Apollo official recounts landing
The sun crept above the horizon as Gene Kranz walked into NASA’s mission control room in Houston, receiving a salute from the security guard along the way.
He traveled three floors up, walked down a gray hall and asked his fellow flight director, Glynn Lunney, how the previous night had been for the mission.
“It’s all peanuts,” Lunney told him.
Kranz lit up a cigarette. He was ready.
It was like any other day at the Manned Spacecraft Center — now called Johnson Space Center. Ex
cept it wasn’t.
On this day — July 20, 1969 — Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin would land on the moon.
“My team sounds great,” Kranz, now 85, said of that morning during a speech at Space Center Houston, the visitor’s center for Johnson, on Friday. “There’s no indication that today is any different than the hundreds of hours we spent in this room previously.”
Fifty years after that historic day, Kranz donned one of his famous white vests and walked the crowd at Space Center Houston through a silent movie of
the day Armstrong and Aldrin landed on the moon.
Flight directors are in charge of keeping astronauts safe by leading teams of controllers, researchers, engineers and support personnel at the Houston center. Kranz was one of NASA’s first.
“It’s incredible to be here on landing minus one day,” Kranz said. “I don’t feel 50 years older.”
The event on Friday was one of numerous being held in Houston and across the country to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, which launched on July 16, 1969 and splashed down after a successful mission in the Pacific Ocean on July 24.
Kranz was the flight director on duty when Armstrong
and Aldrin landed on the moon, but he also served in that position for seven other mission during the Gemini and Apollo programs. He’s best known for leading the enormous team on the ground that helped bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home after an oxygen tank explosion forced them to abort their trip to the moon in 1970.
On Friday, Kranz recalled the day in 1961 President John F. Kennedy told Congress that the U.S. should put men on the moon.
The country had just 15 minutes of time in space — a record set by Alan Shepard in May of that year, just a few weeks before. And by all accounts, the U.S. was two years behind the Soviet Union’s outer space exploration.
But that speech “ignited the fire,” Kranz said. And NASA plowed forward.
So it was particularly special when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
Kranz remembers breathing for the first time in “I don’t know how long.”
He was happy and excited. His team had done it. But there was still work to do. The mission was only half over.
People were getting excited and cheering, he said. “I told them to keep it down.”
And when Armstrong stepped foot on the moon at 9:56 p.m. Houston time that day, “We fulfilled our promise to our dead president,” Kranz said.