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Sunday Morning News

Veteran NASA Flight Director Discusses Book About Race to the Moon

Aired May 7, 2000 - 8:39 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Thirty years ago last month, four men had left footprints on the moon and a nation ripped apart by the Vietnam War was paying scant attention to the third lunar landing mission. And then, on April 13th, 1970, came the legendary call from the crew of Apollo 13.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED ASTRONAUT: OK, Houston, we've had a problem here. (UNINTELLIGIBLE) we've had a hard release start. I don't know what it was.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: The crew cutted man sitting in the hot seat in Houston at that pivotal moment was veteran NASA flight director Gene Kranz, who has written down his memories of that harrowing moment and so many others during the race to the moon. The title, appropriately, "Failure Is Not An Option." Gene Kranz joins us from Houston this morning. Good to see you, sir.

GENE KRANZ, AUTHOR, "FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION": Good morning, Miles. Great to be with you this morning.

O'BRIEN: All right, well let's continue on this Apollo 13 for a moment and then I want to ask you about how you got this back together. Everybody knows Houston, we have a problem. Let's listen in to what happened immediately subsequent to that as you attempt to sort of calm down the troops and then I want to ask you about that. Let's roll the tape.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

KRANZ: OK, now, let's everybody keep cool. We've got the lens (ph) still attached, the len spacecraft's good so if we need to get back home, we've got a len to do a good portion of it with.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: All right, what was going through your mind at that moment, Gene?

KRANZ: Miles, I had gone through three very rapid change mode. Initially when the crew called down I thought it was an electrical glitch, we'd solve it quickly and be back on track. The second phase, about five minutes later, I moved into hey, let's proceed carefully lest we step into something we don't want to. We had a report from a controller that a lot of valves had closed due to the shock that we had.

The third one was when Lovell (ph) said hey, we're venting something. Then it was survival mode. We weren't going to the moon, we were in a survival exercise from now on and it was going to be tough, maybe impossible to get the crew home.

O'BRIEN: So the entire thing had turned on a dime and your role as flight director is so crucial at that moment because what you have is you have a tremendous amount of disparate information coming in, a lot of young controllers trying to raise their hand and say here's what we think is going on and the key for a flight director in that case is what?

KRANZ: The key is really to listen and assemble the pieces very rapidly, ask the right questions and then pick a course of action and get going.

O'BRIEN: And, of course, that's exactly what happened. As you look back on that moment in time, was that one of the finer moments for the folks in the mission control room there?

KRANZ: Yeah. I think that this team was perfectly tuned. If somebody had come up to us before the mission and said could you handle this kind of a survival problem and I'd say certainly we can. We've got leadership, trust, values and teamwork and we're always going to make sure we get our crew home.

O'BRIEN: All right, Gene Kranz was the flight director as well during the famous Apollo 11 moon landing, the first moon landing. And space junkies know a few of the details about this, but the bottom line was that the computer on the lunar module was sort of over stressed as it was going down, to use a lay person's term, and was issuing alarms, 1202 and 1201 alarms. Let's listen in for just a second to the radio conversations then I want to ask you about this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED ASTRONAUT: 1201.

UNIDENTIFIED ASTRONAUT: 1201.

UNIDENTIFIED ASTRONAUT: Roger. 1201 alarm. We're go, string tied, we're go.

UNIDENTIFIED ASTRONAUT: Altitude, velocity right. And it is down, 223.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'BRIEN: All right, well those of us who were watching at that time had no idea what a 1201 alarm was. It turns out that your team there on that evening knew all about it. Tell us what 1201 was and how you had prepared for that.

KRANZ: Well, the two program alarms that we are seeing there, one was the computer was going through a frequent restart, but it was still executing everything that it needed to from a priority standpoint. If we went to the secondary alarm, which is what we call a P00, program zero zero, the computer would go to halt and wait instructions.

Now we were lucky that in our final training run before the crew departed for the Cape we had had a series of exercises on exactly the same alarms, only this time we were over cautious and we aborted the landing. We came back, studied those alarms that evening, did some more training and wrote some mission rules, said it's OK to proceed under these alarm conditions as long as the guidance navigational control is working.

O'BRIEN: So that's just a fascinating little footnote to history that if you hadn't done that particular sim right at the 11th hour before launch, Steve Bales (ph), the computer whiz who was one of the controllers there, probably would have said abort and you wouldn't have had a landing on Apollo 11, right?

KRANZ: Yeah, he would have been right on the edge. I tend to think he would have continued on but we sure wouldn't have had the confidence to keep working the problem and we might have had some overload in the control room at that time.

O'BRIEN: All right. You know, of course, I could go on all day about this, but I've just got to ask you why the book now and how did you go about writing it?

KRANZ: Actually, I wanted to talk about my teams in mission control. We're an elite force in the business of space flight. Our job is to take actions needed for crew safety and mission success and we do it very well. When I decided to write the book, I just felt it was time to tell this side of the story. I actually did the writing with my control teams. We'd sit around a tub of beer on ice and we'd eat pastrami sandwiches and tell the war stories and it worked great.

O'BRIEN: Some things never change after all these years, right? All right, Gene Kranz, the man who, well, if you were to look in the dictionary under flight director, I guess your picture would be there, wouldn't it?

KRANZ: I believe so. I hope so.

O'BRIEN: All right, the book is "Failure Is Not An Option." Thanks for being with us on CNN SUNDAY MORNING.

KRANZ: Miles, thanks a lot.

O'BRIEN: All right.

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