- [Interviewer] Well, thank you, Chris. Talk a little bit about what you thought, what went through your mind when JFK said you all were gonna go to the moon by the end of the decade.

- Well, initially, I thought it was foolhardy. Because I thought it was... The question had been asked were they too much them thinking about what that would take to do it. Gilruth and Low, and several others had talked to the president about going to the moon, 'cause he asked about it. He said, "What could we do to..." I didn't know this. "What could we do that would really be a very important "part of the space program and at the same time "would be... "Really do the Russians in?" And, Gilruth said, "Well, we could go around the moon." But he said, "We don't know how to do that today "and that's a very difficult job. "But if you asked us to do it and were willing "to give us the priority in the country "and the money to do it, we could do it." That's generally what he said to the president. And didn't go any further than that. Now NASA had been thinking about going to the moon at NASA headquarters. And we had a few guys at the Manned Spacecraft Center that were doing that also. But we saw that as a future thing and it required us to know a lot more about space flight than we did at the time. Recognizing then the Shepard was flying as our first manned and it was a 15-minute flight. We weren't even putting him in orbit. And so the results of that were great. It was a great job that we did there. But it had no relationship to future departure from the Earth to go to the moon And so Gilruth had called me and he said, "You need to listen to the president's speech." Then he gave us some times of when I was at a meeting. I was at the Cape. And when the president said we're gonna go to the moon, that really floored me. I really thought it was beyond our scope, mainly because I hadn't thought about it. Now I must say that the team of people that we had didn't quite feel that way. I think they were excited as hell about it. And so I became excited about it [chuckles] as a result of that. And I knew we could do it, but I knew it was awful lot of things we didn't know that we'd have to find out. And an awful lot of technology we'd have to come up with that we didn't have. And matter of fact, so much so that I didn't know how much that was. You know, I didn't know like the power requirements. I didn't know about the facts of what the radiation problems might be on the moon. I didn't know what the astronauts might be confronted with from a human point of view. I didn't know what the surface of the moon was. I didn't know what the power requirements were. I didn't know how we would go from a mission plan point of view. And it took us almost two years to figure that out, by the way. We didn't just say, "Well, we're gonna go do "lunar orbit rendezvous and do it." It wasn't that way at all. That was a great consternation as to whether we should have a situation where we would go direct from the earth as actually von Braun wanted to do initially, build a big rocket and just shoot the thing right at the moon and go there, as compared to using orbital science, orbital mechanics to get there on a more controlled way. And it took us a couple of years to convince ourselves that we had a game plan. So it was not something that we were gonna do tomorrow, I guarantee ya'.

- [Interviewer] You were, if I can ask one more quick. Just getting close so you can hear me. You came up with the, not just the concept, but the execution of Mission Control kind of as a whole entity. Where did you... I remember reading in your book sort of some of the prototyping for that, how there was a company, and I forget the vendor, who were like, "You just need three telephones "and you can run the whole thing from here." As you were constructing in your head what you needed to control flights, at the beginning of Mercury, how did you get from blank sheet to the concept of Mission Control that we have today?

- Of the moon?

- [Interviewer] Of Mission Control, in general, what inspirations did you draw from? Like air traffic control processes, how'd you get from, "I need to a make a control center "to here is the control center that we have."

- Well, we didn't. [laughs] I have to say that when we first had the concept of what Mission Control was, I saw it as an extension of high speed flight and the cooperation between the ground and the pilot and supersonic flight, and therefore, wanting to be in continuous contact with the pilot, and being able to help him if he got in trouble because you could very easily get in trouble in those days with supersonic speed, going through transonic speed you'd lost control of the airplane. So you had to figure out how to get through that speed range. Now that's where I came from as to what could the ground do, what might the ground do. Now that was just a toy, kids play, as a matter of fact. Because as I began to think about the details of what you would do, then I realized, well, what can we do for the ground to help? And when you start thinking that way, then you realize, well, I gotta have some information. And I gotta know what the vehicle is in terms of its system, to detail. How might I help the situation and the success of the mission as well as the safety of the crew? And so what information do I need to do that? And what instrumentation, what systems, on the ground such as telemetry communications? Then I began to realize, well, we don't have any communications around the world. If we're gonna control this thing as it goes around the world, we've gotta provide a whole new communication system. We can talk from California to Cape Canaveral or vice versa, but you didn't have any communications in the Pacific, you didn't have any communications to Australia. You did have landlines to Europe, but that's about where all you had. You could do a telephone. And we were gonna have to fly over Africa, where the best we could get was 20 words of teletype. Okay, now, you start trying to put those thoughts together. You realize then that I've got to build a whole system of worldwide communications in order to control this machine while it's in orbit and do the best you can to prevent it from getting in trouble. And if it did, what were you gonna do about it? So that was a big, broad step from what we did for Mercury. Now that other aspect of it, which rapidly came to mind was we're flying a machine which has no controllability in orbit. All it can do is go up, come down, you could control its attitude, and you can fire a retro rocket to bring it down in a particular spot. You could probably hit the spot on the ground within maybe five miles or less. And that's pretty good. But that's about all the capability we had in a mission. We didn't have plan, we didn't have any capability to maneuver Gemini. That's where Gemini came from. How do we learn to operate in space? So we were a far step from that in 1961. So we had a heck of a lot to do that we had not even thought about. And so we needed a lot of people that understood more mechanics a lot better than we did at that time. How do we maneuver a spacecraft? How do you bring spacecraft together? How do you dock spacecraft? How do you use that docked maneuver to go where you wanna go? Those things we had not thought about. So here's all these additions of list of things now that we're beginning to find out about. Now what about the power, big thing. I bring that up because it was a big thing. We were doing fine with batteries. We could go batteries for quite a while as we did with Cooper, where you had 17, 18 revs, but that's about the limit of battery and it was just too heavy. So we began to think, what are we gonna do? We began to think about using fuel cells. That was the modern thing. General Electric was working on them and other companies. So here's another thing we're gonna have to worry about. What about fuel cells? We didn't really think about fuel cells systems-wise.

- [Interviewer] Did you run a console for Apollo 1 that plugs in tests, plugs out tests? Walk me through that moment when that test occurred.

- Well, we were having all kinds of technical problems with this spacecraft pre-Apollo I. Communications were bad, on the pad, Gus was very upset all the time about not being able to talk to a blockhouse. He used to say that, "How the hell are you gonna do this, "How ya' gonna do space flight "if you can't even talk to me "from the pad to the blockhouse." He was very concerned about that. He was very concerned about the problems that we were having in getting a system checked out and getting a good countdown going and getting a team of people that understood the idiosyncrasies and the dangers associated with going in a flight. And I don't think we all had in mind the problem that we were gonna have with 16 psi of oxygen. For some reason, we weren't very conversive of that problem and that situation. And so we were not surprised by the environment, but we were worried about it. And we were building on a next generation Apollo spacecraft at that point in time to fly the real missions on Apollo. And this machine was really a poor one. Poor from the standpoint of design, poor from the standpoint of checkout, poor from the standpoint of control of the safety of the systems, the wiring, et cetera. And we were very concerned about people walking on the wires in the spacecraft when they were in there working. You could see they were trampling on the wires. And, God, what is that gonna do? But we were willing to go ahead. That was a mistake, very, very serious mistakes. And so that was in the back of my head when I'm sitting at this console now. We've been going all day. I wasn't at the console all day, I went back by the office it was going so slow. And I said, "Call me and I'll come back "when you're getting ready to pick up the countdown." And that was about four o'clock in the afternoon and after having started seven or eight o'clock in the morning. And when there was a sudden jolt in our headsets, of something had happened, we heard an explosion. We heard people's voices screaming both inside and outside the spacecraft. And the emergency that was taking place at the Cape was there in front of us, which we couldn't see, of course, but we could hear. And then there was dead silence. And I knew that we were deep serious trouble. Well, I didn't, didn't know that the astronauts had been killed, but I had an inkling that that was the case. And I didn't wanna ask the test director, George Page. He and I were good friends. And I wanted to leave him alone. He had enough to do without being worried about the flight director talking to him from Houston. But I finally got through to him and he immediately said to me, "I think we've lost the crew." And that's about all he said. I think that's all he had composure to say. And now I heard the crew's voices. I heard them say they wanted to get out. Heard 'em say they were on fire. And I could hear the inside of the spacecraft of them trying to get out. It was very hard to get out of the spacecraft. You had to grab the handles on the hatch, drop the hatch down behind the seats and then crawl out. And that took several minutes at best. So you knew that if it was a fire in there that the likelihood that they had survived was zero. It was a pretty horrible feeling, knowing that they were dead, and knowing what had happened, knowing that we all had been a party to putting the pilots in that position, feeling very awful about that. And it was something that you knew was gonna take a long time to recover from, actually. I mean, the first thing came to my mind was, "My God, it'll take us a long time to get over this." both politically and the systems and what had to be done to fix what the problem we had. Because we knew the vehicle we had was a lousy piece of equipment. And we had been trying to do things about it, but, frankly, we weren't listened to. Everybody was running too fast.

- [Interviewer] At the same time, we talked about how the fire really put you back on track to get to the moon, right?

- Yes, well, I don't think there's any question about that. It's a hell of a thing to say that had we not have the fire, it's probable, and possible, that we would've never gotten to the moon, because I think that the country may have begun to lose faith in us had that not happened, because we would've had so many failures. There just were too many single-point failures in that system, too many things that could go wrong, too many things that we weren't doing our best job on. And that was very, very sad situation.

- [Interviewer] So talk to me about the decision to go from seven to eight and to make the big leap around the moon. How did that decision come about?

- I think the top management in NASA, Bob Gilruth, George Low, people in Washington, realize that when that fire happened, we were in a situation where we had to change everything. Everything had to be changed to make sure that we were doing our best to bring it back to a point where it was under control. And George Low was appointed head of the program office. And he brought all of the top management at JS, keep wanting to say JSE, but all the top management of the Manned Spacecraft Center in, all the people that he had faith in and knew had the organization, and the people to get the job done. So he brought the top people of those organizations together and said, "What do we gotta do to fix this machine?" That's what we did. Everybody thought about, well, what do we need to do? And we made a list of that, we brought 'em all together and said, "This is what we ought to do totally "to make this machine capable of going to the moon." That was a hell of a job. And George Low did a fine, fine, fine job of that. And the rest of us helped him do it. And it took a change in people, a change in thinking, it took a change in culture to make that happen. And I think we would've ever had the opportunity to do that if the fire hadn't happened. If we would've just kept going and the fire hadn't happened, I think we would've been making mistake after mistake after mistake and I think we would've killed a lot more people, actually in flight had we not done that, or that had not happened and we modified the vehicle. So we found ourselves in a recovery mode and I thought we did that very well. They were having trouble with the rocket also. But the big problem, the question you asked, what caused the transition between where we were at that point and getting to Apollo 8. That happened because of the Lunar Module. The Lunar Module was a machine that was built to save weight. It had to be the lightest machine we could build, with therefore the lightest materials, and therefore the whole machine was fragile. That's the only way I could describe it. The plumbing was fragile, the skin was fragile, you couldn't step here, you couldn't step there. The wiring was fragile, i.e., it was the lightest wire we could build and still carry the current that we needed to do it. So everything we had done was a requirements of weight. As a matter of fact, at that point in time we were paying Grumman $50,000 a pound in profit for every pound they could save. That turned to be a good Godsend for them in money. But the only problem then that brought about was we had delivered the first vehicle to the Cape and we found that it was even more fragile than we thought it was. It was very difficult to work in the machine, we were breaking things, we were having problems with the systems themselves, and we were way behind the schedule of having it fly with the command module, after the first command module flight by itself. And George Low recognized that and he came to Gilruth and myself, he had asked me to go with him to Gilruth and he got Slayton. So the four of us, which we're usually the guys that made the decision in the program at that time at the Manned Spacecraft Center. And so he brought us all together and he said, he had talked to me briefly about it, but we were in Gilruth's office and he said, "I'm having trouble getting the "Lunar Module checked out. "It's a long way from being ready to fly "and I'm trying to think of something "that we can advance the program with "that will give us a big step forward, "which is still within the capability of what we have." And he said, "What I've been thinking about is "doing a lunar, around the moon flight, "circum-lunar flight around the moon. "And I wanna know what you guys think about it. "Do you think we could do that? "Do you think that we could put that in between "getting the Lunar Module ready "and at the same time not be a big drag on the program "as something that would cause more time "than we could afford." Recognizing that this is 1967, at that point, excuse me, 1968 at this point. And we had said we were gonna land on the moon in this decade. And the response of those four people, whom I had the greatest respect for, their judgment, including myself. [chuckles] The response initially was, "I don't know, George. "We're running like hell in the software, "you know that. "We're trying to train the crews. "And the trainers are not working too well. "And now you ask us to take a huge step forward, "which we don't have that much time to do that. "I don't know if we can do that or not." And I said to him, "Let me think about it overnight "or a couple of days." Well, I went away to my office and I called my best people in. I called Bill Tindall, always Mr. Space Guy, John Mayer, few other people in the flight control world. Got them in my office and I told them what the problem was and what George wanted to do and, "I'd like you guys to think about it overnight. "See what you think. "Do you really think we could do it?" I said, "I'd like to do it, but I want your advice." Well, [chuckles] the next morning I got to the office about seven o'clock and the phone was ringing off the hook. As a matter of fact, I had messages there at five o'clock in the morning that they wanted to talk to me. And so Tindall and John Mayer, Carl Huss, particularly, came to my office and said, "You're not gonna think much of this, "but we don't think we ought to just go around the moon, "we think we need to go in orbit around the moon." And I sorta did a double take, because going in orbit around the moon is one hell of a big difference in risk than just going around the moon and coming back, because you go on a free return trajectory and come back, don't ever have to touch the machine from a mission point of view. And they said, "Here's why. "We've been running all these future game plans "of trying to figure out how to do "rendezvous around the moon, "where we're gonna land, accuracy of where we're gonna land. "And when we do that, using data we have, "which is taken from lunar..." I forgot what we call that, anyway, the thing that was taking pictures around, had been taking pictures around, but when they took that information of tracking, from tracking, and found out that the orbit they had, when they tried to compute where they would be from the backside of the moon, to the front side of the moon, where we start the descent, it was off by 10,000 feet. And they couldn't find any real reason for that. They could guess at it, but the lunar information they had was wrong. Something was wrong with their computation. Something was wrong with their gravitational model of the moon. So if we could go in orbit around the moon with Apollo 8, we could then come up with an empirical technique of guessing, not guessing but measuring, what the real orbit information was. That sounded too damn good to me, frankly, [chuckles] because it made a hell of a lot of sense. But I said to myself, "Isn't this something? "Who's gonna go convince "[chuckles] somebody that we should do that "on the first flight around the moon. "That's gonna be very difficult." And, by God, it was, believe me. So I thought about that myself now for a couple hours. And I called George and I said, "Well, my guys have been back at me "and we think we could do it, "but we wanna do something else. "So we gotta meet again and let you explain to you "what we wanna do." So we did. And I said, "We wanna go in orbit around the moon." And, like I said, they had the same damn reaction I did. "Well, my, Lord, that's a big step." I said, "Yes, it is a big step. "But I think we're gonna eventually gonna have to do this. "Eventually we're gonna have to figure out "what the gravitational models are. "We're gonna have to have a better job "of being a trajectory if we're gonna have a "capability of landing on the moon." We're gonna have to have that information in the Lunar Module computer. We're gonna have to have that information in order to do rendezvous when you come back up off the moon, besides having to land on the moon. That's how we got to Apollo 8. It sounds simple now, but it was a big step. But from that point on, it turned out that George Low didn't think too much of the idea at first, but he was like I was. First thing you know, they're thinking it's a great idea. Gilruth is thinking it's a great idea. Frankly, I don't know what Dekes thought about it, because he was faced with, "By God, I gotta change "this whole crew out. "I gotta come up with training people to do that. "I don't know if I could get that done "in a couple months after a flight." And now we also said, there was one cardinal thing, we said that if we're gonna do this, we're gonna have to fly the next Lunar Module, command module, in orbit around the Earth, and it's gonna have to be just about perfect, because if it doesn't, there are two things that are gonna be difficult. We're not gonna like it and we're never gonna be able to convince anybody that we can send this spacecraft to the moon. So that was the first thing we said. We've got to have a perfect Apollo 7 flight. That was a cardinal thing, rule, all the way to the top when we made the decision to do it. Second thing was that we had to get the computer software in... Made the ability for us to go to the moon and back with that software and the software to train the crew which we didn't have. Those were the big things that we had to come up with. And we knew we were gonna have to work very hard, very fast, to get that done.

- [Interviewer] You're leaving one thing out. Tell me about the Navy and how you had to go convince them to work over the holidays.

- Oh. [chuckles] Well, that was secondary, Eric. Well, when we started figuring out where we were gonna go, how we're gonna do the trajectory, where the moon was gonna be at that time of year, we realized we were gonna have to come down in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. It's the only way you could come back on a free return trajectory from the moon and have a decent landing site. We wanted to land in the daytime, but when you added that feature, [chuckles] it got even more complicated. So we gave up the fact that wanted to land in daylight. We'd take early dawn. Now the recovery people started talking to the people, the DOD people, about the Navy support we're gonna require in the Pacific. And the commanding general and the DOD rep at the Cape was General Houston. General Houston says, "I'm not about to go ask "Admiral McCain to bring his ships, "which he is now planning to have a Christmas vacation... "Everybody in the Pacific, all ships, "all the support, all people. "We've already planned... "I know that they've already planned to have that time off." And he said, "So I'm not gonna go ask Admiral McCain "to break that to the Pacific. "You're gonna have to do that." I said, "Bring me an airplane, we'll both go." So that's what we did. We got an Air Force airplane. I got John Mayer to draw me up some charts describing the mission, which is the first time we had done that. "And give me the charts and I'll figure out what to say "on the way to Hawaii." So the general and I went to L.A. and then to Hawaii. Wet met with, I won't go into details of that, but we met with the admiral. I was in a room, it was one of these amphitheater rooms you could probably seat 100 people. There was nobody in that room below four stars, nobody, or four stripes. And here's Chris Kraft, I don't know what my rank is in the Navy, but it ain't very high, I don't [laughs] believe. But, anyway, the admiral came in, everybody jumped to attention, including me. And he said, "Okay, young man, what do you got to say?" So I game him this 15-minute briefing of what we wanted to do, why we were going to the moon, what it meant to the country. "But I need your ships. "And you've got 'em all coming into Pearl for Christmas. "And he said, I need you to have those ships out there, "because it turns out that we're gonna be around the moon "at Christmas time and we're gonna land "two or three days after Christmas "and you're gonna have to have some ships out there "to pick up our spacecraft." And after I asked him that question, he said, I could see him going, he had a cigar in his mouth, by the way, it was that long. And you could see the people in the audience saying, "Oh, my God, this kid's asking for something." But he banged his hand down in his fist and said, "That's the best Goddamn briefing I've ever heard. "Give this young man anything he wants." And walked out. That's the story.

- [Interviewer] Thank you, that's a wonderful story. Is Apollo 8 your favorite out of all of 'em? I know you love 'em all, but--

- Absolutely, because first thing I had to do, convince myself I knew what I was talking about. And then I had convince everybody up to the President of the United States that I knew what I was talking about. That was quite a challenge. George Miller didn't wanna do it. I don't know what Webb thought, 'cause he quit in the middle of that. I think Seamans, who was one of the deputies, I think he liked the idea. And it turns out that Payne, who then became the acting administrator came in to one of our meetings one day, he says, "I wanna talk to you guys." He said, "I am extremely proud of you people "that you have been willing "to come up with this change in plan "and come up with a game plan "to take advantage what you have to do "to get the program back on track. "I congratulate you for having done that." Boy, that was one of the best things anybody's every said to me. Miller wants everybody to sign in blood at everything he did. And so he started bringing in, he had started this program of having the presidents of all the major companies come in and hear briefings of what we were doing and then hear briefings of what they were doing in order to bring Apollo to the point of being able to fly. And he therefore said, "I'm gonna have those people "after we make a decision of whether "we're gonna do it or not, "then I'm gonna bring all those people in." So then I had to convince those people that we knew what the hell we were doing. And so, yeah, I have to say that was my favorite mission, because it challenged me for many a day to convince first Sam Phillips and Wernher von Braun that we could do it, and then convince ourselves that we could do it and then convince Miller to do it, and then convince, I guess, the President of the United States to do it.

- [Interviewer] It had to be pretty sweet then, to watch that on Christmas Eve, the mission and then the landing a few days later. I must've just been incredible to be there and to see it happen.

- Well, it was except to the first time went around the moon, because the firing of the command module engine to put the vehicle into orbit the first time had took place, of course, on the backside of the moon, 'cause that's the most efficient place to do it. And when you did that, that meant you could be around the moon for 30 minutes. So we got to the moon and we hit the time when they were gonna lose communications with the spacecraft on the second, on the second. And that gave us pretty good confidence that we were in the right orbit, the right place, because if you were too high or too low, or at the wrong angle, [mumbles] by the door. So at that point, we went behind the moon, we were actually on trajectory where if we didn't do anything, it would come back around the other side of the moon and be on trajectory to come back to the Earth. But from the moment you fire that engine to put it into orbit around the moon, now you've changed the whole complex. If it's wrong, you could be too fast, too slow, not enough power, et cetera, and that would cause easily, you could come down, be then entering the lunar's gravity surf, you're already in the lunar gravity field, and you could then come down on the backside of the moon, on the front side of the moon, or it could be gone on the way to the sun. Those are the choices you might end up with. And so when that thing came around the backside, if you know, I did a lot of praying for 30 minutes to thank God it's gonna come out on the other side of the moon. And it did. That's when... I was gonna say that's when Lovell said that... It was the second time we were coming back to the Earth, when he said, "There really is a Santa Claus." But there was a Santa Claus for the first time around there also.

- [Interviewer] It's always been incredible to me how after that you did 9, 10, and then within seven months you were ready to go for Apollo 11. What was that time like between 8 and 11 [drowned by distance].

- Well, the first thing we had to do was do a flight with the lunar orbiter, with the LEM, Lunar Excursion Module, the LEM. We hadn't had that vehicle in orbit yet. So we put that up with the command module and went through all the various maneuvers that we were gonna have to do of separating from the vehicle and going through a practice, practicing some rendezvous, with the two vehicles to make sure they could do the proper maneuvers, that the computers could compute that and we could do it all on the ground, which would simulate what we would do around the moon around the Earth. And, unfortunately, we had a sick astronaut. That wasn't very good experience either. But we got through that. And, actually, the Lunar Module turned out to be a very stellar vehicle. And then there was a great demand, even at the time, that while we're gonna go to the moon, again, as we did on Apollo 8, but this time we're gonna descend as if we were going down on the moon, but we don't wanna land on the first flight that we could do that, because we're not sure the engine, the lunar controllable, throttleable engine, was gonna work properly in the control of the trajectory as you descend on the lunar surface. And then we're not sure that... We want to have said we have accomplished the ability to rendezvous with Lunar Module as you come up off the surface. And we think we ought to, therefore, we ought to go down, initiate an abort situation and then bring the Lunar Module back up and rendevous to get us the experience with that in the environment of the moon. Now when we said that's what we wanted to do, we started down that road. There were a lot of people said, "Why the hell would you ever do that? "Why wouldn't you land? "If you go that far, why don't you go ahead "and land on the moon?" Well, myself and others didn't think that was right thing to do. We thought we ought to have the experience of being able to do those extremely dangerous, extremely important, extremely accurate maneuvers around the moon before we then could say we could do it. Under circumstances, we're not quite as final as having landed or crashed on the moon, which we might do. So we had to talk everybody out of that that was trying to get us to do that the first time. Glad we did, because I think, as you know, we made some very [chuckles] serious mistakes. Like losing the gyros and having them tumble and so forth when we were around the moon, which would've been hell to pay had we done that coming up off the lunar surface. So the other aspect was that, since you asked that question, I can't... Thinking back on it, I can't believe that we did it in that length of time, that we did Apollo 9, and the details of that flight were tough, they were difficult. We did it well. Even got the man well from being sick. If you can imagine vomit, and all that [chuckles] sorta thing being in the cockpit, that must've been awful. I know Jim McDivitt didn't like it. But we got it done. And then this getting ready at each point, getting ready to do 9, and getting ready to do 10, then getting ready to do 11, was a very, very intense time for managers and engineers to do. It wasn't too hard on engineers. It was pretty damn hard on the management, because making those decisions yourself and then convincing your bosses that you knew what you were doing and knew how to do it, and that you had the equipment, you had the software, and the computer's ready to do it and it was gonna work as you described. And then that was a very intense time. I remember George Low asking Neil Armstrong, "Have you thought yet about what you're gonna say "when you put your foot on the moon the first time?" I got a kick out of what Neil said. He said, "Yes, George, I have." [Interviewer and Chris laughing] I got a kick out of that.

- [Interviewer] So talk about the... Talk about kind of that moment where you start seeing the moon and they start to see the boulder field and the fuel is running out. Sort of what was the feeling like in Mission Control? What was going on in your mind as those crucial last seconds played out?

- When we did Apollo 10, we had used all the equipment on the Lunar Module, we used the lunar landing radar, which was the most important piece of hardware. We had used the antennas, we have been able to communicate, therefore, get the data as the Lunar Module descended. We had practiced with rendevous had we had to do an abort and bring the Lunar Module back up with it having landed. So we had done all those things and we had it all set up ready to start the landing, start the descent, after having fired the engine on the backside of the moon to get it down to a lower altitude. And lo and behold, we thought we had everything set right. We did not. We had left the... We didn't know this, what I'm about to say, we didn't know that the lunar radar was on as we descended to the moon. So all of that information was going into the computer. I'm telling you things that we didn't know when suddenly after we had gotten to a pretty serious point in the descent where we either had to fish or cut bait, so to speak, that we got a signal that said the computer's overloaded. I didn't wanna say it gave us a number, but we figured out that our guys know that system, and frankly I did, too, 'cause I was in charge of the software at that point in time. It said to us that... What that meant was in computers, you hae a priority system. And it says this is what you do first, second, third, fourth, fifth, on a given cycle. Well, cycle in the Lunar Module was 40 milliseconds. So we go through this whole priority process of checking the computations, what they were and then you could see whether they were correct or not and whether we're guiding the spacecraft on the proper trajectory to follow that trajectory to land on the moon. That had to be very carefully done, 'cause you have only so much fuel to drive your engine to give you the forces you need to do that. And so the signal, the warning, that we had suddenly overloaded the computer was very disturbing, to say the least. And it took one of our flight controllers about 30 seconds, 20-30 seconds to get an answer to that. He had an answer, but he wanted a backroom answer, which where all the computer smarts were. And they said, well, it is bad, but it's going through the cycle and it's not getting everything done, but it is, on the first part of cycle, doing everything correctly. And that's really all we need to get the trajectory correct to get down to the moon until we get to the point where we take in the lunar radar, lunar landing radar, and we then can correct the errors that that might've caused in the computer. I know that says a lot, but that's what everybody was going that's process of thinking that everybody had to go through to say, "It's go." And as soon as we started taking in the lunar radar, lunar landing radar, then that corrected the errors that were possible errors that could be in the lunar computer, which was computing where it should be and how the engine should be operating and how the spacecraft should be pointed in order to get it to certain points in the trajectory. And they had to pass through those points in the trajectory to make sure you were on the proper trajectory to get the landing. That was quite impressive. And quite disturbing as we went through that time period. Now, having done all of that, it turns out that we were on the wrong place. [chuckles] The trajectory been okay, but it was just off enough when we started that final descent from about 7,000 feet, that instead of being at this point to land on the moon, we were gonna land on the moon about 500 feet away, 500 feet plus, from where we were. We didn't know the condition of the surface of the moon at that point, we knew the surface of the moon was smooth where we wanted to land, but we didn't know the large craters, et cetera, and the large rocks that existed where we were gonna land, and Neil Armstrong did, because he could see it. We couldn't see that. We didn't know that was the problem. So he stops the descent and starts flying the thing, the vehicle like helicopter, which you could do with the Lunar Module, transposing the thing across the surface, until he could find a reasonable place to land. We did not know that's what he was doing, but that's what he had to do. Now, we had maybe an excess of 30 to 45 seconds of fuel. And when he started doing that then, he was rapidly using up the fuel that he had as a backup to do what he was doing. And that's what brought us all to the fore of saying, "Well, this thing is not gonna be able to land, "we're gonna have to abort." And, frankly, we would've not been too surprised had he had to abort. Now, I would've been surprised that everybody else that knew Neil Armstrong would've been surprised, 'cause we knew damn well he was gonna put that damn thing down at that point, somewhere. He was gonna put it down even though it might be too rough, even though it might be a big crater, even he might land on the side of a crater. I knew at that point in time he was not gonna give up landing on the moon. So that's the reason it was taking so much time. He was trying to do the best he could to get the best place to land. What Charlie Duke said was what we all though. He said, when he said, "The eagle has landed." he said, really, he said, "Thank God, "you gotta a lot of people that are about to turn blue." Which mean we were all holding our breath on the Earth while he brought it down to a reasonable landing point. Exciting. I don't know how he could ever do anything that would be more exciting in your lifetime. Any engineer or any patriot.

- [Interviewer] You know, looking back at it now, almost 50 years, does it seem real? I mean, how does it seem looking back at something now in your life that is now a major historical event?

- Well, there a lot of feelings I have. First, I was proud to be an American, which is what drove us all in the first place. I think the space program people were for sure the biggest patriots in the country. They gave us everything, they gave us everything they could do to make it happen and make it right. I was proud that I'd been able to be myself. I was proud to have been able to be a party to the leadership of getting it done. I was proud of the country, that they gave us the support that allowed us to do it. The Congress, the President, the people that cheered us on, so to speak. That's how I think of it today. I think I was extremely fortunate to be one of the few people that was involved in carrying out that mission. And you realize today, in the first place, how important it was, but in the second place, how difficult it was, because here we are almost 50 years later and we can't do it. [chuckles] We can't do it today. And we were able, in that time frame, 1969, to do it when we said we could do it, that we could do it in that decade, or do what the President asked us to do, i.e. land on the moon in this decade. All of that took one hell of a lot of doing. I mean, at one time there were 400,000 people working on Apollo. Somebody had to tell those people what to do [chuckles] everyday, if you could imagine that. What that meant was a management job. We had people from universities all over the country. We had people from people in the USGS, geological survey organization. We had people from every walk of life advising us what to do, some good, some bad. And somebody had to manage all that. So the management cascade of people that do that was no small task, keeping all those people under control. But the reason we could do that, I think, was that everybody wasn't as intense about getting it done as I was and my people were.

- [Interviewer] What would your advice be to people at NASA today who would like to do something great in their careers?

- Well, depends on what it is. Is it in space?

- [Interviewer] Yeah.

- Okay, because I think there are a lot of great things to do in the world besides space flight. I have to admit that. But if it's in space, I think the first thing you have to do is realize what your limitations are. What can you do, which is rational and reasonable to do, and what can the country... What can the country afford? And how can you sell what you're gonna wanna do to the country for the price you say you're gonna do it for. We now know these things are expensive. We don't have a blank check. And then thirdly, I think you ought to do it, because it's something that is beneficial to the United States, but also beneficial to the world. What results can you obtain with this investment that will be the next state-of-the-art, so to speak, in both science and engineering, but also in way of life? Those are the things I think you gotta go through. That's the reason I have come to my own conclusion of I ask, why do you wanna go to Mars? Why do you wanna do that? What's there? What's important about going to Mars? As compared to doing something else that's more accomplishable, more rational from a standpoint of finances, and more rational in the standpoint of what you really can do in a rational period of time? So those are the steps I think you should go through in determining what you should do in space. I don't think you ought to say, "Well, Mars is the next step. "It's a great thing." It's sort like to me, why do you wanna climb Mount Everest? Well, it's there. You can't give me a much better answer than that. I don't think it's beneficial. I don't think it has a return on investment that you ought to have for investing the people's money. So I wouldn't be willing, if I was in NASA today, to try to convince the powers that be, whoever they are, and the people, that we ought to go to Mars as opposed to going back to the moon and justifying it on the basis of the things you could gain, both from a point of science and future operations, future things that can use, whether that's electrical power form the moon or different kinds of materials. Or some day we may be able to se the resources on the moon for the Earth. Or sending power back the Earth from the moon, all kinds of new things. And also visualizing the world from the Earth and the moon and what you could do from the backside of the moon, which you can't do from the Earth. All those things come to my mind that say you could convince yourself you ought to do that as the next step rather than going to Mars, which I don't believe you could do today or the next 50 years anyway.

- [Interviewer] Do you think NASA should be building its own rockets? Or do you think the private sector, SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, Blue Origin, have shown that they have the capacity to do that?

- Well, you know, I'd like to answer that question, because people say, "Well, let's let the commercial people do it. "And get NASA out of it or NASA can just observe "and they can go do something else." You can't do that. They don't do it that way. I mean, we say we've got commercial spacecraft, commercial rockets, that's not what it is. It's government money that they're spending. So when you say SpaceX is gonna do it or Boeing is gonna do it, they're not doing it, United States is doing it. So let's do what is best, in the best interest of the country, with the best people to do it, which includes the commercial people, along with the government people, along with the government leadership, along with the Congress, along with the people in the President's office. They all ought to be a party to how you're gonna do something that's gonna spend the country's resources. If that makes sense. I don't know if that makes sense to people. But SpaceX is not spending much of their money to do these jobs, nor is Boeing. It's mostly government money, so let's do what is best, in the best interest of the people of the United States, not what's in the best interest of SpaceX or Boeing. That's the way I see it.

- [Interviewer] I wanna talk about the bureaucracy at NASA. You and I once discussed an effort you made in the 1970s to cut back on the number of NASA centers. If NASA is going to be viable, you know, for the next couple decades, what changes need to be made to the organization to make it effective?

- Well, anytime you get an organization, which now has gotten to be the age of NASA, you're gonna have a lot of waste. You're gonna have a lot of doing things you shouldn't do, which you don't need to do, or maybe shouldn't do, because it costs too much money. I think you need to do things that are more of a consensus of what should be done in the country. Now when you do that, I recognize that there's a political element, which has to be considered, which we're seeing today in great fashion with Trump. He's got a hell of time with all the political aspects of the things he wants to do and can't do because of the politics, or people will not let him do. I don't know why even bring this up, but I see this as a problem that you have in any democracy, I guess. Just people think they could do things and it will have to be no rules or no restrictions. You have to have an agreement upon what could be done, 'cause you are using the American people's money. And, therefore, I think you have to do what is best for the country to begin with. That has to be number one, before you go off and do something which you think, "Well, I wanna send people to Mars. "It's a great challenge." Sure it is, but you might kill quite a few people trying to do it, in my opinion, in the first place. In the second place, I don't think we know how to do it, so why not do something in the interim, which is good to do as opposed to something you can't do. Not very good answer.

- [Interviewer] No, I understand what you're saying. Looking back on your career, what was it like to be in the middle of the storm at NASA during the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs?

- Well, I'll guarantee it was not in... No program or project that has got people in it, and large numbers of people also, is easy to accomplish. You got too many diverse opinions, you got too many diverse ideas. You got too many people thinking that they're in charge. You got too many people that you have to worry about that need to be in charge. All those kinda things were there. Not too much in Mercury, because we only have four, 500 people when we flew the first vehicles. But by the time we got to Apollo, and you realize that we did have 400,000 people working on the job, you know you got a tiger by the tail. So we had all kinds of people problems that we had to deal with. And so you had to do the job in spite of that. And that's takes leadership. It takes people that are willing to give up themselves, people that are willing to do what's in the best interest of all, what's in the best interest of the country. And that you have to work at every day, just like you have work at a fuel cell every day. So managing the program was just as hard as building the Lunar Module.

- [Interviewer] I guess what I'm asking is, you know, every day you got up, you know, you were in Houston, Texas, you were in Space City, you were developing flight Mission Control, and you were going to work every day to try to put people on the moon. I mean, what was it like to just be part of such a great enterprise?

- Well, if you could restrict it to the things you just asked me, I would say it was the greatest thing any engineer, like myself, could ever have as a job to do. It was a hell of a challenge. Can't think of a bigger challenge. I can't think of a better challenge. I can't think of better thing I'd rather do every morning. So I was happy to get up, go the office every morning, I was happy to work 10, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, and I had quite a few thousand people that were willing to do the same thing. And I was proud as hell to be a part of what they were and be a part of what they did, and in the end, be able to do what we did successfully. I don't know how you could ever do anything better in your lifetime as an engineer or leader.

- [Interviewer] So, I guess, last question, Chris. New president, new administrator for NASA, what's your advice to the next administrator of NASA about human space flight.

- Well, my advice is to make sure that what you're going to do is worthwhile and you could convince yourself that it is the rational thing to do at this point in time with the technology we have or might be able to develop over the next 10 years, not what you could do 100 years from now, because 100 years from now, you might not wanna do what you wanna do today if you did that. And that's the reason I keep coming back to... I can't convince myself that going to Mars in the right thing to do. I just don't see that as a proper goal. It might be a goal that I can't see, okay, I'll admit to that. But it's also, I think my arguments need to be answered. What can we do with what we've been tasked or with the money we've got that will allow us to do it successfully, realistically, and profitably. That's what I wanna convince myself I wanna do, rather than just say, "Well, I'm gonna go to Mars." And then set out to do it, myself recognizing that I don't think you can. I don't think that's the way to go about it. I think it ought to be a little more rational in terms of consensus.

- [Interviewer] You've talked about Charles Miller and using the existing or new launch vehicles provided by NASA working with the commercial launch sector, and that to explore the moon. Do you think that's still probably the best way for NASA to go?

- I don't think it's the SLS, which is a great, probably a great rocket, once it gets tested and proven. But it costs so damn much that you can't buy many of 'em. So it's gonna really soak up your budget to use that vehicle, whereas you can use the vehicles that we now already have and we're using every day, Atlases and Titans and other solid rockets as a joined in, which you could do for a lot less money. And, therefore, do more, fly more often and do more things. And now that may require you to do it a little differently. You might have to use refueling, or you might have to use spacecraft which are reusable, which I think is a good thing. And those are the kinda things that we could do with what we've got today. Now, I'm not opposed to increasing the knowledge that we have to do it better, to improve the technology then of what the country can do. It could use other places other than the space program. But I wanna be convinced and I think it's worth the price. And right now I don't think it is.

- [Interviewer] I think we're good. Is there anything else you'd like to say?

- Not really. [laughs] Well, yeah, I'd like to say I'd like to see NASA do what I say do. But I doubt they will. The too much politics they're involved. You know, I'd have to admit that we would probably never have gone to the moon when we did, or ever, without the politics. So I can't ignore the politics. I gotta be able to convince the powers that be that what we're doing is what the country ought to do. We did Apollo wrong. We shouldn't have done it the way we did. We should've done it in a more gradual step fashion of development of vehicles, which when we got through would've allowed us to do one heck of a lot more than rather than get to the end and stop and say, "I'm finished." And all we got now is a few big rockets and a command module. That wasn't a very good investment. The investment and the accomplishment of what we did, the impression it had on the rest of the world, and the impression of the fact that United States is the greatest place and the greatest society, yeah, it did all that, I agree with that, but it could've been done differently and then allowed us to do one hell of a lot more than we did, and we'd still be doing it and gaining from what we did then and what we could do with the development then of more technology. That's the way I would've done it. But I didn't have that choice.

- [Interviewer] That's a very eloquent way of saying that you were given a task, you had to do it, but in hindsight, to create a sustainable space program, that was not the way to go about it.

- Right, and I think that's the reason you see it took us 50 years, 50 years since we've been able to go back to the moon. We've only started about 10 projects and spent the money in the meantime. We built a space station. God knows it doesn't have to be as big as it is. I mean, it's just too damn big, too expensive, too big to operate. We need 50 little ones, not one great big one. That's what they did with the rocket. I asked Griffin, because he came out in favor of the SLS. And I said, "Why the hell did you do that? "You know damn well you can't afford it. "You know damn well that's just too big to use continuously. "It doesn't have any practical capability eventually." He said, "Well, I thought that we could get it done "and it's something we could do, "I'd get the powers that be to agree to do, "and therefore I was willing to say "yeah, we need a big rocket." He was in Houston a couple of weeks ago and he said, "How's Chris?" And he said, "I know he's still mad at me." because I was thinking I'm not bragging about that, but now we have a rocket, if we're lucky, we could fly every 18 months. And in my lifetime, if you can't fly a rocket more than once every 18 months, I'm damned if I wanna fly on the end of it, 'cause rockets can only be made safe, safer, you can't make 'em safe, but you can make 'em safer by flying them. SO you have to put pieces together, et cetera, et cetera. I just think it's a more practical way to do it. But that's the reason I'm an old man and not in charge.

- [Interviewer] A lot of people believe that, what you just said. Chris, thank you very much for coming. I really appreciate it.

- My pleasure.