Apollo 13: Bonus 2. John Aaron

13 Minutes Presents: The Space Shuttle

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, History

9.5 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 16 April 2020

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Nasa flight controller John Aaron talks to Kevin Fong about the ill-fated Apollo mission, from the moment of learning about the explosion to his fears during the spacecraft’s final descent through the Earth’s atmosphere.

Theme music by Hans Zimmer and Christian Lundberg for Bleeding Fingers Music.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Mariana Spring, the BBC's social media investigations correspondent.
0:06.0	In my podcast, I've been investigating what happened to the daughter of a conspiracy theorist who died having rejected chemotherapy.
0:13.0	It would mean the world to me if I could make it that she wasn't just another in the long line of people that die in this way.
0:19.0	How does this reflect the rise of health conspiracy theories on social media and beyond?
0:24.8	The new series of Mariana in Conspiracy Land.
0:27.8	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.3	Hello, I'm Andrew Luck Baker, the series producer of 13 Minutes to the Moon, standing in again for Kevin.
0:36.7	This is the second of our bonus episodes, released in the week of Apollo 13's 50th anniversary,
0:43.8	and this one has dropped 50 years to the very day of Odyssey's return to Earth.
0:50.0	This is an edited interview with flight controller John Aaron,
0:53.8	which Kevin and I recorded at John's home in Texas Hill Country.
0:58.9	If you need a reminder, John was one of the e-coms, responsible for monitoring the command module's electrical power and life support systems.
1:08.4	And Gene Krantz put him in charge of stretching out what remained of
1:12.6	Odyssey's meager power reserves to get the crew through the final couple of hours to splash down.
1:19.4	Now, of course, no one person in mission control can be singled out or should be singled out as
1:25.1	the one who brought the crew back home.
1:32.7	But we're featuring John Aaron in this bonus episode because he's a bit special.
1:38.9	Have a listen to fellow Ecom, Cy Leibogott, and Apollo flight director, Jerry Griffin.
1:49.2	John Aaron is an amazing story from a little university in Oklahoma, physics major, wanted to come to NASA long enough to make enough money and go buy some cows, go back to farming, ended up spending
1:55.7	about 30-some-odd years, I think with the agency. It could be said that John was probably the best flight
2:03.5	controller that we ever had. John was gifted with, what is the perfect memory, didetic memory,
2:11.6	didetic memory with good common sense. It was something else. It's like my manager told me one time when I was complaining about
	...

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