Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 04/12/2026 1:40:35 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Eugene F. Kranz, the legendary NASA flight director who helped guide the Apollo program, says the newest views of the Moon and the Artemis II mission are hitting him on a personal level. In a one-on-one interview with the 13 Action News I-Team, Kranz, now 93 years old, described how the images from the Artemis II crew brought him right back to the era when the U.S. first made lunar history. He compares what NASA can see and do now versus what tools astronauts had during the Apollo area.
(Excerpt) Read more at 13abc.com ...
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
I streamed it on the Roku YT app, but the search didn't appear in the first few hits, so, anyway.
Nice to see he’s still around. I thought he was dead, but I guess death is not an option.
Wow, this was hard to find.Gene Kranz, Apollo flight director & Toledo native, describes emotions watching Artemis II missio... | 6:26
WTVG 13 Action News | Toledo, OH | 16.2K subscribers | 2,356 views | April 11, 2026
Yeah, almost 15 years after last shuttle mission. Glad they could mod the External Tank from the shuttle to use as the core. Still not pleased with water landing but........ 🚀. Nice to see it launch and land safe. Lots of memories.
Transcript
Reflections on Moon Exploration
How impressed are you with these newest images of the moon?
It was, uh, it took me back, made me young again. Yet, I’m 93 right now and, uh, I was in my 30s, 34 when we landed on the moon. And it’s, uh, [sighs] like, uh, starting all over again. And I, uh, just wish I talked to the NASA interns, the new people coming in. And basically, we must have about the last session was about three weeks ago. We had about 60 of them. And I looked at these kids and I was jealous. Anything I’ve ever done, I would trade them to be in their position.
And, uh, when I see the images of the moon, I just think of the guys, the astronauts I worked with, the controllers I worked with. Uh, the image of the material we brought back and, uh, just say thank God we had a mission. We’re back on track again. Artemis is going to take America and our nation back to the moon now for a final time. We’re going to build a habitat there. We’re going to have a set of facilities. It’s going to be, uh, a new era in space exploration.
Reflections on Pride in Space Exploration
So, as somebody who was part of the start of all this, how proud are you that we’re at this point?
Well, I’m too, too proud to even describe it. You know, I came in, uh, as a young pup. I was a fighter pilot. I did flight tests. I was there in the very beginning, and all I can think of are the great people that I worked with that made all of this possible.
And, uh, back in Toledo when I was at Central Catholic, my high school thesis was titled “The Design and Possibilities of an Interplanetary Mission.” And in the conclusion, I stated that within 5 years we’d be back [sic] on the moon. And it’s really strange.
I made some copies of that and gave it to our family. We got six kids, and, uh, when I gave it to the family, it is really strange to have written that description in that term paper.
By the way, I got a 98, and, uh, to be the person that actually took Neil Armstrong to the moon for the first time. Uh, I lived as an explorer. I lived with explorers, and, uh, Toledo was, uh, my starting, my jump-off to space.
Surprises from New Moon Images
So, is there anything that’s surprising you with these new images and the new things you’re seeing with the moon from Artemis?
Well, there’s a heck of a lot better quality. Uh, if you go back into our era, uh, this was before we had all the satellites we use nowadays, uh, weather and communications in particular. All of our pictures were, uh, grainy.
If you take a look at Neil Armstrong getting down the ladder and getting to the surface there, it’s really, uh, hard to say what is that?
You recognize there’s an image there, and you had his voice talking about one step for man, giant leap for mankind. And he said that, but the picture was, uh, it looks like it had been dissolved, settled. Now I see the imagery we have. And I said, “My God, if we had that image, we could have better directed the crew when they were on the surface to go pick up that rocket, to go do this thing right on the line.” Uh, I think we could have had a, uh, much better operation, but, uh, we did the best with what we had.
Concerns About Re-Entry
So, re-entry is coming up in the next 24 to 48 hours. You’ve been a part of very perilous re-entries. What are your concerns as they start coming back to Earth?
This is, uh, I won’t say it was leisure time. There was, uh, very little that we could do during the re-entry. On a couple of occasions, we’d have to make, um, very small trim maneuvers to actually get down to the exact landing point we wanted to go to.
Now, with this skipping trajectory, we got the spacecraft. The system on board the spacecraft is doing all the navigation. It’s doing all the thinking that, in many cases, we had to do. Uh, I think the crew is, uh, with this, uh, skipping trajectory that they will fly. It will go to an exact location where the recovery forces are.
Uh, to a great extent, we had to make a small maneuver, make small maneuvers, or we had to shift the recovery forces. In most cases, we shifted the recovery forces. But now, with today’s technology, these guys are, uh, home free except for there’s 11 parachutes that got to come out, and, uh, those guys, fortunately, the main shoots were, they had three of them. They got at least two of them’s got to work. But, uh, that heat shield is a real key to this thing, and I’m going to be, uh, glad to see it, take a look at it.
Wow, July 8, 2011. That went fast.
And he looks like he’s doing great.
The man’s still got his wits about him! Great interview!
Literally the majority of X users think the entire mission was faked. Brain rot.
“Now, with this skipping trajectory”
My understanding is the skipping trajectory heated the heat shield and then the heat soak after that initial heating caused parts of the heat shield to essentially bubble off. So they eliminated the skip trajectory and came straight into the atmosphere. That was what I read a couple weeks prior to the launch.
“Fake it until you make it.”
Lol.
😂😂😂. Our contract after that was wheel stop(of shuttle) + 30 days. Then laid off. Woohoo! Then 4/1/2026 watched the Artemis. Sweet!
The first time we went to the Moon resulted in the usual Collectivist losers whining how that money should have been spent elsewhere. Now that the Federal Government has been turned into a giant looting machine supporting 'Learing Centers' for turd World invaders imported here on our dime, I'm happy about the turnaround. I'm not surprised a new round of losers is whining and doing the same thing they did last time around.
*** It was, uh, it took me back, made me young again.***
I told my kids that I felt like a kid again. Took me back, too, to the glory days, before Watergate, gas lines, humiliation at losing so many to the Vietnam War, embassy hostages in Iran, etc, etc, etc.
Given the extreme high pressure job, and that era of smoking and steak, it’s amazing that this man didn’t drop dead 50 years ago. Chris Kraft, his predecessor, also lived to extreme old age.
They must really have been Steely Eyed Missile Men.
Yes, and I was with my youngest for a health checkup. I wanted to stay in the waiting room. He was a young adult, so that was fine. (He had many health problems growing up. Thankfully, most of his issues don’t give him as many problems as he had back then.) He didn’t quite understand why, but he knew I was upset. Now he understands so much better.
If the crew survival rate from 300m from landing is 99.9% landing in water and 99.8 landing on the ground of a watertight spacecraft, what does it matter. Securing a landing site for 48 hours, grounding drones and the wear and tear on local infrastructure by the local looky loos costs more than declaring a piece of water a no fly zone, and providing a pickup boat.
Now musk and spacex have something to prove, this aint spacex.
We went from walking on the moon to a broken shitter in 50 years,,, yep thats progress.
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.
