Although there were problems on every mission we flew during the apollo program. If you could look at the entire report, it is a book about that thick. It is in the archives so you could get it through freedom of information. And as an appendix it lists the problems, we call them anomalies, some people call them funnies, that happened on the flights. And they listed them museum air cally by flight auditor and you ignore apollo 7 and 8, they only have one spacecraft, they didnt fly a landing aircraft. Apollo 13 had the second least number of problems of all of the flights. We almost aborted apollo 14 and apollo 16. They had pretty Serious Problems they were able to work around and allowed them to land. So that was the nature of the business. And as i said, the very theme of this movie that carried very well was the story of somebody in problem, with problems, with a challenge, challenges really to face. And showed a group of people, a team in this case of Mission Control and ourselves. And actually a lot a few more people, a lot more people than they could show in the movie. I criticized ron howard when i met hame after a special showing that he didnt depict some of the key people i thought might have been in the movie as characters and he told me in the movie you ome have so much time and you can only develop so many characters. You only have that much time. So, but any rate, it was a fairly large team at that day and age. The peak of the program. In about 1968, before we landed on the moon, there were over 400,000 people working on the apollo program. If you go down to the contractors, the subcontractors, down to the vendors making supplying piece parts even, we had contracts in every state in the United States except one of the dakotas. By the time we flew apollo 13 the program had started tailing off but we still have a quarter of a Million People on the program. A great interest. So at any rate, it showed this team coming together, working together with the right leadership to pull off this miracle if you will. It was not an accident because we had a process as i mentioned before and a place to work problems. When the flight director like gene crans, played by ed harris in this movie, when they give a go for launch they had behind him a total dedicated, motivated team. There was nothing else more important than the mission at hand. The theme had been trained through really hundreds even thousands of hours. And various training modes. But probably the more realistic for the flight condition is what we call integrated simulations. We had trainered, simulators at kennedy where we trained, Kennedy Space center. They were replicas of the capsule, of the Landing Craft, same geometry. We laid in couches. We cheated and had padding put in to make it more comfortable but we laid in these simulators. All of the instruments worked and the systems functioned and it gave you the readings just as if they were operating in the real vehicle. They could impart fairs. In fact the command module simulator could put in over 500 fair. What we call credible fairs. And at the same time the simulators were linked back to Mission Control where the controllers there would see on their scopes the replication of the systems we were looking at and how they were behaving as well as as well as the manifestation offers. They had a special group called sim soup by a dozen people that worked behind the scenes for each of our simulatation. And we could do entries other day and on orbitar lunar landings. So it was done by mission segments. But for each of those runs, they had evolved the scenario with certain fairs to be put in at a certain time that only they knew. And these people are very smart people. They knew the systems very well. And they were very devious people. And took great glee in making us look bad. Making Mission Control or us combined in trying to handle the situations look bad. And some of the sims we never gave up until we had to give up. So some of the sims went on a long time. The lewanor ashity prepared for landing simulation may last eight hours before we had to give up the ghost. Now in the ernie days whether i was working apollo 8 on that backup crew and apollo 11 the first time we landed, we were still learning so the simulations were useful to drudge up situations with fairs that we had actually go back to work and back through the Program Office and worry about changing software or changing our procedures to be able to handle that should it ever happen for real. So were still in a learning curve in the early part of the program. But at any rate, apollo 13 had a particular fair with an explosion. And as we went through design and that is true of modern airplane, aircraft design, spacecraft. As you go through the design of the vehicle, you work through what we called i dont know what they call it in the commercial business, but we call fem mema. Failure mean effect analysis led by engineering where they looked at every component, every fail open or closed and every wire, fail opened and what is the manifestation of that failure and documented. And early on in the design before you built hardware that would even affect changes to the design, adding redundant legs or instrumentation, that sort of thing. And the explosions were thought of. Certainly in a rocket engine. We worried it had rockets billow up and certainly in the cryogenic situations where you had liquid oxygen and hydrogen. The manifestation of a explosion is thought to be the answer in the femas was youll lose the vehicle and lose the crew. So we gave them a situation that we never planned on because we had this explosion and an oxygen tank, too, and we were still breathing. So that there was no plan b. For most all of the credible fairs on board, we had procedures called malfunction procedures and airplanes we had the same thing, they were called emergency procedures. But we had these procedures. People in Mission Control had books behind them, behind their console they could reach and grab for certain socalled credible failures that would reach and grab and have set procedures. But for this particular case, the situation we were in, there was no plan b. So there was a lot of scrambling and the movie showed the hours worked by people on the ground. Many when i got back and talked to people, i think many got less sleep on the ground than i got in flight. So this was a truly a great story that does kind of become folk lore of working problems and people working together with the right leadership to make things happen and end up with, in this case, a good hollywood ending, im happy to say. But at any rate, now i would like to run a video and show you some of the real stuff. You saw a little bit of it from the ground side in Mission Control and the Launch Control center at Kennedy Space center and i was looking at the video from the back here, youre just seeing, but now ill show you what is called 13 first 13 minutes as called the quick look of apollo 13. It has no soundtrack. Ill narrate it. And well just let it run on through to the end. If we could now get the video cranked up here. All right. Were running. We have a countdown even. Three, two, one. It is appropriate. The satern 5 we used for all of the Lunar Missions and to launch the lab and sky lab. That part of the program is still the biggest rocket that weve flown. If you saw it today laying on its side at huntsville at kennedy and Johnson Space center, on the side laying down it would cover a football field plus both end zones, plus three feet. So that is the size of this rocket. It is three stages. Two spacecraft are on top and were way, way up on top at the very tippy top and laying in that little capsule. We suited up and the operations and check out bill at kennedy is quite a ways from the launch pad. So we hopped in this van, this van got a little fancier during shuttle days. With this, i think it was just a converted milk wagon or something that got painted up fancy and they had benches we sat on and we could hook up to intercom to talk to our suit techs who escorted us out to the pad. Deke slaton escorted us out to the van there, the original seven. There were four people waiting up at the top of the stack. So you had four people waiting for you and two suit teches to help you get inserted, strapped in and the hatch closed and they left you for a couple of hours until you got to launch. The launch pad looked kind of eerie because most of the time ive been out there, many times to test in the spacecraft, routine test and there is normally a lot of people up and down the stack and the day you go for real is as i said, just the people to get you hook up and ready to go. The engine started a little over seven seconds before liftoff. It allows them to observe the Chamber Pressure stabilize and the big f1 engines. There is five of them here running. They collectively generate 7. 5 Million Pounds of thrust, push if you will. It goes very slowly. This is not slow motion. This is the real motion. But the reason is the entire stack at this point weighs over 6 Million Pounds. So you dont have a great thrust to weight ratio. Havent been flown in airplanes and military airplanes, fighters. This is not exciting in sense of the glevels you sense. The peak g at first stage burnout because it is getting lighter as its going up burning tons of locks and propellent out every second. It gets to about 4. 5gs. The fighter planes i flew and routinely and you would pull 6 or 7 gs and i think todays fighters are up to 8 or 9 gs. So 4. 5gs wasnt that big of a deal. It was jerky. This is the front end of the digital age. So the steering im sure if you flew one of these today would be a little better. But the big engine is on the bottom and youre up on the top and you have exaggerated motion so you have jerking around with the engines and that is the most unusual thing i saw riding a rocket from flying airplanes from sensation. We went in earth orbit and went around a couple of times to have the opportunity to check out systems in the mothership, the command service module. Both the prime and backup to the extent we could to verify that nothing had been damaged during launch. And then the third stage was reignited by people on the ground. They accelerated us to escape velocity, 25,000 miles an hour and that is where you are here in this scene. Jack sweigert separate the the command module, moved away a couple of hundred feet and hes coming back in to put a probe in that dark circle, just disappearing in the upper right of this scene, using that target, about dead center, that little t with the black circle to keep himself alive as he put the into the upper hatch of the landing kraftd. And then you could find latches that would pull the two vehicles tightly together that formed an air tight seal and then you could open tunnel hatches on either side and be able to go between the two vehicles. And youll see a scene of that later. Thats the third stage as it was set up there as we pulled the Landing Craft out. And on this flight for the first time and they did that on all subsequent flights, they figured out how to use vining of the tanks to redirect its path so it was made to impact the moon. We had left seismometer on apollo 11 and 12 and put seismometers down on all flights that landed and with that meteor item pact you could look at sub strata on the moon. Same thing they use with looking for gas and oil. They use seismic events to search sub strata on earth. This is the mothership after we completely shut it down. Which it was obviously never supposed to i call it the mother ship. It was never supposed to be shut down. It was always supposed to be there for you. So that was probably the most worrisome for me, was how this thing would act trying to get it back up. Because it never planned to be shut down. We never tested it in the environment to be completely turned off. And in this case four days and froze the water tanks in it. This shows the scene of me drifting down through the tunnel with jim and jack jim level the commander and Jack Sweigert there doing the camera work and im playing around in zero gravity which is it is sort of euphoric to float yourself or float objects around. And actually made those little vehicles, smaller volumes seem bigger. I mean, you could imagine in this room we could have another set of chairs on the ceiling. Because we used this entire volume of this auditorium that youre not using now. This is the real people in Mission Control. A lot of furrowed eyebrows as i said. A lot of them got little sleep. Ed mitchell there, landed on 14. There was ken mattingly. Jim level there is rubbing his hands. He got pretty cold. We h we had to power the Landing Craft down to preserve the battery, it ran off Battery Power and this was meant to be a twoday vehicle at normal power so we had to go down to a low power vefl. We went down to 12. 5 amps on a 30 volt d. C. System. So if you think about your threeway light bulb at home and you go to the third click, if you did that on two lamps, that is about the power we went down to on that vehicle. So it got very cold. It was not meant to operate with that little that small amount of electronics on. We put on three sets of underwear. I had we had spare underwear so that is what we did to try to keep warm. This is the thing shown in the movie, the rig of the cartridge that was done on the ground. Deke slaton there is holding it. And they actually tested that in a chamber in building 7 at johnson with human subjects and most things they did that with. On the ground they did as much as they could after they perfected effects to go test it in some way to make sure it worked and that is what they did with this cartridge. They have a landing Environmental System and the chamber and in 7 and they put a person in there and let him live with that cartridge a while. We never had light on. Some of this photography, you could see it is pretty bad. I was shooting im shooting my own self. This is probably the first space selfie. I just put the camera out. It was a little 16 millimeter battery camera, you would push a button to start it and i just put it out there and let it sit there. So i was shooting my own picture. But we never had lights on. When we went to power down mode, we shut off all lights so we had to use the flashlight if we had to read or write or wait for the sunlight to be coming in a window. Someone shot me asleep. My arms is tucked in there. Not because i emulate a favor napoleon but the arms tend to do this, go to a minimum Energy Position and would wake me up so i always tuck my arms in somewhere. That is a brief shot of jean crans spoking a cigarette. Gene doesnt smoke any more. That is the day and age. This is the scene that we saw that surprised us. That upper section should look as shiny and smooth as that lower section. That is where one quarter of the spacecraft had blown off. Quite a surprise because thinking back to the explosion, it had not seemed as severe as what we saw. This is chow time. We gave up on all of the freeze dried, the powdered stuff because it is not too good if you have hot water and certainly aint good with cold water. So we mostly lived on cookie cubes, bread cubes, peanuts and jim was spooning out jim had a frankfurter package and i think jack was having a thick beef stew. This is the earth as were headed back in. Coming as you return. You end up coming back in at same velocity you left. About 25,000 miles an hour. And the upper entry was kind of strange. And the fact that we got rained on a little bit. Because it had been so cold and the command module turned off the long water head that slowly built up from perspiration and humidity had built up and the Instrument Panel when jack and i went to power up that vehicle, we had to use wash rags to wipe off the panel to read the instruments. They were just covered with water and a lot of that fell out on us at the front end of entry. But other wise, another one of those miracles. This machine, this command module that was never supposed to be powered down came on, came to life. And gave us the second most accurate splash down of the program. Only apollo 10 had a better hit the water at a closer point to the mark from the ship of the flights. Were picked up, recovered on iwo jima Aircraft Carrier. It had been on a tour to vietnam and it came back and navy s. E. A. L. S were the ones that jumped in the water and saved the spacecraft on the way back from vietnam as i said on a tour. And they actually saved the vehicle outside and get the flotation gear and when their ready they knock on the window to tell us their ready and they have a tool to open the hatch to let us out. This helicopter, interesting in the movie, ron howard went to the trouble to get a similar model helicopter that was shown in the movie. And brought on board. And i had a urinary tract infection so i just went to sick bay. Other crewmen went to a party on the hangar deck. That was people in Mission Control celebrating because they were so tired for this flight, they did not have the usual splash down party that they normally had after a flight when the crew was recovered. So we got to we were the only crew that got to attend our own splash down party because they held it two weeks later. So we got to attend that. I went off following this mission to backup john young as a backup commander on apollo 16. At the time i had hopes i would get to fly in apollo 19. That is at that point the last mission to go to the moon. And budgets were getting cut and nasa canceled 18 and 19. So i ended up being a deadhead crew assignment. Bill poeg and jerry carr who were going to fly the mission, deke slaton moved off to give them a flight because theyre running out of seats and i stayed on and inherited ed mitchell and stu rusa who had just finished their assignment. I had a view of eventually getting into program management. So i went off to Harvard Business school to the program mpnd course, and came back and went in the arbiter project office and early shuttle development and while there i was doing sport flying. I flew this japanese val. I was not flying as part of the movie making. These were aircraft that had been rebu