Charged. Its a special day, an auspicious day. Were honored to have with us a panel of four important engineers, my personal heros when i was growing up. I was only 14 when you did the miracle back in 1969. I tried very hard to get here and follow in your footsteps as quickly as i could. We have a panel thats going to talk about lunar module landing operations today. If you want to know what that is, theyll tell you about it as we go around. The panel is jack knight, bob nance, harold loden, and bill reeves. Ill have them to identify themselves, say a little bit about what they did, and then open it up a little bit for questions. By the way, since i didnt introduce myself, im john charles, the scientist in residence here. Id like to turn the microphone over to mr. Knight to talk a little bit about what you did here for apollo 11 and what brought you here in the first place, and your recollections of that important day. Okay. I was the son of an air force family. We were in various bases around the world. I went to Georgia Institute of technology and graduated in 1965. I came directly here to the manned Space Flight Center and was hired by the operations area. And in particular, the apollo systems group. At the time i arrived, apollo had been as a program in work, but we were flying the gemini and the gina vehicles. I was in the Environmental Control electrical control area. I was on in the ssr Staff Support room for that. And on all subsequent flights i was in the Mission Operation control room in positions we called telcomm or telmu depending on the flight. Thats apollo 9, 11, and everything with a lunar module on it. Ill pass to bob nance. [ applause ] good morning. This is a big day. I started this morning with a prayer just like 50 years ago. Lord, please help me not screw up today. My name is bob nance. In 1962, i heard president john kennedy tell the world that we were going to go to the moon by the end of that decade, and i wanted to be a part of that, and everything from then on went on. I also went to georgia tech, and i met astronaut john young there and through him ended up here at from georgia tech to then the manned spacecraft sooner in lunar module propulsion. I was so blessed that i got to absolutely live my dream of sitting on the consul as lunar module propulsion when we landed on the moon. I think well talk a lot about that later. [ applause ] well, good morning. My name is howell loden. A little bit about my background, i grew up in texas. Moved around a lot. My dad was a methodist preacher. I was in florida working on a Space Program in 1963 to 1964 which is the langley project and the manager of that was a good friend of mine. He said well, why dont you go to houston and mind the spacecraft center. My wife and i are from houston. I said that would be great. I got a job here. Went into the operations directory, and i was at the gemini gina systems. Back up just a second, im an electrical engineer by education from texas a m. Anyway, during apollo 11, i was a Flight Controller in the lunar module emc systems area, which that area comprises to the descent and ascent engines. The radars and the hardware for the primary and backup computer systems. And i flew all the Apollo Missions from remote site in australia, apollo 9 through 10, 11, 13, all the way through 17. I was in Mission Control for the lunar module. Specifically on apollo 11, i was the control guy on consul for the ascent from the moon. The descent was exciting. I was there sitting behind our good friend karlton who is no longer with us. Passed away a few months ago. I was a little hesitant as to whether we were going to make it or not when bob was calling out the fuel remaining because we didnt have a lot left, did we . But, you know, when i got on the ascent, we had problems too. I hear people say the ascent was more risky than the descent. I find that hard to believe. Anyway, thats my story and i pass it over to bill reeves. [ applause ] good morning. My name is bill leaves. This working . Okay. My name is bill reeves. I grew up in arkansas and went to oklahoma ou to get an Electrical Engineering degree and wound up in texas here as fast as i could. When it came to football season, i didnt have a chance growing up in arkansas and ou and texas. When i hired on in 1967, i hired on into the Flight Operations drek rat Flight Control vision. As a Flight Controller on the lunar module in the electrical power system group. We were in charge of all the Power Systems and Power Distribution systems of the lunar module, and we also were in charge of the pyrotechnic systems. I had gotten here right after the apollo 1 fire which happened in january, so the program was in a delay while they figured out what had happened and redesigned and got back flying again, which turned out to give me the time i needed to get on board and was lucky enough to be in position when we started flying the lunar module. And so i was in the Staff Support room which is the support rooms are the rooms that support the main control room, and were the people that made the people in the main room look good. Absolutely. When you see the control center, when you go over and see the control center, when you see it on movies and everything, thats the tip of an extremely large iceberg. Theres a lot of people supporting that. Then i was i controlled on the lunar module throughout the entire Apollo Program for all the flights, and then after apollo was over, i flew backseat in airplanes for about eight years and then came back to operations for shuttle and was a Flight Controller in shuttle and later selected as a flight director for shuttle for 22 shuttle flights. And thats it. [ applause ] this is excellent. This is a very good thumbnail sketch of the lunar module activities for apollo. I am derelict in my duties. I forgot to tell you when were finished here, not now, but when were finished, please move quickly to the exits. Theres 200 people or more waiting for next presentation. With that out of the way, id like to ask a couple questions and then well open it up to questions. Id like to talk to the events of any mission, the powered decent and the powered ascent. Id like to talk with mr. Nance and talk about your recollections, my trepidations or confidence you had about the Lunar Landing, the powered propulsion down from lunar orbit and your thauoughts about the success, the inevitability of success or any sweaty palms you might have had. Yes. There were a lot of sweaty palms. That is a raw area, but let me try to give an overview. First of all, the lunar module descent starts shortly after the lunar module comes back around from the backside of the moon. The big surprise we had, and i think jack mentioned it in the previous session, that the data was so difficult that we were having trouble getting voice and data, in particular, high gain data, and as we started the descent, the engine fired, the first thing that happened was the data dropped out. Were sitting here giving no, no gos without any data. I know a lot of times you hear the landing and it sounds like everything went really, really smooth, but it was difficult at the beginning. The data would drop out. Wed get a little bit of data, and okay, everything is working good. We got our data back, and then we came to where the crew starts off with their head down so they can see the lunar surface. As they lean down, they rotate 180 degrees. When that happened, we lost data again. So at first it seemed are we really going to be able to land like this, but the great news was we started getting good data. Everything was looking good. We did hear that we were going to be long. We knew that from the very beginning. That had to do with a slight timing error, i think when the burn started but everything was going very, very smooth. One of my jobs, and i was likewise, i should have mentioned before, i was in charge of the ascent engine, descent engine and the reaction control. They are the thrusters that you see out on the lunar module out there. And a lot of people think wow, you just concentrated on the descent engine, but we had to have a visual pattern where you looked at the ascent and rcs. Youre burning an engine. The vehicle was shaking. You wanted to make sure if the descent engine wasnt working good, or if there was something bad happening. Even though you were concentrating on the descent, you constantly had to look at the other systems in the various propulsion systems. We start off burning at about 98 thrust, and then it drops, and it dropped at six minutes and 25 seconds. By then we had data. Everything was looking pretty good. Everything is just tracking. We had a few computer problems that you heard about, overload on the computer, the 12 02, and later. Everything was going good. One of the things we were always worried was our fuel margin on the first mission. It was running about 4. 5 propelment remaining. It was looking pretty good. When we heard attitude hold. Attitude hold is when the crew decides to take over themselves. Normally if they did nothing, the limb would come all the way downright to the moment just before landing. We already knew from simulations that we did with neil that he liked to take over early. But this is way earlier than we normally had ever seen. We knew that something was going on. One of my jobs was of course the propellant monitoring. Are we going to run out of fuel. We had sat in a meeting with neil and buzz and worked out what we were going to do. We first had an indication of low level. That is 5. 6 propelment remaining. We knew that. The goal was at that time you knew approximately how much time you had to cover. Well, to be honest, we got to 5. 6, they werent anywhere close to hovering because neil had realized he had to go down over top of a crater and get away from a Boulder Field to try to find some smooth ground to land the limb. We could see this happening, because the rcs, the little jets normally a descent engine has a bell. Small motions are made with it. When you see the rcs, that means hes overriding it and putting a command thats greater than the descent engine can move that fast. He had leaned over Going Forward to speed up. He stopped descending antewent up a little bit. Im sure that was to see where he could find a clear spot to land. Then the next call was 60 seconds. Thats sixtyseconds until you run out. Thats not 60 seconds until you have to make up your mind. The calls were 60, 30, and bin go. 60 seconds, 30 seconds, and bingo. H my original idea was 60, 30, and 15. And buzz was kind of talked and was pretty active and everything, and neil was always very quiet. And after quite a while of talking about this, all of a sudden neil says, i dont like abo abort, because im a pilot, and ill make that decision. And i said we know that you will, mr. Armstrong. And so he turned around and said can you all give out another name, please . I believe buzz was a navy pilot. He says well, an Aircraft Carrier when youre committed to land, you have to land no matter what, you say bingo. Neil said bingo works. It was 60, 30, bingo. The problem was, i never expected to call 30. In simulations we normally landed shortly after 60 seconds. Actually, i have a website. Its called robertnanceapollo11. Com. You can hear the ssr talking to control, and when i made the 60 second call out that was passed on, it was 60 seconds. When i made the 30second callout, it was more like 30 seconds, like i couldnt believe were here. The final number after a lot of analyzation was we landed with 22 seconds of fuel remaining. In addition to all of that, we had a problem with slosh, but thats another story for another day. But the interesting thing about this is that i think its really important that the public understand just how brave neil and buzz were. I mean, there were so many things. People dont realize they think, well, we sent other missions there. This was the very first time we had ever landed any spacecraft like this. All the other missions, as you heard about probably ranger and surveyor, landed directly. You couldnt do that with men on board. If anything happened, you had no way to stop it to start back up. The ascent wouldnt have enough propellant. We started in orbit and went down slowly. This is the first time. These computers have very little memory. This is the very first time that was ever done. And i just if you want to applaud somebody, you applaud neil and buzz. It was amazing. [ applause ] thank you, and skipping over an awful lot of interesting stuff id like to ask of mr. Loden about the powered ascent back to orbit. And if you could say just a few words about the unique characteristics of the ascent propulsion system. Okay. Lets see what i can come up with here. 50 years is a long time ago to remember all the details. As you remember during the descent, we had the alarms. It gave everybody a lot of concern. That was because the on board computer was being overloaded doing tasks that it really didnt need to be doing. It had to do with a radar trying to keep track of where the csm was and that kind of thing. So when it came to ascent, there was quite a few crew checklist changes that had to be made to take into account that potential problem again showing up possibly on ascent. We did not want that to happen. We wanted to keep those alarms from happening. So one of the changes were made that we just came up with a procedure to stow the antenna and to power off the rendezvous radar during ascent. There was another issue that i remember working when they came back in from their eva, buzz noted the Circuit Breaker panels there are Circuit Breaker panels on both sides of the lunar module on the inside. Its not like in a house where you flip it like a light switch. You push in and pull out. Well, these Circuit Breakers, most of them were already out, in the off position. And he noticed once he got back into the lunar module a Circuit Breaker was broken off. It happened to be the ascent engine arm Circuit Breaker. Okay . That doesnt mean were not going to be able to light the ascent engine. We have two ways of doing it. That one allowed the computer to automatically light it. We have a manual way to work around that with another push button. So they are trying to figure out what to do. As i understand it, he took out his trusty governmentissued blackball point pen, pushed it in. Okay . During the countdown at the right time for ascent. The other thing that occurred leading up to ascent on the ascent propulsion system, the fuel tanks we had two pressurization bottles to repressurize the fuel tanks to get the right pressure before it goes into the stress chamber. Normally when we did this in the simulations, they were operated valves to open the tanks to pressurize the fuel tanks. Normally we would always see both the tanks drop a couple psi or pcm counts is what we called it. That confirmed both valves opened it. When we did it on the lunar surface and they fired the valves to lift off, i only saw one bottle drop. I did not see the other bottle drop. It said theres a possibility weve only got one bottle of pressurization on the fuel tanks. Part of the normal procedure for ascent was assuming you had both bottles bottles. And we had a Correction System they had to both use the same propellant, and we could use the ascent engine propellant out of its tanks to also fire the altitude control system on the way up. But if we only had one bottle of pressurization, we had to terminate that interconnect. Its called ascent feed. So we had to alert the crew before liftoff that that was a possibility, that if we only had one bottle that pressurized, theyd have to terminate ascent feed on the way up. The countdown to t0 was done by the computer. The procedure also called for shortly after takeoff, they were to hit an engine fire override button which circumvented the command coming out of the computer just in case the computer on command went away for some reason the engine would stay on. So at lift off a few seconds after liftoff, i told the flight, weve got both bottles. I saw the other bottle starting to drop in pressure. I was very relieved about that. And to tell them, you know, continue on with ascent feed. And from then on, and i noticed that they had not hit the engine fire override either. The second way of keeping the engine on. So finally about halfway up, they finally energized the backup route for keeping the engine on. Those were the things that occurred for me during the ascent, and as far as the ascent engine, you know, it was about a 3500 pound thrust engine. Not very big. About four foot tall, about three foot in diameter. No big deal. The ascent stage was about 11,000 pounds. It did it job very well. If youll notice on the films of ascent when were looking at the window, you see it kind of rocking back and forth. Thats just in the dead band of the altitude control system. Thats what the altitude control thrusters are keeping it within that. The ascent engine was not givable like the descent engine. Once we got back on orbit, they docked with command Service Module. Got back in to command Service Module and discarded our eagle which impacted on the moon after they left the moon. It was a very good engine. Very reliable engine. It did its job. Thats the part i was very grateful to be a part of such a great event. Thank you. Before we leave that topic, i want to drill down on one point. That is how many test firings did thes ascent engine have before the flight . Thats a question i do not know the answer to. I would assume that it had gone through a lot of tests and firings as well as probably some in vacuum chambers as well. Start kind of things. Both the descent and ascent engines were thoroughly checked out before. The descent engine with the throttle capability was something a new capability wed never had on a spacecraft before. The people that put these machines together were very dedicated. Thats a part of the iceberg that bill was talking about a while ago. The people that built these spacecraft, and the components that went into those spacecraft, those are the ones that made it happen. And