Failure Is Not an Option: Legendary NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz on Space Race [36:52]

[I just know some smart aleck will turn Gene's use of the word "basically" into a drinking game.]
Interview recorded on October 25, 2019: Transcript
We Choose the Moon

We had just launched Allan Shepard two weeks earlier when President Kennedy made his speech. When he made those words, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade." I was all for it because I wanted to beat the Russians. I wanted to get and maintain and establish supremacy in space. And it was the inspiration; it was really a challenge to sit down and say we will put this together and we're going to win this battle for the high ground. And that's what my mission became. Not as much to get to the moon, but to get the high ground that I believe our nation needed.

Dreaming of Flight

I wanted to be a naval aviator. I wanted to do, you know, you talk about Jimmy Doolittle taking 25s off the carrier deck. I wanted to be a fighter pilot coming off the F, you know, the carrier deck and winning the battle. And that inspiration carried me; once I'd been turned down, I continued to look for service and I went to a small aviation college in East St. Louis, Illinois, Parks Air College. And this was really my field of dreams because they had cross cinder runways down there. They were still flying the PT-17s. They had a few Taylorcraft, and I got my engineering degree there. I got the aircraft and power plant license, and I got my first 10 hours of flying time, and from that time on, I was hooked.

I was a graduate there, and while I was waiting for my introduction, the beginning of my pilot training class 56M to start, I worked at McDonnell Aircraft for about 10 months. There, next to my mother, I found the most inspirational leader in my life. His name was Harry Carroll, and he was a World War II B-17 pilot. He flew with the 15th Air Force out of Italy, and his first mission as co-pilot, once he got shipped overseas, was to Ploesti. And anybody who is familiar with aviation history knows the history of the raids in Ploesti; it is some of the most expensive to aircraft and air crew members in the entire air war over Europe. Basically, he moved to the Eighth Air Force for D-Day. He flew many of the missions basically in support of the invasion and then went after Berlin and Hamburg and the rest of it.

Basically, he was what I would say was a renaissance man. He came back and got his engineering degree through Washington University but basically was an inventor. He was looking after aviation safety. He wrote poetry during preparation for many of the missions after seeing, sitting in the cockpit, and he'd write about the clouds in the sky as a playground for the angels. It was just interesting to be around a man. He was a big scout leader, led the Grand Portage canoe trip across the Canadian border. So he was, to a great extent, the father I never had, and he was an inspiration when I completed flight training.

My first cross-country was to go visit Harry and introduce him to my instructor, and I stayed with him all through my life. Later on, I got into the air show business after retiring and flew B-17 Flying Fortress, and I could visualize Harry up in the cockpit at the controls of that aircraft. It was just an absolute dream to live his dream and feel together with him. In fact, many times in the space program, I would be speaking to my people preparing for a mission. After the fact, I'd listen to myself and I think that's Harry talking. It isn't Gene Kranz, it's Carroll. It's what he gave me.

So this was the entrance. I entered the Air Force, went through standard pre-flight at Lackland Air Force Base, and this was still at the time I don't know what they do with the young lieutenants nowadays, but basically, after about two weeks there, I was given to one of the training instructors, and he and I would meet a bus coming in from Chicago with a whole bunch of draftees, and we would introduce these young draftees to the Air Force. In the process, the TI would introduce me to what being an officer was all about. So it was a great time to grow up and a great time to join the Air Force. I wanted to get into Korea, but unfortunately or fortunately, the air war had ended. But basically, I still dreamed of flying and fighting and becoming an ace.

Leadership Under Pressure

What do you think was most beneficial from your air force years when you joined NASA and became a leading official in NASA? What was most valuable from your air force time?

The uh probably the most valuable. There were several things. First of all, I got shipped over to Korea and basically became a flight leader over there. It was basically now taking what I believed about leadership and applying it to three young pilot graduates that were in my flight and teaching them the business to fly, fight, and survive in that kind of environment over there.

I think the second thing was, it's hard to describe, but several of our instructors out at Nellis, I went through fighter weapons school. They would really talk about visualization, being able to position yourself, the other aircraft, and being able to put this whole thing into a picture and basically establish your next move and anticipate what the other guys were going to be doing.

So it was really the process of visualization and air combat maneuvering that I think were very important in really making me feel comfortable in a very difficult environment that I found myself in many times during the space program. So I think that was a major part of it.

The other part of it was basically becoming a young leader and being willing to step up to the accountability that leadership demands.

Joining NASA

What year did you join NASA?

I that's a different that's a different long story. But after I came back from Korea, I became a civilian flight test engineer in the B-52. And basically at that time, they had determined the Soviet Union had a service air missile capability, and basically I was sort of given the Bombay. I owned the Bombay or the B-52 to develop the technologies and the systems that would allow that aircraft to penetrate Soviet airspace. And it was a really great program because there we had McDonald with the Quail missile, we had General Electric with the JD5, we had other people of Sandia who would want to put stuff in the Ford Bombay. So it was a question of working with a relatively large diverse group of people against the time constant of getting the aircraft engine start in time to get on range.

So it was basically making risk-based decisions: is it safe to fly this flight with the squawks, the open items we have, and convincing not only myself but basically leading other people to say, "Yeah, we'll be part of that decision; we'll sign up for you, so let's go." So basically, the flying was very instrumental in that experience in the B-52.

But then when the program finished, I was looking for a job. I could go out to work at Edwards Air Force Base with McDonald. They were taking the F4 Phantom 2 out there. I had an opportunity to go work with General Dynamics up in Omaha, learn about rockets. But I saw an advertisement in Aviation Week magazine. And this said they were forming a space task group and they were looking for qualified engineers to determine the feasibility of putting an American in space. I thought, "Gee, that sounds like a pretty interesting thing." So, I sent in an application, didn't hear anything for several weeks. We had two young kids at that time; they were starting to get sort of antsy. The program's over. We're going to need some money.

And I got a phone call. They said, "Are you still interested in joining the Space Task Group?" And I said, "Yes." And they said, "When can you report?" I gave them a reporting date. I reported to Langley Research Center. And I was never interviewed for the job. I sat in basically a bullpen for about two weeks, and a gentleman came up, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, "I'm Chris Craft. You're working for me now. I want you to go down to the Cape, write a countdown, write some mission rules, and when you're through, give me a call and we'll launch." That was the first Redstone launch.

So, you go to the Cape and you obviously did pretty well.

Well, it was yes and yes and no. It was very interesting because in the process of going to the Cape, you had to figure out how to put the pieces together. I knew there had to be a spacecraft and that's over at Hangar S, and you go down to the launch pad. There's a booster down there. I knew a bit about range safety from Hollowan where we were. So I could go over and find range safety. So it was a question of pulling these people together and then getting to know the people in Mercury control who had the telemetry and the command and the communications and all this kind of stuff and basically pull this into a package against the time and write that countdown.

First Launch Failure

Well, the good news was I got the countdown written. Uh, we then got down to launch day. We sent the firing command. The engine ignited with this great big puff of smoke, and then the television came down. The rocket was still on the launch pad. We had launched the escape rocket, and that was now up to about 1,500 ft. All the senators and congressmen ran for cover because this was coming back to Earth. So, my uh first launch wasn't too swift. So, but they kept you obviously, and uh, so at what point did I know at one point you were the assistant flight director.

Building Mission Control

What was uh Craft?

Chris Craft was an incredibly gifted engineer, and he was getting a job to form a place called Mission Control, Mercury Control in those days, to find out what everybody does. When I arrived at the Cape, several people were starting to write down his job description. This systems guy, and this is a network guy, and this is what a flight director does. I had been through that routine in the Air Force, had been through that routine at Hullerman and flight test. I knew about the communications. I could communicate based on my Air Force experience. So I sort of picked up the business of providing his voice out to the Mercury network.

Remember, this was a time before satellite communications. We did not have direct communications except for those stations that were within the continental United States, Bermuda, and Hawaii. From then on, it was by submarine cable and then by HF point-to-point. So much of the work we did in communicating was through teletype messages. You'd write the teletype message out, and the operator would type it out. It would be received at Kono, Nigeria, or Zanzibar. The paper would be torn off and handed to a controller out there. The controller would read it, and I wondered what he wanted to do. This was sort of the nature of the beast at that time. I was gluing that thing together for Craft, and that was something he needed to do because he had to worry about the spacecraft, the crew, and those kinds of things. But I made sure that all of the functions necessary to support the mission were operating.

By the time we got to the John Glenn mission, he had named me the assistant flight director. From then on, all the way through the rest of the missions, it was basically an incredible relationship based on trust. He trusted me to do my part of the job while he could do his part of the job. It was a relationship that was very important because Mercury was not easy. We had problems in the John Glenn mission. Scotty Carpenter was out of fuel by the time he got around to the retrof point. Wally Shirra, the third orbital mission, was pretty smooth, but then we got to Gordon Cooper. It seemed like every electrical system in the spacecraft was failing. But Mercury was sort of our training ground. It was our boot camp for what space was all about.

By the time we got into the Gemini program, two-man spacecraft, this was the precursor for all of the kinds of things we needed to do for the lunar landing. By the way, we had just launched Alan Shepard two weeks earlier when President Kennedy made his speech. When he made those words, "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade," I was all for it because I wanted to beat the Russians. I wanted to get, maintain, and establish supremacy in space. The inspiration was really a challenge to sit down and say we will put this together, and we're going to win this battle for the high ground. That became my mission -- not as much to get them in, but to get the high ground that I believe our nation needed.

Race to the Moon

So you became flight director during the later stages of the Gemini series and before the Apollo series. What was...

No, I was made flight director at the beginning of Gemini. Beginning of Gemini. I was the second mission. The first mission was a three-bit mission with Gus Grissom, and basically by the time we got to the Gemini 4 mission, I was one of three flight directors: myself, Craft, and John Hodge, an Englishman who has an interesting history because he was a young boy who grew up in England during the Blitz. That's when they separated the families, putting the children out in the countryside while the father stayed in London. John became an engineer over there; he basically was training for the RAF, flying a Tiger Moth. He saw an opportunity to come over to the States and work with Avro of Canada, and Avro at that time built the world's top-performing aircraft, the Avro Arrow. John was the flight test engineer of the number six aircraft that was equipped with the big Orenda engine, which was going to crack Mach 2.

This was interesting. I, myself, Craft, and Hodge were the first three flight directors in there, and we sort of set the -- I won't say the pace or the stage -- because Craft wanted each one of us; he trusted each one of us to basically accomplish our role during the course of the mission. But he wasn't looking for clones; he wanted to look for people who were not only capable of leadership but also able to address the challenge every step forward as he moved into space. So, my job and John's Hodge was to basically say, "Okay, we're sort of looking ahead here, and this is what we must do. This is how we're going to bear; this is the kind of team we need," etc.

Apollo 1 Fire

So it was a remarkable time in space and I think in our nation's history as we developed the capabilities we needed to go to Apollo. Of course, we'll get to Apollo 11 and Apollo 13, but the program started with the Apollo 1 fire. I read you were actually getting ready to take your wife out on a date because you just had a baby, and when you found out that this testing had gone horribly, tell us about that.

Yes, the Apollo 1 fire with Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger B. Chaffee, who had worked with Gus and Ed in the American Gemini program. Roger was a rookie. We believed we heard that he was basically a naval aviator who had flown and got the pictures over Cuba during the missile crisis. The day preceding it, there were two series of tests: what they call the plugs-in test, where you don't transfer power internal to the spacecraft, and then the plugs-out test. I had done the plugs-in test, which was an eight-hour test that basically ran almost 30 hours. We turned around at the end of that test, took about an eight-hour break, and then I came back in to do the early test and countdown work for the plugs-out test.

Basically, I had it up to around noon when I handed over to Craft in mission control. Throughout that afternoon, there were various problems and procedures and communications and life support systems right on down the line. I was at home preparing; I was taking my wife out, just had to get a break, and we were all set to go out.

The neighbor next door, who worked in space, was pounding on the door and he said they had an accident on the launch pad and they think the crew is dead. They didn't take anything to get me going, and I was on route to mission control. They had already secured the building. There was no way to get in, but I knew ways to get in, basically through the freight entrance down there.

So, I managed to get into mission control, up into the operations room, and witnessed firsthand the impact upon the young people that were in the mission control team. I had lost a couple of pilots in my squadron when we were over in Korea. Craft had worked flight tests; he was familiar with accidents, and it was really a question of carrying this young group of people through a very traumatic experience.

It was traumatic in many ways because, if you take a look, we had not only lost a crew, but there was a good chance that the program was now under great threat and we wouldn't be able to write the words "mission accomplished" on the words that President Kennedy gave us. But more so, it was really a question of loss of our teenage years. We now had to mature into a tough and competent flight control team.

At that time, as the division chief, deputy division chief of flight control, I addressed the people three days after, basically assuming the responsibility for our part of that failure. Because all through that day, teams of mission control, flight director Chris Craft could have called a halt. The crew could have called a halt. People at the launch pad did, but nobody spoke up and said, "Hey, stop. Things aren't right."

It was the context of the talk I gave to my people that I think got them back on track. We assumed responsibility for our part of that failure, and we didn't bother searching for who was responsible. We just assumed we were responsible.

This, I think, was true throughout a good portion of the agency, particularly in upper management, and they made a lot of management changes at that time. I became the division chief of flight control, which brought us out of responsibilities. Craft moved out of the flight director job into the center director. So I moved into a role that was principally as the chief of the flight directors, chief of the flight control division, and it was to basically execute the mission assignment we had been given by President Kennedy.

I think it is quintessentially American that the program did continue with the proper safeguards and protocols in place, and then we got a series of Apollo missions. We could go through all of them, but sadly, time doesn't permit. But let's hit some of the ones. Apollo 8 and the Journey to the Moon

Apollo 8's the first one to orbit the moon and that's just before Christmas, and the astronauts are reading Genesis 1. What kind of a moment was that?

That was, uh, I was fortunate because as division chief, I elected to work only the odd-numbered missions. So this was great, sitting behind the flight directors, watching and feeling, and let that emotion sink in. And, uh, I think principally it was the most beautiful Christmas Eve I'd ever experienced in my life.

It was almost like, uh, God's gift, NASA's gift to America in a very troubled period of time because, uh, we had the civil rights movement, the environmental movement was going on, and the protests for and against Vietnam that decade. We had had three assassinations.

Uh, so it was a time where maybe we started the healing process, and I think our nation very much needed it. I had a lot of people that, uh, were Air Force detail, and basically they were over in Vietnam, but to a great extent, I considered that mission, uh, their mission.

So then Apollo 9 and 10, which don't get a lot of attention, are testing out the lunar module, correct? Apollo 10 was basically a dress rehearsal from what I've read. So that brings us, of course, to Apollo 11. Let's start with the crew. Were Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins handpicked for the landing, or were they just the next ones up, or how did it work?

No, I don't know how the selection process went. Uh, I had flown with Armstrong and Aldrin; my first flight as flight director. They were my Capcoms. I had flown with Neil in the Gemini mission where I brought him down in the West Pacific after a spacecraft emergency there. Uh, he was what I would say the leading pilot astronaut of that period of time. We had a lot of good ones. They were all good. They were good in the stick.

But Neil always reminded me of a college professor -- soft spoken, wanted to think things over right on the line. But you put a stick in his hand in an aircraft, the X-15 or the, uh, lunar module simulation, keep the trainer LLTV that we had in there. Put him in that cockpit, and boy, he knows what to do. He's got some kind of a focus intense upon the action in the hand, and he has the intensity to finish anything he starts.

Uh, Buzz was a very smart guy. Uh, he worked on mission control, and he was, I think, to some extent, the key to the beginning of the Apollo program. He was the first real astronaut pilot who mastered extra vehicular operations, and that was in the Gemini 12 mission, which is the final mission before scheduled to start Apollo. So Buzz was a, uh, I won't say a mechanic; Neil Armstrong was the plumber, but basically these two were the perfect match.

And Mike Collins, I like Mike, uh, because he had a grasp of his job in the solo command model. And that basically we worked with him and several of the lunar modules. You get off the surface, you get into proper orbit; he'd have to perform a rescue. And he mastered so many skills necessary to provide solo operation of that spacecraft. It was made for a three right-hand pilot, co-pilot kind of arrangement with a guy in the middle, occasionally flipping a switch. But Mike was basically, uh, capable -- the most capable probably solo pilot next to maybe Ken Mattingly. The two were great solo pilots in the command module.

Apollo 11: One Giant Leap

Let's take you into the mission now. And of course, one of the things that we know about is how low the fuel was running as they approached the lunar surface. Um, two quick questions on this. First of all, you talk about the leadership it takes to run mission control under times of great stress, but what is going through your mind when you hear this countdown going on?

The, uh, the thing that was most interesting about the descent was what we did not know. There were three major problems lurking that made me, as flight director, come very close to not only delaying but scrubbing the first attempted descent. Uh, we had massive communications problems, and there was a ground rule written that the flight director is basically the crash recorder that had to make sure that we had enough data in mission control such that if we had an accident, we could reconstruct what happened. The program could go on; it was purely a judgment call.

How much is enough?

Uh, the second thing was basically a procedural issue related to the separation between two spacecraft. The crew did not fully vent the pressure in the tunnel between the two spacecraft. And when they separated, it was like a champagne cork popping out of a bottle. It basically was like a maneuver. The spacecraft had been performed, but we didn't know it had happened. So this was going to change our trajectory. It was going to change the point at which we start the descent to the surface of the moon.

The third one was one that almost killed us because the computer started having a series of basically faults. It would fault down from normal operation to pure guidance and control. This is because a problem had been recognized early in the program on the interface between the limb guidance computer and the rendezvous radar. And the rendezvous radar wasn't in use, but the computer saw it powered up and was interrogating it, looking for data. Well, the computer normally ran at about 80% CPU, which is 80% loaded, asking this radar for data, which wasn't coming in. Add another 15%.

So they're about 95% loaded in the computer, but we do not have any measurements in this ground. We don't know. And whenever the crew asked what that alarm was about, it faulted down into pure guidance and control. So the three problems that were lurking, the first one, communications, really got us in the process of getting ready to give the go-go. I made the go to go down to the surface of the moon based on a gut feeling that my team would solve the problem and we would continue down for five minutes, and if we didn't, then we would have to abort the landing.

So that was one. The second thing was the trajectory issue; we were moving now to the point where we were landing in a very rugged landing site. The impact to me was the fact that we were probably going to use more fuel down there, but don't sweat it. That wasn't the case because Neil Armstrong, being the perfect pilot, saw those computer alarms happening, and like a pilot, his first job is to fly that airplane. He basically doesn't have an ejection seat; he can't get out. If a problem occurs when he's going down, he has to basically fly that spacecraft out of there using the backup guidance system right on the line. So Neil's busy flying that thing, and he isn't looking out to see where his landing site should be, which is then going to cause him problems later on.

As we go down through this descent, we're fighting communication problems. We're fighting navigation problems. We're waiting for the landing radar to come in. This is all taking time as we get down close to the surface. Neil finally looks out and says, "Aha, I see a landing site out there, but there's a big crater around there. Am I going to overfly the crater? Going to land shortly?" No, I'm going to fly over it. And the procedure in the sea is fuel. He's maneuvering around trying to find a good space. The dust is blowing with him, so he can't determine what his basic motion is. He has to pick out a big rock. He says, "Aha, I know that isn't blowing away, so I'm going to use that as a reference."

And basically gets down to the surface, and we start counting down the seconds of fuel remaining. We start off at what they call low level at 120 seconds. The next thing you hear is total communication silence in mission control. There's only one person talking: basically my control and propulsion guys counting seconds of fuel. 60 seconds, 30 seconds. About the time he says fifty, we recognize the crew has just landed. Then we hear the words, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

The viewing room behind me erupts, and the people are clapping and applauding. But we have to go through now a series of two hours addressing and looking at the system, what it calls the stay/no-stay decision that these were at 2 minutes after landing, 8 minutes after landing, and two hours after landing. If a problem occurred, if we got off at 2 minutes, 8 minutes, and two hours, the limb could provide an active rendezvous with the command and service module. So, these were times while the world was celebrating; we were working that spacecraft.

And, uh, as I told the audience this morning, I just wish we could go back and do it one more time when this time celebrate with the world that we had just landed. You were busy doing your job, yeah, and making sure all the math was working out. A few days later, uh, they returned safely to the Earth. So, you and your colleagues had made JFK's dream come true. Yes, we did. Mission accomplished.

What did that mean?

It's interesting. The, uh, as we finally finished the last two hours and we gave the final stay, and the EVA flight control team was standing by reading gun, I wrote "mission accomplished" in the log. That was, uh, when we had the Apollo 1 fire. I think all of us, myself, many of us had made a pledge to the crew of Apollo 1 and to President Kennedy that we would complete what they set out to do, and we did.

Apollo 13 Crisis

Amazing. Well, like you said, you were in charge of the odd-numbered mission. So, let's go to the next odd-numbered mission. And so, that's April of 1970 with Apollo 13, which, as most folks know, was supposed to be a lunar mission. What exactly went wrong?

Uh, basically we had an explosion in the oxygen tank two. Uh, that basically blew the top off the tank. Uh, basically the pressurization caused many of the valves and the shock caused many of the valves of the system to close, change states. Uh, basically it was like a blowtorch thing. Blew the side of the spacecraft off. When the side came off the spacecraft, the area surrounding the spacecraft was clouded with debris of explosion and frozen particles of oxygen. And we did not know an explosion had occurred at that time.

I went through three frames of mind. The first one was, uh, when the crew got us, we got a problem. We looked at the master alarms before and I said, "Okay, easy problem. We'll solve it after we put the crew to sleep." Then one of my controllers said they had a pretty big bang associated with that. And I remembered a similar occurrence and words in the Apollo 9 mission.

So then I moved into a, okay, let's proceed much more cautiously, more carefully here. And then when level was looking outside the window and said, "Hey, I see something venting. I think it's our oxygen." Then it became a mission of survival.

And, uh, from then on the, uh, the real challenge was to address turning a two-day spacecraft into a lifeboat. First of all, I'd go back because we had to make the decision: what are we going to do? I was the flight director in charge then. Uh, I wanted to buy time, and the way to buy time was to let the spacecraft coast onward towards the moon and then find some way to accelerate our return journey.

So that was the first thing: buy time. Secondly, it was to get my team focused now upon the challenge of turning this two-day spacecraft into about a four to five-day spacecraft, and that we did basically later on, and that was to hand over the responsibility and start this mission sequence. We started with four flight control teams normally during the mission.

Basically, my team was pulled offline to work the problem and show up only when we had answers. The other three teams would continue to operate in eight-hour shifts, basically keeping the mission going, following through in the instructions, getting more data for us, etc.

Uh, 24 hours after the explosion, my team came back in on the console. Uh, we were going to perform a what we call a get home fast maneuver. We're going to use the lunar module engines that we would have used to land on the moon. Well, this time we're going to use to increase our forward speed by roughly about 1,000 ft per second. Cut it off. And then we power down the spacecraft to a survival level.

Then we got to figure out, we got a series of problems now. The spacecraft's freezing up, the other getting too hot out. So, we had to develop a barbecue maneuver to spin the spacecraft, presenting the other to the sun's rays.

Uh, we had basically a crew going to suffocate due to carbon dioxide poisoning. Uh, we had to invent, uh, some way we use a cylindrical color scrubber in the lunar module. We had run out of those. So the carbon dioxide partial pressure is building up. It's becoming very toxic to the crew. So I have to use some of the square scrubbers that are in the old command module that we're not using and adapt them to fit into the round hole.

Uh, then it's basically get some rest for my people and then come up with a series of checklists we need to perform the get home fast maneuver. Uh, basically to do the power up, get ready for re-entry. We had to do an emergency maneuver. We didn't have any, uh, computer display system and we had to learn to maneuver using the sun or, excuse me, the earth as a reference, uh, and basically using scribe lines and two telescopes we had in there. So we had to invent all kinds of workarounds to address every problem that we saw.

But the team was, by this time we were 24 hours into the crisis and we were getting pretty cocky, and I hate to say it's cocky when the guys are still stuck in space. But basically, um, our belief, my belief, our belief as a team was always that give us any problem, that's when we operate best: steady state operation. We don't want to go around in circles. We want to do that stuff. We are problem solvers. So give us something that's tough. And basically, that was the mode we carried through to the final end of the mission.

Was the splashdown successfully of Apollo 13 the greatest moment of your career?

There were many greatest moments, and I would say the greatest moment is always the satisfaction at the end of the mission at my team's performance because these guys, as I said, project Mercury's boot camp, uh, project Gemini was where basically we became a team, and Apollo was where we executed operations as a team.

To me, it was always pride in America. We maintained the high ground of space that we had established very early in the Gemini program. But basically, it was always one of satisfaction that in the nature and the culture that existed within the flight control team. It was always just pure joy that, uh, we pulled off another one and we did it as a team.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.