Dan Snow's History Hit - The Apollo Program with Kevin Fong

Episode Date: May 3, 2021

Getting to the moon was no easy feat, no matter how confident Kennedy may have sounded in his famous 1961 speech. NASA built a team from the ground up, and there were plenty of moments where it seemed as if they weren't going to make it. Fong tells stories of just how close they came, and how risky it was. After all, it was hard to feel safe when a pen could go straight through the module. Kevin Fong is incredible. As Dan fawns in the podcast, he's part of the NHS emergency response team for major fatality incidents like terror attacks, he's an anaesthetist, he's a lecturer in physiology at UCL and an expert in space medicine.

Hey folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. My name is Dan Snow and on this podcast I'm talking to one of the most brilliant people of my generation. I'm talking to Professor Kevin Fong. He's a great friend, he's an inspiration to me and everybody who knows and everyone who doesn't know him. He should be. He's a legend. He's a national treasure in fact. Hidden among his frankly off-puttingly impressive CV, is years spent working for NASA. He is an expert in the effect of space travel on human physiology and worked at Kennedy in Florida for years. As well as playing a key role in the fight against COVID for Public Health England, he is a brilliant broadcaster. His podcasts on Apollo 11 and 13 were smash hits all the way

around the world and given the sad news of the death of Michael Collins the Apollo 11 astronaut who died at 90 years old one of those three heroes Neil Armstrong Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins who went to the moon for the first time 50 years ago. He featured prominently in Kevin Fong's brilliant podcast about Apollo 11, and it's the last significant interview he gave before his death. This podcast is a repeat of my conversation with Kevin Fong. We talked around the anniversary of the moon landings two years ago, and this is that conversation. I hope you enjoy it. If you want to get a history hit TV, we actually have documentaries on the Apollo missions. Oh no, we've got documentaries about lots of things.

We've got documentaries about ancient British DNA, all the way up to the Apollo missions and beyond. Go and check it out. It's like Netflix for history. Every history documentary you've ever needed. And we're adding more and more all the time. Please go and check that out at historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, here's the very brilliant Kevin Fong. Enjoy. hit dot tv but in the meantime here's the very brilliant kevin fong enjoy kevin fong this is uh a huge pleasure for me to get you on this podcast we've been friends and colleagues and allies for years have you been on before uh that is first time first time well you

deserve it you're number one on the itunes now you know what you have to do to get on the podcast dude it's not good enough being a drinking buddy. You've got to get number one on iTunes, then you're straight on the pod. So tell everyone, why are you number one on iTunes? Well, actually, let me start this again. Your new podcast for BBC World Service is about the Apollo moon landings. Let's tell everyone, you're a very modest scientist. You're a doctor.

You land, you jump out of helicopters and perform open chest surgery on motorways in the aftermath of car crashes. An advisor to Virgin Galactic and have worked at NASA and are a space person. So is this podcast coming from that part of your, you're grimacing because it's all true. Is this coming from, and you're so lovely as well, annoyingly. So is this coming from that bit of the Kevin Fong brain? Yeah, well, I mean, this is space.

And I guess this is amongst the very confused CV I have. This is my deep passion. This is one of the first things I remember is being woken up to watch the end of the Apollo project. The Apollo Soyuz test mission in 1975. And that drove my entire life. And all the things I do today in part are because my interest in science and my life in science was driven by growing know growing up as a kid in in the afterglow of Apollo wanting to be an astronaut so I you know and so then there was this opportunity came I wanted to make a program about the 50th anniversary of Apollo which is this July of course

and I thought I'll make a small small series then this opportunity came to this epic podcast 12 parts to go and find not just some of the astronauts who'd been part of that mission, but also the people who made it happen, the flight controllers, the factory engineers, the technicians, the computer scientists, and that cast of people without whom no one would have walked on the moon.

I think the Apollo program and the moon landings are the most amazing thing that's ever happened in history, and it's just so recent that we still aren't able to process it. I think in 500 years' time, the only human from the 20th century that people will know the name of will be Neil Armstrong. I don't think anyone remembers Stalin and Hitler. We landed on the moon! I know, and I think I remember that.

I think it was written in his obituary, and I think it might have even been in The Economist, that said Armstrong is one of the few people from the 20th century who has an outside chance of being remembered in the 25th century. And I think that's absolutely true. And partly because this is a watershed moment for our species, the Apollo program. It's the point in history where to push back the frontiers of science and exploration, it's no longer enough to be an elite individual or even a small group of elite individuals. an elite individual or even a small group of elite individuals you need this army of people melded together with technology and science and together that thing that complex entity is necessary to be able to make any progress at all and that's what Apollo is and Apollo is the

first time we do it and after that that's what how we do everything so we got the most expensive civilian project in the history of the human race to talk about in the course of this podcast. So where should we start? I mean, how did humans go about landing on the moon? Well, I mean, that's the crazy thing. And part of what this podcast series is about is how. The how did we do it?

Because Kennedy gives that speech to Congress in 1961, setting his country on course for the moon. And you think, okay, well, obviously he knows that someone knows how to get there. But no one knows. No one knows. The furthest they've been from the surface of the Earth is 250 nautical miles. And now he's going, let's go 250,000 miles. And as he gives that speech at NASA, people are scrabbling for,

oh my God, how are we going to do this? No one knows. How big does the rocket need to be? How many pieces of vehicle do we need to send? Who do we need to send, how are we going to do this? No one knows. How big does the rocket need to be? How many pieces of vehicle do we need to send? Who do we need to send? How are we going to get there? And so they have to invent the techniques and the technology, and that has to be done by a workforce that isn't recruited.

So they're just hiring people as fast as they possibly can because it's war. It's the Cold War. It's this ideological war for technological supremacy, the United States over the Soviet Union. So it begins there, and they invent all the technologies they require in that short decade. God, it just makes you think what we could do if we put our minds to it.

The story, it's almost depressing. This is, I mean, it's really important. The 20th century, if it taught us anything, it taught us that if you face a complex problem, but there's no fundamental obstacle to it, if it's an engineering problem and you throw resource at it, then you solve it inside of a decade. It happens with the Manhattan Project.

The first time we see nuclear fission is in 1939 in a laboratory, and you weaponise it inside of six years after that. The Apollo project, the president says we'll go to the moon in 61, you're on the surface of the moon in 69. HIV is a good example. You know, you realise it's a killer in the mid-90s. It's a fatal illness, and now it's consistent with a normal life expectancy.

So, yes, it tells us something really important about us, about the problems that we face now, which is if there's a will and it's just engineering, we can get there. And I feel like that. I feel there's an important lesson 50 years on for us in nuclear fusion, which would be really, really important.

Why don't we have an Apollo-level effort to tell us how far into the future nuclear fusion is? Because if you approached it the same way you approached Apollo, in 10 years' time, if you didn't have it, there'd be something pretty wrong. Exactly. And then we could go carbon negative into the atmosphere and the world would be a great place. So they throw a lot of resource at this. What are the biggest challenges that they've got to overcome? Yeah. So now they need a rocket big enough to lift your vehicle, you know, in a larger vehicle from the Earth to the Moon,

they need to travel faster because you need to go close to 25,000 miles an hour to escape the escape velocity of the Earth to get yourself all the way to the Moon. When you get to the Moon, you need to work out how you're going to land on the Moon, how you're going to split your vehicles up. They choose this bizarre architecture.

They choose to do this thing called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous, which means that you send one big rocket, two vehicles, all the way to the moon together, and then you split those vehicles up. You land one on the surface, and then it has to come off the surface and back up into orbit around the moon. They have to get together, and then they have to come home. And all of this is just absurd. You know, in 1961, all of these things just are the stuff of pure fantasy. And yet they do it all. They do it all in the course of that decade.

And what about the individuals? How do they start trying to choose the people that are going to go on this mission? So astronaut selection is quite a thing. You know, when they start doing it at the time of Mercury, when Alan Shepard and John Glenn first fly, they don't know what space is. They don't know what physical threats and hardships space will offer. So they just choose the healthiest, toughest people they can find who can fly aircraft because they just don't know. So basically they just make the most resilient physical specimens

who are also amazing pilots that they can find. That's how you get there, and that's kind of what they select for Apollo. And you need the best test that they can find. That's how you get there, and that's kind of what they select for Apollo. And you need the best test pilots you can find because this is the mother of all test pilot projects. These guys are going to be flying the most complicated vehicles in the history of the species in an environment where there's nowhere to safely crash land.

If you stuff it up on the moon, that's it. Thanks for coming. You're not coming home. So it's a particular kind of person. But it's not just the astronauts. The astronauts are just the tip of this gargantuan iceberg. It is the tears and tears and tears of people who follow it. There are the flight directors, the flight controllers,

but there's the back rooms technical support. There's the guys out in the factory. The success of the mission depends as much on the guy who puts the foil insulation around the legs of the lunar lander as it does the guy who's behind the desk in mission control. If anyone screws up, everyone dies. And there were bad accidents, weren't there, in the first few years? Well, the episode that we're just actually putting to bed at the moment

is all about the Apollo 1 fire, where three astronauts die in a horrific fire on the launch pad in 1967. And so that's one of the things that's worth remembering. So we know that there was an Apollo 1 fire, but actually it hadn't quite occurred to me how late in the game it happens. It happens in 1967. So two years, just over two years, before they actually get onto the moon and they kill a crew of astronauts.

And that story was one that, as we unpicked it during the making of 13 Minutes to the Moon, as we unpicked it, I realised there was much more to it than I thought. You know, up until 67, NASA are basically falling over themselves in their efforts to get to the moon before the decade is out. And actually, it's a bit of a mess.

We talked to people who said, look, you know, in 64, between 64 and 67, everything's behind schedule. The lunar module, the vehicle that's going to land on the moon, is behind schedule. It's not going to be ready in time for the early testing. The command module, the thing that they fly to the moon in, is kind of, it's just a really bad vehicle. It's really bad workmanship. It's really badly put together. And this pressure and this sort of like pressure to try and deliver and what they call go fever, you know, we've got to go,

we've got to go, we've got to go. All of that conspires to create a situation in which in 1967 you put a crew into a badly designed, badly maintained capsule. You fill it with pure oxygen and there's faulty wiring in that cabin. And the rest is history. You know, you kill Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White. And at that point, NASA could have said, well, that's it. We're done. We're not going to the moon. But in fact, what they do is they recalibrate their culture. They reset their culture. They realize that they've got to change everything about their culture

and the way they're doing things, and they redouble their efforts. And in the 21 months that follows that, NASA is a changed organization. You see, when we tell this story of Apollo, it's as if Kennedy makes his speech, everyone hears his rallying cry, and then everyone executes this perfect uh eight nine year program of work to get everyone to the moon but actually it's it's a mess and it's a mess for probably the first half of that eight or nine year effort and so the fire and we had george abby george abby sort of you know huge figure a really totemic figure in the history of human spaceflight at NASA. He said it's a terrible, terrible price to pay, terrible sacrifice.

But if we hadn't had the Apollo 1 fire, if we hadn't had that to reset our culture, we probably wouldn't have got to the moon by 69. We may never have got to the moon. Why do you call it 13 Minutes to the Moon? So it's such a huge, huge topic, isn't it? It's a decade of work. It's 400,000 people. There's so much technical information.

We thought, where can we focus this? What is the unique, what is the crescendo of this whole story? And what's the unique thing that we can focus upon? And for us, it was that 13 minutes of descent. So when Armstrong and Aldrin fire the descent engine on the lunar module above the moon to commit them to the moon's gravity to start their attempt at landing, because up until that point in 69, no one has done that. And it's the period of mission, that 13 minute period taking them out of lunar

orbit onto the moon that armstrong most worried about he said and on record he said you know it was rampant with unknowns i was worried about it and you know this is a guy who doesn't worry about much and he was right he was right so they're in moon orbit they're in lunar orbit there's three of them in in the what's that spacecraft called so uh they're in the command module now the command module is that cone-shaped vehicle that you see. And you've got to think of that a bit like you're, it's like a yacht, you know, that has your accommodation and your food and your amenities. It's actually relatively comfortable and relatively capable compared to the lunar module,

which is that spidery angular vehicle that you see, which is flimsy. It's very, very light. It's kind of like, you know, the dinghy that you take off your yacht to go and visit a nearby island. In fact, that's exactly the design of that mission. So Michael Collins is left in the command module. We interviewed him. He was fantastic to interview. It was quite hard to interview, actually, but fantastic. And so he waits in orbit around the moon and he's got a big job. If it all goes wrong, he has to fly down and rescue them. You know, if they're aborting off the moon, he has to kind of fly down and pick them up,

you know, as they're coming off. And so people underestimate how important his role. He was the second most senior person on that mission. It's Armstrong, Collins and then Aldrin. Aldrin's the most junior pilot on that mission. Anyway, Armstrong and Aldrin are coming off, they're going down to Aldrin and it's a ridiculously ridiculous vehicle.

It looks like nothing on Earth because it's never meant to fly on Earth. It has no aerodynamic features. They're inside it. It's a thin-skinned vehicle. It has to be light. It's so thin-skinned that if you took a pen, you could stick it through the skin of the vehicle. That's what they're in. That's what they're sealed in to protect them against the vacuum of space.

And they're coming down. And as soon as they start into that descent, things start to go wrong. So Armstrong was absolutely right to worry about the 13 minutes because everything happens. Communication starts to play up, and Armstrong says, we'd rehearsed everything, we hadn't rehearsed bad communications. They track their progress across the moon's surface, and Armstrong knows that they're seeing some of the lunar features too quickly,

some of the craters and some of the mountains are coming up too quickly, so he's going too fast, they're going to miss their landing site. And that's important because if they come down in the wrong place, they're going to damage the vehicle, they're going to get onto the moon and then they're going to get off of it again. And then if that's not enough, then they have problems with the onboard computer, which they absolutely depend upon. You know, they can't fly this vehicle on their own,

they need a computer to assist them, and that starts to throw up error code after error code after error code and then if that's not enough, as they get close to the surface Armstrong has to take some control back from the computer to try and manually affect the landing because they're about to come down in a boulder field

and he very nearly runs out of fuel. He gets down to about 20 seconds of fuel, 30 seconds of fuel before he actually sets it down. And everyone in Mission Control thinks, well, we're done. We're not getting to the moon today. We might crash. But he still lands it. It was an incredible 13 minutes.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about Michael Collins, who died sadly this week, and the rest of the remarkable crew of Apollo 11. More after this. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict.

We've got the classics. Understandably, when we see it from hindsight, the great revelation in Potsdam was really Stalin saying, yeah, tell me something I don't know. The unexpected. And it was at that moment that he just handed her all these documents that he discovered sewn into the cushion of the armchair. And the never ending. So arguably, every state that has tested nuclear weapons has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history.

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a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. And then they land successfully on the moon. Have they ever told anyone, did they celebrate? Were they just thinking about the next five, ten minutes, an hour? Or what was that moment like when they're sitting on the moon's surface? That's what you think, isn't it? So once you've landed on the moon, it's time for massive, massive celebration.

But we talked to them about this. In fact, we talked to not just some of the astronauts, but the mission controllers. And here's the thing. When you land on on the moon your problems are far from over so actually what you hear in the mission audio is them sort of saying we've landed after the the landing they've got the stay no stay decision so just because you've landed on the moon can you stay there or are you going to need to take off instantly they didn't know what the moon was really made of at that point was the vehicle going to sink was it going to fall over if they were on a slope that was too steep they were going to have to lift straight away so they

they actually the for the first few minutes after they get there there's a furious work rate for them and the mission controllers trying to make sure that something awful isn't going to happen and they're going to have to just get the hell out of there because you know the risk is far from over so there's a very muted celebration and then they get on with the business of knowing whether or not they're safe and i think after that then you know you have to understand that once you're on the moon you're still in the most alien and exposed environment any human being in the history i guess in the history of our species has ever been in and so you know so Armstrong was all about the job. And so he wouldn't have been high-fiving Aldrin for very long, I don't think.

From your description of the descent, Armstrong was the difference between success and failure, his skill there. It's really interesting. I think an awful lot about this because it informs actually the work I do as a doctor. Armstrong is absolutely essential you need an armstrong because you need someone inside the loop of control of this complex system but he's necessary but he's not sufficient so you need aldrin you need collins up top you need the guys who built the vehicles you need the flight director you need the flight controllers

who are running all of the subsystems. No one can see all the moving parts. And this is really best illustrated by one of the interviewees you had, my favorite. We spoke to about five or six astronauts in the making of this. But my favorite interview was actually this junior flight controller who at the time was 26 years old. His name was Stephen Bales. And he's epic. His story is epic. I loved it. We went to his house near New Jersey, sat down with him.

He's a lovely guy. He is like the Luke Skywalker of the Apollo program. He grows up in Iowa in farmland. He walks out into the fields at night. He looks at the sky, dreams of the stars and the adventurous space. He equips himself with an engineering degree. He goes off to Houston to the hustle and bustle. He's a tea boy. He gives visiting dignitaries tours of mission control, but finally earns himself a place to work on the desks in his dream place.

And so in the end, when they're selecting the team of guys who's going to be in the room to assist the Apollo 11 landing, he finds himself behind the guidance officer's desk, one of the most critical desks. He's 20, 26. And it was funny because when we interviewed him, he's still even 50 years on. I don't think he could quite believe he'd been there. You know, he said to us, you know, there was this 26, 26-year-old kid and I could stop the space mission i mean even then he couldn't and here's the thing at one point during the mission armstrong sees these error codes flashing up on his crappy computer in the cabin of this this this vehicle 1202 alarm he doesn't know what it means armstrong doesn't know what it means the flight director doesn't know what it means nobody knows and if the computer falls over they die that's it done period so armstrong calls down says 1202 what does it mean it goes to him

and so now with only a few minutes left before you're supposed to land on the surface armstrong is saying what the hell's going on do i abort am i gonna die what's gonna happen it's come down and all eyes now turn to this 26 year old boy who's from iowa who's sitting behind the desk and he's like well what do you reckon steve and steve fortunately well not fortunately he works hard and so he is prepared for this he has every single alarm code documented he and his backroom team and they have in 15 seconds they have this little chatter and they say we're okay to go go tell him to go and he makes the decision that saves the mission. You know, boy from Iowa, 26.

I don't know what you were doing at 26, but I wasn't saving space missions. And then, so how long do they spend on the moon? So that was Flags and Footprints' job. So they're there for not very long. They're there for a few hours, really. And, you know know as the Apollo program continues so you've got six landings total 11 through 17 so the first few missions are really just pathfinder missions get out walk around get the flag down get the hell out of there before

something unknown happens as we move on through Apollo 15 is the first time they've got so confident then they're taking lunar rovers up there so they're driving around the moon so so the j missions which are 15 16 and 17 you know they're driving buggies around the moon um and they're then spending several days they're camping on the moon um and in fact one of the people we spoke to was uh charlie duke uh from apollo 16 who actually spent several you know a good couple of days on the moon and he talks about you know camping on the moon you string up there's a bit of gravity not not the same gravity on earth there's a bit of gravity so you string up a hammock but the the cabin's so small that you know you can't have this side by side so you sort of have this crucifix hammock arrangement inside the cabin there's not really

enough room for both of you to put your space suits on because once you've done that you've occupied all the space in the cabin and you just got to kind of learn to live there and then you know go out for a little walk on the moon and drive on the moon and come back so apollo 11 really is about getting onto the moon and knowing you can get there land safely and staying long enough to pick up a few rocks and get the hell out of there but the true exploration happens in the missions after that it's worth remembering so while those guys spent a few days on the moon that one solo guy is still in the missions after that. It's worth remembering. So while those guys are spending a few days on the moon, that one solo guy is still in the mothership, just orbiting the moon all by themselves. So that's Michael Collins,

and we've got almost an entire program dedicated to him because he's kind of like the third man of Apollo 11. You know, everyone goes, there's Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and who's the other guy? And Michael Collins is, I mean, so underrated in terms of his role and importance in all of this.

He is a fantastic pilot. He is by far and away the most emotionally, I guess, in touch and together of all of the people who give accounts of the Apollo period. And we went to interview him. And it was fantastic because we were told, actually, he's notoriously difficult interviewee at times. Well, he doesn't suffer falls lightly. And so you thought, I better have all my ducks in a row when I go and interview him and it was funny because in he was fantastic and he was very very generous but it was like he's a fighter pilot and it was like being in a dog fight with a fighter pilot because you'd think oh i'll ask him this question and as soon as you thought you had

him where you wanted him he was behind you and hosing you down with the guns and you thought god but um but he you know he talked to us about how his job was to be there preparing for if it didn't work out. He was supposed to be there as the last line of defense if there was an abort during the landing or if something went wrong as they're flying off the surface and the engines didn't work properly. He would have to swoop down and fly down somehow and pick this vehicle up. And this isn't just like flying a plane. This is flying a spacecraft with completely different handling. And if it went wrong, everything would depend on him.

So he was up there, and he had a very quiet time up there while they were on the surface, but all the time he had to be prepared to effect that rescue, and that's what he was trained for. Well, I'm sure he was difficult, but the BBC sent the right guy. No one gets behind Kevin Fong. And so they spent a couple of hours on the surface. Then how do you... You said they hadn't got any fuel left,

so how do they take off and get back to the ship in lunar orbit? So really, the lunar module is kind of almost like two spacecraft in one. There's an upper stage and a lower stage. The lower stage is the descent stage, and it's got this very sophisticated engine on it that you can throttle. So up until this point rocket engines were either on or they were off but the descent stage has this engine on it that you can throttle so you can control the engine of your car with an accelerator pedal and the upper stage has this boost back to orbit engine on it and the two are on top of each other.

So yes, they've used up almost all of the fuel in the descent engine, but the ascent engine, the second engine, is in the top half of this vehicle. And that's what lifts them off the moon. So yeah, that's how they get back to orbit. So they get back. So there's so many different spacecraft all in one here. So they get back on this tiny little spacecraft.

The docking goes, so the rest of the mission goes okay? Well, you see, this thing, this lunar orbit rendezvous, which means that you first take two spacecraft together to the moon, then you split off, you land one, and then you come off, join up with your buddy Michael Collins in orbit, and you fly back to the moon in the command module. That rendezvous is non-trivial it requires you to fly in formation but fly in formation around the moon 250 000 miles

from earth and if anything goes wrong with that rendezvous if you you know prang the other vehicle and spring a leak in it no one's coming to help you you're done up there and so all of that flying was extraordinarily precise and important um but despite the ludicrous description of those maneuvers it is the best and only way to do that mission so so yes so they get together and then they come home but coming home again is non-trivial because you're you're flying home as fast as anyone's ever traveled at 25 000 odd miles an hour uh and then you have to re as fast as anyone's ever travelled at 25,000 odd miles an hour. And then you have to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at exactly the right angle. You know, too shallow and you skip off and you disappear forever.

Too steep and you stoof into the atmosphere and you burn up in a ball of flame. So exactly the right angle. And then splash down in the ocean and then you get picked up by your navy. When we next send people to the moon, will the human factor be taken out of it will computers do all the flying um and i guess i'm asking therefore will they have to send pilots start asking for a friend it's interesting isn't it because in fact the narrative we have of the apollo lunar landing is the popular narrative is slightly wrong you know we say it was this computer that was sort of about as sophisticated as a digital watch. And it was up to nothing.

And in the end, it falls over and Armstrong takes manual control, flies the vehicle to the surface like a like a space age tiger moth. And that's only partly true. Yes, Armstrong was a superlative pilot and super cool under pressure. But he is the all important interface between this very sophisticated computer. And actually, the computer does a lot of heavy lifting for them. The computer smooths out the difference between the pilot's intent and the actual action. You know, no pilot could have controlled all of the valves and all of the mechanisms that were required to fire the rockets and the thrusters to get the vehicle in exactly the right place.

It's just too complicated. So yes, you needed an Armstrong there in the final moments to manage some of the decisions. Now, if history has taught us anything, the way to make these complicated systems safe is to paint the human out of the loop wherever you can. That's why you and I are 10 times more likely to survive in our cars today than we were when we were growing up.

And it's why road safety and aviation safety has improved over the, you know, since the middle of the 20th century. That said, you always, I don't think you will ever get to the point where you can fully paint the human out of the loop of any of these systems. Because at some point, the last line of mitigation has to be a human being able to play some part in that system and try and prevent what is about to be an awful failure. So when we next go to the moon, will there be a largely automated landing? Yes, the computers will assist you all the way down, and you may be able to do a hands-free landing. You may be able to let the computer do it, but there will always be human pilots in the loop of that just in case something goes wrong you can't it's hard to engineer systems otherwise looks like the kids are going back to flight

school i got big plans for them living out my fantasies through my children my daughter's gonna do it okay so kevin um how can everyone listen to this podcast? So this is 13 Minutes to the Moon. It's a podcast for the BBC World Service, so you can get it through BBC Sounds or wherever you're listening to this, however you get your podcasts, you can get it on that. Great, thank you very much, Kevin Fong.

That was brilliant, dude. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money.

Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome,

but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. you