female activists and the 1960's civil rights movement. >> while women were instrumental in helping to put the marches together, the event was purely dominated i men. sunday, the global significance of the declaration of independence during and after the american revolution. -- many of the made their way to columbia, venezuela and ecuador. this half-century known to scholars as the age of revolution. >> at 6:00 p.m., eyewitness account from inside the white house during the apollo 11 lunar landing. >> we really staked ourselves into the cabinet room. windowsd see that the were dark into nighttime. at 4:15r module landed

p.m. and the astronauts did not walk until later. ,> next on american history tv four former apollo era flight controllers this bus the lunar operations.ng this panel was part of an event hosted by space center houston to mark apollo 11's 50th anniversary. >> good morning everybody and welcome to the 50th anniversary of the apollo moon landing. i will say that periodically throughout the day so that people will applaud. you can here that atmosphere is charged and the dingling in the

background. usare honored to have with today a panel of important engineers. 14 when you were in the miracle in 1969. i tried to get here as quickly as i could. we have a panel that will talk about lunar module landing operations. knight,l here is jack bob metz, hal loden, and bill reeves. instead of me going on about them i will ask them to identify themselves, say a little bit about what they did and then open it for questions. my name is john charles. i would like to turn the microphone over to mr. knight. it's to talk about what you did

here for apollo 11, what brought you here in the first place and your recollection of that important day. an air was the son of force family. he georgia institute of technology and graduated in 1965. i came directly to the manned , in particular the apollo systems group. at the time i arrived, apollo had been a program in work, but we were flying the gemini and the gina vehicles. i was in the environmental control, electrical power area. in every lunar flight, including the unmanned one. i was in the ssr staff support

room for that. and on all subsequent flights i was in the operational control room, which recalled telcom or telview, depending on the flight. 11 which hadapollo the lunar module on it. now i will pass it to bob nance. bob: good morning. this is a big day. started this morning with a prayer just like 50 years ago. lord, help me not screw up today. [laughter] 50 years ago i heard president kennedy tell america we were going to go to the moon by the end of that decade. i wanted to be part of that. i also went to georgia tech.

i met asked for not bill young there. from there i ended up here in lunar module propulsion. was so blessed that i got to live my dream of sitting on the console of lunar module propulsion when we landed on the moon. i think we will talk about that later. hal: good morning. al loden.s ho a memphisthe son of preacher. 1964.ed -- a good friend of mine said go to

houston for the spacecraft center. i said my wife is from houston, that would be good. i got a job at msc, at the time. i went to the operations directorate. that was the gemini-gina systems. i am an electrical engineer from texas a&m. [cheers] hal: [laughter] i was a flight controller in the lunar module gnc systems. that area comprises of the dissent engines. primaryhardware for the and backup computer systems. i flew the apollo missions from glen 1 in australia for that. apollo 9 through 17.

specifically, on apollo 11, i was the main control guy on the console for the asset on the moon. descentent was -- the was exciting. i was there with -- who is no longer with us. he passed away a couple months ago. i was hesitant as to whether or not we would make it when bob was calling out the fuel remaining. we didn't have a lot left. ,hen we got to the ascent we had problems too. i have heard people say that the ascent -- that the was more dangerous.

i find that hard to believe. anyway, that's my story. i'll pass it to bill reeves. l: my name is bill reeves. i grew up in arkansas and went to oklahoma to get an electrical engineering degree and went to texas as fast as i could. in football season, i didn't have a chance growing up in arkansas. in 1967, ihired on was hired on as the flight controller operations director. in charge of all of the power systems and the power distribution systems. we were also in charge of the pyrotechnic systems, the that separateces

the stages and open valves and deploy the landing gear. i had gotten here right after the apollo 1 fire in january. delay whilewas in a they figured out what had happened and redesigned. it turned out to give me the time i needed to get on board. i was lucky enough to be in position when we started flying the lunar module. i was in the staff support room. the support rooms are the rooms that support the main control room. there the people who make people in the main room look good. [laughter] center, see the control when you see it on the movies, that is the tip of an extremely large iceberg.

there are a lot of people supporting that. controller on the lunar module throughout the entire program for all of the flights. was over, i flew back seat for nasa for about eight years. i came back for the shuttle and was flight controller on the shuttle and was elected as flight director for 22 shuttle flights. that's it. it's. [applause] john: this is excellent. a good thumbnail sketch of the lunar activities for apollo. i am derelict in my moderator duties. when we are finished here, please move quickly to the exits. there are 200 more people outside waiting for the next presentation.

i would like to ask a couple of questions and we will open it up for q&a. two lunar module propulsion events, the descent and the ascent. i would like to talk about any trepidations you had about the lunar landings. your recollections -- your recollections and thoughts. thoughts. about the inevitability of success or any sweaty palms you might have had. bob: there were many sweaty palms. one was when it went around the backside of the moon. the first one was that the data was so difficult that we were

having trouble getting voice and data, high gain data. d we started the escent, the data dropped out. we were giving go's and no-go's without data. you often hear about the landing and it seems like everything went smooth but it was difficult at the landing. yaw, where the crew starts with their head down so they can see the surface. degrees. yaw 180 , it seemshappened like are we really going to be able to land like this. but then we started getting data and everything was looking good. we did hear that we would be long. that had to do with a slight

timing error. everything was going smoothly. one of my jobs --i should have mentioned before, i was in charge of the ascent engine, theent engine, and thrusters for control. a lot of people think you are just concentrating on the descent engine, but we had to have a visual pattern because you are burning an engine. that if to make sure the descent engine is working good -- maybe it is springing a leak. you had to constantly look at the other systems. aboutrted off burning at dropped.then it

we had data and everything was looking good. everything was tracking. everything seems to settle down. everything was going good. one of the things that we were always worried about was that our fuel margin on this mission about 4.5% propellant remaining. then we heard attitude hold. that is when the crew decides to take over themselves. normally if they did nothing, come all the way down to the moment before landing. we already knew with simulations that neil liked to take over early, but this was earlier than we had seen. one of my jobs was the propellant monitoring.

are we going to run out of fuel? we had a meeting with neil and buzz and worked out what we would do. we first had an indication of low-level which is 6.5% remaining. the goal was that you know how much time at that point you have to hover. what we got to 4.5% and they were not close to hovering. neil realized he had to go over the top of a crater and to get away from a boulder field to try to find smooth ground. we could see this happening because the rcs, those jets, enginey a descent has a bell. that means he is overwriting it putting in a command greater than the descent engine can move. he had leaned over to speed up. when he stopped descending, he

leaned down and went up a little bit. i'm sure that was to see whether he could find a clear spot. the next one was 60 seconds. that is 60 seconds until you run out. 0, andlls were 60, 3 bingo. 60 seconds, 30 seconds, and bingo. 60, 30, 1l idea was 5. everything.ive in neil was always very quiet. after talking about this, all of a sudden neil said, i don't like abort. i'm a pilot, i'll make that decision. i said, we know that you will, mr. armstrong. he said, can you give that another name?

i believe buzz was a navy pilot. he said on an aircraft carrier and you are committed to land and you have to land no matter what, you say bingo. neil said, bingo works. the problem with that was i never expected to call 30. in simulations we usually landed shortly after 60 seconds. i have a website, robertnance apollo11.com. i have all of those tapes. you can hear the ss are talking talkingol -- the ssr to control. ien i made the 62nd call out, 60-second call out, it was normal. when i got to 30, it was like i couldn't believe it.

we finally landed with 22 seconds of fuel remaining. the interesting thing about this, it's really important that the public understand just how brave neil and buzz were. there were so many things. time we the very first had ever landed any spacecraft like this. all of the other missions you , therobably heard about ranger, the surveyor, they landed directly. if anything happened, you didn't have enough to start -- to stop it to start back up. so we started it by going down slowly. these computers had very little memory. this was the first time that was ever done. if you want to applaud somebody, applaud neil and buzz.

it was amazing. [applause] john: skipping over a lot of interesting stuff. i would like to ask mr. loden about the powered ascent back to orbit. tell us about the unique characteristics of the ascent propulsion system. let's see what i can come up with here. 12:ng descent, we had those that gave01 alarms everyone concern. that's because the onboard computer was being overloaded with tasks it did not need to be doing. it had to do with a rendezvous with the radar.

ascent, thereo was quite a few crew checklist changes that had to be made to take into account that potential problem again showing up on ascent. we want to keep those alarms from happening. made, wechanges were came up with a procedure to stall the rendezvous radar antenna and power it off during ascent. there was another issue that i remember working. when they came back in from the the circuitted breaker panels on both sides of the lunar module, and they are not like the ones you have at your house where you flick it like a light switch.

he's are the ones where you push arend pull out -- these circuit breakers where you push in and pull out. most of them are in the off position. he noticed that a circuit breaker was broken off. ascentened to be the engine arm circuit breaker. that doesn't mean we are not going be -- going to be able to light this engine. that when allowed the computer to automatically light it. we were trying. pen out his black ballpoint and pushed it in during the countdown at the right time for ascent. the other thing leading up to ascent, on the ascent propulsion

hadem, on the fuel tanks we two pressurization models for redundancies to pressurize the fuel tanks. you have to get everything to the right pressure before it goes to the stress chamber. --the stipulations simulations, the fire was enough to power the fuel tanks. we would always see both of psi, tanks drop a couple or pcm counts as we called it. when it came time to do it on the lunar surface, and they fired the valves to pressurize the asset engines, i only saw one auto drop -- one bottle drop. which raised the possibility we only had one bottle of pressurization on the fuel tanks. the normal procedure for ascent was assuming he had both bottles.

ascent engine and the rear thrusters. they had to both use the same propellant. -- ascentse the asset engine propellant. if we only had one bottle of pressurization, we had to terminate that. we had to alert the crew before liftoff that it was a possibility. we only had one bottle that would pressurize. to zero was done by the computer. calls forure also shortly after takeoff, they would hit this override button, which circumvented the command coming out of the computer, just in case the computer went away for some reason.

told flight, we have both bottles. very relieved about that. want to continue on with the ascent feed. i noticed that they had not hit the engine fire override, the second way to keep the engine on. they finally up, energized the backup route for keeping the engine on. those were the things that occurred for me during the ascent. it wasn't very big, about four feet tall. weighedscent stage, it about 10,000 pounds. it did its job very well.

up theice when you are window on the films you see it rocking back and forth. the is the dead man on altitude control system. those thrusters are keeping that in that dead man. the ascent engine was not give a ball like the descent engine was. once we got back to orbit, they docked with the manned service matt -- service module. we discarded the eagle which impacted on the moon after they left the moon. a very reliable engine. i was grateful to be part of such a great event. thank you. john: before relieve the topic, how many test firings to the

ascent engine have before the flight? that is a question i don't know the answer to. it had a lot of test and firings, as well as some in the backup chambers as well. ascente descent and the engines were thoroughly checked out. the descent engine with the , that wasapability something we had never had on a spacecraft before. the people who put these machines together were very dedicated. the components that went into those spacecraft were the ones who got it done. john: that wasn't a gotcha

question. there is a particular aspect i would like you to know about. this is not my area, but it was part of the development process when they felt there was an area that was risky they would hire two contractors to work on the ascent engine. finally you got to the point where one of them was more successful and then nasa said you are it. -- ascentild as sent engines. the injector was such that erosion during the firing was so bad that they could only fire it wants. bait -- only fire it once. they did a lot of testing. wasr that no ascent engine ever testfired before it was used for lunch. the descent engine was probably different. it was a very -- it is a simple

engine. all you had to do was get them to mix. testing it would work at least once. that was all that it had to work. hal: that is a good point that i had not remembered. the first time we lit that sucker was on the lunar surface. that is pretty risky when you think about it. >> i was in a meeting for our simulations. i remember neil saying why didn't we just put a big lever on the side. the engine looks like a seat in the middle of the lunar module. he said why didn't we put a big

handle on it where you turn it and it starts. ? not necessarily have worked for an abort state during the power off sequence. he had another thing. bob mentioned the calm. around --amb came am came around, they had to point through the landing gear. was added things that late in the game was the deflectors on the descent stage that were right underneath the down firing thrusters. they werelighted --

added late because thermal there might be enough erosion that it would damage them on the descent stage. because it was late in the game, those deflectors were never included in the modeling of antenna pointing, and getting good communications. so the comm guys, i'm pretty sure that's what happened. when you started the descent engine, as you were coming around, the and tenant was trying to point through one or more of those deflectors. you had this until you moved the vehicle a little bit and appointed the antenna. because neil wanted to be looking down at the moon, you had this other maneuver he was talking about after he started the descent engine. he ran it awhile and you had to yaw it over, so when it pitched

forward, armstrong and buzz would be able to see where they were going. flights, they didn't need to be looking down. they could get into their anticipated position, and then all they would have to do is pitch forward. you would not have to have a yaw maneuver. that is probably why we ended up with comm problems, until they had pitched forward enough across the surface that the antenna got good enough comm with the ground. hal: this was the first lunar module that had those reflectors installed. when the lunar module would fire, it would impinge on the descent stage.

impingement maximum of 15 seconds on the descent stage then we would have to terminate the flight. .hese eliminated that factor if weld have avoided it did not have those stressors and reflectors on their. re. there were a lot of great neil armstrong sayings throughout this thing. ,ne of my favorite stories people remember things differently but this is the way that i remember it, late in the with the landing radar, there had been some problems in testing.

there was a lot of concern about whether it was going to be giving them the data that they needed. they had done a lot of testing on it. we were in a flight rule meeting. i remember it like it was yesterday. it was a large room with a lot of people in it. it was a long and white table. neil was sitting at the end of the table. there was a discussion about developing a flight rule that said if the computer was not accepting landing radar data by x altitude, then it would be an abort. they targeted for three hours and finally gene says, we have talked about this long enough. that's the rule. if the computer is not accepting x altitude, it's

an abort. everyone was nodding their heads and neil was at the end of the table shaking his head. all of a sudden kranz saw him and said, you don't agree with this? neil said, you must think i'm going to land with the window shades down. [laughter] jack: i think that is the only mission rule meeting that i remember. hal: i don't remember them there was nothing but smoke. john: we have time for a few questions from the audience. john: how far downrange to the land from the intended site?

bob: it was about 3.7 miles. i was looking all of this up in case you asked. if yout on the website want to look up that kind of stuff. >> [inaudible] john: compared to the smartphone, how much computing power did we have back then? one picture on your cell phone has more bits in it than that computer on the lunar module. >> [inaudible] john: why did the lunar module carry jumper cables? did you know that it carried jumper cables?

hal: i guess we had diehard batteries on board but we didn't need them. bill: there weren't any jumper cables but there were some cables that went between the some heaters.o we powered some heaters so you wouldn't use any of the power out of the batteries that you needed for the lunar module on the lunar surface. those are the only cables that i'm aware of. the those cables, they kept heaters going on our inertia measurement unit. where you were in space. be verybles came to important on apollo 13.

batteryable to use lem power to recharge the reentry batteries on the command modules so they could reenter safety. >> [inaudible] why was the landers so far off the lunar surface when they landed? with the landing gear the original intent is that it would automatically land. what was going to happen was that when these probes that were about four-feet tall were to hit, it would shut the engine off and it would drop. we learned quickly in simulation that that was not what neil had in mind. as a pilot i would not want to have done that either. landings wereollo anywhere near as strong, but if the engine had quit at 10 feet, the lamb was -- the lem was

designed to survive that fall. john: survived by stroking the landing. bob: it had a honeycomb that would compress. you did not want the lander to stop it compressing. bill: there was no spring or anything in the landing gear. it was a honeycomb aluminum structure inside the tube. it was a one-shot deal. it would crush, and the strut would compress. it dided so light that not compress very far. that is why the latter was as hyatt -- ladder was as high as it was. >> [inaudible] john: who was responsible for picking and packaging and mounting the u.s. flag. the top is straight because of the support arm. what about the bottom?

hal: my recollection of that is that was designed by our tech services division here headed by john cocker. they came up with the concept of unfurling the flag with the support at the top and letting gravity.n lunar that was compressed into a small package to afford us the volume. we fly one in our control center just like that. the controlad in center is now on the moon. on some mission they took it from the control center and fluid to the moon. on the training vehicles, didn't armstrong typically land with 20 to 30 -- john: did armstrong always have an equivalent of excess fuel at

the landing? bill: one of them he didn't land. he ejected out of it. [laughter] bob: i think that is right. the normal landings always had four -- 4% or 5% remaining. >> [inaudible] john: let me report -- repeat the question first. the question was it is called mission control but who is actually in control? is it the people on the ground

or in the spacecraft? bill: control covers a lot of ground. control could manually a lot of things within the vehicle. ish the flight ops constantly doing is keeping and any the flight plan changes to the activities that were going to do, and any changes to procedures and working on any anomalies that might occur with the spacecraft. it is a joint effort between the crew and the ground. you are constantly going back and forth. in those days we did not have a lot of the command capability that we have today. you would put together procedures and the crew would work through the switches. today a lot of that is done by command from the ground. hal: do you mean who is an

ultimate command of making a decision? i would like to know how much control was on either end. ground -- jack: the ground computer complex did almost all of the trajectory calculations and sent up a set of numbers to the spacecraft which they entered into their computers. without the ground they would not have had enough computational power to do the mission. once you got to descent, there was nothing the ground could do if the crew wanted to keep going. if the ground called and abort -- an abort, there is a good chance they would abort because they would assume the ground saw something that they could not see. control, it is the flight director who makes a timed critical decision, that

makes those decisions based on his team on the ground. decision comes from the flight director and goes directly to the crew. hal: there are three consoles that have the abort switch on it . that was almost always associated with the launch vehicle. john: we have time for one last question. >> [inaudible] notherhat is a whole seminar. can somebody answer that and five words? jack: my guess would have been the 12:02 alarm.

it was unexpected. we had done it in sims, but nobody really expected it would happen. because of the simulations, it set up a situation. we had done a bunch of research to figure out what alarms would be a real problem and which not. list that head a worked out with m.i.t. who did all of the programming on this thing. >> [inaudible] jack: again, unexpected. during the simulations, he had punched out. thosewe had all discussions and reviews, he decided it was ok. john: that points out that the real unsung heroes, and there are so many all over the country, but the simulations guys were amazing. they had to not only learn the

systems, and how they looked at our procedures, but to find errors. in the last simcoe, the 1201 came up. that is a perfect example of the teamwork that it took to pull this off. hal: another way to describe the simulations people, they were very devious. [laughter] john: on that note, thank you for being here and thank you to these panelists. [applause] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2019] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> this is american history tv, covering history c-span style with interviews with authors and historians. 48 hours every weekend, only on c-span 3.

tour takesan cities american history tv on the road to feature the history of cities across america. here is the recent program. things that people really love about cherries is the taste. color that with the red and it's a fruit that people fall in love with. we are looking at cherries in various stages of development. these are the blossoms that are going to fall off. them, thated inside is with the cherry looks like in its early libation. stage.erry is in a swell we are about a