self-supporting, you know in mission control when a person needs a little bit of help, a little bit more time to make a decision, and this team is so totally focused, it's marvelous. marvelous experience. >> all of this paid off, eventually, because that landing was not a piece of cake. >> no, the landing i don't think there was anything really prepared us for the intensity of the landing. if i back up a little bit, one of the mission rolls, talking about game plan, that was given to me exclusively, where i had to make a decision is in the preparation for the mission. headquarters people, the program managers and chris craft, was concerned that if we would crash and not have enough date to to figure out why we crashed, we

would be in jeopardy of the not only losing the lunar goal, maybe the entire program. so, everybody wanted to make sure that there was some formula that would be used by the team to say okay, we got enough data to continue. i fought this particular rule because they wanted numbers with this thing and i fought this all the way through the process of building the rules, going through the reviews, the mission review, et cetera. and i wanted very simple one that says the flight director will determine whether sufficient data exists to continue the mission. and i just wanted that, that simple, it was a subjective call by the flight director. this was batted back and forth until very close to the mission, and it was not resolved so i wrote in the mission rules that exact statement, flight director will determine if sufficient

data exists to continue. going back to the landing day now, this alleged adequate info information and telemetry. as soon as the spacecraft cracked the hill and we were coasting down to the 50,000 foot mark above the moon, the telemetry was broken, the voice was broken, we couldn't communicate, nothing was going right, and immediately that rule came to mind, do i have sufficient information to continue? but then we'd get a bit. and i would say we can look at the spacecraft, there were a couple times i would make calls for go-no-go, all flight controllers, go, no-go time, use the last valid data points that you saw. this might be 30 seconds old. they are making decisions based on stale data. we kept working, trying to figure out what was the problem with the communications, and

this turned out to be a bad information on the attitudes used in the spacecraft because we were getting reflections off the skin of the lunar module. but again, this is too late, we had to try to solve the problem in realtime, and again go back to the team work. charlie duke, my spacecraft communicator, was looking at the signal strengths and he saw the signal strengths vary, and he had seen, he had also worked apollo 10 mission, he suggested to don putty, the responsibility for the communications but also the life support, electrical system on the lunar module. he said "don, do you think we could have changed attitude change, would that help any". >> we tried an attitude change. in training we had worked in relaying voice information from the ground to mike collins back down to the lunar module. we were using ever conceivable way to communicate. in the meantime, time is

marching down to my go no-go point. we then have anomaly on the spacecraft where buzz aldrin is not seeing what he expects to see from the voltage indications. this is very critical from a standpoint of gyros, very critical, the controllers said okay it's looking good. by this time a guidance officer, steve bales has tracking information and the spacecraft isn't where it should be. i mean it's that straightford. he didn't know whether the data he was getting was bad, bad navigation, or we had some kind of problem with targeting in the spacecraft, but the problem was that he really got my attention, he says flight, we're out on the radio velocity. vertical velocity, and halfway to our abort limit. boy, when you haven't even started down to the moon and

some guy says we're halfway to the abort limit it gets your attention. he continued and said i'll keep watching it. so, all of a sudden now you got communications problems, minor electrical, navigation problem and struggle to meet the windows for making your decisions as you're now saying we're ready to ignite the engine. we got down to the go no-go for start of power descent, four minutes before the landing point, again there is no reason i had to wave off. the team was working well we made got to continue. then we lost communication, we couldn't tell the crew. so again, we relay charlie duke relays through mike collins to the lunar module they're go to continue. we're getting ready to go to the moon and can't talk to the crew correctly. we keep working through this problem until it's time for

engine start. we had data intermittently. engine start, we need to capture the telemetry so we know the quantities of propel lanlts in the tanks, now the propellants are being settled by the acceleration of the spacecraft as the engine starts up. as soon as the engine starts, we lose telemetry, we miss this very valuable point and we continue down and now, from the time we start until the time we land on the moon, it should take about between eight and nine minutes. and this becomes a very intense period, where again steve bales has been trying to figure out what's with the navigation problem that we're halfway to the abort limit. he comes back and gives me a call that really is a bit more confident. he said we're still halfway to the abort limit but not growing.

and he tends to believe that something happened upstream, might have been a lunar execution, where the engine didn't shut down perfectly. in retrospect we found out, this is after the mission, that the crew had not fully depressurized the tunnel between the two spacecrafts. and when they separated the spacecrafts, it was like a champagne cork popping out of a bottle. it gave the spacecraft a little bit more speed than it should have, like performing in extremely small maneuver. over the period of time, of a lunar orbit, this maneuver has placed the spacecraft in a different position than it should have been to start the december sent. now we're in the process of going down and we're making the calls, everything seems to be going right for a change. you never quite relax during this process, we learned to work

around the broken communications, but it seems to be getting better. and we're now at the point where we're starting to evaluate the landing radar data. this is an extremely important junction. because the lunar module is now using the altitude we gave it based on the tracking data and our knowledge of the position of the moon. we now have to update altitude by the real altitude measured by the landing radar. if there is a very large difference between the altitude we've given it and what the radar is seeing, they have to find some way to smooth it out because you can't make the correction instantaneously. we're trying to figure out if the radar is acceptable when we get a call from the crew they had a computer program alarm. for a few seconds, it's just total silence, nobody is

commenting on the thing, we all heard it, and then the crew comes down and gives a reading on the alarm. it's like coming to a fork in the road. half of my team, in fact most of my team is trying to decide when to accept the radar steve bales is an important part of that decision. but now he's got to answer to this program alarm kind of thing and it's for a period of time half the team was moving in this direction, the other half starting to move in this direction here, so i have to pull these guys back and charlie duke makes a call can we give a reading on the alarm. again steve bales now has studied the alarms as a result of the training exercise. now he goes back to his back room controller, tommy gibson, says tommy, these are the ones that basically we reviewed after training run and i don't see any problems, do you see any problems? very rapidly we got a go to continue. so, now we've worked through this, now we're starting to

accept the landing radar data and the program alarms are continuing intermittently through the descent and one of the things that steve comes up with that he says hey, it might be relate some of the display the crew is using. we tell the crew to back off the very high utilization on board displays on altitude and a altitude rate and we will provide read-ups for them during this period. so this team now is faced with -- we're going to the moon. this is not a simulation anymore. and it's faced with incredible problems, nobody had ever really anticipated. we thought it's whatever happens is going to be clear-cut but far from clear-cut, yet this team seems to be getting tighter, the more problems they got, the more effectively they are working. and this almost makes me happy because flight control team is

always best when they are working problems. all of a sudden they are now focused on something. from a back room loop and we're never able to identify who said it, a voice comes across and says "hey, this is almost like a simulation" and i sort of snicker, it's sort of a mental point where you mentally back off now, the intensity is still there, but all of a sudden you say hey, we licked these problems before, we're going to lick them again. and we continued down the process. now communications, we're about to the point where in power pitch-over, five minutes off the surface, communications have improved dramatically. so this worry that was in the background festering i might have to make a call because we didn't have adequate data is now out of the back of my mind, all we're doing is working these very focused activities. and again, the communications gets very tight, you can feel

the crew has got their landing point identified, they can see it, they can see if we continue this automatic gought maautomat land in a boulder field. neal took over input with a hand controller that redesignates a landing point. it's like a gun sight. it's or yenlted that if i don't do anything different right now this is where i'm going to land. basically he's redesignated, we see now as a result of this separation of space draft, we're going to land 2 1/2 miles i believe, from our designated landing site. and this is rocky boulder crater field area. now neil is working in this area, and all of a sudden you start becoming intensely aware of the clock. that says in most of the

training runs, we would have landed by now and we haven't landed. and it is going to get tight. and this is reinforced moments late when my propulsion guy, bob carlton says low level. we don't have a fuel gauge on the spacecraft. when you're in the round part of the tank at the bottom there is a sensor that says okay, if the crew is at a hover throttle setting, he's going to have two minutes to go. but now in the back room, this is where some of the magic in mission control comes in, the crew when they are flying or hovering is above the hover throttle setting and below. say 30%, might be up to 40, might be down to 20, they are throttling up and down here as they are scooting forward across the surface of the moon, much faster than we expected to move this low and i have a controller in the back room now looking at

the squigles on the analog recorder. there are three seconds above 30%, two seconds below, four above, he's mentally trying to integrate how many seconds we have remaining of fuel. he got good that the during training. he got to the point co nail it within about ten seconds. we put a ten second uncertainty. so whatever number he gave us, we are always on the safe side. then carlton calls 60 seconds, and the crew is still not on the surface of the moon. we have 60 seconds before we are going to land or we're going to abort. and charlie duke at this time says we better be pretty quiet right now. and this has been a mutually agreed on point, that our job is to get the crew close enough to attempt the landing. from then on the only calls we'll make is fuel remaining. we just told them it's 60 seconds, they're not down.

there between 60 and 30 seconds, we get a call the crew says kicking up dust. and about the time they say that, we get the call 30 seconds. so now we're down to 30 seconds remaining and all watching the clock, counting down and about the time the clock sits 17 seconds, it took a few seconds for me to recognize this, we heard "lunar contact" this is there is a probe under each one of the feet on the limb. when it touches the surface the crew will hit engine stop and will fall in the last few feet. you hear that lunar contact, and then i hear the crew going through ac -- it takes seconds to recognize that they are going through the engine shut down, we must be on the surface. and then the only thing that was out of normal throughout this

entire process that we had never seen in training, was the people behind the viewing room start cheering and clapping and stomping their feet, instructors in the room to the right of the room, again behind a glass wall, and they are all cheering, and you get this weird feeling, it's chilling that it soaks in through the room and i get it like my god, we're actually on the moon. and i can't even relish that thought because i have to get back to work. we have to make sure almost instantaneously whether the spacecraft is safe to leave on the surface of the moon or immediately lift off. we go through the t-1 stay, no-stay decisions so that within 60 seconds of getting on the moon i have to tell the crew it's safe to stay on the moon for about the next eight minutes. and i don't have any voice.

i'm clanked up. charlie duke is saying we hear tranquillity base here, eagle landed from armstrong, duke says you got a bunch of of us down here about ready to turn blue. and now i'm trying to get started in my t-1 stay no-stay, i'm clenched up. finally i wrap my arm on the console and break my pen and finally get going, get back on track again. and in a very cracked voice say okay, flight controllers, stand by for t-1 stay, no-stay and we go through this. make the stay no-stay decision, t-2 stay, no-stay, everybody is celebrating, we're focused to make sure it's safe to stay here. then we have to go in to a t-3 stay, no-stay, the final one after almost two hours that we're safe to be on the moon for an extended period of time.

in the meantime the pressure gas we use, the super critical helium had some -- this is something we didn't anticipate from the design, we got heat soak back from the engine, the tank, very cold gas is warming up rapidly, we don't know if it will explode, we don't know the relief valves will fire, we have to stay on our toes through this process, we're in crisis mode while everybody else is still celebrating until finally, we see the pressure start to decrease very rapidly, we believe the thing is venlted, the relief valves by design have done what they should have done. for the first time we can power down. it is only after we made our t-3 stay no-stay, we -- i won't say pat each other on the back, but say we did it. today we just landed on the moon! walking over i walked over to the press conference with doug ward, and all i wanted to do is

get back to mission control because we had made sort of a silly mission design decision and nobody believed it that once we get down on the surface we'll put the crew to sleep. we knew and the crew knew and i think the world knew that the crew wasn't going to go to sleep they wanted to get out on the surface and start the exploration. at the time i was doing my t-3 stay no-stay, i had two flight control teams, charles, trying to figure out who was in charge at that point. the adrenaline in the control room is building up you could feel it was palpable. it was like a heavy fog that it was so real. and the controllers got a break. during the loss of signal period, and when they came back in the room now, these guys were going to be here and there was only three options, we were going to land, we were going to crash or we were going to abort.

and the room goes through almost a ritual, we go through what we call battle-short condition. we physically block the circuit breakers in the building because now we would prefer to burn up the building rather than let a circuit inadvertently and lock the doors. i didn't realize until after the mission when a couple of the controllers talked how it was sinking in that they were now not going to get out of this room until we had gotten our job done, steve bales was probably one of the most vocal about it of saying you don't really know what you' are doing what you hae a 26-year-old kid in this room and bay slick write in the history books whatever happened today and you lock the doors and i realize i can't leave anymore. kant say hey i don't want to do this job. okay it's too much for me. and i felt i had to talk to my

people. and i called them up on the assistant flight director loop. that is secret loop we use only for debriefings, people can't hear it, just tied in the people in the room and we use it only when we debrief and we got heavy duty talking, somebody didn't do the right thing or somebody has to be chewed out, very private, very personal. i called the controllers up in the loop and i told them how proud i was of this team and the job we were chosen to do. i indicated that i believed that from the day we were all born we were destined to meet in this room this day, and at this moment, and that from now on, happened, we would remember this forever. and we then proceeded to give just a few coaching tips and this, and i said whatever happens, i will never second

guess any of your calls. now let's go land on the moon and terminated the loop and all of the people in the viewing room were probably wondering what we were talking about. that is a blank on the tapes. steve bale seven sas says how i the settling down process was not only to him but the people in the back room. since he was such an intense part of the job, steve was a very interesting guy. he was what i would say the prototype of the nerds or geeks that work in the computer world. he was the first guy working with data making absolutely irreversible time critical decisions. and about four years out of college, he had grown up in the business and steve you could feel his emotion, when we would pull the room and go through his go no-go's i didn't need an

intercom loop because steve you could feel this go, and it ricochetted, there was one times as we were actually almost to the surface, when we did our final go no-go, he was so go i actually had -- i almost chuckled that he was so intense in doing the job. but this is a group of young people who had signed up to do a job, it was generally the first of generation in their entire family who had ever gone to college. most of these people were midwesterners, their work ethic was spectacular. and i had no doubt that this team was capable of doing the job. >> they were young. >> they were young, their average age was 26 at the time. i have a picture it almost looks like some of the kids you saw flying the bombers in world war ii where they had the troops

outside, their b-17's or b-24's you feel so intensely proud of these people. in the after -- after we completed the t-3 stay, no-stay i made one final trip to the training area right in the corner of the room because i wanted to thank all of our instructors for the job they did in getting us ready and i was concerned because the before we started shift appearnd kous was there. when i went down, i found out in his haste to get in mission control the day of the lunar landing, my lead trainer rolled his car. he had fortunately emerged unscathed and without second thought of the car he continued to get a ride in here and reported to his console in mission control. walking over to the press conference with doug, it was

doug and i talked about the fact that not only had we landed on the moon but i almost felt cheated of the emotional content of that landing. where everybody else was out celebrating and to this day i just sit down there, in mission control you have to stay so intensely focused, that other than just a very brief tear, sort of a -- from the team at the time of the landing and realizing how close this thing was, we immediately had to get back to work, and it was -- i would have liked to have found some way to get some of the feelings of the emotions of the other people. i know chris craft and dr. gilruth were behind this, and it was marvelous time, a time of pride within the nation. it was a time of turning young

people loose, giving them their head, seeing what they can do, and for a very short period of time i think we united not only our country but the world, and it's marvelous what could be done by such an event. i wish we could recreate it do it again today. >> perhaps some time in the future, maybe on a mission to mars or something similar there might be such a moment again, do you think that might ever happen? >> i sure hope that my children and the youth of america can find this kind of a dream that we were given by president kennedy, because it was a dream we lived. we were so fortunate and proud to be americans and living and to be challenged by such a magnificent set of goals. i don't think anyone ever considered themselves overworked or underpaid. the pay was the job that we were doing, and it was an

unbelievable time and we were privileged and proud to be born and a part of that very violent decade. >> there were other missions still to be flown, gene. tremendously important in your life as well. let's not leave apollo 11 until i'm convinced you said what you wanted to say about it. >> i think the final thing i saw neil armstrong, we had celebrations and all of this kind of stuff, but a bit about neil armstrong. all through the preparation, for the mission, i was absolutely amazed how quiet, how calm he was. we would go through a debriefings, and generally buzz would do most of the speaking. he would take most of the notes. and the quiet, absolutely

superbly confident assurance neil had also was in retrospect was pretty inspirational itself. here's a guy who knew he was destined to do a job. again i believe he believed that from the day he was born this was a job that he was singled out to do. i think every person whoever worked with neil had such a respect for the very quiet, confidence that he exuded, his incredibly professional demeanor, he was literally a man for all ages within mission control. i think every person today has that same respect, even it's increased. after the mission, the one time that i ever remember neil

talking, almost with boyish glee was he was sitting over in a corner i think over in the conference room, i think 9:30 in building 1, and we were just shooting the breeze. all of a sudden he just says "you know, i think this says a lot for american craftsmanship" because in those days american craftsmanship was in question. were we capable of building the high technologies that seemed to be coming from europe at the time. the european standards were the ones everyone was trying to emulate and there were questions whether we were capable of competing in the world of the '60s and '70s and neil proceeded to elaborate on his feel ings about american craftmanship