and griffin handed over to i believe it was phil shaffer at that time. and we then proceeded to sit in the viewing room for the remainder of the mission and watch our new flight directors now apollo, carry over into the skylab program. that was the ending of telephone program for us. >> it wasn't really the ending of the program for you though, because by now you had moved on into management and it was the end of your flight direction. >> yeah. >> but on the other hand, there were still flights to be flown and spacecraft to be worked with. you just mentioned a couple of them. skylab, for one. >> skylab was -- it was -- people say gene kranz, you really can't believe what you're saying. but skylab was as exciting to me as apollo ever was. this was -- skylab to me was a different type of focus. focus as a leader and focus as a team. where we had -- the apollo missions were all short, on the order of ten days or so. and it's one thing to hold a team together and do all the right things, keep the quality for ten days, even though it is a very intense. it is

so phil shaffer was given the responsibility to come up with techniques to check our spacecraft attitudes for maneuvers and those kind of things using only the sun, earth and moon and to continue to refine the techniques of aligning the navigation system on-board the lunar module once we did have to shut it down. i took my team offline and tried to figure out ways to cut down the return trip time because john aaron said there's no way we're going to make five days with the power in the lunar module. we got to cut it down to at least four days. maybe three and a half. so i now had the team split up and moving in several different directions. i had one team working power profiles. i had another group of people that was working navigation techniques. i had a third one that was integrating all the pieces we need. my team picked up the responsibility to figure out a data to -- way to cut a day off the return trip time and we set up formal tag-in ties. we set up working areas down in the control room proper. and it was amazing how literally presidents of corporations would respond to these 26,