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Nasa houston mission control12/14/2023 “I’m like an orchestra conductor,” Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr., flight operations director for the Apollo missions told TIME back then. After all, none of this had been done before. The average age of the Mission Operations Control Room was 28, and the learning was all on the fly. And watching the Saturn V rocket launch the Apollo astronauts into space was like coming full circle for flight controller Charles “Chuck” Deiterich, the son of an airport mechanic who drew pictures of rockets in junior high school he ended up computing the throttle-down time for the lunar module’s descent to the moon’s surface and the maneuvers for the astronauts’ return to Earth. Flight dynamics officer Dave Reed built model airplanes growing up, but switched to rockets when he was 15 after watching the Soviet Union become the first country to successfully launch a satellite on Oct. Air Force but had set his eyes on NASA when he saw Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin become the first man in space on April 12, 1961. Some of the Mission Control staffers had been waiting for this moment since the Space Race started. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. “When they actually landed, I remember the hair on the back of my neck standing up just a little bit, but when I saw the moon, it was just… wow.”įor your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. That’s when it really hit me, the emotional drain,” he says. “I was looking at the moon, the real moon, and I just felt, Oh wow. On that humid evening, the man with a reputation for sangfroid looked up at the sky in a new way. John Aaron, who was a 26-year-old subsystems flight controller for the command module, was done with his shift after the landing, but didn’t want to go home yet. Pete Conrad, who would become the third man to walk on the moon during Apollo 12, had come to watch and remarked that it was “just like Armstrong to say something profound like that,” remembers Jerry Bostick, who back then was the 30-year-old leader of a team of flight controllers in “the trench,” the nickname for the first row of consoles. “The crew has just landed,” he explains, “and we have to make sure it is safe to remain there and we have to do it at very specific times, when the lunar module could lift off and do a rendez-vous with the command module that’s orbiting the moon.”Īfter getting the clear that it was safe to stay, Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the lunar module and spoke his famous words. The crew still had to do the post-landing checklist. I sort of yelled at everybody to settle down.” He even broke his pencil and it flew up in the air. “They start cheering and stomping their feet, and that sound seeps into the room at a time when we have to concentrate,” he says. The 35-year-old flight director Gene Kranz, whom TIME described as “a crew-cut and clip-voiced former test pilot,” started to get annoyed by the whooping and hollering of the VIPs in the viewing room behind him. “You’re looking out, seeing it, feeling the spacecraft as it maneuvers, than looking at charts and lines on a computer screen.”īut the successful landing didn’t mean the astronauts were out of danger.Īs people around the world began to celebrate, the men in Mission Control knew their work wasn’t yet done. “I was much more confident and relaxed” in space. ”įifty years later, Duke says he found it “easier” to be the one actually landing a spacecraft on the moon - which he did during Apollo 16 in 1972 - than to monitor this one from Mission Control down on Earth. “I was so excited, I couldn’t even say Tranquility,” Duke says.
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