WRIGHT-PATT COVERAGE
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One soared toward the moon in a life-and-death crisis aboard Apollo 13 to return to Earth alive.
The other took control of the crisis on Earth to bring three astronauts home after their space-faring mission to another world faced an impending deadly catastrophe.
Together, 45 years after that heroic space flight – former astronaut James A. Lovell and retired Mission Control Flight Director Eugene Kranz — will receive accolades Friday at the National Aviation Half of Fame enshrinement ceremony.
Lovell, who was born in Cleveland, will receive the first ever Neil Armstrong Outstanding Achievement Award. Kranz, a Toledo native, will be inducted into the Hall of Fame with the likes of the most famous American pioneering aviators and astronauts, from the Wright brothers to John Glenn.
Lovell, who was enshrined in 1998, will introduce his long-time NASA colleague Kranz at the ceremony in the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force.
The hall will enshrine three others:
*Retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Robert L. Cardenas, a B-29 pilot on X-1 sound barrier breaking flights in the 1940s,
* The late Robert N. Hartzell, a propeller-making pioneer,
* The late Abe Silverstein, "architect" of the NASA space program.
The four were chosen among 200 nominees, according to NAHF enshrinement director Ron Kaplan.
The Right Stuff
“The first thing is I’m wondering why I’m there because I can think of a thousand people much more qualified for that enshrinement than I am,” said Kranz, 82, a one-time Air Force fighter pilot who recited the names of World War II aces.
“There’s people that just did everything and they did everything well so it’s a tribute but it’s very, very humbling and I’m trying to figure out what are the exact words I’m going to say when I have to accept it because I look at this as a team achievement, not something I did,” he said.
The exploits of Apollo 13 were chronicled worldwide at the height of the crisis during the April 11-17, 1970 mission and were later detailed on the silver screen in the 1995 Academy Award-winning film of the same name. Actor Tom Hanks played Lovell and Ed Harris played Kranz.
Lovell and astronauts Fred Haise and John Swigert found themselves in trouble three days and 200,000 miles from Earth when an oxygen tank exploded on the Apollo spacecraft. The three-man crew was forced to abort a landing on the lunar surface and faced the danger and unknown chance of survival of flying a crippled spacecraft back to Earth.
In a telephone interview this week from his Lake Forest, Illinois home, Lovell, 87, said the crew confronted getting the spacecraft back on the right trajectory to head home to dealing with a poisonous build-up of carbon dioxide inside the spacecraft. All of it was part of a seemingly never ending series of life and death issues and decisions that tested the astronauts and NASA’s mission control in Houston.
From the beginning, the spaceflight “was plagued with bad omens,” Lovell said, like the damaged oxygen tank installed in the spacecraft “and no one caught it,” he said. “That was a bomb waiting to go off.”
Spectators had become complacent about the Apollo moon missions by then, and the disaster brought everyone’s attention back to the historic space treks and NASA’s ability to safely bring home the astronauts, he said.
No moon landing
“I think that although I regretted not landing on the moon, I’m sure that not landing on the moon was a benefit worth (more) to NASA than anything that I missed,” he said. If the astronauts had touched down on the dusty lunar surface, the former Navy test pilot added, “Apollo 13 probably would have been swept to the dust bin of space history rather than it be distinguished as something unusual that NASA accomplished.”
The space veteran vividly recalls making the first human trip to the moon aboard Apollo 8, which orbited the lunar surface on Christmas Eve 1968 but didn’t land in a kind of space test flight. Wapakoneta native Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made the first landing aboard Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969.
Lovell never forgot on his first 240,000 mile journey to the moon, seeing the dark side of the orb for the first time and looking back home at the distant blue marble in a swirl of stars and darkness.
For him, he remembered, it was “seeing the Earth as it really is. Seeing it so small that you could really almost hide it with your thumb and realizing how insignificant we really all (are) on Earth, when your eyes can sweep around the universe and look at the moon, look at the sun, the stars out there and here’s this small body by itself.”
A white vest and the Tiger team
Kranz, known for his crew-top hair cut and bright white vests, and his “Tiger Team” at mission control in Houston faced a litany of problems.
“There were many,” he said. “In fact, the movie only touched on the easy ones.”
The astronauts and ground controllers had to figure out what happened, what route to take home from the moon, how to make the trip to Earth faster, how to conserve power and how to navigate with a debris cloud blocking instruments on the spacecraft, among other problems.
“All of these things just came together,” he said, “but, as I said, this team was magnificent.”
One thing Kranz didn’t worry about was if he had the authority to make decisions at such a critical time.
“The worry that we didn’t have is we had leadership that basically gave us our head and turned us loose and said, ‘Solve the problem,’” he said. ‘So we weren’t second guessed and had to waste a lot of time briefing people during this thing.
“I think the principal concern I had was basically fatigue because we worked very long hours,” said Kranz, who lives in the Houston, Texas area. “Shortly after the explosion, we had already put on a 12-hour shift prior to that and basically we went for another two days, 48 continuous hours from that time on.”
“I think we ran on adrenalin, black coffee and cigarettes for a good portion of the time,” he said, noting the mission control crews and astronauts trained for every contingency NASA could throw at them. “A failure is not an option mentality permeated Mission Control and that’s what drove us to keep going.
‘Failure is not an option’
But, he said, unlike the Hollywood movie Apollo 13, where Harris utters to NASA technicians “failure is not an option,” he never said those words.
“What I said was, ‘We never lost an American in space, we sure as hell aren’t going to lose one now. This crew is coming home. You’ve got to believe. You must make your team must believe it, and we must make it happen.’ But that was too long for Hollywood,” he said.
Kranz retired in 1994 as the mission operations director of space shuttle flights. The NASA veteran said the space agency should shoot for a return trip to the moon before astronauts are launched to Mars, a NASA goal through the Orion space program.
The last lunar mission was in 1972.
“I think it’s time to go back to the moon,” Kranz said in a telephone interview. “People talk about going to Mars, but basically anybody who’s camped out knows you’ve got an awful lot to learn before you’re a good camper. And it’s the same thing. Before we go to Mars, we darn well better learn how to live and build and operate and sustain life on an alien object. And I think going to the moon is the only one that makes sense.”
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