9UNP1291HD_Chris_Henry_WordPress

Without further ado, tonight's speaker is no stranger to us here at EAA as well as to the speaker circuit. Chris was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA, loved aviation from the start as a kid. Started volunteering at his local air museum at the age of 12 and since then, he has been involved in aircraft restoration and preservation of the stories of aviation's rich history and heritage. He works closely with our B-17 program and events for the museum. He was part of the team to develop the Apollo 13 reunion for the AirVenture 2015, which he'll talk about tonight and had a chance to work real closely with the Apollo 13 crew and team, so without further ado, please help me welcome Chris Henry. 
(Applause)

- How is everybody tonight? Well, thank you guys for coming. So, before I start, I guess we should ask who has seen the movie Apollo 13? Pretty good, you haven't seen it? 
(Chris laughs)

 He's the one guy who hasn't seen it.

Coming to AirVenture, working here at EAA, I always knew there'd be a pretty cool opportunity to work with some interesting people and just get to do some cool projects. Had no idea I'd get to be involved in something like this.

How many people here tonight remember the Apollo missions and the Mercury missions and Gemini? It was a pretty inspiring time in our nation's history, of course.

The whole thing began with kind of an idea. I realized that it was the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission and...

EAA is set up in a way that you can pretty much kinda walk into someone's office and say, hey, I have a cool idea and it ends up at the top and sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes it's a bad idea, but if it's a good idea, and the right people believe in it, sometimes something pretty amazing can happen and that happened here. I told Jack that it is the 45th anniversary, be pretty neat to do something for that and he said, "Sounds good, "go ahead and get on it." 

And, I'm like, "what on earth does that mean?" And he says, "Well, try contacting these guys," and I was like, "Oh, okay, I'm gonna start." So, I started with Gene Kranz. If you've seen the movie or you know your space history, you know, tough as nails, gruff, flattop, no nonsense, mission control flight director, and I'll never forget the day I was sitting in my cube here and the phone rang and I answered and I said "Hello, this is Chris," and he goes, "Chris, this is Gene Kranz." Yeah, mission control voice still, you know, and I'm like oh my gosh. He still sounds just like that, still uses those terms. Throughout the whole deal, whenever I'd have to call him, he would answer the phone and just, you know, most people say hello, and he would pick up the phone and, "This is Kranz." And as a matter of fact, Tom, who's sitting back here works with me and a friend of mine here and we had to call him just to brief him on something and his phone died. And right away, he's just, "Standby one." You know, and you're just, you know, what? 

And he came back, he goes, "Okay, we're good to go "on this other phone," and it's like oh wow, we just switched phones and it's like we're in space, so, 
(Laughter)

 pretty incredible, but it started with Gene and Gene said, "Well, have you tried getting a hold of "Lovell and Haise yet?" And, I said, "Well, not yet," and he says, "Well, go ahead and call Jim, and it'll be fine." So, I'm nervous, I started with an e-mail and I get an e-mail back from his assistant and his assistant said, go ahead and give us a call and I called. And much to my surprise, Jim Lovell answered the phone. I was thinking this assistant is who I'd be talking to and it was very much him and so as we talked and I will talk about the history of the mission, so in case you're unfamiliar with the mission, we could talk about that, but in between, we also talk about the recap of how it came about Did anybody come to Oshkosh and see them while they were here? That was pretty amazing to see those guys together. Funny story, though I will tell you is, wow, that's loud.

On the way here, Fred Haise's car died. 

He had a rental car, so they had to give him a replacement rental car and he ended up at Jim Lovell's hotel because they couldn't figure this all out, so, it was kind of interesting, because they said, "Yeah, you can't get us two together "without something breaking."

But, in order to talk about Apollo 13, we have to talk about the space program in general. 1957, something happened that changed probably the entire world and that was Sputnik. I believe it was October of '57, they sent out this basically a satellite with a tone it that you can actually hear. And, I think that probably spooked out a lot of people because, suddenly Russia has something orbiting us and nobody liked that feeling. It was imminent that we were gonna get into a space race with Russia. It was also known that they were gonna beat us for a while before we would catch up. We working very closely in 1961 to get something launched.

We had formed the nucleus of the Mercury program, very much like that capsule back there and if you get a chance, look in that capsule if you haven't already tonight. That's what these guys were gonna fly into space and it's a pretty interesting setting in there.

So, these seven astronauts were hailed as the best pilots anybody had ever seen and they were working feverishly to get somebody up there. And they were just about ready to go in May and, that's when they were planning to leave, and in April, Russia put a man into space and beat us by a month. And, once again, we were trailing the Russians. We did eventually go in May with Alan Shepard.

He was sitting atop his capsule in his Mercury spacecraft and when I talked to Gene about it, Gene said, "We got to a point where we had never had a guy actually "sitting on top of a rocket before," and he said, "Keep in mind, a month ago, one of our rockets "blew up on the pad." So, it wasn't a guaranteed success, this was something very new and very dangerous and the flight controllers, as they were counting down, kept flagging stuff, because nobody wanted to just finally give the green light and say let's do this. And they said, lo and behold, Alan Shepard atop that rocket in his capsule, clicked on the mic and he said, "Let's light this candle." and they finally did. He actually said a silent prayer to himself, sort of not knowing he had his mic keyed and it broadcast over mission control and he said, "Lord, don't let me blank up," you could put whatever word you want in there, but it came straight across to mission control.

So, think about this, Alan Shepard gets back, we have a total time of 20 minutes of space flight.

The president a couple weeks later comes out and says we're gonna go to the moon by the end of the decade. Think about that for a second. That's a lot of trust put in these men and what they're gonna do. That's a lot of faith in technology that's not even existing yet, and that's exactly what we did. He challenged us to rise to this occasion and to do exactly this.

So, let's talk a little bit about the guys that were gonna go up and be part of Apollo 13. One of 'em is Jim Lovell. The Mercury flights concluded, they got more astronauts and went into the Gemini flights after Mercury. Gemini was a two man crew and they were gonna do things like walk in space. We had to prove the technology. 

We knew we could fly there, now it was time to actually see what else we can do there. Jim Lovell was part of Gemini 7. Does anybody know where Jim Lovell went to high school? He graduated from Juneau, Wisconsin and as a matter of fact, he graduated college from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, so he has a little bit of a tie to Wisconsin. Was a navy fighter pilot and there's a, geez, that thing really gets loud doesn't it? Kind of a cool story, how many of you have been EAA members for a long time? Well, he had a cool story that one time he was in Milwaukee with his panther jet and it had a high tail on it and they had had some snow and ice, he was getting ready to leave and he forgot to check the tail for ice. And some guy come running out and said you can't fly that airplane that way, you didn't check the tail, it's probably iced over and he went about checking the tail for ice and you bet the airplane had iced over and if he tried to fly that way, he'd have been killed. And the guy that ran out and saved him was Paul Poberezny. So, he had a direct tie to EAA and EAA is sort of a special place for him. 

Other things we did in Gemini was of course, rendezvous, which you see there, was something they were gonna have to do if we were gonna fly to space, go to the moon, you're gonna have to figure out how to dock spacecraft and continue go and this was all more of living in space.

We got to January and they were really sort of pushing to go. They had a really great crew for the first Apollo mission. This was the series that was gonna land on the moon. Gus Grissom, a veteran of Mercury and Gemini and, how many here have seen the movie The Right Stuff? Okay, so, I'm not preaching to the, I'm preaching to the choir here, you guys know Gus.

The movie takes some liberties, Gus was not really blackballed at NASA, the movie sort of makes it out like he was. On his Mercury spacecraft after splashdown, his hatch blew. They did determine that the hatch could just blow. The movie kind of depicts it that he did it, but that was not the case. 

With him was Roger Chaffee and Ed White. Ed White, first American to do a walk in space. So, pretty good crew to go up there with.

One night, they decided they were gonna do something called the 'plugs-out' test, really, really simple thing. Basically, it was gonna show that the rocket could support itself, that the systems, the electrical systems, the oxygen systems were all good. It was classified as a non-hazardous test, not a big deal, and, as a matter of fact, Gene had been working so hard, they gave him the night off, they said, go take your wife out to dinner tonight. So, he was home getting Marta ready for dinner and they all lived in the same sort of housing complex there and he said, "There was a knock on my door and I go out "to answer it and it was my neighbor who also worked with me "and he said, 'We lost the crew.'" And he said, "The first thing I thought it was they took off "somewhere and were out messing around," he goes, "Well, get 'em back, where are they? And he says, no, you don't understand, they're dead." And he goes, "What do you mean?" So, he said, "I immediately drove in to see "what was going on and all the control "room doors were locked." 

That was something that they would basically do if there was an emergency. So he found a way to sneak in and did exactly that, he got into a freight elevator, got into mission control and he said, "the minute I entered that room, "I knew that crew was gone." What had happened was they testing in pure oxygen, there was a spark, and just fire swept through the spacecraft killing the astronauts in about 13 seconds and he said that that

did not sit well with us, because the guys in mission control took it personally. As a matter of fact, Gene sort of really struck to home with me, he said that, "We literally sat there in mission "control and listened to our crew die on the radio." And he said that "that's something that we never forgot." Mission control felt that they were responsible for the first loss of life in the space program. What they had found out as far as I know, they believe a hatch down by Gus's feet, which had been opened and closed a bunch of times, wore some wiring coating free, the spark jumped from there and, of course, the pure oxygen environment, it went up pretty fast.

Gene Kranz didn't wait. We talk about a leader and if you watch the movie, you get the sense that this guy was a leader. 

He said, "I didn't wait for this report to come out "to tell us what was wrong." He went into his mission control team, they had a debriefing, and he said, "We're not gonna wait "for the report, this was our fault." And he said, "Nothing was ready, the simulators "didn't work right, our equipment didn't work right, "nothing that we did had any shelf life "and nobody stood up and said dammit, stop." And, he said, "from now on, when you go back "to your consoles, you're gonna right tough and competent "on your board and we will never again shy away "from those two words to define mission control. "And the words tough and competent are gonna be our "personal memorial to Grissom, Chaffee, and White." So, right out of the bat, it was, this is never gonna happen again and they didn't. They redesigned the capsule, redesigned the program. A lot of people actually think that the program probably saved lives, or the Apollo 1 fire probably saved lives in space, because they went back, redesigned the capsule. Apollo 7 would be the return to flight and think about this. When Apollo 7 flew, that was the Apollo 1 backup crew, so when those guys flew, they knew exactly what they were doing. 

That was led by Wally Schirra. Gene said, "When Apollo 7 launched, that was the most scrutinized spacecraft you'd ever seen, because we just looked over every little bit of it." Now came time for Apollo 8, and Apollo 8 was gonna be the first launch of the Saturn V rocket. Now you want to talk about something big, this is a rocket that's taller than a 35 story skyscraper. It's the most complex machine that man has ever built and it's gonna take you to the moon and you're gonna sit in the very top of it. So, kinda interesting, we watched something here recently, but Bill Anders basically said that, when it launched it was so powerful that it vibrated him so hard, that he thought they bought it on liftoff. He said he thought that they had died. Frank Borman joked about the fact that right before the engines fired, he was looking out through a window and saw a bunch of geese flying around, and he said, "I always wondered what happened to them "when that thing lit off, so." 
(Laughter)

 But Apollo 8 would have to go up and be the first guys to go around the moon and nobody had ever done this before. 

At this time, this was the furthest into space that we were gonna be at that point. They had to change it around a bit, because the lunar module wasn't ready and so, these guys went up. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell had flown together in Gemini and then, of course, Bill Anders there with him. And, not realizing when they went around the moon, they had no idea they were gonna see the first Earth-rise. It never actually dawned on them and to be honest, they were lucky that the spacecraft was in the right angle to see it. But, they were able to grab that picture. The caption is that the picture is not scheduled. That was kind of a joke, Frank Borman was saying as they were going crazy trying to get all of these pictures of this. Of course, they also read form the book of Genesis on Christmas Eve as they went around the moon. I believe NASA was actually later sued for that by the way.

Apollo 9, now, this was the first spacecraft, again, that was gonna get to be named. When you were in Mercury, you had names for your spacecraft.

As a matter of fact, Gus Grissom was part of the controversy in this. His spacecraft that sank was named Liberty Bell.

After it sank, he went on to Gemini. He named his Gemini capsule the unsinkable Molly Brown. 
(Laughter)

 So, once again, you'll hear the phrase you had to know Gus. And I believe that that is true, he had a very interesting sense of humor. As a matter of fact, during training, he once hung a lemon from the command module I believe, basically because they had so many problems. 

So, they said, "well, Gus, you can't name it unsinkable "Molly Brown," and they said, "think of something else." And he goes, "Well, my second choice is Titanic." And they said, "Well, okay, go ahead "with Unsinkable Molly Brown." So, they come up to Apollo 9 and suddenly now, you have two spacecraft in the air again,

and they say, "Okay, well, you're gonna have to name "the spacecraft." So, they were waiting for this really, really, you know Columbia, or something really great. Well, the crew of Apollo 9, the first time they had ever seen their command module, it was all wrapped in plastic and pink wrapper, so named it Gumdrop. And Apollo 9 was the first guys to fly with the lunar module and they called it Spider, so, those majestic names were kind of pushed out and Gumdrop and Spider went up on Apollo 9. But, they went out and tested the LEM, and let's talk about the lunar module for a few minutes, you can see it doesn't look anything like an F-86. It's just built to support the lives of two guys for a short period of time. 

On the ground, if you would drop a pen, it could rupture the, I don't know what you want to call this, the cabin of the lunar module, very fragile machine. So, not really built to do a lot of stuff here on Earth. Only built to do one thing on space for a short period of time for two guys.

A lot of people sorta wondered if the lunar module was gonna be alright in space. It was a new design, of course, it doesn't look anything aerodynamic, it's not, so there was a lot of, it was a very fragile machine, there was a lot of concern about the lunar module. Apollo 10 was the guys that went down. They probably had the least glamorous mission of all. These guys got to do everything Apollo 11 did except land on the moon. They got to go down, test the approach, test everything, test the computers, but they weren't allowed to land. There was a lot of concern at NASA that these guys were gonna try and land on the moon anyway, so they short-fueled the lunar modules so that they couldn't and so, there was a big, we trust you, but just in case, we're not gonna give you any gas either, so. 
(Laughter)

 And, then of course, the big leap, Apollo 11. Gene said that, "You know, we'd been working on Apollo 11 for a while and went to work every day and no big deal." And he said, except, the day they were gonna land on the moon, when he showed up, he said, there were guards everywhere and security and TV, and he goes, "Okay, something is different today." And he went into mission control, got everybody ready, it was on his watch that the landing was actually gonna happen. And, he ordered the control room doors locked so nobody can come in or out, and once again, being the true leader that he is, he said, "Whatever happens today, I will stand behind your decisions. "We will leave this room as a team and we're either "going to land on the moon, abort, or crash. "Those are the only three outcomes from this point on." And, that was his style of leadership. There was no questioning. 

If you told me there wasn't enough fuel to do this, that's it, there's not enough fuel to do this, so, I wouldn't want to be the guy that would have to tell him that, so, we'll get to that a little bit later with the making of the movie. We definitely got to talk to him about some of that. So, July 1969, Apollo 11 is going down to land on the lunar surface and the computer starts sending error messages. Basically what's happening is the computer was overworking itself. It was concentrating on the big things, dropping the little things and giving the error message that hey, we missed these. And, as they approached the lunar surface, they also noticed they were coming down into a crater field. Buzz Aldrin had to manually land the lunar module and when they landed, they had about 13 seconds of fuel remaining, I believe, maybe even less, before they had to make a go, no-go decision to abort. So, they were down to just a few seconds of fuel remaining in the lunar module. When they landed, Buzz and Neil sort of gave each other the nod and started shutting down the lunar module, they forgot to tell the guys in mission control. So, the guys in mission control are, oh my god, are we out of fuel, what happened? 

And, when they realized that on Apollo 11, that's sort of the famous speech you here with, "Houston, Tranquility Base, the Eagle has landed." If you hear an extended version of it, the comeback from mission control is, "You have a bunch of guys about "to turn blue down here," and that's because they had no idea if they had landed or not. Of course, "One small step for man, one giant leap "for mankind," as Neil put his footprint there on the moon.

Apollo 12 came up. Apollo 12, we had corvette's here a couple days ago, these are some of the guys that had a lot of fun with their corvettes and had personalized ones. But, you had Dick Gordon, Al Bean, and Pete Conrad, and Gene said, "This time we were ready, we had this. "Apollo 11 was done Apollo 12 was gonna be smooth sailing." That lasted for about 30 seconds into the flight. On liftoff, they were struck by lightning kicking off all the electrical systems on-board the spacecraft. The only thing they had that was good was the rocket and nobody knows what's going on. 

They''re probably not far from aborting the mission and, lo and behold, John Aaron fires out and he says, "Have them switch SE to Auxillary." And, to quote Pete Conrad when they told him, he says, "What the hell is that?" And, you can actually go on YouTube and listen to the tape which is pretty funny and Alan Bean said, "I know that that is," and it just happened, it was a dumb switch over by his part of the cabin. He knew where it was and he hit the switch and it brought everything back up online and reset the electrical system in the spacecraft. The rest of the way into orbit, Pete Conrad just kind of nervously giggled the entire time on the frequency, so, just a few seconds before they were gonna abort something.

So, then came around Apollo 13 and Gene said, "Now we were "really ready for just an easy mission that went right "by the books, no stress, a straightforward deal." And, that didn't even last until liftoff. These guys trained for years together, so you have to remember, just because they were on Apollo 13 and their mission was up, doesn't mean that they weren't training together already as a crew. As a matter of fact, these guys were the backup crew for Apollo 11. So, 13, they're the prime guys, they're getting ready to go. 

Three days out, Ken Mattingly gets exposed to the measles and this is a time where you're ready to go, you can predict each other's movements and what you're thinking just by the way people were breathing or what you're thinking just because of the simulations you've done, and now suddenly, you have to change one of your crew members. So, they brought Jack Swigert in and Jack Swigert had been a backup and I asked Jim, I said, "How did you feel about that?" If you watch the movie, there's a lot of sorta turmoil around some of that, and he said, well, "It wasn't "that we had anything against Jack," he said, "Jack was a qualified pilot, we thought he'd be great. "The problem is is that you broke up the fluidness "of this crew, they way this crew gelled together. "Now we have to relearn that." So, for the next two and a half days, these guys were in a simulator, just constantly, simulator, simulator, simulator, they went out, got in the capsule and launched.

They launched on April 11th and at 13:13 local time. And their center engine failed on one of the stages on the rocket. They burned the other engines longer and got rid of that stage and he said, "Well, we hit our glitch "for the mission, we're good to go." So, as they kind of got squared away and are heading toward the moon, it dawned on Jack Swigert that he forgot to file his income taxes and all of the headache and all the back and forth and all the simulator and he thought he'd be there to do it. 

And, so he had to radio mission control to see if he could get an extension on his income taxes. 
(Laughs)

 And they did, they said, you're definitely out of the country, so you can have it.

Think about this, Apollo 11, first lunar landing, and Apollo 12 was just the second. Here's the third, Apollo 13, they actually had a TV broadcast, they filmed on-board and they were gonna beam down to be carried here on TV and the TV networks didn't want to carry it. They said it was routine, not a big deal anymore and a lot of them didn't consider it news and Gene said that some of the guys on his team felt that way. They wanted to watch the ball game and they said they couldn't because the TVs in mission control and in the break rooms had the mission on. So, they do this and they're stowing everything, they're putting everything away and Jim Lovell said, he actually saw one of the cameras on him he was stowing and they had asked somebody to stir the tanks. Now, let me set the setting for you here. Back at mission control, it was switch out time, so these guys were in the middle of a mission crew change on the flight controllers and some of the controllers are just trying to tidy up stuff for the next guy, so you wouldn't have a mess to deal with. 

Up in the spacecraft, like I said, they were stowing the gear that they had from their broadcast and stirring the tanks was something they would do several times on a mission, not a big deal, just a couple switches. And what it did, it would turn on these fans in the oxygen tanks that would sort of level everything out if you will so they can get a more accurate measurement on what was it the tanks, so that they can sort of gauge how they can use the oxygen. Now, when I say oxygen, I'm not talking about the breathing oxygen, I'm talking about the oxygen that was used to power systems for the ship. So, Jack Swigert reaches over and he stirs the tanks and suddenly, there's a big bang and one of the thrusters kicks on on the spacecraft and starts just automatically trying to correct itself. It was a pretty large bang, the tunnel that connects the lunar module and the command module started to buck and to torque a little bit and, as a matter of fact, it was sort of a joke, Fred Haise would take the cabin repressurization valve and sort of turn it, and they depict that in the movie. And, Fred said, "I was scared when this happened, "I didn't know what was going on," and he goes, "and Jim looked at me, sort of with an angry look "on his face thinking it was me messing with that." And he goes, "And then in a brief few seconds, "he had a look of I wish that was you doing that." Down on Earth, the guys at mission control had no idea anything was wrong, so they're just going along with their business and their change out and suddenly, from the spacecraft Jack Swigert had actually said it first, he said, "We've had a problem." And then somebody says, "Sorry, say that again." And Jim Lovell comes on with the famous call of "Houston, we've had a problem." 

And at first, Gene said, "We thought we were facing "an instrumentation problem. "We thought this was something that, you know, the computers "in mission control weren't as powerful. "Your phones are more powerful than probably the entire room of mission control and we started, let's back up, let's see exactly what we're facing here. And, he said it wasn't uncommon to chase a problem that didn't exist. You would start chasing these instrumentation problems and the next thing you know, there wasn't a problem at all, you were chasing a phantom. So he said, let's stop, let's work the problem. Let's not make things worse by guessing and let's take a look at what we have here. Once the crew, it was Jim Lovell that looked outside one of the windows and saw something venting and he reported that down to mission control that they knew that something serious indeed did happen and they were facing a pretty decent crisis.

I got this from one of the flight controllers that was here. He had kind of an interesting thing, he said, "One time, in the simulator, we had used the lunar module "as a lifeboat and we just experimented with it." 

And he said, "It was something I always keep "in the back of my mind that we had done that "and that was kind of an interesting simulation." And, as they were watching the oxygen tank gauges drop in the command module, they realized that their command module was dying and that is something that you needed to preserve, you needed to keep that safe, because it had your parachutes, that had your heat shield to reenter the Earth's atmosphere. So, they said, it was very clear that suddenly we were gonna be out of power in the command module. So, this gentleman back on Earth, he said, "I didn't even "clear it, I just told Capcom, the guys talking "to the capsule, I just told 'em, tell Fred Haise, "lifeboat LEM," because that was the title of the simulation they did. And he said, "Fred Haise was the kind of guy that "he would remember it, I knew it." And he said, Capcom said, "Lifeboat LEM, Fred." And they said, "Without even saying another word, "Fred Haise went down into the lunar module "and started powering up the systems." It took about three and a half hours by the checklist to completely power up the lunar module. They estimated they had about 15 or 20 minutes before the command module was dead and out of power. So, this is something they never simulated before, because now, Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, they're both trying to power up the lunar module and you had Ken, I'm sorry, not Ken, Jack trying to shutdown the command module and save the power for reentry.

They were faced with two options. After they got this all stable, as stable as they could, Jim said he really had to learn how to fly this thing again, because you're CG shifted really big now. In the movie I think he says you're flying with a dead elephant on your back and he said it was very hard to control it. "Any of the controls that I would use, it didn't do anything "of what it was supposed to do, so I had to teach myself "how to fly this thing all over again." And, back on Earth, mission control is working to figure out what to do. They said, well, we have two options. We can go around the moon and come back that way. It was the safest option, it didn't require, it required a few days of being in this situation, but it required not starting the engine on the command module, on the service module that was attached to it. The other option was a direct abort, to turn around right where it was, fire off that big engine and try and come home. The problem was, you couldn't see outside the spacecraft, so nobody knew what the damage was. 

Gene said he didn't like the idea of firing off this engine and he consulted with some people and he thought about it. He says no, we're gonna do a return trajectory.

He basically would have to wait three days to find out if that was the right decision or not, so he didn't right away know. In the mean time, they realized they were gonna have to power down the lunar module. So, what they were basically left with was a small fan to circulate some air, a light bulb and a radio. They turned off all the navigation equipment, they turned off the computers, they turned off everything to try and save as much power as they could. Down on Earth, John Aaron, same guy that called out SE to Auxillary on Apollo 12, Gene described him as the czar of power. He just kind of owned all the power, he goes, "If you needed something, you'd go to him and say, "Can we turn this on?" And, in the meantime, it got to be about 30 degrees up in the capsule and these guys were just wearing their thin little suits, they didn't have the space suits. They had the space suits, but of course, they pretty bulky to try to put on, so you didn't want to do that.

As they're flying along and they're gonna go back around the moon and come back, of course, they have to suffer their food freezing, their water freezing. As a matter of fact, at one point, they said, you couldn't vent any more waste from the capsule, so they basically, Fred Haise took that as a command to stop drinking or to not drink as much and so, in that process, he actually ended up with a bladder infection, so he got pretty sick on-board on the mission as well. Of course, then they get the call that their, basically oxygen for breathing was fine, they weren't running out of oxygen, but what do you exhale when you breathe out?

Exactly, so they were breathing out too much carbon dioxide and the filters on-board the lunar module were only built for two guys for a couple days. Not a big deal, let's just take the ones out of the command module and talked about in the movie. Gene Kranz said this had to be a government operation. The ones in the command module were a different shape than the ones for the lunar module, so they wouldn't work. And he said, "I have have no doubt that this was the "gravest thing we were gonna face in spaceflight. "These guys were going to pass away if we couldn't "figure out a way to put a square peg in a round hole." The engineers in Houston got together and they did just that. 

They took everything that they had on-board, figured out a way to basically jam that filter into the other one, seal it in a bag using only things that were on-board including a sock of one of the astronauts a zip lock bag, duct tape, things like that. And, you could see it there, jerry-rigged a filter and put it up on the bulkhead there in the module.

It's funny, because the movie makes it look really action-packed, like, wow, this was a big deal. And, I asked Fred Haise, I said, "What were you feeling at that point?" And he says, "I was sleeping." And, I'm like, "Really?" and you know, he's like, you guys are fighting for your lives. He's like, "Yeah, I was tired, I went to sleep. 
(Chris laughs)

 But, Jim Lovell said that obviously, it was a pretty trying time to try and put this thing together in space knowing what was depending on it.

So, now, you have flown around in space and you have a computer that has been frozen for a couple days and there's literally ice on it. And now you have to restart it. These guys on the ground were talking about what to do, what kind of numbers do we have on this? And Gene said, "The guys from North American said, 'Well, " 'We kinda did an experiment.' " And he says, "What happened?" and he says, "One of our engineers went home "with the control panel in the back of his station wagon "one night and forgot it was in there." "Over night, the temperatures dropped to about 30 degrees "and when he came back to work, he realized it was in there, "so we right away and bench-tested it and it worked." And he goes, "That's it. 
(Laughter)

 That's the testing that they've done on it. One of the gentleman that was gonna be a big part of this again was John Aaron, the guy that owned the power. 

Another gentleman, Ken Mattingly, the guy that was scrubbed from the mission who to this day is thrilled to announce that he never had the measles. He would get in the simulator with a couple other guys and basically try to figure out the order of turning things on so that they can get these guys home. Everything had to be turned on in a certain order. You had to make a checklist on how to get here as well. Everything that these guys did was a checklist. Well, there's no checklist for what they're about to do. So, they needed to make sure that whatever mission control would read to them, these guys were gonna hit the right switches, that it would make sense to them and that's part of what Ken did. He was given several options to go home and take a break and he refused. You know, these guys were tight, these were his friends up there.

As they were getting close, it was time to configure the spacecraft, time to reenter, we're gonna come through the Earth's atmosphere. 

So, they jettisoned the service module, where the explosion was. This is the first time that they're gonna get to see the damage to their spacecraft. And that one picture on the left there you can see, it basically took off the entire side of the ship, that's where the oxygen tank was and goes right up to the heat shield. And you can't see it in that picture, but the engine bell had a big ding in it, so Gene Kranz's decision days ago to take the long way around and not fire that engine had turned out to be the right decision. They weren't sure what would happen if they had fired off that engine.

The Aquarius, which was their lunar module, that served them so well as a home for a couple days wouldn't reenter the atmosphere, that would actually burn up. So, they jettisoned that and, I believe it was Lovell that said, "Farewell Aquarius and we thank you." Grumman was very happy about the fact that the lunar module, the thing that nobody was that sure about had served them well and basically was responsible for these guys even being alive at this point.

So, the damage goes up to the heat shield. There's no testing on that, that's all they know is the damage went up to the heat shield and it's time to reenter the atmosphere. 

Right before loss of signal, which as a spacecraft travels through the reentry coming through the atmosphere, you lose signal with it, and Gene said, "We got pretty good "at dictating how long it would it be." He says, "A matter of fact, on some of the flights, "we would take bets, you know, and try and see "how close we can get to it." And he said, "Nobody had ever gone any longer "than four minutes." And he said that there was a lot of stuff going on, there was a typhoon warning, people were in mission control trying to get a report, word to some of the reporters. There were actually PR guys from NASA trying to get word to the president to prepare for whichever speech he was gonna give and one of 'em said, "There's a lot stacking up against these guys. "This could be our worst day ever," and Gene said, "That really ticked me off," he said, "that that guy "was in that room where we all had gotten together "and decided that we weren't gonna lose this crew." And he said, "I just kinda looked at him and fired back, and I said, 'This is gonna be our finest hour.' " And he says, "Matter of fact, that guy never "talked to me again," and he says "I was okay with that so." The USS Iwo Jima is in place for the recovery and as hard as it was, now it was just time for waiting, this was it. And right as they're getting ready to come through, they're getting ready to lose signal, Jim Lovell keys up very emotionally and he says, "I know what you guys have been doing "back on Earth for us and I just want to tell you "it's been a privilege flying with you." And that's it, boom, loss of signal. 

That's the last thing that, if they don't come through that they're gonna hear from Jim Lovell. Ken Mattingly who had worked so hard to get these power procedures up to them, Gene said, "We were trying to get Ken out of mission control, "because we didn't want him, he was gonna get emotional." He says, "Well, we couldn't get Ken out of there," and he goes, "So, I figured well, let's do something "with him," so they put him up with Joe Kerwin to work Capcom. Basically, how this worked was they had used the tower system, they were bouncing signals off of towers. So, the two of them could work together and try and find out where the spacecraft was. And, so they're sitting there, the minutes are ticking by. This is it, you fought to keep these guys alive for days and it's gonna come down to six minutes or however long it takes them to reenter. They're supposed to be here in four minutes and four minutes comes and goes and nothing. And, he said, "You know, you're sitting there and then "suddenly, you realize it's been five minutes and nothing," and he said, "It was the worst six minutes of my life." And he said, they're calling out to see where it is and he said, "I closed my eyes, just trying to clear "my thoughts for a second," and he said, "I couldn't even do that, because there's "Ken and Joe up there saying, you know, 'Odyssey, Houston.'" Nothing, you know, he goes, "There's Ken looking "for his friends." 

He said, "That's a pretty tough six minutes," and he said, "Then, suddenly, we got a call that we were "starting to get telemetry." One of the aircraft had spotted something and then suddenly the parachutes deployed and they were able to see the parachutes right out in the front screen there in the main room and he said, "We still "didn't hear anything yet." And then, it turns out mission control was heard in spacecraft, the spacecraft couldn't get word out to mission control, they couldn't hear 'em. And, basically you hear Jim Lovell say, "Okay, Joe, "I can hear you," and they had made it through. Gene said that the room erupted and he said "I wish I had this great story to tell you about how "the brave soul in me stood there proud of my team," he says, "But instead, I just cried." And he said, "I feel like I failed them," he says, "because, there I am balling like a baby." Then, he goes, "But, then I look around and everybody else "was balling too," he goes, "I didn't feel so bad." The crew was recovered on the USS IWO JIMA and that was it, that was the mission. Of course, they went on to make a movie about it and there's some interesting things about that. When they came here, we were gonna have them here for the reunion and EAA always has a special way of doing things. 

And I'm kind of lucky enough that I've been coming here since the 90s that I think I've seen the light, if you will, on that stuff, and one of the cool things was Gene Kranz was an F-86 Saber pilot in Korea. It was after the war, he was part of the peacekeeping missions and his F-86 was named My Darling Marta after his wife, and we didn't know how he was gonna take this, we wanted to do something that was a little surprise for him, so what we did was we have a very beautiful F-86 in our collection here. The markings that were on there had been on there for a long time, we were thinking about changing them. So, we changed the markings to his airplane without telling him. And during AirVenture here, a picture, I guess be on your right there is him being reunited with the airplane.

We didn't want to make a big deal of it as far as being public. We thought it would be nice and classy to just let him have a few minutes with that airplane. We weren't sure what reaction we were gonna get and we got the exact reaction we thought. He got very emotional at the fact that his airplane had been recreated here.

On the left is a picture of myself with Jim Lovell and Fred Haise. 

That's hands-down the coolest phrase I think I'll ever get to say by the way, so. 
(Laughter)

 I gotta tell you, we were driving back and I have them on my golf cart and you wanna see a struggle, a mental struggle is every airplane nerd sense in my body was saying, oh my god, can I ask them for a picture when I'm done. I've worked on this product for over a year. I would really love a picture to hang on the wall and say there I am with those guys. And the professional side of me is saying that's absolutely not professional, you can't do that. And, so I'm driving this golf cart around and I have Jim Lovell and Fred Haise, I keep driving ,I'm looking and there's Jim Lovell. And at one point, it was a nice moon out and he actually does the thumb over the moon thing, you know, he's talking about what a nice night it is. I'm like, oh, that's cool. So, we get to the hotel and I decided, I said well, I'm not gonna do it, I just, you know. 

So, we get off and I'm thanking them for everything and Fred Haise is from Texas, he actually sounds like he's drilling oil while he's talking to you, I mean it's just. He was just kind of like, "Well, it'd be a nice night "for a picture if you wanna get one." I'm like oh, thank god, you know, so I got a picture with them, so. It was really neat though, talking to them about the making of the movie. They said that Tom Hanks and a lot of the guys actually went and lived with their counterparts that they were portraying and Jim Lovell said it was pretty weird going to the grocery store and Tom Hanks was walking around with you in the grocery store, you know. The one thing they didn't do, though, is Kevin Bacon was never introduced to any of the cast until they started shooting, because they wanted to give that sort of feeling that he was not originally assigned to this, he wasn't part of the club prior to this. So, until they started shooting, he was left not, and obviously Jack Swigert had passed away, so, he didn't have anybody to shadow. He did however, deal with some of the other astronauts and sort of follow of them and they showed him some of the mannerisms they had. Funny story was there's a scene in the movie when they ditched the lunar module and they say, "Farewell, Aquarius and we thank you."

And Fred Haise, on the mission says, "She sure was a good ship." 

And Bill Paxton who portrayed Fred Haise heard that and sort of ad-libbed that into the movie and when they asked him why they did it, he said, "Well, it really happened, listen to the tapes." So then, they left it in the movie. Ed Harris, who portrayed Gene Kranz was doing another movie, so he wasn't gonna get to spend as much time with Gene Kranz as he wanted, so what Ed Harris did was he hired Bill Reeves and Milt Windler, both of which were here, they were flight controllers with Gene, both of which were here for AirVenture. And they were his technical advisors, they would actually travel with him on the sets of these movies and tell him what it was like to be Gene Kranz, good and bad. And, it was really kind of funny, 'cause one of their first shoots was in mission control and Ed Harris is clicking his pen, if you watched his movie, he clicked his pen a lot. When it was all said and done, Gene Kranz got to talk to Ed Harris and he said, "What's up with "clicking your pen a lot, why did you do that?" And he said, "Milt Windler happened to be standing right there and he goes, "You clicked that friggin' pen "every day in mission control and drove us crazy," so, some of the stuff that he didn't know he did got picked up in the movie. It was really interesting though to see, they all say it was a really fantastic movie. The one thing that Jim Lovell, to this day, says, is that the whole scene where they argued in space did not happen. He said, "They needed to Hollywood it up a little bit, "so they did that to show a human side of us." 

Gene Kranz said that when he's sort of demanding the power procedures, there's a part where he kicks the garbage can in mission control, and Gene said, "You know, I don't remember kicking the garbage can, "I don't think I did that." and Bill Reeves and Milt Windler kind of looked at them and they were like, yeah, he did, so. But, it was a really tight-knit group, I mean and that was really neat, and that's something that we can be proud of here is we had our own spin on this. That we hosted them for the 45th anniversary, they were really excited to be here, . Something I never thought, it was just dumb timing, that a lot of these guys, we forget, that the Apollo astronauts are aging. You know, Jim Lovell's 87, so the time do to this kind of stuff is now. It's not being taught in schools necessarily as it should, as much as it could be, and so these guys are always very eager to get out there and be part of this, so never in a million years did I think I would do that. Now, going forward, I can actually legitimately say that I've sort of become buddies with Gene Kranz which is interesting, where just about every couple weeks since a convention, I'll get a phone call or an e-mail from Gene. Funny story was last Saturday, or I'm sorry, last Sunday. I was giving a presentation here and Gene shot me an e-mail and he said he was just inducted into the aviation hall of fame in Dayton, Ohio at the Air Force Museum. 

And the e-mail said, "It was a nice party, they had "nice favors, I stole you some," so 
(Laughter)

, it's really pretty interesting, and they all have a tie to EAA which is interesting. Jim Lovell had been here, Gene was a home builder. He'd actually built a couple different airplanes and was also a crew member on a B-17 called Thunderbird. That's out on a war bird turret circuit, so he's been here a good bit with them. Fred Haise had never been here, he was really excited to be here and see the Mosquito. I shouldn't say he's never been here, but he hadn't been here in recent years. And the other guys, Milt Windler, Bill Reeves, they had not been here. It was really kind of neat to give them a little bit of spotlight too of what their sort of story was as well and what they went through, 'cause they all went through it together and that mission changed them so much that they're still together. 

These guys are still traveling around together and it's pretty inspiring to see, but that's basically my presentation here. I am gonna leave a few minutes for you guys to ask any questions. If I don't know the answer, I'll make something up or I will punt my friend back there and he'll try and think something up, but thank you guys very much for coming. We really appreciate it and next time you watch Apollo 13, you can watch it with a little bit more insight as to what really happened and know that they did it pretty much right on, that movie, so. But, thank you guys, very much. 
(Applause)