In April 1970, a year after Apollo 11 put the first man on the Moon, three astronauts set off to complete NASA’s third lunar landing. Instead, two days after the Apollo 13 launch, the mission became one of simple survival. An explosion on the spacecraft caused critical damage, forcing the crew and everyone at Mission Control to problem-solve in real time. As lead flight director, Gene Kranz was in charge of the Apollo 13 mission. (You may remember actor Ed Harris portraying Kranz in the 1995 film Apollo 13.) His leadership helped avert disaster, bringing the astronauts home safely. In addition to other programs, Kranz served as a flight director for seven Apollo missions, including Apollo 11. Now, at 93 years old, he has watched humanity return to the Moon. In an interview with WTVG-TV, Kranz shared how he felt witnessing the Artemis II mission more than five decades after the Apollo missions he helped oversee. “It took me back, made me young again,” Kranz said when asked about seeing the new images of the Moon. “I’m 93 right now, and I was in my thirties, 34, when we landed on the Moon. And it’s like starting all over again. And I just wish I’d talked to the NASA interns, the new people coming in…We must have about—the last session was about three weeks ago—we had about 60 of them, and I looked at these kids, and I was jealous. Anything I’ve ever done, I would trade them to be in their position.” Kranz said that looking at images of the Moon makes him think of the astronauts and controllers he worked with, as well as the material they brought back. “And [I] just say, ‘Thank God we had a mission,'” he said. Gene Kranz working in the Mission Control Center in Houston in 1965. Photo credit: NASA Now we’re “back on track,” Kranz said, as Artemis program takes us to the Moon to build a habitat. “It’s going to be a new era in space exploration.” Kranz said he’s “too proud to even describe” how he feels about NASA reaching this point. “You know, I came in as a young pup,” he said. “I was a fighter pilot—I did flight test. I was there in the very beginning. And all I can think of are the great people that I worked with that made all of this possible.” Kranz shared that he had written his high school thesis on how humans would land on the Moon. It was titled The Design and Possibilities of an Interplanetary Mission. Gene Kranz working at his flight director’s console in the Mission Operations Control Room, 1965. Photo credit: NASA “It is really strange to have written that description, written in that term paper—by the way, I got a 98—and be the person that actually took Neil Armstrong to the Moon for the first time,” he said. “I lived as an explorer. I lived with explorers.” Kranz also shared one of the downsides of the Apollo missions in the 1960s and ’70s: the quality of the photo and video technology of the time wasn’t equal to the task. “Now I see the imagery we have, and I said, ‘My God, if we had that image, we could have better directed the crew when they were on surface to go pick up that rocket, to go do this thing right on the line,'” he said. “I think we could have had a much better operation. But we did the best with what we had.” Indeed, they did—and not just when it came to images. When the fate of the Apollo 13 crew was up in the air (or, more accurately, out in space), Kranz famously declared, “Failure is not an option.” Not only did Apollo mission scientists do the best with what they had, but they also engineered ways to pull off one of the most harrowing feats in human history. How remarkable that this legendary leader in lunar exploration has lived to see a second round of Moon missions, and what a delight it is to hear him share his reaction. The post 93-year-old Gene Kranz shares how he felt watching the Artemis II mission appeared first on Upworthy.