The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 19

Apollo 11: 25 years later The Orlando Sentinel, Wednesday, July 20, 1994 A-1 9 3H3 NASA chief chides America I was the most emotional of the flight directors. Space really got me all honked up. Gene Kranz Apollo 11 flight director for its spending priorities WASHINGTON American society in 1994 seems more eager to guzzle beer and watch pornographic movies than venture into outer space, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin said Tuesday. 'Take a look at how we spend our money," Goldin told a roomful of space exploration enthusiasts. "We spend $8 billion on nornncranhv but we don't debate that.

We spend close to $b0 billion on beer and all LI fi 1 accoutrements that come with 1 uf) While those expenditures by the I jb) general public go unquestioned, ft. Goldin complained, NASA faces a mr Mr SMzttrtf 'ftp UJ fioldin struggle each year to defend its $14 billion, taxpayer-fed budget. "And we have to really come up with all the right charts and words to justify why we are going out into the future," he said. "Decades into the future." Goldin, who in the past has compared the government's space program expenditures to U.S. corn chip sales, made the remarks in closing a two-day symposium tied to the Apollo 11 silver anniversary.

He called space exploration a form of "intellectual nourishment" that America has neglected, focusing its energies instead on the short-term gratification that comes from entertainment and recreation. "NASA will take the American public as far, as fast and as high as they want to go. We're a reflection of America," the space agency chief said. "And if America's in the intellectual doldrums, our space program reflects that." Goldin then softened his words by saying he thinks America is "coming out of those doldrums" with the end of the Cold War and the dawn of a new era of cooperation in space with Russia. Apollo astronauts put in an appearance WASHINGTON The three Apollo 11 astronauts will appear together at the White House today as President Clinton commemorates the 25th anniversary of the first moon landing.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins will be joined by members of other Apollo crews, as well as 28 schoolchildren from throughout the country. Vice President Gore and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton will also participate in the 2:30 p.m. ceremony in the East Room, the White House announced Tuesday. Post office adds its stamps of approval CAPE CANAVERAL The U.S. Postal Service will issue two new postage stamps today commemorating Gene Kranz (left), shown in Mission Control, is virtually unknown while Neil Armstrong (at right, stepping on the moon) is a folk hero.

'General Savage' ramrodded moon landing LOS ANGELES TIMES the first lunar land- ing of Apollo 11 a 29-cent first-class stamp and $9.95 Express Mail stamp. To mark the event, former astronaut Henry Hartsfield Jr. will unveil the new stamps at Spaceport USA, the visitors center at fl l-irst Moon Landing ASSOCIATED PRESS The crew of the Apollo 1 1 moon- Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz landing mission (from left) Neil Aldrin Jr. is shown in 1969. "Hang tight everybody," Kranz said over the flight director's loop.

"Eagle, you're looking great. You're go," said Charles Duke, relaying Kranz's assent to Armstrong and Aldrin. As the mission's "capsule communicator," Duke was the only one in Mission Control allowed to talk directly to the crew during flight. Armstrong proceeded as planned and took manual control at 2,000 feet. His flying skills were so formidable that three times nursing a crippled jet onto a carrier deck, at the controls of the X-15 and then in a Gemini space capsule he had turned near-disaster into triumph.

Aboard the lunar lander, he steered the craft back and forth, seeking a safe spot in the boulder-strewn landscape. In Houston, a flight controller announced on the loop how much longer the lander could fly as descent-fuel levels dropped. Sixty seconds left. Thirty seconds. Fifteen.

Through the static, Aldrin reported seeing dust from the surface, blown up by the engine exhaust. "OK, engine stop," Aldrin radioed "Houston, Tranquillity Base here," Armstrong radioed. "The Eagle has landed." It was 3:18 p.m. Houston time, July 20, 1969. Armstrong left NASA two years later and taught aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati until 1979.

Now 63, he confines public activities to a few corporate boards and the chairmanship of AIL Systems a small high-tech engineering company on Long Island. Kranz gave the rest of his working life to Mission Control. In 1970, when an on-board explosion threatened the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts halfway to the moon, Kranz was at the flight director's console and helped save them. In 1986, Kranz still in the mission director's chair had no way to avert disaster as an explosion destroyed the space shuttle Challenger shortly after launch. And last winter, as shuttle astronauts repaired the Hubble Space Telescope, Kranz oversaw the entire Mission Operations Directorate from the same chair.

He retired in March. Reflecting on Armstrong's distaste for public adulation, Kranz recently pronounced his judgment of the Apollo 11 astronaut and on himself as well, whether he meant to or not: "He wanted to do something, rather than be something," said Kranz, "and he did it." HOUSTON Neil Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon. But it was Gene Kranz who guided him the last few miles onto the dusty, pockmarked surface to take that "one giant leap for mankind." Today, exactly 25 years after that first moon landing, Armstrong remains a national folk hero. Kranz is virtually unknown outside an inner circle. But if Armstrong was the public image of American space prowess for years after the landing, then Kranz the hard-charging NASA flight director known as "General Savage" was its private face.

Armstrong was a paragon of test pilot cool: terse, aloof, unknowable. The commander of Apollo 11 was a blue-eyed Eagle Scout with a hesitant, lopsided grin so shy that there are almost no clear pictures of him standing on the moon's surface, only photographs of his footprints and his shadow. He declined to be interviewed for this story. He declines almost all interview requests. Kranz, who retired from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration four months ago at age 61, was unabashedly sentimental, a fierce agency loyalist who played Sousa marches in his Johnson Space Center office to pump up his adrenalin.

He relished his nickname and his in-house reputation as a relentless taskmaster. "I was the most emotional of the flight directors," Kranz said in a recent interview. "Space really got me all honked up." The two very different men were never so close as when they were farthest apart. On July 20, 1969, Armstrong was 240,000 miles from Earth, flying only a few miles above the moon's surface, searching for a safe landing site with his craft's emergency alarms flashing, his on-board computer about to break down and his fuel supply minutes from running out. Kranz was in a locked control room at Mission Control in Houston with a dozen young engineers relaying data through the earphones of his headset.

Within NASA, the flight director is the single person with absolute authority over all operations during a space mission, and it was Kranz who decided to override the alarms that day. "No way can you ever, ever, ever evidence confusion, concern, lack of understanding," Kranz said of the flight director's job. "You have to be in charge. You are the guy. You have to be cooler than cool, smarter than smart." During the 13 minutes of that lunar descent, millions of people on Earth held their breath.

Eight years' labor, $25 bil- Kennedy Space Center, at 10:30 a.m. "The moon landing remains one of the best examples of what happens when all of America pulls together towards a common goal," Postmaster General Marvin Runyon said. "The new moon landing stamps were designed to capture the drama of a chapter in American history that we can all look back on with great pride." Town celebrates with a trip to Moon MOON, Ky. It's one small step for man, one giant excuse for a party. The 25th anniversary of the first moon walk is a big deal for this tiny Kentucky community, population 20.

The Kiwanis Club in nearby West Liberty even asked Kennedy Space Center about borrowing a real spacecraft, but it would have cost too much to ship from Florida to Moon. So the club has launched a "Win a Trip to the Moon" contest: to the winner, a trip from West Liberty to Moon in a homemade wood-and-steel lunar module, a case of Moon Pies, a case of cola, plus dinner and tickets for two to a local theater. The winner also gets to stomp a "one giant step" footprint in wet concrete in front of the pdst office. The Postal Service's Moon branch closed last year but will reopen Wednesday, just for the occasion, to postmark mail with a specially designed cancellation stamp. Here's your chance to name the moon WASHINGTON Some planets, such as Saturn and Jupiter, have more than one moon.

Other planets, such as Earth, have only one moon. But only one planet ours doesn't have a popular name for its satellite. It's just "moon." Hoping to remedy the situation, Final Frontier magazine is sponsoring a contest to name the moon. "Jupiter has Io, Europa and Callisto among its entourage, Saturn has Titan, Neptune is orbited by Triton, even tiny Pluto has Charon," Editor Leonard David said. "But what is the popular name of Earth's moon? Moon.

How boring." People may send their suggestions, with 25 words or less explaining why their choice is best, to Final Frontier, Name The Moon P.O. Box 15451, Washington, D.C. 20003-0451. Entries must include a name, address and phone number. Sean Holton and Jay Hamburg of the Sentinel staff contributed to these reports.

Wire services also were used. lion in taxpayer money, the work of 300,000 technicians, a Cold War rivalry and an assassinated president's promise hung in the balance. When the lunar lander settled safely onto the moon's surface, the national victory was so complete that for decades the Soviet Union would officially deny there had been a race. Earlier, with just 10 minutes remaining before Armstrong and copilot Buzz Aldrin Jr. were to appear from behind the moon and begin their descent, Kranz had called his flight controllers together for a confidential "pulse check." Stephen G.

Bales, then a 26-year-old, engineer from Iowa, was running the guidance console for the lunar descent that day. are getting ready to do something no one else has ever Bales said recently, recalling Kranz's words at the time. Tfou are trained. You are prepared. We will do well.

No matter how it turns out, when we walk out of this room, I will walk out with Then, aboard the Eagle, as the lunar lander was named, Armstrong and Aldrin emerged from the radio silence caused by orbiting behind the moon. Back aboard the orbiting command capsule, the third crew member, astronaut Michael Collins, waited for them to start the descent. Then the problems started. Communications were unusually distorted and static-filled. Could they get enough data to allow the flight to continue? Yes.

Then static drowned out all critical data for 30 seconds. When the signals picked up again, radar readings revealed the craft was moving too fast. If it continued to accelerate, it might overshoot the landing zone, and Kranz would have to order an abort On board the spacecraft, a power meter failed. No sooner had the ground team responded to that problem than a computer-program alarm flashed in the capsule and on the meters in Mission Control. That signaled that the on-board computer was getting overloaded.

Would they have to abort? Bales hesitated. Voices on four or five "loops" in the control room's communications system dissected the problem in a knowledgeable gabble in his ear. Within seconds he had determined that the problem could be safely ignored. Kranz grunted acknowledgment The descent continued. The computer alarm went off again.

"We're go," Bales told Kranz, more confidently. Again the alarm came. Again. Shuttle astronauts followed in the footsteps of their childhood heroes COMPILED FROM WIRE REPORTS Columbia commander Robert Cabana, at 45 the only crew member who was an adult in 1969, was a midshipman at the Naval Academy during Apollo 11 and watched the moon landing on a wardroom TV. Colulmbia's crew and their ground controllers are now keeping an eye on the shuttle's onboard navigation system because of a "minor spike" in one of the three guidance units that feed information to the Columbia's flight computers.

Mission managers refused Tuesday to call it a problem and said they did not plan to cut short the two-week mission, which is scheduled to end with a sunrise landing Friday at Kennedy Space Center. The failure of just one guidance unit is grounds for ordering the space shuttle home immediately. That happened on a mission in 1991. screen the whole night" said Donald Thomas, 39, another of Columbia's first-time astronauts, who was watching TV that night at his Cleveland home. Cleveland-born crewman Carl Walz, now 38, was just across town from Thomas, watching TV at home, too.

He doubts he'll live long enough to travel to the moon but fantasizes about going there and finding Armstrong's and Aldrin's footprints. Halfway around the world in Tokyo, Dr. Chiaki Mu-kai was listening intently to the radio as Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to step foot on another world. "I was so excited to listen to the radio and I couldn't believe that, 'Oh gee, there are human beings on the said Mukai, 42, who became Japan's first female astronaut when Columbia blasted off. ers have followed their heroes into space they are orbiting Earth this week aboard the shuttle Columbia Columbia's flight is the first shuttle mission to occur during an Apollo 11 anniversary.

To mark the occasion, the crew is carrying moon dust and rocks gathered from various Apollo missions, as well as an Apollo 11 plaque that hung in Kennedy Space Center's launch-control center. "I can remember irritating my dad somewhat, in the sense that I insisted on staying awake and watching all night as Neil and Buzz on the moon," Halsell, now 37, recalled recently. Now Columbia's pilot and a first-time space flier, he was in Lafayette, for a family wedding on Armstrong's and Aldrin's historic day. "I think I had my nose about 6 inches from the CAPE CANAVERAL Jim Halsell was 12 and had to nag his parents to let him stay up late to watch television in their Louisiana hotel room. Rick Hieb was 13 and didn't even have a TV in North Dakota, so the whole family went over to his grandmother's house to watch.

Leroy Chiao was 8 and watched from his back yard in California; it was so hot his parents moved the TV outside. It was July 20, 1969 25 years ago today and the youngsters all witnessed the landing of Apollo ll's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. A generation later, Halsell, Hieb, Chiao and four oth.