mercury and gemini programs. the discipline. because once we failed into gemini four we got into a series of arguments between crew and ground and how the job was to be done, it carried over into the mission. morale. believing so strongly in your mission, your team and your success that you literally cause the right things to happen. tough and competent came out of the apollo fire where basically we weren't tough enough, we didn't step up to our responsibilities. we have to remember in the business we're in, we're always accountable for what we do or what we fail to do. competent we can never stop learning. basically i sketched out to bob the elements that i wanted to be representative of the emblem of mission control and he agreed to go do this. i then came back in, launched the crew off the surface, and in lunar orbit -- because we were going to continue in lunar orbit for some period of time -- both griffin and myself handed over to the next generation of flight directors. i handed over my responsibility to chuck lewis becaus

bears mention that much of the hardware on the early generation space systems, including mercury, geminints, but with slide rules. and the computers on board the mercury, the gemini and the apollo capsules were very rudimentary by today's standards. several weeks ago and a hearing before the house science committee, neil armstrong made this point by holding up his cell phone and testifying that it had far more capability than the computer that guided the apollo 11 capsule. it's impossible to fully grasp the discoveries and technologies that have sprung from our nation's space flight program. and the innovations and products they spawned. so too it's challenging to measure the effect our space programs had on america's place in the community of nations and on our international prestige. but i can tell you we wouldn't be discussing these outcomes today were it not for john glenn, neil armstrong, mike collins, and buzz aldrin, and their wives and families who support and sacrifices enabled the success of these missions. congratulations to all of these. your exploits have become integral to

my god, we had done that as early as the gemini program. there wasn't any technical aspect of doing this and i could not believe that we were giving up and an extended mission in the sky lab for a purely political set of objectives. but again, i've never been a politician so i did not really focus -- maybe as well as i should -- upon this -- the broader set of political objectives. because there has to be many constituencies in space. there are political, technical, they're what i would say is our keep america working. there is a variety. i look at the one as most important, however, as giving young people a place to go, young people a dream to have, to hold on to and to move into the future. that to me is most important legacy of space and if it takes a political set of objectives to do it, so be it. >> you are not too happy with the decision then to end our first space station, even that space station of course introduced a whole new philosophy, didn't it? now you are looking at the difference between a mission and this thing that stays u

that actually started, actually, in the gemini program, because in gemini, we had continued adding in the small pieces so that by the time we got to apollo, we were approaching maturity in this business of crisis management. >> you were welding a team together that would stand you in good stead during later flights, weren't you? here in mission control, weren't you? in this room filled with memories for you, gene, and i'm sure it is, there must be a few that perhaps might be good to tell. do you remember anything in particular, any anecdote that's happened on the way to flying to the moon? >> well, we were speaking of apollo 9, and one of the responsibilities -- jobs of the flight director is to not get ahead of his people. in fact, don't make decisions that they should be making. that's essential, really, for two reasons. one, you want to build the team and you want to give these people the ultimate responsibility to provide you the information so that you can assemble it together and pick the course of the mission. in the training process, the trajectory officer is called the flight

>> mercury wasn't as complicated, so to speak, as later on gemini and apollo. first thing before you launch it, first you go through the steps a little bit -- you put your spacecraft on top of the rocket. okay? now we have to hook up all the connectors that interface with the rocket itself. then you have to prove that all the wiring and all the circuits in there work. then each system engineer wants to make sure his system is still working, be it communication system, oxygen system, environmental control system. the guidance system is on but each one needs to test it. now the problem is each one wants to do it at the same time. it doesn't work. you now have to go ahead and play traffic cop and say, okay, can you do your job in the time slot after we have powered up and you can do yours at this time. however, i need these people to monitor this. see, that's where you need to prepare everything. then before launch you get -- mercury wasn't that critical because they didn't have much in the way of food provisioning or things like that but you had to load the oxyge

a.s we had ever done since the gemini program. anyway, this was -- i looked forward -- pete frank and i who was flight director. we basically sat 12-hour shifts in mission control every day for a year, and we were absolutely delighted when a flight director would call for us to sit down at the console and maybe take a shift -- there was one time that was really anecdotal. at the end of the first sky lab mission, several flight directors went to receive awards in huntsville. you need a flight director on shift here. myself and carried the time frame while they were off getting their rewards. flight directors came back from the awards, took a look at what we had done from the standpoint of flight planning, threw it all out and started from scratch on that day. the other thing that was neat, not really something, chuck lewis had been suffering from stomach problems all through the final mission until finally he required emergency surgery. so two weeks prior to the end of the mission i was recalled back to my flight director duties an

from mercury and gemini, their actions unfolded that the will of a nation for the greater achievement of human kind. we are challenged to reach for new heights and plan an ambitious mission to mars. as we called on the four individuals we honor today to carry out our early achievements in space, we now call on a new generation of explorers to go where we have never gone before. i want to honor those who contributed to the incredible success of the mercury, gemini and apollo programs and that have followed and has yet to come. i also want to thank congress. our nation is a better place because of more than a half century of strong bipartisan support for nasa's work. five members of the most recent class of 2009 are with us today to pay tribute to the congressional gold medal honorees and build on their accomplishments to make similar lasting contributions to our nation's space program. this new group of astronauts stands on the shoulders of the giants we recognize and honor here today and they will redefine space exploration in the years to come and continue to honor the legacy of john

same thing went on with gemini. that was my job to go ahead and coordinate all these efforts. so in the beginning then i worked with the -- i interface with dr. davis. we were doing something that hasn't been done before. that was essentially my job to shepherd the spacecraft through that and i was going all the way through launch. now once the thing lifted off, that was the end of my responsibilities and i didn't have anything to do with it. and the chachb command actually is that i reported strictly to the test conductor.in of comman actually is that i reported strictly to the test conductor. it was a little bit interesting in that somewhere in the chain i would change allegiance. in the preliminary stages each test has their own conduct you are, mike mcdonnell, north america had the capsule, the first stage of the test conductor, at then at some point they merge to the cvts -- or nasa test director. then i would report to nasa test director. and the unique position was that even through all this time, i did have the ability to stop the count if i saw something wrong, but i

in the gemini, we now got to the point where there was a very definite relationship between crew and ground. we had to provide the information for the maneuvers that the crew would perform or during a rendezvous we had various abort modes during powered flight. we had to control the target spacecraft, the aegean form. so now all of the sudden there is starting a convergence between crew and ground. and also we had acquired much more -- a greater insight into the space systems that we were flying. for a change, we had more data than was being displayed to the crewmember. but again, this was a process of now of maybe going from the baby steps we were taking in mercury now to the point where we were in our adolescence. capable of getting an awful lot done, but periodically going off in tangents. one of these tangents was an associate with extra vehicular operations. we just kept blundering and blundering and blundering until finally after so many had failed, evas, we had to go back in and say what is it we're doing wrong. so then we moved from that phase, okay, into apollo, and were imm

john aaron, a new controller, had joined us in the "gemini" program, was given the responsibility to sit on top of all consumables, all resources available on both spacecrafts. and john aaron had absolute veto authority over any checklist entry. so they were almost welded at the hips with aaron being the guy who had the veto authority. a third one -- it was obvious we needed -- was some guy to figure out how to turn the lifeboat into a survival vehicle. bill peters, one of my limb controllers, got that. basically these were the three key individuals and i told these three people to look around the room and anybody that they didn't think they needed for the next few hours to send them back to their consoles and get them out of there so we could focus the smaller team. we then did a blackboard exercise that very quickly listed the majority of the issues that had to be worked and who would work them. john aaron who was the power guy came and said, gene, one of the things we got to do is we got to get powered down immediately. i said, john, i'll work on this but we got to figure out new

sent to the salon and pendant and this is so bowls over the top unless it and like them rings unlike gemini and as well me and pull this off in my compiled a diamonds moon the object of this entire top of this is nothing but diamonds and sell but that year joel and those are big big deal, not once has a little bit of a puff to it will of the dimension that this has in this is lovely there's myograph and put the beads down and drink and put the beads away and ring unease over this and indeed some and then not our be its and 40841 is yet a number on this so we need me to be parodied myograph show and i'm so excited and on and now it is on shawn and looks gorgeous purple and and that he had been mardi gras today and am and remind and yes does wonderful small to large stones and and of this screen diamond 4093644 under for under dollars and the noise and it is when diamonds this ring is not some foreign dollars and thank you chukkers policy in a couple days and oakland where we have serta coming up for a perfect nicely. hist whom welcome in every one and so excited for you to be aired today if

converted to islam in the seventeenth century but they were never designed us about it mixed with geminis and the magic customs they could use a version of islam has long been more of a moral code then a religious doctrine. it helped shape a society where women are just as sacked if and ambitious as men and when religiosity when tandem hand with good education but that is starting to change. after the collapse of the soviet union kurdistan has seen a very fast growth of. some of it is the message driven poverty poor education corruption trust of authorities all of that is prodding people towards religion but much of it is also driven from abroad with countries like pakistan your saudi arabia kuwait a very generous when it comes to building mosques here. islam is on the rise across all of central asia but only in kurdistan have there the regions adopted an open door policy. these are followers of the to believe. a group of islamic missionaries originated from pakistan its members have come up in many terrorism investigations and as a result the group was labeled extremist by many european

kranz worked on mercury, gemini and apoll jie space missions and was fight director when the apollo astronauts landed on the moon. he and his team played a significant role in guiding three astronauts back to earth after an explosion on the spacecra spacecraft. this is part two of an oral history interview conducted for nasa's johnson space center. >> it is time to move on to apollo 12. i can remember pete conrad since you were talking about one great test pilot, another said to me, lord, those guys landed on the moon. what do i do for an encore. was there a similar feeling here at mission control? >> no, i think that they -- in fact it didn't take a second for the program office to ratchet up the complexity, objectives. once you land on the moon, what are you going to do to top it? i'm going to land next to a surveyor satellite on the moon that was put up there a couple of years ago. we're going to give them a verbal guidance update, they're going to enter into their computer which is going to alter their trajectory so they can land right there. and doggone, if they didn't do it! i think the

we were threatening their gemini over this issue thank you it was a remarkable gathering in the rose garden this morning because here with the head good industry and the president actually agreeing on something i'm pleased to announce that eight of the largest hand gun manufacturers now provide child safety devices with every new handgun they sell back in one thousand nine hundred seven there was legislation in the senate to mandate child safety locks on guns there was pretty much universal agreement in the industry that we ought to do this on our own get the credit for doing it we thank you mr president without having pledge. site of all regulatory mandates on the way we had to do it the n.r.a. came unglued after that announcement i sort of went from the guy who came from n.r.a. representing the industry to being an r a's public enemy number two. well we had really done was and several fundraisers for them i mean once we made the decision to include child safety locks it was no sense opposing something that's already a done deal. i don't think n.r.a. senior leadership like that too

we covered a lot of the beginning bases going back to the task group and early days of mercury and gemini. when we ended we were talking about apollo 9. you had said something about jim mcdibitt as the commander of that mission and i think that's a good point to pick up. what do you remember of apollo 9? >> well, there were many things, really. i think the principle change that we saw was the very long-term association we had with the crew preparing for flight. we were originally in the slot that the bormon crew took, we were shoved back in the schedule.

push them deep into recession like greece spain billions in foreign debt how do largely by gemini in france it's money which wouldn't be paid back less spain to leave the year as a schools without heating teachers without jobs came listeners and unemployment on the rise make for a bleak cold naysayers and as the country tips into a second recession and with more protests planned for later in the week seems like these could be set to become much more common on the streets this day so. they. stay with us here at r.t. still to come from politics to prison his career has been bruised by fist fights and drunken brawls but now ukraine's former interior minister faces more serious charges more just ahead. but first south korea and the u.s. have started a large scale joint naval drills despite north korea's threats to attack if provoked for p.r. nyang the exercises involving hundreds of thousands of troops are a silent declaration of war in two thousand and ten the north responded to drills from its neighbor with an artillery strike that killed four people and raised fears of a wider conflic

covered the american manned space program, interviews director gene kranz, who worked on "mercury," "geminiand "apollo". as lead flight director of the "apollo 13" mission, he and his team lplayed a significant role in guiding astronauts back to earth. this is part two of an interview conducted for nasa's johnson space center. >> it was time to move on to "apollo 12." i can remember pete con regard, since you were talking, let's talk about another, who said to me, those guys landed on the moon, what do i do for an encore? >> was there a similar feeling in mission control? >> no. i think, in fact, it didn't take a second for the program office to ratchet up the complexity of the objectives. once you landed on the moon, what are you going to do to top it? i'm going to land on the moon next to a surveyor satellite that was put up there a couple years. what we're going to do, at the time the crew is dedescending, we're going to give them an update to alter their trajectory so they can land there. and if they didn't do it. i think the entire "apollo 12" mission had this -- now for a change, i wa

y vÁmonos con gÉminis, les sale el balance, para que todo se balancee, ese balance en el amor, especialmenteza todo con la amistad, tener a esa persona pero que no sea solamente cama y sexo, y para escorpio, un compaÑero del alma llega a ti con fuerza y Éxito. y para sagitario, cuidar tu cuerpo que es como un templo, come saludable, ejercicio. para capricornio, te sale celebraciÓn, a gozar, ya tÚ sabes, juega, disfruta. para acuario, meditaciÓn momento de meditar, de decidir quÉ es lo que te conviene. y para piscis, mi prima, te salen encantos, usa esos encantos, esa fuerza para conquistar, donde llegues que llegue ese encanto primero. mi gente, eran mis predicciones amor para todos ustedes. >> gracias mi vida, oye, esta noche en el talismÁn se va a revelar un secreto de la malvada dorys, me puedes dar un adelanto de ese secreto? >> vamos a preguntarle a las cartas, pero vamos a dejarlo a que dorys te lo diga. que se aguanten! >> te mando un beso! si quieren saber un poco mÁs de esta telenovela lo Único que tienen que hacer es entrar a univisiÓn. un beso mi corazÓn, y ahora te invito a celeb

we were building the rockets for the next generation, the gemini program of flights. >> if you compareto today's mood, what do you make of this? >> there's the sense that space flight is routine. that could be hardly further from the truth. it's risky business for today. it requires real dedication and leadership to make sure our nation retains the leadership we've enjoyed for the last 50 years and i think we've seen in these last four years, a steady decline in our ability to do things in space. we have a space station with americans aboard right now but we can't get their replacements up there on our own rockets and if we continue on this trenld, we're certainly going to be a second class power in space. >> unbelievable to do the comparisons 50 years ago to today. it's always great to speak with you. former astronaut and author of "sky walking" thank you so much for being our guest. >> you're welcome. >> john glenn will join us live at 7:20 a.m. today. that's not john glenn in your picture there but he will be joining us. coming up on our show, president obama promising to cut the un