Gene Kranz, 93, watches Moon missions return after 50 years

At 93 years old, Gene Kranz still remembers landing humans on the Moon like it was yesterday, and watching NASA return there has filled him with a feeling he didn't expect: jealousy.

The legendary flight director who led seven Apollo missions, including the dramatic Apollo 13 rescue, recently watched the Artemis II mission send new images back from the Moon. "It took me back, made me young again," Kranz told WTVG-TV.

Kranz was just 34 when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969. Today, he speaks regularly to new NASA interns, and seeing their excitement stirs something powerful in him.

"I looked at these kids, and I was jealous," he said after addressing about 60 interns three weeks ago. "Anything I've ever done, I would trade them to be in their position."

The man actor Ed Harris portrayed in the 1995 film Apollo 13 hasn't forgotten the team that made history possible. When he sees Moon images now, he thinks of the astronauts and controllers he worked alongside.

"And just say, 'Thank God we had a mission,'" Kranz said.

His connection to lunar exploration runs deep. In high school, Kranz wrote a thesis titled "The Design and Possibilities of an Interplanetary Mission" about how humans would land on the Moon. He got a 98.

"It is really strange to have written that description 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."

Now, with the Artemis program building lunar habitats, Kranz believes we're entering something even bigger. "It's going to be a new era in space exploration," he said.

Why This Inspires

Kranz says he's "too proud to even describe" how he feels about NASA reaching this moment. His career spanned from fighter pilot to flight test to Mission Control, where his famous declaration during Apollo 13 became legend: "Failure is not an option."

The technology gap between then and now amazes him. The grainy photos from the Apollo era limited what Mission Control could direct astronauts to do on the lunar surface.

"Now I see the imagery we have, and I said, 'My God, if we had that image, we could have better directed the crew,'" he explained. "But we did the best with what we had."

And what they did with what they had changed human history forever. How remarkable that this pioneer has lived to see humanity's second chapter of Moon exploration unfold before his eyes.