headquarters people, the program managers, as well as chris kraft was concerned that if we would crash and not have enough data to figure out why we crashed, we'd be in jeopardy of 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've got enough data to continue. i thought this particular rule because they wanted some quantified, some numbers with this thing. i fought this all the way through the process building the rules, going through the reviews, the mission reviews, et cetera. i want a very simple one the flight director will determine whether sufficient data exists to continue the mission. i wanted it that simple that 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 into the mission rules that exact statement. the flight director will determine if sufficient data exists to continue. going back to the landing day now, this adequate information means voice information a

i have a picture of chris kraft leaning over the console talking to jerry griffin giving him exactlyhe same coaching. and it was we don't have to go to the moon today, young man. and this immediately relieved the political pressure to achieve the missions to the point where this team had only the technical issues to work. and in the business of mission control, business of spaceflight, what you got to do is you have to make your decisions based on the technical data and that's this team's job to do. and it is up to the people that sit in the consoles behind the flight director to take the political heat from whatever decision had to be made. and this is the kind of inspired leadership that we had in the program that was capable of stepping up to the plate and buffering the outside world from the technical decisions these guys had to make. >> i guess, in part, that's because people like kraft had the same experiences that you had, wouldn't you say? as a former flight director, he knew? >> i think kraft's name, christopher columbus, was entirely appropriate for this guy, because he was

chris, we're in deep shit. i think that sort of expressed it and chruggeenin. and again, kraft's business -- his experience in the flight control business and as flight director, he got back up to console. he didn't bother bothering me. he was trying to let me extricate myself from whatever problems were occurring in here. by this time, a call came down indicating they're venting something and we came to the conclusion we had some type of explosion on-board the spacecraft and our job now is to start an orderly evacuation from the command module into the lunar module. at the same time, i'm faced with a series of decisions that are all irreversible. at the time the explosion occurred, we're about 200,000 miles from earth, about 50,000 miles from the surface of the moon. we're entering the phase of the mission we use the term entering the lunar sphere of influence. this is where the moon's gravity is becoming much stronger than the earth's gravity and during this period for a very short time, you have two abort options. one which will take you around the north side of the moon and o

kraft wanted to power down even more. i had to tell him, chris, no, we're not going to power down completely until we get this passive thermal control. we had to invent a rotisserie-type maneuver to spin the spacecraft on its axis because the only energy we had was the sun. and it took quite a while to do this. the first attempt was unsuccessful and again we had kraft and others grousing, they thought they had the right take on things and thought we could solve this problem later and basically i was the guy in charge and said, no we're going to set up this ptc. there were emergencies, contingencies all the way through this process of returning to earth. there was no such thing as a free ride. we had to perform a couple of emergency maneuvers because our trajectory was flattening out. we didn't know why. we had to correct that. the crew was suffocating. we had to invent techniques of using the square -- chemical scrubbers we used for the air from a standpoint of the command module and be able to adapt those over to the lunar module. finally as we

it carries forward the strong leadership like chris kraft, deke slay on the, aaron cohen, own morse. basically if you look at how this device came into being, it is probably the most advanced technological space system that has ever been built. interestingly enough it was built by a generation of people who today just really don't receive the recognition that they should have for the commitment they made to america's, in fact the world's capabilities. the belief that the shuttle was the instrument that was built by the most gifted technologists, leaders and managers that ever existed within the space program. and i think this gift that they gave to the american public, the space business, is never fully recognized. it's the most fundamentally reliable system, space system, that has ever been built. it is a space system that has a broad range of missions. it's demonstrated itself fully capable by accomplishing every one of its design objectives. unfortunately it has not achieved the economies that were intended, but to a great extent these economies are not being achieved principally