Because we live in the age of tiktok, twitter etc. Most people now days find it difficult to concentrate for more than a minute on a subject.

How about Clifford Charlesworth, Gerry Griffin, Milton Windler, and Pete Frank?

@@powerfulstrong5673 Did I speak badly of any of the other Flight Directors? No, I didn’t. This was not their interview.

If you listen to the tapes, it's clear that the main burden fell on Lunney very early and he was magnificent. Lunney's team had to make a lot of irreversible decisions in short timeframes under extreme pressure that turned out to be correct.

Impossible to find a Cliff Charlesworth interview…

One of the titans of early space flight. Rest in peace.

So sad to hear. Rest in peace.

I was born in 1957 and would lay in the snow in my front yard in Lutherville, Md in the 60's and look up at the night sky and be all inspired to go into space... We now live in Clear Lake, TX in the shadow of NASA, (since 1986). It is fascinating to listen to the experts of the space program...

After one hour Kranz+team left to organise the backrooms and get a plan for the long term. All the critical parts after the incident were managed by Glynn Lunney and his black team. without such a plan. This shift had to improvise a lot of things very quickly without making this one fatal mistake. Including all the powering down and up and moving to the LM, getting on free return, getting a ptc. In what was arguably the most challenging shift in it's history. The movie giving him no credit is a big shame. But whoever and whatever, no team or flight director works alone. There is are big backroom staff and Windler, Griffin and Kranz came in and out, as did a lot of other people. Like astronauts coming from the simulator, advising the flight director. In these first hours mainly Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan. And i never understood how Movie(!)Kranz got so much praise anyway. I think he (again, not the real one!) is an absolute horrible flight director. He only barks at people, he shoots ideas down without listening. And his answer to problems is "i don't care, figure it out". That is not how Kranz or any FD works. The flight director audio for the first hours is on youtube. And apollo in realtime (google) has all the mission and all the audio from all the mission control channels. Which is a bit of an information overload. For apollo 11 and 13. And some interesting post-shift press conferences with all the flight directors.

Absolutely. Glynn's team handled everything from power down, guidance transfer, getting back on free-return, and so on. That team was very critical in getting that ship home. There are 4 videos on KZfaq, the flight director loop, from end or the TV broadcast up to getting on free-return. It's absolutely fascinating.

@@HistoricSpaceStuff Listening to the flight director loops is extraordinary. The difference in management styles between Kranz and Lunney is interesting, but it is very clear that they both lead their teams from the front. The sheer weight of critical information that Lunney had to handle during the 13 crisis is mind boggling. The fact that they got home suggests he made all the right calls in that incredibly tense few hours.

Agreed. Here kzfaq.info/get/bejne/hd11ZM12y-CtXXU.htmlh07m08s is the flight director loop precisely when Lunney comes on shift during the incident, and you can hear him immediately start kicking butt for 8 hours. Here kzfaq.info/get/bejne/q9mapsqexreqj58.html is his press conference following the shift, which really shows how on top of things he was and his state of mind-not worrying about what went wrong, but what to do about it. Wonderful that we have these recordings of these historical moments.

@@HistoricSpaceStuff It's the nature of movies. You have two hours to put across a story, so they can only concentrate on a handful of "characters". Kranz was a more picturesque character than Lunney. Even the way he looked was more like what the public would expect of a flight director. Lunney looked more like a high school science teacher, while Kranz had the crew cut and was better at turning a movie-friendly phrase that could be put into a script. For the movie, they wanted John Wayne from "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon" as the flight director, and that's how they wrote the part. Another example is Jim Lovell. As a kid who followed the space program from Apollo 7 (I was 8 years old at that time), I was familiar with the public persona of Jim Lovell for most of my life. I'd seen him on television what must have been a hundred times in interviews and commentaries from the time I was about 8 years old until the movie came out 25 years later, but in the movie, the Jim Lovell character was just your generic action movie hero, no different than the hero of a thousand other movies. There was nothing about this character that distinguished him as Jim Lovell the individual we'd known since the 1960's. That's just Hollywood, where everything has to be simplified and dumbed-down.

Today's NASA would need 75 years and more money than could be printed.

At times they oriented by the stars! Fantastic!

there are a lot of them in written form on the jsc history website. Lunney has done a lot of them.

I am unlearned. You are learned man.