NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Gene Kranz, NASA Flight Director, part 4 of 5

So, the DICS time for me was we had finished this maneuver to accelerate our return journey. We had used the lunar module engine. We had burned about eight minutes. The crew is now coming back home. We fixed our landing time on all of a sudden three guys appear next to my console. It sticks light and bossy ass knots pounding in my chest and said, look, I want you to get my crew to sleep. They're too damn tired. They're going to make a mistake. And then craft news. My boss comes in. He'd be sitting in the console behind and he says, no, he says you call on the two damn close and probably wants you to get the spacecraft bar down. And then Max Fajet, who's chief of engineering shines and he says, no, you've got to restore thermal balance to the spacecraft. Now we had three different opinions, but we'd been tracking the temperatures for the previous 24 hours. It's getting darn cold in the lee side of the spacecraft. There's a 330 degree temperature change from one wall of the spacecraft to the other. And the systems on the dark side were freezing up.

Well, we had to set up this passive thermal control maneuver. The only source of energy we had was the sun. And we had to invent a barbecue maneuver, spin the spacecrafts on its axis and using the lunar module thrusters to do it. Well, this was a very frustrating time consuming. The first one didn't work, but we finally got all the pieces put together. We got that maneuver executed. And for the first time, we could power the spacecraft down. We could get the crew some rest and my team could get off and get some rest. Now in the meantime, the crew was suffocating. Their breathing had poisoned the atmosphere in the spacecraft with carbon dioxide. And we had run out of these cylindrical air scrubbers we used in the lunar module. So we had to fabricate an adapter for the square scrubbers that we had in the command module. Now, this is one of the things that was very low down in my party list. But we have a great organization at Johnson, the crew systems division, who came up with the answer. They took a piece of cardboard from the flight plan and they took a plastic baggie and they took some duct tape and they used a sock as a filter and they used a hose and they

piece part of this thing together. Tested it in labs, voiced the instructions up to the crew. So by the time that we came back from our rest period, all of a sudden this problem had been solved. Well, then a bunch of new problems showed up because for some reason, the typhoons developing in the landing area were bringing the spacecraft back to. It's getting colder than we had expected than all of our predictions on the spacecraft. For some reason, our trajectory is shallowing out. And this is the one that got my immediate attention because we got a quarter we have to come in through. And it's only about two, two and a half degrees wide. And if you come into shallow, we skip off the earth's atmosphere and we're never going to get home. If you come into steep, we're going to burn up in about 30 seconds. So we had to come up with a maneuver technique. And again, people had been anticipating this. So they looked at using the shadow across the earth between daylight and darkness and came up with a plan to have level move. We have a triangular window with sort of a gun sight grid on it in the spacecraft and

to align that on the earth's terminator and then to have level steer of the spacecraft when the engine starts. So the earth doesn't go up and down in the window and hey, so it doesn't go from left to right. So we innovated that procedure. So now we're in the final horse race to pull together all of the procedures to separate these parts because we have a dead service module where the explosion occurred. But it's sort of protecting the heat shield from the intense cold of space. We have the command module, which is our reentry vehicle with limited power. We have the lunar module, which is providing that's our lifeboat and it provides attitude control and life support. So we've got to separate all of these pieces on different trajectories in the final few hours of entry. So we can bring this crew back through the atmosphere and that's what turned out to be the real horse race in this mission. How'd you feel when they got down? There are so many feelings that this time, the key thing was, is I think every controller

went through their emotional climax, their crisis, when we saw that spacecraft and the parachutes. And until we saw that spacecraft come out, hanging under the parachutes and get to the splash stand, we didn't know we had it made. We knew that it was going to be dicey right up to the last second. I cried. As soon as I saw those parachutes, it was literally the tears float and I think this was true for many of the people. The extremely long, the extended blackout period got us because I think this is the first time some of the people really started to doubt it's first time I came up and said something didn't go right and then I immediately caught myself and say no it's some kind of a communications aberration. Not wrong with communications. This crew is coming home and then when we saw them, I mean, just this, she had these conflicting emotions.

It was days, I think, before any of the controllers really recovered from this event. And I think even today, I can speak of it, I'm writing a book and I talk to my controllers. Their controllers actually have to go through the same climax all over again. I speak to crowds and leadership and trust and teamwork and at times it will become so real to me again that I get all clanked up. It's time never to be forgotten. Cut. I've seen, as you look around here, how much of your life is in this room? When you walk into the building, you immediately get the sense of history of this place. When you walk down the halls, it's a very high hall out there, very narrow and your footsteps echo on the hollow floorboards underneath here. You walk into the room and the room is immediately bathed, you're surrounded by sort of an intense blue gray, almost a silence in this room.

You hear the hum, but basically that's the background noise, it's always there. You take a look at the displays. You see where the yard and the flight plan, you see what's going on, and you can immediately sense if everything is okay or not okay, just from the noise level in the room, the little clusters of people that you get. As you walk through the consoles, you hang your coat up on the coat rack in there and it's always over full. We should've had two coat racks for some reason, we only have space for one, and you almost worry that the thing's going to fall over and come crashing to the floor, but you finally get that. And then the next thing you sense is the smell of this room, it has a very unique atmosphere. It's got the coffee that has been spilled on the hot plates and burned into them for the years. It's got the pall of cigarette smoke. The ash trays are just dumped, everybody was a heavy smoker during these days, they're dumped into the waste bags of basket.

Sometimes I'll even start a fire and you'll put on your poor, your coat or your coffee in top of it. I forgot pizza was the principal food that we lived by because pizza you could carry for two, three shifts, it'd be on days, you'd have it for supper one evening and breakfast the next one you came in. There are always cookies in this place. So it's got a very definite atmosphere, you look at the controllers in there, you sit down, the logs tell the story, the controllers faces tell the story, they are young, these are young kids in their early twenties, the flight directors in their early thirties. It's a mystical place, it's a most marvelous place in the world for the people who lived here, grew up here and went through their mission life here. What was it to you? To me this was, I always wanted to lead people in a desperate battle and I led them many times in this place.

Great, last thing I want you to do, we need a second to just put a light up there, I want you to sit up in the VIP room a second, we're going to shoot a shot of you, we don't have to talk. Good. Okay. That's okay. We'll have to move over there.