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From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey, and this is Against the Odds. Over the last five episodes, we've told the story of Apollo 13. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Hayes, and Jack Swigert were 56 hours into their mission when an oxygen tank exploded during a routine stir. The accident ended their dreams of landing on the moon and threatened the lives of the three men.
In the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges, NASA worked together with the astronauts to bring them home safely. My guest today was one of the people in Houston's Mission Control who helped get the Apollo 13 astronauts back home. Jerry Griffin worked as a flight director during NASA's Apollo program.
He was on duty for all of the lunar landings and served as lead flight director for the Apollo 12, 15 and 17 missions. He also advised director Ron Howard on the movie Apollo 13, starring Tom Hanks. Jerry Griffin, welcome to Against the Odds. Glad to be here. Let's bring it back to April 11th, 1970, with the launch of Apollo 13 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral.
What do you remember about that day? You know, we'd already been out to the moon on 8, 10, 11, and 12. And I remember thinking that we weren't cocky at all, but we felt ready. We were ready to do this because we had finally gotten pretty comfortable with the way the hardware worked, the software worked, and all that. So
I think it was a mission that we were hoping to be an easy one, and it turned out to be anything but that. Yeah, because Apollo 11 landed on the moon, as did Apollo 12, correct? Correct. And so 13, you've already got two in the bag already, and okay, well, we know kind of how this all works. Let's rinse and repeat, right? Yep. And that's one of the things that you have to remember about spaceflight or anything else that's
It's got a risk to it. You cannot let up. You've got to always focus on something going wrong. And quite often it did. Every mission had problems, nothing like 13. But the first couple of days were a piece of cake. Things were going very well until the very famous line popped up, Houston, we've had a problem, or Houston, we have a problem, depending on where you've heard the story.
And when that happened, where were you exactly? I had just gone off shift.
and had gone outside to play a softball game. We had just started and somebody came out and got me and said, you need to get back to the control center. Had a problem. So I went back into the control center with my softball sweats on and it was calm and disciplined, but there were just more people in there. So I went straight to the flight director console, plugged my headset in, listened, and I could tell what had pretty much happened. And I was chatting with people next to me and
It was kind of a shocker because things had gone so well, I was relaxed enough to go play a softball game. When you first walked into the flight control room there, decked out in your softball sweats, were you worried? Did you think, okay, this is not a big deal? Or was there a bit of an ominous feeling that maybe this is more than what we think it is? I wouldn't call it an ominous feeling, but any time the crew reports a bang and then reports we've had a problem, yeah, it gets your attention.
Was there any thought in the beginning that maybe these guys wouldn't be making it home? We never discussed it. The reason is it wasn't because we were trying to avoid it. I think we all knew out there at the end of trying everything we were going to have to try to get them back.
But no, I don't think the guys in the control center, I don't think the astronauts ever thought we wouldn't get them back. But it's a risky business. Space is a hard place to work and live in, and you can't panic. You've got to swallow the panic and the fear and get on about the business. After the break, we'll hear more from former NASA flight director Jerry Griffin on the Apollo 13 mission.
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A flight director is like a orchestra leader. You've got to listen to a gazillion inputs. Sometimes they're opposing or they're not quite aligned. I could listen easily to four communication loops at the same time. And you had a knack for kind of picking out the one that was really important.
And then you've got to make a decision. Flight director makes the final go-no-go decision for every critical phase of the mission. Launch, to do the maneuver that headed you to the moon. The flight director made that decision. Now you had a lot of help. You had those guys in the front room. We had guys in the back room. But it all ended up coming back up to the flight director. And the flight director had that final say. So it was tremendous responsibility there.
When I was made flight director, I was 33, and I was one of the oldest people in the control center. We were a bunch of young guys that the challenge and the fact that you had to make those kind of decisions on your own, kind of standing out on the end of the diving board with nobody else around you when it came down to the final decision. I think that was probably the most important attribute that a flight director had to have.
Just like a symphony conductor, you had to know what all those other instruments that were out there in front of you were saying and playing because you're the one that had to pull it together at the end and make it sound right. So I'd love this for you to paint a picture for us. And I think you did actually take a picture, didn't you, in 1970 where there was desks and computers, giant computers, by the way, coffee mugs, cigarettes, ashtrays. Is it still like that now or...
Probably not. No, it's not. I think the picture you're talking about was probably, it was taken during splashdown of 13. I got my thumb in the air and a cigar in my mouth and
matches in my left hand that I lit afterwards. And in those days, most everybody smoked. There was only one major door inside the room. When you came in there and there was a full team in there, when you opened the door, the smoke would kind of roll out of the top. But I do have to say it was never chaotic in that room.
except on splashdowns when everybody was okay. During the movie making, every time Ron had a shot in the control center, he had extras walking in the background back and forth. I used to try to tell him, that didn't happen. He said, Jerry, I'm not making a documentary. Yeah, exactly. And so anyway, I had to get used to all this motion in the control room because
If it ever did get a little bit busy, the flight director used to say, okay, everybody sit down. It was the best job I've ever had in my life. And I later became the director of the Johnson Space Center, the whole thing. But that job was more fun than anything I've ever done.
We had mentioned how whether it's a truck or a spaceship, a bang is a bad thing to hear. But at least with a truck, you can stop, you can pull over, you can walk outside and see that you hit a rogue watermelon or something in the road, right? Yeah. With a spaceship, you can't. Yeah. You can't do that. And so when this happened, when there was a bang, in the beginning, how easy was it to tell how bad it really was? There was no easy way to tell.
The most telltale thing I think that happened about 15 minutes after the bang is that Jim Lovell looked out and he told us, he said something is venting out into space. Most likely it was oxygen.
I think at that point, everybody knew we're not going to make the moon, guys. We got to figure out how to get them home. And we never simulated using the lunar module as a lifeboat, but we had talked about it and said that in the event, if we had an error of some kind in the command module and the lunar module was still attached,
It's got a lot of battery power and a lot of food and water and that sort of thing we could get to and use it as a lifeboat to get back to Earth. With all of this on the table, when the whole picture started to unfold, how was the emotional state of Jim, Fred and Jack up in space at this time?
You know, I think, and I've talked to them several times about that. I think they felt a lot like we did. Well, let's see what we can do now to pull this fat out of the fire and see if we can make it work long enough to get us back home. And I think they were doing the same thing. They were just trying to figure out how to get home. There was always a nagging thought. I thought about it every once in a while.
is had that explosion, not knowing how big it was, could it have damaged the heat shield? When we knew the oxygen was leaving us in a hurry, our first thought was we're going to be short of oxygen to get them home. But it turned out that wasn't the case. We had oxygen that was stored in the lunar module and the backpacks that they were going to get out on the moon had already been charged with oxygen. And what turned out to be the shortest consumable was water. We weren't producing any water.
We limited the cruise. That last couple of three days, they were down to six ounces a day. Yeah, that's not very much. Not much water. Whose responsibility is it to keep the astronauts sane, happy, stable?
To stop panic attacks. I mean, I guess they'd be trained to deal with some of this, but is there a particular person or is that your job as flight director? No, it's actually the CAPCOM, the capsule communicator. CAPCOM was his call sign. The CAPCOM was an astronaut that had trained with him. He knew what they were up against. And the CAPCOMs did a good job of keeping the air just light enough. And
And there were chuckles that happened, and it wasn't all serious. But the big thing is they got very, very cold. It was about 38 degrees in the command module and maybe a little bit higher than that in the lunar module. We powered out everything we could to save the batteries. So it was tough on them, particularly trying to sleep when it was that cold. And they were pretty well worn out when they got down on the ground. So were we. Most of us had little kids still and
If you went home, you weren't going to sleep anyway, so you just kind of hung around where you could. It seems that men in dire circumstances, whether it be space, war, or the gallows,
Humor is something we use to help deal with the severity of a situation. And it did seem that throughout the mission, when things were dire, humor was present. Is that correct? I think men are wired that way. And I guess some women too. But you're exactly right. There were some light moments.
Joe Kerwin, who was a backup astronaut, was a CAPCOM. When we got to that thing of trying to make the canisters from the command module work on the lunar module to withdraw the CO2 out of the atmosphere, we had to read up a procedure to him. And he started it off, and I will forget, he started it off. He said, tear off a three-foot piece of gray tape. He said, that's about as long as your arm. Yeah.
Swagger was writing it all down. He said, okay, got that. And we did find moments of lightness in the whole mission. Yeah. And one we didn't include in the podcast because we can't include everything. It was that I heard there was some conversation about the income tax rules changing if you're out of the country for so long and maybe saving, getting some tax breaks. Yeah.
Some other things are on his mind probably, right? After the break, we'll hear about how ground control helped the Apollo 13 astronauts survive the mission.
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So you worked on every lunar landing mission in the Apollo program. Did things go wrong on any of these other missions when people were out in space? And what kind of problems did they face?
Oh, yeah. We had not started the descent yet on Apollo 14, and the abort light came on. We were in lunar orbit. That's not good. It just came on out of nowhere. There was nobody pushing on it or anything. It was a single button that the crew could push, and it would abort the landing and take them back up to join the command module.
First thing we thought of is the old typical fix, like you do in an airplane or a car. If a gauge doesn't look right, give it a whack. You know, hit beside it with your fist. Yeah.
And they did. They hit the side of it and the light went off. And in a few seconds, it came back on, indicating that it was closed and there was a short. So we had them bang it again. They banged it again. It went off. Then it came back on. That's when this young man at MIT that had done the code said, hey, I can figure out a way to have the computer ignore that abort switch and they can still abort by using keystrokes. I
I golly, we read it in there, just a bunch of ones and fives and sixes. But it worked because as they started down, the light came on, but it didn't abort. And then on the lunar surface, we had all kinds of issues. They wore these undergarment suits that had cooling running through these lines.
They would put it all away on hot and it'd still be cold. Over time, we finally learned how to do that because it was affecting their ability to walk around the moon and do some hard work. And then we lost fenders off the rovers twice, two flights, 16 out of 17.
tore the fenders off, their fiberglass off the rover vehicle. So it would just throw this plume of dirt as the tire went around. It would rain it down on the two astronauts, the lunar dust, which is called regolith. They just got rain showers of dirt on top of them. They looked like coal miners. So anyway, it was a learning experience. I would say that Apollo was probably...
60 to 70% learning and 30% lunar exploration. When they go back on Artemis, they should be way ahead and get a lot more out of it, more exploration and less trying to figure out how to do it. I guess getting your bright white space suit a bit dirty is the least of your worries because a lot more can go wrong up there as we've seen. But also it seems that back in the day in the Apollo missions,
jury rigging something together to fix a problem was something that had to be done often. And you were there the day they did that, when they had to do the carbon filter creation between the lunar module and the command module. You know, the interesting thing, Mike, that I think out of the whole program, one of the things that always amazes me is we had this one that was built under clean conditions and plenty of room and all kinds of things to fiddle with. So we had it in the control center.
The only way we could get that procedure up to them was to read it. We didn't have a point of any kind. I've tried to give tech advice to family members over the phone before, and it doesn't work very, I can only imagine. It doesn't work. Yeah. Well, anyway, these guys wrote that procedure down. They built it, put it in place. It worked immediately, by the way. The
partial pressure of CO2 immediately dropped. It was all the way up to about nine and about 10 or 11, you start getting in trouble. I don't think people understand how serious that is. Oh, it's an air filter, right? But asphyxiation, suffocation is kind of an important thing. And that would have happened because the lunar module was only meant for two. They would have died. Oh, yeah. And that technology actually came out of the submarine world because submarines are
had to scrub CO2 out of the air that they were breathing when they were below the waterline. When they took a picture of it,
Of course, we didn't get the lunar module back. It burned up coming back into the atmosphere. But they took a picture of it installed on the LEM, on the lunar module. It was exactly like the one that we had made on the ground. I just think it's amazing how some engineers can sit there and be like, all right, what do they have? They've got a binder. We can use a piece of cardboard from that. We can use this tube and just put it all together and it works.
There was a hole in the middle of the rectangular cartridge. And he said, well, how are we going to plug that up? He said, get some socks. And they got socks on board. So they stuffed socks in the hole. And those guys figured it out. The movie took a little license dumping all that stuff on the table. They didn't do that. But yeah, it was ingenuity at its best. And thank goodness for great tape. Tape fixes everything, right? Yeah.
Yeah. So the decision was made to use a free return trajectory, and that was to slingshot around the moon and get the astronauts back to Earth. Can you just explain to us how that all works? And also, at the time, were you on board with that decision? Oh, yeah. The first thing we did actually before we did anything else was we put them back on a free return right after the explosion. That was one of the first things once they got settled down.
they would go around the moon and slingshot back to Earth. And it would put them back in the Pacific Ocean, not in exactly where we wanted them, but at least they would be in the water. Two hours after we came closest to the moon, we did another maneuver
added about 850 feet of velocity. It got us home about 18 hours earlier than the free return did, and it put us in a good spot in the Pacific. It seems like a tremendous amount of math too. You know what I'm saying? It's not like it's rocket science. That sounds like a lot of rocket science to lay out the trajectory, to have the gravity of the moon slingshot you around. Again, the fractions of
decimals here, of percentages, of angles, I think is very important. It is incredible, Mike. And the people that did that were in the very front row of the control center. We
We called them the trench. But I can tell you the average flight director like me, I knew how to change orbits and how to change trajectories to the moon. But I had no idea how to calculate all of that. They had computers out to kazoo. The computers were as big as my house. We had five of those big IBM 360s.
you know, for its day and age, it did the job. Yeah. How incredible is it to think that we have more power in our pocket, more computing power in a cell phone than we do, that you guys had NASA to land a person on the moon. But you worked on Apollo 13, the movie, as a consultant. And movie directors and movies in general don't always focus on all of the perfect details. But what was your role in the Ron Howard movie, Apollo 13?
Okay, my title was technical advisor, and I didn't know what I was getting myself into. It was, you know, I gave up five months of my life and spent most of it in California in some own location.
And boy, I was on that set a few times. Man, a lot. They actually had that thing cranked down to 38 degrees. And when they speak and you see the steam coming out of their mouth, that was real. It was so cold, the cameraman looked like they were in Alaska in a snowstorm. What Ron did, after he decided to make a film, he said, I want you glued to my hip. If you see something wrong, tell me. And if it's technical stuff, we'll get it right.
I've done five movies now, counting that one. And by the time I got to about the third one, the creative side of my brain started loosening up a little bit. Every other film I worked on was fiction, so it was a little easier to do that. But I really enjoyed it, helping those guys. Tom Hanks, one of the nicest guys. And you talk about prepared. And same with Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton, really good guys that really did their homework.
They didn't want to screw up. Yeah. And I think Ron has a difficult job because he has to tweak it a little bit to appeal to the massive audience of the world and make a film that's successful. But being able to appease the NASA astronauts and everyone who worked that day and also the world is a very interesting juggle to balance, right?
Yep. And one place he had to do that at home, he came to me and said, hey, I don't have time to develop for characters as flight directors.
He said, do you mind if I make Kranz a composite of all of you? That was okay with me, and I don't think it affected the movie that much. It made Kranz a little more of a standout, I think, to the mission than he was. But Kranz was on duty when the tank exploded. So it made sense that he'd be the centerpiece. But I wonder what your impressions were when you watched the final movie. Excellent. They had a showing in Houston, a private showing before they released it,
where they invited all of the Apollo astronauts, their wives, the flight directors, several of the flight controllers. Ron Howard said it was the scariest preview he had ever shown of a film to anybody because it was to all of the real astronauts and real people. And everybody, when it was over, was standing and clapping and he...
He was ecstatic. He said, God, I passed the test. I said, Ron, you passed the test a long time ago. You don't have to. He said he was just on pins and needles trying to decide whether they were going to like it or not. In fact, to this day, when I'm surfing around on television, if I see it, I can't leave it. I don't care whether I get in the middle, the start, the end. I got to watch it till the end one more time.
After the break, we'll hear more of my conversation with former NASA flight director, Jerry Griffin.
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Let's bring it back to 1970 again, when you've got your three boys, the astronauts, sitting in a very cold spacecraft, having drank only a few ounces of water, a couple pieces of food, hurtling towards the Earth's atmosphere. A very tense day. Can you remind us of the dangers they were facing upon re-entry?
When we came back from the moon, usually we just had the command and service module. The lunar module was all left at the moon. So on our way back, all the way, we had the command and service module docked to the lunar module. So we had them flying back together.
We actually got rid of the service module first. So now we're flying along with the command module with the heat shield exposed and the lunar module still on the nose. So we got closer to the Earth and used all the power that we could out of the lunar module. And when we came time, we had to get rid of it. Then we got rid of it and we were strictly just the command module, the three guys inside it with a heat shield exposed.
and three reentry batteries just like they would have had had everything been normal. This is probably the diciest part of the mission the way it turned out. The heat shield might have been damaged in the explosion. And we also had explosive devices in order for the parachutes to be ejected and let the command module come down in the water.
three big chutes. We didn't know the condition of those. But here's the dicey part of the flight. At every entry, you have a blackout period where you can't hear any comm. We can't talk to the crew. They can't talk to us. And the reason is because it was the hottest part of the reentry. And all this hot plasma is coming around the spacecraft. It was flying in heat shield first, extremely hot, 2,000, 3,000 degrees.
with all this plasma coming around it, and it created a sheath that you could not get radio signals through. We had a clock counting down to begin blackout called BBO. It was counting down to when blackout should start. We had another one called EBO, exit blackout, and it was counting down.
In every other flight that we've ever had, including Earth orbit flights, those two clocks were within a second of being accurate. We would lose them right on time and they would come out right on time, come out where we could talk again. Well, three minutes, right? Yeah. In Apollo 13, began blackout right on time. And at end blackout, Joe Kerwin calls Apollo 13, this is Houston, over. Nothing. That goes on for another three or four minutes.
And all of us in the control room, it's kind of funny. Excruciating. I think about we were all just looking forward. Nobody was looking side to side. And I remember thinking to myself...
Damn it, we've come this far and gotten all this and got them that close. That damn heat shield was cracked. Especially because the heat shield issue and that would have been where, yeah, if the heat shield was damaged, they would have burned up then. And so that extra two minutes or whatever it was, or 90 seconds, I believe, would have been excruciating for you guys. It was. It was. And it was quiet except for Joe, the Capcom, about every 15 seconds. Apollo 13 is Houston. No answer. No answer.
Finally, he made one of those calls and Swigert comes over the, "Hello, Houston, it's Apollo 13. We're doing just fine." And the room erupts. That's when the chaos happens. We just about fell over. About that time, he'd show you how low that was. A couple of minutes later, we saw him on the TV off of the carrier. We saw the three chutes.
And they tracked them all the way down to the water. That was a big, big relief because we felt possibly all of us individually, we weren't talking about it or anything. As crap, you know, we've lost them. Damn heat shield. So it worked out fine. They got into the raft and onto the carrier deck.
And that was great. It was fitting in to about four days of really hard work and very little sleep, almost none for them and not very much for the people on the ground either. You know, we never celebrated until they were on the carrier. The splashdown in the water didn't count because they could still drown or the spacecraft could sink.
And it went from many people watching Apollo 11 being a world sensation to no one really caring about Apollo 13 to then everyone really caring about Apollo 13.
Yeah. I remember seeing pictures of people on the streets in Japan and Europe, you know, that were watching televisions. I thought, my gosh, this thing really created a stir, you know. And the comedian, I can't remember now, stopped the mess game. So let's have a moment of silence for the crew of Apollo 13. That's when we were still trying to get them back. So anyway, yeah, it was a neat time. I imagine a few whiskeys were drank and a few cigars were smoked after that. Yeah.
It wasn't just a few. It was a lot. We had a favorite watering hole that you wouldn't go into in the daytime. It was pretty raunchy looking, but it was very calm. What was the vibe inside that night?
Yeah, it was good. That place was called the Singing Wheel. I bet there was some singing that night. There was. I think most of us stalled out pretty early, though, because we were damn tired. And then the next day, Nixon shows up on his way, actually, to Hawaii. He stopped in Houston.
And there's a great picture of, he's got the four flight directors and Nixon presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the mission ops team. He also presented it to the crew. That was a special day, but if you look at it, you can tell everyone else are tired and or hungover. I can't imagine how stressful it must have been for everyone, also very much including yourself. Do you have any...
techniques or thoughts or advice for staying calm under pressure? I think everybody approaches it a little differently. There were two things that I always attribute the success of Apollo, all of it to. One was the preparation. The simulations that we ran, which for 1960s and 70s was extremely high fidelity. We could probably do five landings on the moon a day.
And with the turnaround times and all of that, getting it right. And so we were prepared. And I think that makes a difference. In that business, you're always looking for not everything that's going right, but what's going wrong. Right. What's not right that we got to think about. Right. The other thing that led to our success was our leadership. And I'm talking about all the way from the White House, the Congress, to NASA, to the field centers.
You know, we had two Democratic presidents and one Republican, and the White House never wavered in their support. The Congress was split, just like it is now, but they worked together on all kinds of issues. We spoke a little bit about the future and the word Artemis, because we are headed back to the moon, aren't we? We are. With Artemis 2 launching next year,
What do you think astronauts need to know today as we're headed back to the moon and then on to Mars? What's your advice to them? Well, it's interesting. I've given this advice to young people at Johnson Space Center, and I'm about to go do it again to some new flight directors. My advice to them is they have been caught in low Earth orbit. The space station is an amazing machine, but it's today about 250 miles over our heads here going round and round.
Earth orbit is a lot different than deep space. And I keep, and I'm not hounding, but I keep emphasizing to them that it's very, very important to think about the differences because we kind of had to think about it the first time it happened. It takes a lot longer to get them home if something goes wrong. Earth orbit from the space station, you can have them home in just a little while.
few hours. At the moon, you're probably at least three days, maybe three and a half. I can remember the first time that trans-lunar injection, sending humans to the moon, the first time was Apollo 8 in December of 68 at Christmas.
I can remember thinking, well, now we've done it. They're on their way to the moon and we got to get them back. That's a learning experience. And I think these kids today, these younger people that are going to be doing Artemis, I think they understand that. I started to say they're as smart as we were. For the most part, they're smarter.
They used the term, and I think it's a good one. They said, we are standing on the shoulders of Apollo. We got a lot better technology. We've got missions that are going to be much different than what we did in Apollo. But they said, without Apollo, we wouldn't have those shoulders to stand on. And I think they're going to get a lot out of what we did. What if you got a call?
today and you pick it up. Yes. Yes is the answer. Before I even finish the question, you would go up there. You'd go to the red planet. You'd go to the moon. No hesitation. Amen. Amen. Absolutely.
I would hesitate personally, but hey. Yeah, I'd go. You know somebody, Mike, you could talk to. Yeah, exactly. I'll go through my contact list and I'll see if I've got any NASA officials. That'd be helpful. I really enjoyed our conversation today, Jerry. It's great to hear a bit behind the curtains. We tell the story on Against the Odds, but it's so great to hear someone who was there before.
Tell us the little details that we couldn't include because you were in that seat that day. So thank you so much, Jerry. Well, thank you very much, Mike. It was my pleasure. Always fun to talk about Apollo 13. This is the final episode of our series, Apollo 13.
Thanks so much to my guest, former NASA flight director Jerry Griffin. I'm your host, Mike Corey. This episode was produced by Pauly Stryker. Interview episode producer is Peter Arcuni. Audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Coordinating producers are Christian Banas and Desi Blalock. Series produced by Emily Frost and Alita Rosansky. Managing producer is Matt Gant. Senior managing producer is Ryan Lohr.
Senior producer is Andy Herman. Executive producers are Jenny Lauer-Beckman, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.
Scammers are best known for living the high life until they're forced to trade it all in for handcuffs and an orange jumpsuit once they're finally caught. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And we're the host of Scamfluencers, a weekly podcast from Wondery that takes you along the twists and turns of some of the most infamous scams of all time, the impact on victims, and what's left once a facade falls away.
We've covered stories like a Shark Tank certified entrepreneur who left the show with an investment but soon faced mounting bills, an active lawsuit filed by Larry King, and no real product to push. He then began to prey on vulnerable women instead, selling the idea of a future together while stealing from them behind their backs.
acts. To the infamous scams of Real Housewives stars like Teresa Giudice, what should have proven to be a major downfall only seemed to solidify her place in the Real Housewives Hall of Fame. Follow Scamfluencers on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now on Wondery Plus.