jr., Donald Slayton, John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, Alan Shepard, Virgil

Grissom, and Gordon Cooper. This group was dubbed the “Mercury Seven.”

Before any one of them could be sent up, everyone needed to be certain that they would come back again. In order to get a better idea of the survivability of spaceflight,

NASA (as well as the Soviet Union) did numerous tests with animals, especially with matters pertaining to high G-Forces. The first animals to take a ride aboard an American rocket were two monkeys named Baker and Able. They travelled fifteen hundred miles out over the Atlantic Ocean, reaching an altitude of three hundred miles and speeds of up to ten thousand miles per hour. Both were safely recovered several hours after landing.

After several more tests with monkeys in rockets, NASA decided to try to put one in

orbit, like the Soviet Union had done with the dog Laika1 aboard Sputnik II in 1957. On

January 31, 1961 a chimpanzee named Ham was put aboard the Mercury spacecraft and launched to simulate exactly what the first astronaut would experience. The rocket was not powerful enough to get Ham into orbit, but the test was still a success. Ham landed four hundred and twenty-two miles downrange from Cape Canaveral and was safely recovered. These early animal tests strongly contributed to the success that Project

Mercury would have.

NASA continued their tests not only with animals but also with the rockets themselves. These tests did not go as smoothly as those with the monkeys. The rockets’ names were determined by the capsule name (Mercury) and the name of the rocket itself

(Redstone and later Titan). During the very first test of the Mercury-Redstone rocket system on November 21, 1960 the rocket failed to launch. There was a brief moment of thrust, at which point the engine shut down. The flight controllers were faced with a serious problem: a fully fueled, uncontrollable rocket on the launch pad that threatened to violently explode. Fortunately, they chose a correct course of action when they decided to wait for the batteries to die. This would open the valves, allowing the oxidizer tanks to depressurize. At this point, it would be safe to approach the rocket. This early lesson was reflected by then Flight Director Chris Kraft, “That is the first rule of flight control. If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything!” (Kraft qtd. in Kranz 32). Historians, writers, and those who witnessed it have called this mission “The Four-Inch Flight.” A

1 The reason that the Americans never used dogs as test subjects was because of the philosophy of “Man’s Best Friend.” In the Soviet Union dogs were regularly used for medical testing. Laika orbited Earth for a week before her oxygen supply ran out. Her craft burned up in the atmosphere a few months later.

month following this failure, the Mercury-Redstone successfully launched, giving NASA a positive end to 1960.

This success was met a few months later with a bitter failure. During the test of the Atlas rocket, the rocket that would carry a Mercury capsule into orbit, the rocket malfunctioned. During a normal rocket launch, the craft lifts off and the rolls over slightly to fly over the Atlantic Ocean and eventually into orbit. During this launch, the rocket did not pitch over, but continued straight up. Because this is an imminent safety hazard, the range safety officer was forced to push the self-destruct button. This was a serious setback in the Mercury-Atlas development. Luckily, the engineers and controllers had several months to solve these problems, as it was now time for the Mercury-Redstone to send the first American into space.

After all of the rocket tests and animal tests were completed, NASA was finally ready to make the biggest risk yet and put a man into space. They would have to settle for second again, however, as the Soviets had put Yuri Gagarin into orbit aboard the Vostok I a month before the Americans’ first attempt. The man who would be launched was Alan

Shepard. He would fly into space atop the Mercury-Redstone like his simian counterparts had in previous flights. He would not reach orbit, however, the Redstone rocket was just not powerful enough. Before his flight, Shepard named his ship Freedom 7. At 9:34AM,

Eastern Standard Time, Freedom 7 lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Since his flight was not orbital, it was extremely short, only about fifteen minutes after launch, Shepard splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean. Shepard’s flight was followed shortly thereafter by the flight of Virgil Grissom aboard Liberty Bell 7 on July 21, 1961. However, Grissom’s flight did not go as smoothly. After landing, the hatch to his capsule opened and water

rushed in. The capsule began to sink. Grissom was able to fight his way out of the ship, but struggled against the thrust from the helicopter’s propeller. The helicopter, unaware of Grissom’s situation, was trying to raise his capsule out of the water. With water filling his space suit, Grissom would not be able to keep himself afloat for very long. Finally, a second helicopter flew to his aid, barely saving him from drowning. The first helicopter was forced to abandon Liberty Bell 7 after the helicopter’s engine began to overheat2.

This was another hard lesson for all at NASA, “The Liberty Bell 7 mission was perfect until the very end and then it turned to worms. Rookies and veterans alike were once again reminded: there are no free rides in a flight test” (Kranz 58).

Until this point, NASA had only performed suborbital flights. No one had orbited the Earth. The next step was to do just that. In order to ensure this, the Mercury capsule was no longer positioned atop a Redstone rocket. To reach orbit, they needed a larger, more powerful rocket; the Atlas rocket was the ship for the job. Having overcome its earlier problems, the Mercury-Atlas was ready to take a man into space. This man, another of the “Mercury Seven,” was John Glenn. He would be the first American to experience orbital spaceflight. His ship, named Friendship 7, lifted off on February 20,

1962. The liftoff was flawless, and Glenn entered space without a hitch3. The flight would soon take a nerve-racking turn. Just before a phone call conversation with the

President, systems monitor Don Arabian reported that the telemetry reported that the landing bag (used to cushion the landing) had come loose. This meant that the heat shield

2 Many years later, in the summer of 1999, the capsule was located and recovered by deep-sea explorers. It was reported to be in excellent condition. 3 During the first orbit, Glenn said he saw, “thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they are luminescent.” It turned out that this phenomenon was caused by steam expelled by the craft’s heating system that froze and was illuminated by the bright sun.

was no longer fully attached to the spacecraft. This discovery had dangerous implications. If Glenn re-entered the atmosphere with the heat shield in such a state, there was the very real possibility that he would be burned up. In an attempt to fix this problem, flight control instructed Glenn to leave the retropack (the thing that slows down the spacecraft for re-entry) on in the hope that it will hold the heat shield in place during re-entry. Gene Kranz, then flight controller, puts the tension in perspective, “John

Glenn’s life, the Mercury program, and America’s future in space were in the balance”

(73). After a few nail biting minutes, Glenn’s spacecraft was spotted floating down gently by the destroyer Noa. The post-flight analysis showed that the telemetry that said the landing bag had come loose had been incorrect.

Just before Glenn’s flight, President Kennedy had challenged NASA to land a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s. Based on the present rate of progress, this seemed to be an almost unattainable feat. In order to overcome this new enemy of time,

NASA would need to move forward with unprecedented speed and efficiency. To help this process, a new chapter was begun after the close of Project Mercury in 1963. This new chapter would be called Project Gemini. The name was fitting as Gemini was the constellation of the twins and the Gemini spacecraft would be carrying two astronauts up at a time atop the much more powerful Titan rocket. The stage was set for the next act in this adventure.

The first two men to be taken up aboard Gemini III4 were Virgil Grissom and

John Young. They flew into space aboard the Mary Brown poised atop a Titan II rocket5.

4 The first two Gemini spacecraft were sent up as test flights with no pilots.

Unfortunately, the Soviets had beat them again, this time with their Voskhod rocket. Not only had the Soviets already put multiple men into space, but on that flight they also performed the first Extravehicular Activity (EVA) whereby one of the cosmonauts,

Alexei Leonov, exited the spacecraft and floated freely. This took place only five days before Grissom and Young were scheduled to launch on March 23, 1965. Their flight was meant to test out all components of the Gemini capsule and ensure that they worked.

After a relatively short flight, Grissom and Young were back on Earth, bobbing in the waters of the Atlantic. Shortly after this flight, NASA, fueled by the success of the

Soviets, planned an EVA for the next Gemini flight.

This was a particularly dangerous undertaking, since NASA had not planned to perform an EVA for several more months. This forced them to work overtime on the ground and some worried that something might be missed. Even the ground tests in vacuum chambers caused a stir. John Young describes NASA’s sense of trepidation when it came to these tests, “NASA was not pleased about ‘putting guys in vacuums…,’ a process whose safety seemed to depend too much on a ‘little old lady’ seamstress at the company who sealed their spacesuits with her ‘glue pot.’” (Young qtd. in Aldrin 127).

Jim McDivitt and Ed White were the astronauts scheduled for this seemingly Kamikaze mission, with White being the man slotted for the EVA. They flew into space on June 3,

1965. They had two main mission objectives: a rendezvous with a spent portion of the

Titan rocket and White’s EVA. The reason that NASA wanted to rendezvous with the rocket was that during the lunar missions, a rendezvous would be critical as their would be separate modules for the astronauts and they would need to be able to rendezvous at

5 NASA stopped allowing astronauts to name their own craft after Grissom and Young’s flight in the Mary Brown, but they later re-allowed it during the Apollo missions to the Moon.

various points during the mission. Unfortunately, this phase of the mission was a complete failure. McDivitt did not grasp the physics that were at play and one of the engineers later commented that, “[he] just didn’t understand or reason out the orbital mechanics involved” (Meyer qtd. in Aldrin 128). On the other hand, White’s EVA was a resounding success. Using a small “zip gun” to maneuver himself, White floated freely in space, attached only by a thin umbilical cord that connected him to the spacecraft. When

McDivitt instructed him to return to the capsule, White said, “It’s the saddest moment of my life” (qtd. in Aldrin 128). White had proven that it was possible to exit a spacecraft and safely re-enter, a concept that would be vital for the future missions to the moon.

The other necessary concept, rendezvous, would be realized during the Gemini VI and Gemini VII missions. On December 4, 1965, Jim Lovell and Frank Borman flew into space aboard Gemini VII, followed on December 12 by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford in Gemini VI-A6. Finally on December 15, the two craft converged in what was the first successful orbital rendezvous in the American Space Program. This completed another one of the objectives necessary for a trip to the moon. Furthermore, Lovell and Borman continued the streak by spending a full fourteen days in space, longer than anyone had to date. They proved the ability of humans to remain in space for extended periods, another necessity for the Apollo missions. At the end of these flights, the United States had over four times the number of hours in space than the Soviet Union. These flights also maintained the United States’ interest in spaceflight. This was crucial, as Congress was now more concerned with the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam. With

6 The reason for the “A” was that Gemini VI originally had an accompanying rendezvous target, an unmanned rocket called Agena. Unfortunately, the rocket disintegrated during launch, thus postponing the mission until a suitable replacement could be found.

Project Gemini going smoothly, NASA could now focus on the beginnings of Project

Apollo, with the first test flight just over a year away.

The purpose of Project Gemini was to test various elements that would be vital to the success of Project Apollo. With most of these elements proven possible, NASA began work on possibly the most ambitious project of the twentieth century: landing a man on the moon. This endeavor would span almost six years and land a total of twelve men on the moon. But like its predecessors, Project Apollo would not simply float to the moon without troubles. The problems encountered during the Apollo missions would prove to be some of the most difficult and hair-raising yet.

Grissom, Chaffee, and White were going to be the first three Apollo astronauts.

They were not designated to go to the moon, however, and would be forerunners for those who would follow behind them. They would be the testers of the Apollo spacecraft, one of the most deviously complex spacecraft ever built. At this time, in late 1966, there were problems at NASA. The craft was so complex that every single component of every single system was built by a separate contractor and later integrated into the spacecraft.

The complexity coupled with errors in tests pushed the test date of Apollo 1 back over two months from its original date. To add to this, there was an immense amount of pressure on NASA to get these flights off of the ground, “Everything seemed to conspire against Apollo. Low public interest, a cost-conscious congress, and a balky, expensive spacecraft and rocket, each so complex it was difficult to measure its potential safety”

(Barbour 117). These external pressures coupled with the problems occurring at NASA would combine to form a situation ripe for a disaster. And that’s exactly what they got.

On January 27, 1967, Grissom, Chaffee, and White boarded the Apollo 1 spacecraft to perform systems’ checks prior to the actual launch date. Before the astronauts entered, NASA had skipped several safety procedures and even the astronauts felt a sense of trepidation as they boarded. After being sealed in, the capsule was pressurized with one hundred percent oxygen at a pressure of sixteen pounds per square inch. Throughout the test, there was trouble with the communication system, causing a hold in the countdown. Even Grissom complained about the problem, “If I can’t talk to you five miles away… how can we talk to you on the moon?” (Grissom qtd. in Barbour

122). About a minute before the countdown was to resume, Chaffee shouted out, “We’ve got a fire in the spacecraft” (Chaffee qtd. in Barbour 122). A fire had started in the capsule. Due to the pressurization of the capsule (16 psi) the hatch, which opened inward, could not be opened. And because the capsule was filled with pure oxygen, the fire burned rapidly, killing the astronauts in just eighteen seconds. These men were the first

Americans to be killed during the American space program7. This was a tremendous setback for the program, one that almost ended it outright. However, due to the nature of the accident NASA, along with others, was able to launch a ten-week investigation to find out the source of the fire so that it might be prevented from happening again. The conclusion reached was that NASA and the builder of the capsule, North American, were responsible due to negligence, carelessness, poor management, and a failure to assess the safety, or lack thereof, of the situation. It would be months until the next launch, and over a year until astronauts would fly again. Thankfully, due to the failure of Apollo 1, future accidents of a similar nature could be and were avoided in subsequent missions.

7 They were also the first people to die during the space race from any nation. The first person to die in an actual flight was cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. He died when the parachutes on his Soyuz 1 spacecraft failed during descent on April 24, 1967.

The next few launches that NASA performed were unmanned test launches of the

Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V was the largest rocket ever built by NASA. It towered an astonishing 363 feet above the Floridian swampland and weighed in at almost seven million pounds when fully fueled. The rocket contained three stages in order to not only get into Earth’s orbit, but out of it and into the moon’s as well. Sitting atop this magnificent piece of engineering would be the Command Module8, where the main cockpit was, the Service Module, which supplied oxygen, water and propulsion to the

Command Module, and the Lunar Module9 which would be the module to make the final descent to the lunar surface. Apollo 4, 5, and 6 were launched in order to test the rocket.

They were all unmanned. The first manned launch since the Apollo 1 fire, Apollo 7, took place on October 11, 1968, almost two years since the accident. The three astronauts who would test the fidelity of the new rocket and redesigned CSM would be Wally Schirra,

Walter Cunningham and Don Eisele. They lifted off shortly after ten in the morning.

Then flight director Gene Kranz describes the launch, “…there appeared to be one heart- stopping moment of hesitation… [because] the launch acceleration was gradual, taking ten seconds to clear the tower” (229). The mission of Apollo 7 was to test out all of the components of the CSM in space and correct any outlying issues. After an eleven-day flight, the astronauts were back on Earth, and NASA was preparing for its most ambitious mission yet.

They had never ventures out of Earth’s orbit. Eventually, NASA would have to take the plunge and fly to the Moon. They did not want to do this for the first time during the actual lunar mission; so another test mission was planned. That mission would be

8 When the Command Module is connected to the Service Module, the assembly is abbreviated “CSM” 9 The lunar module was generally abbreviated as “LM”

Apollo 8. Commanded by veteran astronaut Jim Lovell and accompanied by Frank

Borman and Bill Ander, these three astronauts would venture farther from the Earth than any human being ever had. They would have to trek across almost two hundred and fifty thousand miles of empty space to reach lunar orbit. If they had a problem, they would be unable to return to Earth for as long as a week. This was a huge leap for NASA, and they hoped that they were going off of more than faith. Apollo 8 blasted off on December 21,

1968 just after dawn. These three astronauts would be the first humans to see the Earth from a distance, the Moon up close, and the far side of the moon; not a bad consolation prize for not actually landing there. The trio reach lunar orbit on December 24, Christmas

Eve. To signify the day, Bill Anders, during a radio broadcast from the CSM, read from the opening lines of the Book of Genesis; not a bad choice since they gazed down upon all of God’s Earthly creation. During the flight, the astronauts took one of the most famous photos in all of American spaceflight: the photo of the Earth from lunar orbit.

The mission was done and on Christmas Day, the crew was headed home. They splashed down in the Pacific Ocean a few days later.10 The biggest gap until the final landing had been bridged.

The next two missions in early 1969 were the final tests of the CSM and the LM.

Apollo 9 would test the two in Earth’s orbit, performing separation, maneuvers and docking. Apollo 10 would perform these same tests in lunar orbit. After the LM had separated, it descended to an altitude of only fifty thousand feet above the lunar surface before ascending back to the CSM to dock. All tests, preparations, and missions were completed and it was time for the brave men and women on NASA to send its three intrepid explorers to the lunar surface.

On May 20, 1969, the Saturn V that would carry Apollo 11 to the moon was prepared and given its final inspection for the July launch. For NASA, everything was ready. The astronauts had trained tirelessly for years to prepare for this mission. The flight controllers had prepared in simulations and could confront almost any scenario and find a solution for it. All tests and preliminary missions had been completed: rendezvous, duration, flight to the moon, the CSM and the LM. All was ready and it seemed that

NASA would make it to the Moon before Kennedy’s prescribed deadline of the end of the decade.

On July 16, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins boarded the CSM of Apollo 11, which they had named Columbia. They launched at exactly nine

10 The landing was so accurate that Bill Tindall sent a letter to the Recovery Division, “Jerry, I’ve done a lot of joking about the spacecraft hitting the carrier, but the more I think about it the less I feel it is a joke. The visual reports or the landing indicated the spacecraft flew right over the carrier and landed… too close.”

thirty-two that morning; it was flawless. The Saturn V rose slowly from the launch pad with a massive tail of fire behind it. After a short time in Earth orbit, the CSM was docked with the LM11 and launched into translunar flight. On July 19, Apollo 11 entered lunar orbit and prepared to release the LM. Michael Collins would be staying in the CSM while it remained in lunar orbit while Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the lunar surface. They descended gradually while slowing themselves down by using the LM’s thrusters. By the time they neared the surface, they were almost out of fuel. With only about twenty seconds of fuel left in the tanks, the duo touched down on the lunar surface.

They had done it.

The next step in the process was to get out of the capsule and explore the surface.

On July 20, after a brief nap, Armstrong and Aldrin got into their spacesuits and opened the hatch. Armstrong was the first one out. As he took his first step onto the lunar soil, he uttered some of the most famous words ever spoken, “That’s one small step for… man, one giant leap for mankind” (qtd. in Aldrin 240). The process that lasted nearly ten years, cost billions of dollars, required millions of man-hours, and took three men’s lives had reached its climax with Armstrong and Aldrin and their first footsteps on the moon.

Armstrong and Aldrin’s moonwalk lasted only about two hours yet the collected over forty pounds of moon rock samples.12 These samples would be critical for those who wanted to learn more about the moon and it’s makeup. As the astronauts departed the moon, they left a plaque that read, “HERE MEN FROM THE EARTH FIRST SET

FOOT UPON THE MOON JULY 1969, A.D. WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL

11 The crew had named the LM Eagle 12 This was the smallest sample collected during a moon landing. The largest sample was collected by the Apollo 17 crew during their week-long stay on the lunar surface in December of 1972.

MANKIND” (qtd. in Aldrin 242). The response was monumental. The three astronauts were welcomed as heroes all over the world. They received countless ticker tape parades, banquets, and invitations by celebrities and politicians. These were the men who had travelled to another world and beaten the odds (not to mention the Soviets).13 Their flight would open the floodgates to the rest of the Apollo missions over the next three years.

Apollo 12 was almost an exact copy of Apollo 11. Pete Conrad and Alan Bean14 landed on the Moon in November of 1969 in their LM named Intrepid and collected another ninety-five pounds of lunar material for study. In addition to the moon rocks, they also brought back pieces of the Surveyor III probe that had landed on the Moon three years prior. This proved that the LM could be landed much more accurately than the

Eagle had demonstrated.15 The proximity to Surveyor III was reflected in Conrad’s comments upon seeing it, “The old Surveyor. Yes, sir. Does that look neat! It can’t be any further than 600 feet away16 from here. How about that?” (qtd. in Pyle 75). This mission was very lighthearted and the astronauts were happy and joking all the way to the

Moon and back, literally. This would be a stark contrast to what was about to befall the

Apollo Program.

13 The Soviets had been falling behind the Americans since the Soyuz 1 crash. Just before a test of the G-1 (the rocket they intended to use to take cosmonauts to the moon) an electrical spark ignited some of the fuel and created a gargantuan fireball as the rocket was consumed in flames. The Soviets’ attempts at catching up with the United States were over. 14 Their Command Module Pilot was Richard Gordon 15 In the Eagle, Armstrong and Aldrin landed many miles downrange from their designated landing site. This provoked worries that the LM was not capable of landing at a set location. 16 It was actually only about three-hundred feet away

Jim Lovell was the most experienced pilot that NASA,17 so it came as no surprise when he was selected to be the mission commander for Apollo 13. He would be accompanied by Fred Haise and Jack Swigert.18 Their flight began at 1:13pm19 on April

11, 1970. Other than a failure in one of the boosters, the takeoff went smoothly and the crew was quickly in translunar flight. After a little over two days of flight, there was an accident. A wire short in a heater in one of the oxygen tanks caused an explosion in the

CSM. This caused a severe loss in oxygen as well as damage to the batteries. The crew quickly realized that they would not be landing on the Moon; the primary goal became one of survival. In order to save the batteries for the final re-entry, the crew would completely power down the CSM and use the LM as a makeshift lifeboat. As a result of the CSM’s power being shut off, the temperature in the cockpit dropped to near freezing.

Lovell described the environment, “…all the metal fixtures felt cold and clammy, as moisture formed on everything. Even the windows began to frost over. The interior temperature kept dropping and finally reached about 35°F” (44). As the crew neared

Earth, they needed to power up the CSM again and get all of the systems back online before re-entry. With this task accomplished, the crew jettisoned the LM and the Service

Module. As the latter floated away, Lovell snapped a photograph of it, revealing the damage that the explosion had caused.

17 Apollo 13 would be his fourth spaceflight and his second to the Moon. He had previously flown in Gemini 7, Gemini 12, and Apollo 8. 18 Swigert was actually the back-up Command Module Pilot. The original was Ken Mattingly. He was denied flight status after being exposed to Measles a few weeks before takeoff. 19 In Military Time this is expressed as 13:13, slightly dubious when viewed in retrospect

Many had feared that the parachutes and their deployment systems had been compromised by the explosion. Others feared that the heat shield had been cracked. If either of these speculations was true, the astronauts would have survived their ordeal just to die during re-entry. Fortunately, these fears were dispelled when, on April 17, just after one in the afternoon, Apollo 13 and her crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean, alive and well. This was the closest that NASA had come to a tragedy since Apollo 1. Except this time they did not lose astronauts because of careless errors.

After Apollo 13, the Apollo program continued as previously planned, with four more missions eventually making it to the Moon. Three of them even incorporated the

Lunar Rover, a four-wheeled vehicle used by Apollo 15, 16, and 17. These missions brought back more lunar material and scientific data from the Earth’s heavenly neighbor.

After Apollo 17 in 1972, the government cut NASA’s budget, and the final three Apollo missions were cancelled. This ended the golden age of American Spaceflight as attention turned to future projects like Skylab, the International Space Station, and the Shuttle

Program. The United States has never seemed to rebound to the level of ambition, desire, and willingness to take risks since those days of Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

A way to gain a different (and possible better) perspective on the events that transpired is to examine newspaper articles from the time. Neal Stanford, a writer for

Christian Science Monitor, described the launch of Apollo 11 based upon what he witnessed, “The flame, smoke, thunder, and shock that shook the press stands… thrills them, surprises them, and stirs them… [And] what ever happens to the rest of the flight,

[this was] a perfect countdown a liftoff” (Stanford 3). Another striking article comes from

Washington Post journalist Hayes Johnson as he describes the world’s reaction to the

Apollo 13 astronauts’ safe return:

From countless gatherings in communities large and small, there were cheers and

occasional tears. In Manhattan, ticker tape and confetti were thrown down from

the windows. In Los Angeles, sirens sounded. In Washington, the bells at the

National Cathedral rang for 10 minutes. In Paris, a press conference was

interrupted for a bulletin that brought spontaneous applause. (Johnson)

These news articles help to illuminate the atmosphere of the times and may serve a small oral histories within themselves.

During this period of early space exploration, there were some conflicting viewpoints. Every time the action seemed to die down, people lost interest in the space program, as did congress. They only gained support when major events happened:

Sputnik, John Glenn, Kennedy’s speech, Apollo 11, etc. The space program was cut at the end because of this lack of an interesting event. That coupled with the near-disaster of

Apollo 13 led congress to cut NASA’s funding which eventually led to the cancellation of

Apollo 18, 19, and 20. The Apollo 1 incident also caused a downward spiral of NASA’s

image in the public eye. But, NASA was able to recover from this accident and was hugely successful in accomplishing their goals in Project Apollo. Henry Hazlitt, a newspaper columnist during the 1960s, criticized the costs of the space program and how it would not be worth it, “Yet when all this has been said, the question remains whether these incidental or by-products will be enough to justify the huge spending, the huge diversion of national effort, the space program involves” (Hazlitt). This quote goes to show that there was American disinterest very early on as this article was written in 1962 when Project Mercury was the only one going on. However, there are few (if any) historians today that criticize this program, its costs, or its results. This shows that, over time, the outcome of the program has been vindicated as being successful and worth the price paid.

Last year, Ben Coleman interviewed John Glenn on the topic of the space program during the 1960s. This is part of what Mr. Glenn had to say about his experiences:

…there had been two years of real hard work that gone into this before I was

getting ready to launch – you just find it hard to believe that you’re all ready to go

and do this thing that you looked forward to for so long. Once you got up there,

the experience of weightlessness was something that was hard to describe because

there’s no other feeling quite like it… All I could do was loosen the straps a little

bit to make the flight more comfortable, and then got to the business of all the

things that we wanted to do on learning how the spacecraft reacted up there, what

my reactions to it were, and what my physical sensations to it were” (Glenn qtd.

in Coleman 42).

Mr. Glenn was talking about his first spaceflight aboard the Mercury Spacecraft in 1962.

It was a long, difficult, and extremely successful path. American spaceflight hit the ground running after it was caught off-guard by the Soviets’ Sputnik and it never stopped thereafter. Inspired by the recent successes of spaceflight, the President Kennedy challenged the nation to get to the Moon, not only before the Soviets, but before the end of the decade as well. At the time, this seemed like a goal that would be wholly unattainable, and yet NASA pulled through with years of hard work, research, and testing to make this dream a reality. Twelve men walked on the surface of the Moon, their footprints remain as a symbol of American commitment, energy, enthusiasm, and resilience.

Interview Transcription Interviewee/Narrator: Gene Kranz Interviewer: Harrison Nealley Location: A telephone conference call Date: December 9, 2011 This interview was reviewed and edited by Mr. Nealley

Harrison Nealley: This is Harrison Nealley and I am interviewing Mr. Gene Kranz as part of The American Century Oral History Project. This interview took place on

December 9 via a telephone conference call. All right, to start out, can you tell me about

how you became interested in space during your childhood or younger life?

Gene Kranz: Actually, I, my interest in space was generally related to, in the early forties they had the “Pulp Fiction” magazines, the authors, Willy Lay was one of the principal ones there and they had Arthur Clarke. They would write about the future. They would write about voyages to distant places and I think I was always a, an explorer, from the standpoint of reading. I loved to read. However, it changed very rapidly. I lived in a boarding house, my father died when I was young, my mother ran a boarding house and we had military personnel from World War II living with us. And this turned my interest in, what I would say, space into one in aviation and I developed a passion for flying as a result. And basically it was that flying is what carried me through probably about the first ten years of my career before I then had the opportunity to move into space.

HN: I see. And what were you doing before you became associated with NASA?

GK: Well I was a military fighter pilot. I flew the last of the subsonic and the first of the supersonic aircraft. And then spent two years in aircraft flight tests at Holloman Air

Force Base. And as our program at Holloman was wrapping up, I noticed an advertisement in “Aviation Week” magazine that indicated that they were forming a space task group and they were looking for engineers. The objective was to determine the feasibility of putting an American in space and I thought, gee, that’s a pretty cool job.

And they were looking at positions down at Cape Canaveral up in headquarters of space

task group in Langley, Virginia. And under my wife’s influence I decided I’d go to work at Langley, Virginia.

HN: So, what were you doing there, at Langley, then?

GK: (chuckles) Well this was a, you have to go back into the early years of the space program, the space task group was forming up, there were roughly about three hundred people total in NASA at that time. And I reported from my job at Holloman to Langley and went into a pool of about six other people and still had not been assigned a job. We sat there for about two weeks, reading the documentation, the manuals on the Mercury program. And then a gentleman walks into the room, says, I’m Chris Kraft you’re working for me, I want you to go down to the Cape, write a countdown, write some mission rules, and when you’re through, give me a call and we’ll come down and launch.

And that was my introduction to the space program.

HN: Now I understand that one of the first tests that were involved in at Cape Canaveral was the “four-inch flight” of the Mercury-Redstone—

GK: Yes it was

HN: Can you talk about that?

GK: (chuckles) Well the, going down to the Cape in these early days, I had never seen a rocket, I had fired some small rockets off of aircraft, but I had never seen anything to compare with a Redstone or an Atlas rocket. I certainly hadn’t seen the spacecraft. And it was a constant challenge on almost a minute by minute, hour by hour basis to come up to speed on the various knowledge that you needed for working in this new arena. We, the first mission that I was fully involved with was the Mercury-Redstone 1A, one, it was,

Mercury-Redstone 1 at that time. And we went through the normal countdown. We had only two television screens in the Mercury Control, one at the Spacecraft

Communicator’s console, the other one at the Flight Director’s console. And the firing command was set and we see this great big burst of smoke and cloud that obscures the launch pad. And you see the tracking camera pan upward as it’s tracking something and then, all of a sudden, it very slowly pans down and the rocket’s still there. That was my introduction to the early space program. The escape tower had fired, that’s, we had launched the escape tower instead of the rocket. The parachutes come out, and then it’s a question of what do you do with this live rocket sitting on the launch pad. And that led to a lot of varied discussions where people wanted to connect the umbilicals, but that was impossible. Others wanted to use a cherry picker to sever the parachutes. Other ones decided, well, we’d shoot holes in the tank with a rifle. After that, Chris Kraft, the boss, wrote one of the first rules of mission control: if you don’t know what to do, don’t do nothing. And we sat there and watched it for about a little bit over fourteen hours. The batteries depleted, the, all the valves went back to the, went back to a normal safe position, they vented the pressure in the tanks and we had a safe rocket that we could now

work with.

HN: All right, and how did this event affect the attitude of the controllers who were working there at the time?

GK: Well there were two events that dramatically changed the attitude of the controllers, this was one of them because it was obvious that we had insufficient knowledge of how the spacecraft, the launch system, the hardware that we were dealing with, and we were unprepared to work with contingencies. This was sort of the beginning of a very steep learning curve that pretty much finished up with the John Glenn flight where we had the questioning about the deployment of the heat shield. But we had insufficient information as to the measurements and the telemetry on it. So those two sort of kicked us off and kicked me off in the direction that I used when I was working in flight tests to develop a series of notebook-type schematics, integrated schematics of the systems we were dealing with. So at least we could have an initial point of departure for our discussions and what are we going to do about it if something goes wrong and be in a better position to talk with the engineers down in the launch complex.

HN: I see. Now going forward a little bit, what were your attitudes towards the Soviets, especially after their first manned flight in 1961?

GK: Well, I’d seen, I was a fighter pilot and I’d seen MiGs in Korea and basically they had a performance capability that had a couple thousand foot altitude capability on us and for a fighter pilot, that’s, that’s deadly. And basically I saw the Soviet Union going to capture the high ground and I believed that this was something that was going to turn into a battle. And I believed it was a battle for space and space supremacy. Really drove the majority of the people of my generation.

HN: And can you describe the atmosphere at mission control before Shepard’s first flight?

GK: The mission control is a unique, pretty, pretty unique part that’s pretty much like the blockhouse where you’re intimately aware of the mission and the challenges of the mission, you’re very familiar with the risks of the work that you’re going into, and you, you’re basically treading in unfamiliar terrain and virtually every step that you take. And

Alan Shepard was our first manned launch and we had several dress rehearsals, attempted launched with Shepard. And basically we’d recover, we’d debrief, we’d figure out what we going to do differently in the next countdown, but there’s always minor glitches and the issue with Alan was getting the hatch fully closed. And there was a bolt that they just could not get properly seated. But Alan was sitting on the launch pad, he was very cool at this time, we were somewhat, you know the business was more like an aircraft flight than a spacecraft test. There was a lot of joking, a lot of cross talk. We played records of José

Jiménez, which was Bill Dana’s takeoff on the reluctant astronaut across the voice loops so everyone could sort of power down, relax, get a chuckle before we had to get back to

work again. So it was a combination of being on top of the job but also knowing when to power down and take a break and relax a bit.

HN: I’ll bet. Now, a little bit after that, in your book, you talked about John Glenn’s flight and the error you had with the landing bag indicator. And you also talked about the controllers were, not necessarily arguing, but disagreeing over which approach would be safest for him. Can you talk about the differences in opinion and how you guys reached the proper solution?

GK: Well the, the issue with the John Glenn flight was shortly after we had completed our first orbit. We saw an indication that indicated that the heat shield might be loose.

And the heat shield is absolutely essential to reentry. It basically takes and absorbs the incredible punishment associated with reentry from orbital velocities. It has to act to dissipate the heat. But the heat shield in the Mercury program was attached to a rubberized bag that, at the time when we were in the parachutes, we’d actually deploy the heat shield and this bag would acts as sort of a shock absorber when we hit the water. The indication that we had was that the heat shield had come loose. And we provided instructions for John Glenn to sort of rock the spacecraft to see if he could hear any bumping noises. He indicated he didn’t hear any. And as time went by, we went through the second orbit, moving into the third orbit where it was time to prepare for reentry. And we had two, two positions, technical positions, within the operations room. One was basically associated with it’s a faulty telemetry indication and the safest thing to do is to ignore it, and everything will work out fine. The program manager, however, Walt

Williams, came in and said nope, I don’t think that’s the way to go. What I think you want to do is to retain the heat shield because it had clamps, it had a series of straps that basically would keep the heat shield in position until the straps burned off. This was a very (pauses). See if I can find the right word. Webb was, it was, basically each, each person, Walt Williams and Chris Kraft had very strong feelings about the direction they wanted to go until finally Williams directed Kraft, the flight director, that we would reenter with the heat shield on. This came at the very last minute as we were actually de- orbiting the spacecraft, firing the retrorockets over the California site and we provided them the instructions for what we wanted to do over the Texas site, so John Glenn had no clue as to what we were talking about on the ground until he got information over the

Texas site, that we wanted to reenter with the heat shield attached. So he obviously asked for why, why are you doing this and the Texas CapCom indicated that the flight director had decided that this was the way that we would go. We were very fortunate that the reentry worked out safely. And after the fact, we went back and looked at the heat shield indication and found it was a faulty switch and all along we believed that we should have just gone through with the normal reentry. And this sort of set the stage for a change in the operational philosophy at mission control, that the flight director was the ultimate boss responsible for the safety and mission success.

HN: Now, later on, during Project Gemini, Ed White was the first American to perform a spacewalk. How did this make you feel when he, you know, he “stepped out of the hatch,” so to speak?

GK: Well this was, this was hopefully, we had been working on this for about three months in secret, because we were, we knew that the spacewalk and EVA, extravehicular operation, would be the next major breakthrough in space. So basically we were conducting testing, writing the plans, developing the materials in secret, only to find out just a couple weeks prior to Ed White’s flight that the Soviets had conducted the first spaceflight, or spacewalk. But from our standpoint, this was an indication of several things. The first thing was that we had closed the gap to a great extent between the United

States and Russia in space. When we started, it looked like they had about a two and a half year gap, but when Ed White stepped outside the spacecraft, we had narrowed that gap down to mere months. So, from our standpoint, this was a realization that we were mastering the majority and the skills that we needed and had developed the technologies that we needed to continue to move further into space so we looked at the remaining missions of the Gemini program as our ability to not only catch up but to go ahead.

HN: Now, some historians say that around the time of Lovell and Borman’s two week flight, the United States was actually beginning to pull ahead of the Soviet Union in the space race. Drawing from your experience, does this make sense to you?

GK: Yes, yes it did because the Soviets, the majority of the intelligence we had about what the Soviets were doing came from the media. And we very intensely followed the papers as to what the Soviets were doing. But also we had tracking information that indicated on two occasions that the Russians had launched two spacecraft and had apparently attempted to rendezvous, but had missed each other by just a few miles. The

first time, we thought, well, that was some sort of onboard malfunction, some targeting glitch, but then the same thing happened again. And that was an indication that the

Soviets did not have onboard guidance rendezvous, planned rendezvous capability, and we did. Basically indicated they did not have computers with the kind of horsepower they needed for the spacecraft to execute a rendezvous. So at that point, about midway in the

Gemini program, we knew we were in the leading position, ahead of the Soviets.

HN: Now, moving on a little bit more to Apollo, the Apollo 1 accident, what was your first reaction when you had heard that Apollo 1 had caught fire and burned up?

GK: The, the time frame as we were transitioning from Gemini to Apollo was, it was very intense. In fact, at times, we had people actually flying Gemini missions on one floor in mission control and we would be training for Apollo missions on a second floor.

At times, we would finish a shift down in the Gemini program and then go up and have a training shift for Apollo, so we basically doing double duty at that time. The transition was very, very rough because we had not only a new spacecraft we had to learn, we had new technologies. We had to start addressing the business of going to the Moon, what are you going to do when you get there, and the entire process of navigation at lunar distance.

So it was a challenge to transition from Gemini, where we were working with one level of technology and we had to step up to much more computing horsepower and much more difficult missions. And we had to do this basically on the fly. It was, I think, a very difficult period of time for everybody because it seemed we were trying to serve two masters. And the master that had to be served well was Gemini because they were the

ones that, those were the missions that were flying with people. That is where the risk was being faced on a daily basis. So it was a conflict of interest that, I think, really bothered everyone.

HN: Now, after the Apollo 1 incident, can you talk about, like, what sorts of things that were going on at NASA during the period between Apollo 1 and Apollo 7?

GK: Well, the key thing was, was that we had a team in place and we were very fortunate to have very strong leaders at that time. After the Apollo 1 fire, George Lewis took responsibility for the program, led the investigation. Frank Borman helped him. We had

Sam Phillips, basically come on board there, he came in from the minutemen program, very capable leader. And basically we had a change in command, new leadership come in and basically, I think the difference, I’d compare between the Apollo 1 fire and

Challenger. Apollo 1, we didn’t bother to look for who was responsible, we all individually assumed our responsibility as if we were a major part of the problem, so it was a shared responsibility that resulted from the Apollo 1 fire. And I think this allowed us to get back on track very rapidly. And it was just roughly ten months later that we launched the first Saturn V and had a very successful mission with the Saturn so it was a question to come back, we had the new management in place, we were, we designed several elements of the spacecraft, we moved from the Block 1 to Block 2 spacecraft, but we got, we got our act together and that was never again.

HN: You talked about the Saturn V rocket, what was it, what was it like to stand next to one of those?

GK: (chuckles) That was the most powerful machine in the world. It was absolutely intimidating. If you sit the Saturn on top of that transporter, the crawler transporter that we use to get there, this thing was, it almost looked like you were looking straight up into

Heaven, when you stood and looked at that guy. And when you went up to the top the launch gantry and walked over to the spacecraft, you’re three hundred foot over the, over the launch pad, and basically you’ve got this open grating underneath you. That’s some real experience there because everything is swaying and groaning and moaning and you got all kinds of funny noises so I’d say it’s some experience.

HN: And that helped you get Apollo 8 to the Moon. And that was also a pretty big step for Project Apollo and can you describe what the atmosphere was like at mission control during that flight?

GK: I believe that the Apollo 8 mission was probably the gutsiest mission that we’d ever flown because this was the, it was only the second time we had flown a manned

Command and Service Module. It was also the time when we had flight tested all of this software that we had strung together that takes us through launch phase and capable of addressing all the various abort modes that are in there and getting into Earth orbit. And basically then you’ve got the translunar injection phase where basically now you’re

orienting, you’re targeting the Moon. You’re relying upon the Saturn V to provide you with the energy to move outward bound to the Moon. And you’re, you’re now setting a spacecraft on a trajectory that about two and a half to three days later is going to pass in front of the leading edge of the Moon by about a little bit over a hundred miles. And that’s biting off a big chunk. And then once you get there, you’re going to, in relatively short order go into orbit around the Moon and you’re going to place humans, for the first time, orbiting another celestial body. So it was a pretty big chunk to bite off for the second manned mission in that, in the Apollo program.

HN: And going back to what you wrote in your book, you talk about how you were affected by the crew’s reading of the Book of Genesis, how—

GK: That was probably one of the most, it is a combination of them reading the Book of

Genesis but it was also Christmas Eve. And from my standpoint, it was very fortunate because I was not working that mission, so I had the opportunity for one of the few times in my life in mission control to really have that emotional moment where you really can reach into the depths and say this is one of the greatest times in history, we’ve done incredible things, and I was a part of it. I just had the opportunity to experience the thrill, the emotion, the passion at that moment that when you’re operating at the console, you can’t do that, you’re all business. It was just a very marvelous time for me.

HN: That must have been incredible. And you also, in your book, talk about SimSup and how rigorously you and all the other controllers at mission control trained for these missions. Can you talk a little bit about how this affect the way you carried out your procedures and confronted problems during the missions?

GK: Well the, the training for the mission, when you go into mission control and start your simulations, that’s sort of the end of the training process. The training process starts when you start establishing, you develop the systems schematics. The controllers would go out to the manufacturer and come back with all of the information needed. To build the spacecraft, you’d go up to the people who provided the software and you’d bring in the software program listings back and then you would decompose that stuff into procedures, handbooks, schematics, that basically you could use in real-time. And then once you did that, you’d start writing the mission rules which was basically the risks and strategy for the mission, and then once that is all done, then you start your training, so basically you’ve got over a year under your belt before you move into these final three months of preparing for the mission. And this is where you test your personal knowledge, you test the quality of the documentation that you’ve produced, you test the risk management strategy that you’ve got, you test your ability to effectively work with this crew for the first time and to have them the ability to work with you. So it’s a time of very steep growth, and all through this period of time, you’re tested by another team of controllers, or instructors with SimSup, and they write these scenarios to test the people, the plans, the procedures, the mission rules and everything else and test our ability to make good decisions and to stay on track towards our objective with a variety of

problems and decide when to call it off if it’s time to change the direction of our mission.

So this is a time of intense pressure but it’s also the kind of thing that leads you as you approach launch day with a very solid feeling that no matter what happens, you can sort out the problems and continue on to your objective.

HN: Now, in the months leading up to the Apollo 11 flight, can you describe what the people at NASA were doing to prepare for that?

GK: The preparation for most flights was pretty much the same. Apollo 11 was slightly different in that there was incredible press coverage. And it seemed we not only had to do our work in getting ready for the mission, we had to brief every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

We had to brief the media and the various reporters we had in there with the media people and the people who were writing for the newspapers and the radio commentators.

We had to brief headquarters. Scientific communities came at you, wanting to be briefed and updated as to what you were going to do. So this was a time where you had to very carefully ration how you used your personal resources because you knew that your loyalty was to get ready for the mission and all this other stuff was, not necessarily superfluous, but it was a lower priority. So it was a time of very intense priority judgments and we finally decided that it was time to stop talking to these folks and continue with our preparation for the mission. That led to some, some conflicts, basically we were fortunate because our bosses knew we were the key to getting this mission executed safely. So when we decided to call it quits with all of the outside world, they

supported us.

HN: Now when Apollo 11 finally did take off in July, did you personally think that that flight would be the one that would make it to the Moon and land?

GK: Oh yeah. Yeah, you always have the, the, you have to have that belief. This was the mission, we have a set of objectives out there and this team, not only the ground team and the team in place with the crew, you know you’re going to drive to that objective, you’re going to accomplish it, you rely upon the launch team to give you good spacecraft, and they always did. So you had this attitude that says no matter what happens, you’re going to continue driving and we will land on the Moon.

HN: Now during Armstrong and Aldrin’s descent to the surface, in your book you talk about how there was a lot of, not really tension, but that sort of thing going around at mission control. Can you talk about, more about that a little bit?

GK: Well it was a real battle. The time from when you acquire the spacecraft on the revolution where you’re going to descend to the Moon, you’ve got, roughly, about a twenty-five or thirty minute period of time. About fifteen to twenty minutes of this, is the spacecraft is on a descending trajectory that’s going to take you to a place over the Moon of about fifty thousand feet. From there you’re going to ignite the engine that’s going to slow you down and let the Moon’s gravity pull you down towards the surface. So during

that period of the time from when you acquire telemetry to when you start the engine to start the descent, you’re going through a series of checks and cross checks to make sure that all the criteria for landing are satisfactory. Now, our problem was, was as soon as we acquired the spacecraft, communications were absolutely lousy. Now, normally when we were training, working the missions we had about a three second time delay in our communications with the crew. And now we had to relay instructions through Mike

Collins in the command module. So that increased our time delay to more on the order of five seconds. So all of a sudden you’re working with a much heavier workload just based on the communications at the lunar distance. But we worked on that, we verified the orientation, we had them change the orientation and select different antennas to see if that would work. In the meantime, we also knew that something had changed our trajectory and we were going to be landing long. In fact one of my controllers used the term: Flight, we’re halfway to our abort limit. Now the word abort is one that is not used casually in mission control. So that basically, sort of set the stage for Go NoGo, and I made the decision that would give the go for the start of powered descent. And we started going down toward the surface, the trajectory error didn’t increase so trajectory so the trajectory officer told me he thought we were go. And then, at the best of our knowledge, when we start down towards the surface of the Moon, the LEM guidance computer has our best knowledge of the altitude of the spacecraft above the Moon. And our uncertainty of that altitude is on the order of several thousand feet. So what we have to do is use our landing radar in the lunar module to update the altitude so that we can now start more precisely guiding to our point on the surface. And we were waiting for that landing radar to come in and that’s when we had a series of program alarms. We have two types of alarms, a,

what we call a bailout, where the computer resorts to a priority scheme because it can’t get all of the work done it’s CPU is at the limit. And that affects the crews over a significant period of time go into what we called a pudue, do a program zero-zero, and that happens when the computer goes to hell and the mission’s over. So we started having a series of bailout alarms in there and Steve Bails, my guidance officer, had to take a look at these and asked if it was safe to continue. And we’d have these variety and pass it on and tell the crew we’re going to start looking at some of their displays, for them to stay off of the keyboard, don’t ask the computer to do too much. But then, as we got down to the surface, we normally would land with about two minutes of fuel remaining. The gas gauge of the lunar module didn’t read once we got to the hemispherical part of the tank, didn’t go down far enough. But we knew, based on training, that we had about two minutes of fuel at the thirty percent throttle setting. So the controllers start counting off seconds of fuel remaining. A hundred and twenty seconds, then ninety, then sixty, then forty-five, then thirty seconds. And we hear the crew talking about their altitude, altitude rate, trying to avoid some craters down there, right on down the line. And at the time the controller Bob Carlton gave me the fifteen seconds, we realized the crew was shutting down the engine on the lunar surface. At the time we landed on the Moon, we had less than seventeen seconds of fuel remaining and we were in the process of coming down to a very risky Land/Abort position.

HN: And what was the reaction when they touched down, finally?

GK: Well, the reaction in the viewing room was people started applauding and stomping and everything else but in the mission control we have a series of Go NoGos, we call them Stay NoStay decisions once we’re on the surface of the Moon. So we had to run a poll of the team at landing plus two minutes and give the crew a Stay decision, at landing plus eight minutes give them another Stay decision, and we had to do it again at two hours so we were working like Turks down there for two hours while everyone else was celebrating.

HN: Does this mission seem any different now, in retrospect, than it did at the time?

GK: Your voice is dropping out on me again.

HN: Does this mission seem any different now, in retrospect, than it did back then?

GK: No, but I, not a, in retrospect, but what I’d say is I really take a look at the young people I had as a team, twenty-six years old was the average, and I appreciate them more so, from that standpoint I say yeah, I think about this young group of kids, young group of Americans really willing to step into the breach and sign up for this kind of duty. And if you made a mistake, you’d be living with it for the rest of your life, but these kids didn’t make mistakes. To them, failure was not an option.

HN: Now, moving on to Apollo 13, you’re probably most well known for your calm leadership during this mission. During my research, I found a quote from an author name

Michael Useem that says, “At the center of the swirl stood Gene Kranz, a man whose self-discipline, determination, and ‘unnerving cool’ steadied, then galvanized the energies of all.” What was your initial reaction after finding out that there had been an, been a problem in the capsule?

GK: Well the initial reaction went through about three phases. And at 55:55:04 I got the call of “Houston, we’ve got a problem.” Well, earlier in the shift I had had two electrical problems, one associated with the oxygen tank two and another one associated with my communications antenna. So the initial thought was, when the crew reported a master alarm and the controllers reported some electrical aberrations was this is just another electrical glitch, we’ll sort this out once we put the crew to sleep, so let’s press on. So that lasted for about a minute and then I started getting all kinds reports about things that were lost, fuel cells going down, pressures going to hell in a hand basket. And then one of my controllers reported that the, he says, Flight, the crew reported a pretty large bang associated with this, and I think some of my jet nozzles are closed. Now that same problem occurred to me back in the Gemini IX mission when we undocked the lunar module from the command module we closed some of the jet select valves, so I now moved into my second crisis mode, which was tread lightly, lest ye aggravate the problem in there. And that lasted for about five to eight minutes. And then Jim Lovell reported, looking out the window that he saw some oxygen venting and all of a sudden, that was the piece of information we needed to know that their had been an explosion

onboard the spacecraft with an enormous amount of collateral damage. So basically I was downloading all throughout this time and from OK, it’s an easy problem, we’ll sort it out to tread lightly to now survival mode.

HN: And on that mission there was just problem after problem that was initiated by that one explosion, was there ever a point at which you doubted that the astronauts would make it back?

GK: No. No. That was one of the questions I was asked repeatedly during the mission and after the mission and basically if you put yourself in the frame of mind of the flight director down there and the crew in the spacecraft, and the crew in the spacecraft doubting whether Kranz thinks he’s going to get them home. Same thing where your flying an airliner and you’re riding as a passenger in the back and it’s stormy and there’s lighting all around, right on down the line, you’ve got to belief in that crew to get you down. So that’s the kind of relationship that you need and basically that’s the kind of mental toughness you have to develop that basically convinces your team that we will solve this problem and we will accomplish our objective and if our objective basically defaults to one of survival then we will get our crew home. And that’s basically the attitude you have to have.

HN: So you said in your book that you never actually used the phrase, “failure is not an option,” but it sounds like, based on what you just said, that that would describe your

attitude during the mission very well.

GK: That was pretty much, pretty much the description. Basically the words were, “we never lost an American in space, we sure as hell aren’t going to lose one now. This crew is coming home.” You got to believe it, your team has to believe it, and we will make it happen. And this is the kind of focus that the team has to have in order to perform at their highest level. The kids we had in mission control were great and we had absolutely spectacular support from our contractors and people around the world. Within hours, we had literally the entire world helping us get this crew home.

HN: And when they did make it home, how did you react, what was your reaction?

GK: It was, you see Ed Harris, in the movie, he sits down and sort of leans back and his eyes get sort of misty. And basically I think the pressure was so great that not only myself, but I think many of my controllers just sat down and cried. It was, it was incredible.

HN: Now some say that the Apollo 13 mission may have been the reason that congress cancelled funding for the final three Apollo missions. Do you agree with this idea or disa—

GK: I, I think that that’s a possibility. I believe that the, at this stage in the program, you know, the future of the manned program was in doubt. They were talking about a

spacecraft that basically was a combination of spacecraft and aircraft. They were talking about the early concepts of the Shuttle, fly back boosters and all this. I was so busy flying mission right out to the very end that I really didn’t have much time to really think about what our future was. Now, I knew that when they finally did cancel that we had this program Skylab out there and that basically was going to be dramatically different, but from a flight control standpoint, it was the first of the real spacecraft, space laboratories that we had. And I thought it would be an interesting program. But basically I was very disappointed when they cancelled the final three because we had the team in place, we had the rockets, we had the spacecraft, we had everything to go. And I think it was our nation had become preoccupied with civil rights, environmental movements, war in

Vietnam, the economy, there were a variety of things that were putting pressures on the space program at that time.

HN: As Project Apollo kind of carried on towards the end, did your attitudes towards it change at all?

GK: It was one of sadness. Because you saw, that basically we had accomplished, we had won the war in space. We had run the space race is probably a better term. And this team was operating in, they were a Superbowl quality team and at the time when they were shutting the program down, we believed that, I believe all of us believed that within the century that was still ahead of us, the following thirty years that we’d go back to the

Moon, and we’d reach even further into space, maybe start off to Mars. So I believe that we felt that we had a very strong future ahead of us. And to me, one of the saddest things

in my life today is that when they cancelled the Constellation program. That was, I think, the last time that I believed that we might be back on the Moon in my lifetime. So I’ll never see, I’ll never feel the pride, the accomplishment, the sense of accomplishment, that absolute joy again that I felt the day we landed on the Moon and I doubt my kids will feel it. So it’s a, you have to have belief in the country and we need to generate cutting- edge technologies to compete with the rest of the world, it isn’t going to be done by building pipelines or anything like that. That will help the economy in one sense but it isn’t going to allow us to ahead of our competitors because we’ve got some good ones out there.

HN: Ok, now for this question, we actually need to backtrack a little bit to, actually, the height of Project Mercury in 1962 where there was a Newsweek columnist named Henry

Hazlitt who—

GK: I can’t, I can’t hear you again.

HN: Where there was a Newsweek columnist named Henry Hazlitt who questioned the massive financial costs of the space program. And he questions it amidst a country where it puts undue strain on the economy when you have things like you said, the Vietnam

War, and the whole Civil Rights Movement and things like that. At this time, what was your knowledge of American opposition to or disinterest in the space program?

GK: We, we followed the newspapers but, depending upon where you lived, basically if you lived in the areas where there was major investment in space, Houston, Washington,

Huntsville, Alabama, Florida, out in California, you generally found newspapers pretty much treated space as front page, all the time. In fact, if you go back through the history of those things, you’ll see that basically space had the first cover on every newspaper of literally everything that happened. We were aware of some of the challenges put against space, but at the same time, we were also aware of the technologies that we were producing and if you take a look at the, where we went, you know. We started off in space with very rudimentary computers, analogue devices, analogue technologies, but within four years, we’ve moved into digital technologies. We started off running our missions with Morse code between the tracking stations. And we had thirteen tracking stations, because there was no way to get data back, so we had to put teams in place there. And within five years, we had communications satellites that were bringing this data along. The computing horsepower had literally increased by several orders of magnitude in there. We saw the technologies of new space systems emerge, in fact, it’s unfortunate, we talk a lot about fuel cells today, but basically we were using them back in

1964. And it provides great opportunities for environmentally friendly production of energy. You take a look at the Apollo 1 fire and we have a Dr. Kadeki here and we develop the technology of materials that could be used in operating rooms under the oxygen environment that, basically, wouldn’t burn. So the people that are familiar with space, you know, can answer that question very easily. The payoff is about seven to one; for every dollar spent in space you get about seven dollars back in other things.

HN: Now, John Glenn, who was interviewed last year by one of my classmates, said in his interview that “the statement that Kennedy made,” obviously about the space program, “was very forthright, and he was willing to put his presidency in, and congress was behind it also.” Now, in my research, I discovered that President Kennedy, who is generally regarded to be a strong supporter of the space program in the early sixties, was only moderate. He said, “this is important for political reasons, otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I am not that interested in space.” What is your knowledge of his attitudes like this?

GK: Well space has always been an instrument of foreign policy. And I think it depends upon which direction you’re looking at it from. If you’re looking at it as a politician, you’re going to use space as a instrument to accomplish your objectives. You can go back into Nixon going to China. You can take a look at the rapprochement where, basically, we decided we’d set up a rendezvous program with the Russians during the Soyuz program. So, virtually everything has a political component, what they call an objective, associated with it. And, frankly, it’s my belief that Kennedy was still looking for a victory, because he’d been pretty much beat up during the first months of his presidency with Bay of Pigs, then he got into the Cuban crisis with the Soviets there, so he needed a victory and I think space gave him that victory. He didn’t know he needed it at the time, but he sure did.

HN: So would you say that this didn’t affect the way you felt at that time?

GK: It didn’t affect the way I felt because basically all I wanted to do was beat the

Russians. I wanted to assure that, you see, I was over in, on Mimosa when the Russians launched Sputnik. And I had the opportunity to see the impact of that simple beeping satellite upon the rest of the world. And I just wanted to make sure that basically we won the space race to, basically, show the power of a free and open and intelligent society.

HN: Well, that’s about all the questions I have, is there anything else you’d like to say that I might have missed?

GK: No, I think you’ve covered it pretty well. Let me think here for a minute, see if there’s anything else (pauses). No I think that’s about it. I hope your recording came out well.

HN: I do to.

(both laugh)

HN: Alright, well thank you very much.

GK: Thank you very much, sir. Have a good one.

HN: You too, goodnight.

Interview Analysis

The Space Race was one of the most exciting times in American history, as stated by Gene Kranz, former flight director at NASA, “[you] really have that emotional moment where you really can reach into the depths and say this is one of the greatest times in history…” (Kranz 42). It is a statement like his that reflects the value of oral history to the general historical community. Mr. Kranz talks about his emotional

realization that he was living through one of the greatest times in American history and, not only that; he was a part of it as well. This is a strength of oral history: the display of emotion that is received when a person tells their story. Many historians do not use oral history very often, as reflect by Native American author Joe Marshall, “[p]eople don’t consider the resource of oral tradition to be a valid one,” (Marshall qtd. in Charlier 1).

For thousands of years, native Americans have been conveying their people’s history by nothing other than word-of-mouth. And yet their stories are not given any credence.

Another strength would be the ability to see history from a perspective that is generally not represented by historians. This is the advantage of the interview with Mr. Kranz: his perspective can only be known by those men who worked around him during the missions. His testimonies reinforce those made by historians of this period as he confirms both the success and the value of these missions to American science, engineering, and culture.

Oral history is the study of history as told by people who experienced it for themselves. It differs from those histories that are more “mainstream” per se, like the books by Carr, Zinn, Schlesinger, and others. Their works are dependent upon documents, both primary and secondary, that form the basis of their research and therefore the content of their writing. Oral history is totally dependent upon a person’s testimonies and memories of a particular event. Historians sometimes look down upon this method of doing history due to the fact that memory is fallible and that historians would be better off not using oral sources. Historian Donald Richie touches on this point,

“The correlated assumption is that the historian, with hindsight and thorough research, perceives past events more clearly than those who lived through them,” (Richie qtd. in

Whitman 6). The idea is that historians are trained to look at history and separate fact from fiction. They are more able to pick out what is important and relevant than someone who is just telling a story, in theory. What these critics of oral history fail to grasp is that first-person experience may succeed where normal sources fail. The history may be incorrect or biased, or incomplete in a way such that only personal experience can fill the void. Overall, oral history needs to be appreciated (and used) far more than it is currently in the world historical community.

In the interview with Mr. Kranz, he begins with his experiences in the United

States Air Force and how this eventually got him working with the Space Task Group that would become NASA. He continued to talk about how he began his work during the beginnings of Project Mercury in 1960 and ended at the end of the Apollo Missions in

197220. Mr. Kranz talked a lot about the men he worked with in Mission Control. He praises them for their nonstop efforts and their strength under pressure, “…I really take a look at the young people I had as a team, twenty-six years old was the average, and I appreciate them more… if you made a mistake, you’d be living with it for the rest of your life, but these kids didn’t make mistakes. To them, failure was not an option” (Kranz 48).

Mr. Kranz is perhaps most well-known for his work during the Apollo 13 mission where he guided his flight controllers and astronauts in order to get the astronauts back to Earth safely. When asked if he ever had doubts about the outcome of the mission, Mr. Kranz’s reply reflected the importance of a positive mental attitude and confidence in yourself and your colleagues, “…that’s the kind of relationship that you need and basically that’s the kind of mental toughness you have to develop that basically convinces your team that

20 Later on he would become an administrator at NASA, but he did not discuss this during the interview.

we will solve this problem and we will accomplish our objective…” (Kranz 49). Towards the end of the interview, Mr. Kranz expressed his sadness about the premature ending of the Apollo program and how the lack of such a program is detrimental to the nation’s morale, “So I’ll never see, I’ll never feel the pride, the accomplishment, the sense of accomplishment, that absolute joy again that I felt the day we landed on the Moon… and

I believe this nation needs that kind of a boost. You have to have belief in yourself and the work that you’re doing” (Kranz 52). Mr. Kranz’s testimony helps to illustrate the value of such a program to the United States and the world as a whole.

Mr. Kranz’s interview has historical value because it helps to show the value of the space program during the 1960s. There were several critics at this time who questioned the costs of the space program in a nation where there were far more pressing issues than space travel, issues like the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, and others. Even President Kennedy, who is generally regarded to be a strong proponent of the early American space program, had little interest beyond its political implications,

“This is important for… international political reasons… otherwise we should not be spending this kind of money, because I am not that interested in space” (Kennedy qtd. in

Potter 1). When asked about how he felt concerning President Kennedy’s lack of interest in the space race, Mr. Kranz replied, “…space has always been an instrument of foreign policy…” (Kranz 54). This statement points out that space is important for politics, but that does not make it worthless. If anything, it makes it more valuable as a political instrument. In reality it is very difficult, if not impossible, to fins historians that have a negative opinion about the space program and the Moon missions. This in itself is evidence that the missions were worth it and successful.

Some question whether the moon missions and the flights that preceded them were successful. One prominent wirter about this was Henry Hazlitt, the columnist for

Newsweek who frequently criticized the costs of space travel and whether these investments would have successful outcomes. Many of these critics would point out that there were failures, and these failures could have (and did in one case) take the lives of the astronauts involved. Mr. Kranz refuted these ideas, “We saw the technologies of new space systems emerge, in fact, it’s unfortunate, we talk a lot about fuel cells today, but basically we were using them back in 1964… The payoff is about seven to one; for every dollar spent in space you get about seven dollars back in other things” (Kranz 54). Mr.

Kranz notes the success of the program not only through the plethora of successful missions to space, but also in the technologies that were developed in the process that continued to advance the technology in the United States. Therefore, Mr. Kranz’s discussion about the successes of the space program refutes the arguments made by critics of this period.

The process of oral history is different from any other method of doing history that I have done before. Through this project, a person can immerse themselves in history and feel it through the orations of the interviewees and their emotions, as I did with Mr. Kranz. I learned that in order to be a good historian, I need to work hard to find the truth and be objective. In the context of oral history, this translates into using the most correct sources to flesh out your background knowledge and asking the questions that will dig the deepest into your interviewee’s conscious. This all helps you comprehend the history in a new way that has a new sense of reality about it.

Time Indexing Recording Log

Minute Mark 20 0 25 5 30

10 35 15 40

Recovery from the Apollo 1 fire 45 Details on training for missions

50 Armstrong and Aldrin’s descent to the lunar surface

Reflections on Apollo 11

Attitudes at mission control during Apollo 13 American disinterest in space exploration

Wrap-Up

Topics Presented in Order of Discussion Introduction/Childhood “Four-Inch Flight” of the Mercury- Redstone 1

John Glenn’s flight

Technological realizations during the Gemini Program

Appendix 1

Sputnik 1, the first man-made object put into orbit around the Earth.

Appendix 2

The Mercury-Redstone rocket. The United States’ first rocket for putting men into space.

Appendix 3

The first three Apollo astronauts. (From left to right) Virgil Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Edward White. They would lose their lives to a cockpit fire during a systems test.

Appendix 4

The Apollo 1 cockpit after the fire

Appendix 5

The Saturn V rocket. At 363 feet tall, it was the largest and most powerful rocket ever built by the United States.

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