Thank you. [applause] mr. Holbrook howdy. Jfk emphasized the importance of the space race during a time of fear in the u. S. Incredible men and women took this challenge head on. Nasa became a beacon of hope for the nation. I am honored to introduce one of those legends. The man who pioneered apollo 11 and apollo 13. If you have ever heard the phrase houston, Tranquility Base is here, the eagle has landed. With great honor, i am here to introduce houston. Mr. Gene kranz. [applause] mr. Kranz thank you. It is a real privilege. I have a couple aggies in the family. To be introduced by an aggie. They told me i had three hours to speak, so we will have to be speaking through lunch here. But jared said no, he will give me a call when i have five minutes. So he is going to stand up and give me sort of a heads up. When i finish, i have a three minute video of the actual Lunar Landing. And i think that will put this year, this decade of the 50th anniversary in context of what is happening. I used this at the smithsonian. If you look at the smithsonian website on flight jacket night, basically i described the entire Lunar Landing from the time we acquired the spacecraft until touchdown, and for roughly the first couple hours after the touchdown. So, theres a lot of details i am going to leave out in my three hours here. But anyway, i was born in 1933. My father died. He was a world war i veteran and he died. My mother we lived a very close to the American Legion boardinghouse. And basically she operated the boardinghouse for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen during world war ii. And basically my two sisters and i grew up in an environment of duty, honor, and country. And this is what i think inspired us. I wanted to become a naval aviator because we lived very close to the Naval Training center. Great lakes. And many people at our house were going to become aviators. And i got an appointment to annapolis, but unfortunately i failed the physical. So the navys loss was the air forces gain. And i moved into the air force, went through a small aviation college, and basically got my commission. My wings at Laughlin Air Force base. Then i went through Fighter Weapons school at dallas, learned how to fly under the aces of the korean war. I graduated, and my first initial assignment was to myrtle beach 354th fighter wing, which was commanded by a double ace. An ace in korea as well as in world war ii. And he was what i would say an inspirational leader. He used to travel around. He had a colored jeep, he would travel around to various locations on the base indicating his very presence. They would say hey, heres here. Basically he made all of these people part of the great team of the 354th. With the vagaries of military orders, i got assigned to a k55 korea. Well, i lost my love affair with the hun. This really established the love affair with the saber. A marvelous, marvelous Fighter Aircraft. We flew down on the taiwan straits. A marvelous, marvelous fighter top cover during a period of time when nationalists would resupply the islands. I served as air controller with the 7th infantry. And returning to the states i elected to go to return reserve status. And looking for the jobs that were out there, and there was an opportunity to move into flight tests with the b52 aircraft. I became a flight test engineer on the b52. But it was a flying testbed. Basically in the bomb bay they had trapeze and all kinds of equipment in there. They could lower such things, a jd5 jet engine, we had the quail missile in there, we did separation studies from various equipment they would install on the forward bomb bay. We did tough studies, we did acoustic studies. Truly a Great Program and very enjoyable. Lasted about 30 months. At the completion of the program and i had the opportunity to move to edwards, or up to General Dynamics and learn about rockets. I saw an advertisement in aviation week. It was challenging. It said they are looking for qualified engineers to determine the feasibility of putting an american in space. I thought, gee, this sounds look at pretty cool job. So i sent in an application. I did not hear from anybody until roughly about six weeks. All of a sudden i got a phone call. Someone says are you still interested in coming here . I said yes. They gave me a reporting date. I reported to Langley Field in virginia. I sat around reading manuals. We had a relatively small group of people in the office. People would come in and say you think youre going to engineering, recovering. You are going to launch operations. Nobody wanted me. Until finally my life changed. A guy by the name of Christopher Columbus kraft came in, tapped me on the shoulder, and said i want you to go down to the cape, write a countdown, write submission roles, and when you are through give me a call and we will launch. I did not know anything about rockets. I didnt know anything about spacecraft. It was a very interesting challenge. Hanger s has the spacecraft. Found out where the block house were. Yet another telemetry and the command guys in a place called mercury control. So, it was a marvelous place growing up. And learning the business of spaceflight literally from the ground up, writing the book. One of the most interesting things was the quality of leadership that we had in those days. Nasa and the entire aircraft industry was just literally full of leaders. Our boss in project mercury was walter c. Williams. And if you have not taken a look at him, he basically established the highspeed test station out of what we call Edwards Air Force base today. I did a lot of work and development in the Fighter Aircraft of world war ii, the p51. Basically he was project engineer for the x1 rocketship. He was Chuck Yeagers boss. Basically responsibility of the Steering Committee for all of the xseries of research spacecraft. He was the toughest man i have ever known. He was a brawler. When you went into one of his meetings, he would call you he was very interested in mission rolls because i was writing mission rolls for the program. He would go to sleep on you. He would try to make up your mind, are you going to continue or not . All of a sudden his hand would go out and he had a big box of nickel meds about that big. He would shake them out, then go back to sleep. But the problem was when you finished, he heard every word and you had asked the darndest you had asked the darndest questions i have ever had in my life. The Space Task Group was incredible. I dont know if in modernday america there is an organization capable of building in the same fashion. When they established the Space Task Group, they gave dr. Robert gilruth the responsibility to head up the organization. Basically he came from the Langley Research center, the mecca of aeronautical knowledge at that time. And basically he went in and picked what he called the pick of the litter, the top 50 people he wanted in his organization. The Center Director picked another 50 people that maybe were not the pick of the litter, but they all became members of the Space Task Group. Then the canadian government got involved here, because the canadian government, they had the worlds topperforming airplane. Nothing could touch this. It was basically an interceptor to design they intercept soviets coming over the polls. This aircraft in 1958 had hit mach 1. 9, and an aircraft with the engine was expected to break mach 2. But the canadian government decided they could not afford to build that aircraft and canceled the program. They laid off 12,000 people in one day in the toronto area which was devastating. , in the government sent people down with welding torches a couple weeks later to destroy every aircraft that was sitting in the flightline. Five of the six had flown. This really ticked off the people, the engineers of the program. Jim chamberlain was the program and project manager at that time. Andcalls up dr. Gilruth says i have a bunch of good people out here that would like to work on your space program. These two had been working on highspeed aerodynamics. They closed the embassy in toronto, and they brought in roughly in 50 to 60 people. I dont know the exact number, but the interviewed each one for about five minutes, and they selected 31 to become members of the Space Task Group. We had the chief designer, john hodge, flight engineer, the number six aircraft, we had a guy doing ejection seat testing. We had basically the pioneers of Aeronautical Research in the united states. Now they are the middle part of the organization. I came in with a group of young americans, generally some people who had just served in the military. Others just out of college. We were the raw material for this thing called the Space Task Group. It was amazing. The mixing of these three cultures resulted in a capacity that was greater than the sum of its parts. And we moved into project mercury. Project mercury was basically our boot camp. This is where we learned the business of spaceflight. You know, in those days we had computers, but ibm did not trust us. They put it 700 miles north of the goddard space flight center. Her computer interviewed her in bermuda helped us with trajectory stuff. Our communications was lowspeed teletype that dated back to the days of americas pony express. Basically had 13 tracking stations around the world and we sent young people just like yourselves into these sites that were literally at the ends of the earth. The risk was very high for these young people because this was the end of the european colonial period. At zanzibar they had worked under protection of the gordon highlanders it would march them out to the site and then move them back into the zanzibar hotel. Station gunners at both ends. We shut that down after only three years. But these young people were our eyes, ears, and basically the voice as the spacecraft passed overhead. And those that stayed in operations became leaders of project apollo. We had many nearmisses during the Gemini Program. When gus grissom and others hit the water, the hatch popped off and we almost lost gus. The reason is almost every one of the crewmen, they had dimes in the pockets of their flight suits. When he hit the water and without struggling to survive and avoid drowning, he had the flight suit pulled down by these roles of dimes he would give to the launchpad teams. We almost lost gus, but we got him. John glenns was pretty close. We thought we had a heatshield with him. And we learned many things about the business of spaceflight in those days. I will get to them when i wrap up. But john was close. We did not tell him we thought we had a heatshield problem until he was in the process of reentering over the texas site. He said, by the way, i should retaining my resurrected package . I should have jettisoned this when i was back over california. That is when we explained when we thought we had a retro rocket package to hold the heatshield on. Scotty carpenter was basically virtually out of fuel as he arrived over the hawaii site. Very fortunate i had a controller there, a very young guy just like you folks right here. Basically he kept talking and reviewing the checklist for reentry with the crewmen after physical communications, line of sight. He just kept talking. Fortunately the atmosphere was such that scotty heard him and started packing up. He got over the california site, he is out of his automatic fuel. Very low on manual fuel, maybe just enough to turn around. We got him into an orientation that was close enough for reentry, we had him fire the retro rocket. He landed a couple of hundred miles down range but the control , team now is learning the business of spaceflight. And when we got down finally to the end of the program, we felt that, yeah, we know what the business is about and we know what we got to do. The key thing was during john glenns flight we had about five people in the control room. Basically a chief engineer the , manufacturer, program manager, the flight director, we all said what are we going to do . They are still debating, the spacecraft is going around the world. The fact is we finally said look, there has got to be one boston he has to be god. No one will challenge him. He is the ultimate. We established the responsibilities for the flight director take any actions necessary for crew safety and mission success. The other thing we found and basically in my work in the flight test of the b52, i did not put anything in the bomb bay i did not have understanding of the thing is we were flying spacecraft, launching rockets that we have virtually no good data on. The data we had and project mercury is what you call a pocket just last checklist which fit in the lower pants of a pilots flight suit. I have a very rough schematic. Didnt have the integrated information you needed to make realtime, time critical, high risk decisions. So at that time i established i am going to become more knowledgeable than the people who designed the spacecraft. And i got support from chris craft, and i got support from walt williamson. We told our contractor, we are going to build the manuals that we fly with. Very shortly thereafter we set up a process of learning by doing. Every product, by the time we flew apollo, was developed by the Mission Controllers themselves. The flight systems, every procedure, normal procedures, emergency procedures, the whole nine yards, done by the people in the Mission Control team. The other thing was the training. The training would come in from the manufacturers. Basically we knew what the business was. So i picked up the responsibility for all integrated training. And to this day, we still perform the integrated training. Between the control team and he the controllers. So these were the major changes that we used in getting ready for the Gemini Program. Gemini, we had to come to grips with the new technologies of space. And for the first time we had a computer on board the spacecraft. We knew nothing about the computers. But we were very fortunate the Army Missile Command had been working with computers in the ground air missile command. So we found a lot of people who were retired and leaving, and we brought these guys in. They became our leaders for training. They basically taught us the business of what using computers was about. 4000 word machine. Basically we had to load in the programs for each one of the phases. But that was our first entry. We got into the use of cryogenics and fuel cells, and by propellant rockets. During mercury we used steam to it was interesting. During mercury we used steam to basically rotate the thrust of the control to control the orientation. That is how we maneuvered the spacecraft around. That would not get you very far if you wanted to rendezvous with something. So it came along the Gemini Program, and basically this is where we developed our teams. And they were darn i will not say darn good, but there are one of the best darn good teams i worked with in my whole life. We started biting the bullet for things that we normally would not do. The first gemini mission, we said lets try to do a rendezvous with the booster. We would separate from the booster and try to do it. Every pilot, boy, they were experienced in formation flying, but it did not work worth a darn there. Hmm, theres Something Different about this new environment. And finally reestablished a simulation that allowed us to train the crews as well as the ground. So we basically now had started to break ground in these technologies. And we moved into the apollo program. And myself, and englishman john hosch, chris craft were the flight directors for the apollo one mission. Basically we all transitioned after we finished assigned missions in gemini. And we were sitting at the consoles january 27, 1967, roughly one month from launch. And our crewmembers were gus grissom, ed white and roger chaffee. And we had worked with gus on the mercury and Gemini Program and i did most of the procedural and Development Work for ed whites gta. Roger chaffee was sort of an unknown to us, although he did have a reputation as one of the navy pilots who took the pictures over cuba during the cuban missile crisis. The test did not go well. We had problems with communications, problems with life support. Basically crew reporting a noxious odor inside the spacecraft. Test procedures we frequently called halts. We ur minutes after fire exploded in that spacecraft. And those of us that were there that day will never forget it. It was searing. But basically it was what was we needed to get our act together to follow president kennedys challenge to go to the moon. And we did. We became tough and confident. Competent. Those were the words written on every blackboard. In Mission Control and in my office area. Tough and confident. And we went and we flew the first of the apollo missions, apollo seven. We had a sick after not on board astronaut onboard, but it turned out to be that spacecraft was literally perfect. And then we looked at it and it was time to play poker. Because the lunar module was well behind in the development of the software. We could not pack all the software into that machine. 60k machine, we could not pack it all in there. We were overweight. So what did we do . We decided, lets go to the moon. Go to the moon with no escape system. Just a basic command service module. The systems that are on there, second flight test, and lets go for it. It was interesting, sitting at Mission Control that Christmas Eve listening to the crew, reading from the book of genesis as they circled the moon. It was a wonderful Christmas Eve. And it was a Christmas Eve that our nation needed badly, because in