Eight Years to the Moon

by Nancy Atkinson

  But just as the Mercury flights got under way, Kennedy’s challenge to land on the Moon came along. As details of NASA’s future goals emerged, the Sim Group knew they’d be tasked with an even bigger job of simulating complicated rendezvous missions for Gemini and even more complex missions going to the Moon with two spacecraft for Apollo.

  Before Mercury was over, Miller left Cape Canaveral for Houston to formulate plans for the Gemini and Apollo sims. First, he needed to define the interfaces between the Simulation Control Room and the two Mission Operations and Control Rooms—known later as Mission Control—under construction in Building 30 in Houston. Miller and his team had input on where the sim control room should be located and how it would operate. The decision to have two Mission Control Rooms for redundancy in case of an emergency also allowed for sims to take place in one room while an actual mission was operated in the other. Two Mission Control Rooms meant two Sim Control Rooms too.

  “I decided to have a simulation control room located next to each Mission Control with a viewing window,” said Miller. “This put the sim guys in close contact with the controllers and helped coordinate our activities, especially the debriefing after each of the sims. We could monitor and inject failures into both the ground and the spacecraft, to the devilment of the flight controllers and crew.”

  The crew cockpit trainers were going to be placed in Building 5, so all the wiring and hookups between the various simulation systems were housed in a series of underground tunnels at MSC. This sophisticated closed-loop simulation system was called the Simulation Checkout and Training System.

  Once these decisions were made, all the contractors building the crew trainers, the control rooms and the consoles were able to develop the technical details of the many interfaces and the algorithms for simulating the environment, providing realistic data for the flight controllers and crew.

  Transfer of IBM computers and equipment from the University of Houston to the Real Time Computer Complex at MSC. Credit: NASA.

  Gemini became the first spacecraft with a digital computer and digital telemetry. And the new Mission Control would be on a digital-based mainframe system. These digital capabilities lent themselves to digital-based simulation systems, providing the most realistic way of doing a “let’s pretend we’re in space”–type training. But designing the simulations themselves for both Gemini and Apollo at the same time presented a huge challenge to the Sim Group, as they had to incorporate the different computers that would be used in each of the spacecraft. These computers were being designed and built at the same time as the Sim Control Rooms and Mission Control. Modifications were frequent, meaning almost everything was a moving target.

  While the simulations for each program would be different, both could take advantage of the new IBM 7094 computers being installed for the Real Time Computer Complex (RTCC), also in Building 30 on the first floor. These were the biggest and fastest computers available, but it quickly became apparent that the Sim Group would need their own computer solely to support what they needed to do with the simulators and the flight controllers. This computer became known as the Ground Support Simulation Computer (GSSC). The sim team used the GSSC to build math models of the rockets and to simulate the control center telemetry systems, along all the data for the tracking and communications systems. IBM also had the job of creating all the simulation software, built from a set of detailed requirements provided by the Sim Branch and the flight operations team.

  “Simulating the dynamics of a vehicle, especially with developing the trajectory and doing it realistically put a big load on the computer,” said Koos. “It got pretty complicated real fast.”

  Bigger spacecraft meant an exponential explosion in the amount of data that needed to be processed. For Mercury, there were only about eighty-eight parameters that had to be transferred between the spacecraft and the flight control team. For Gemini there were about two hundred, and Apollo had close to fifteen hundred instrument data, such as temperature and pressure sensors on every tank, thermocouples buried in the ablative heat shield and astronaut health information. The simulators needed to be able to display the same type of data.

  “The Gemini and Apollo flight crew trainers were so much more complex than the ones for Mercury,” said Miller, “and the foremost challenge for Gemini was the addition of the Agena, which was a highly classified military vehicle, so keeping the system current presented real issues. We asked IBM if they could do a digital simulation of the Agena, which was a major design challenge since at that time there had never been a completely digital simulation. But it was the only way I could see us ever keeping a configuration similar to what the flight controllers would be seeing in the real missions.”

  Among Miller’s many tasks was to hire more people in order to meet the demands of figuring out these complicated simulations, which was the only way NASA could meet the upcoming flight schedule. The new hires had to first learn what spaceflight simulation was and then work out all the details of how to do it.

  “We were inventing the job at the same time we were learning how to do it,” said Carl Shelley, who arrived in Houston in 1964. “And everyone had to figure out what to do from scratch, so we went ahead and did what made sense. We were all pretty young, and it was a fun time because there was nothing bureaucratic about anything. If you needed to do something, you just went and did it.”

  A view of the Real Time Computer Complex in Building 30 at the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1966. Credit: NASA.

  As in almost everything NASA was doing at the time, this level of complexity of training through simulators had never been done before. There were snags, hiccups, troubles in developing the systems and a lot of long hours trying to get the system up and running (then to keep it running). In the meantime, the Sim Group had to develop plans for how to do the simulations, and there were also classes and training for both the flight controllers and the sim controllers in order to learn the systems and hardware inside and out.

  “When I got here,” Shelley said, “the flight controllers were developing their own handbooks, doing their own drawings from studying the manufacturing schematics and overlaying the mission data information to get the functional flow down into a minimum-size book they could refer to. And we in the Simulation Branch had to do the same thing, plus develop the malfunction procedures, which was pretty much anything a guy could think of that could go wrong.”

  Harold Miller in 1966. Credit: NASA.

  The Simulation Control Area, with technicians on console. Back row (from left): Rod Rose (assistant to the flight director), Carl Shelley (SimSup), Harold Miller (Mission Simulation Branch chief), and Herman Mobley (tech support). Front row (from left): Gerald Griffith (Simulation Group), unrecognized person, Paul Joyce (Simulation systems engineer), unrecognized person and Bob Holkan (Simulation Dynamics specialist). Credit: NASA, caption courtesy of Carl Shelley.

  They also had to set up a network sim of all the tracking stations around the world, which would still be used for Gemini, and for Apollo when the spacecraft were still in Earth orbit.

  “We still had these remote sites all around the world, and we had to worry about how we would integrate those distant flight control teams into the overall training environment,” said Shelley. “So we built a couple of simulated remote sites here at MSC, even though the guys were just through the wall in the next room. The computer would sequence them as if they were acquiring the vehicle from Bermuda or Australia or wherever during a real flight, turning the telemetry on and off into these simulated remote sites. It made the whole network look pretty real.”

  As the hardware for the simulators started to come together, the assignments were divvied up among the Simulation Branch: Shelley was in charge of sim operations, Koos oversaw all the systems and Gordon Ferguson was in charge of classroom training. Almost everyone took a turn at being a simulation supervisor, or SimSup.

  Using this complicated, never-been-tried flight simulation system, the idea was to va
lidate the plans and procedures for each flight and to make sure the flight controllers and crew would be able to handle any problems that might surface.

  Would it work? The team had to wait until November 1964 when everything was built and ready. Astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White, command pilot and pilot for the Gemini–Titan 4 mission, were the first astronauts to be grilled with the new facilities.

  “The first simulations run in Houston were Gemini launch aborts,” said Miller. “I was acting as the SimSup and we ran nine cases on the first day. The most launch aborts we had ever run in a day at the Cape were four. It was quite a good feeling being able for the first time to run that many simulations with a brand-new complex.”

  AS THE INTEGRATED SIMS IN BUILDING 30 provided an intellectual challenge for everyone involved, NASA also developed other, more physical crew trainers and simulators for the astronauts, such as a centrifuge where astronauts were spun around to simulate the forces they would feel at launch, reentry and splashdown. The best way to simulate weightlessness on Earth came by flying a KC-135 aircraft in a series of roller coaster–like parabolas. The airplane would climb 10,000 feet (3,048 m) and then plunge downward an equal distance. The free fall simulated the feeling of weightlessness in 20- to 25-second intervals, during which the astronauts could practice various procedures, such as conducting tasks while wearing spacesuits. Some NASA training flights would do about one hundred of these climbs and dives. For obvious reasons, this aircraft earned the nickname the Vomit Comet.

  By 1964, NASA was creating a couple of different trainers and simulators for landing the Lunar Module (LM), as well as mock-ups of lunar landscapes where the astronauts trained for their surface activities. At Ellington Air Force Base, the astronauts flew the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) to master the intricacies of landing on the Moon. This strange contraption looked so ungainly and awkward, the astronauts dubbed it “the flying bedstead.” But it could accurately simulate the LM’S performance with LM-like thrusters for attitude control and allowed the astronauts to simulate flying in the Moon’s one-sixth gravity. How it worked was all theoretical since no one had ever been to the Moon. Neil Armstrong called it “a contrary and risky machine, but a very useful one.”

  Indoors, NASA constructed special rendezvous and docking simulators for the astronauts to practice these maneuvers for both Gemini and Apollo, and new optics allowed for realistic out-the-window views of the starry views of space and the pockmarked lunar surface. Some of the high-fidelity cockpit trainers sat on a fixed base, others were on a moving base to simulate the actions of the vehicle. When the Gemini cockpit simulator arrived in Houston in April 1964, it was supposed to be stationed in Building 5, the Space Mission Simulation Facility. But that structure wasn’t completed yet, so the cockpit trainer was put in Building 4, the Astronaut Office building. It barely fit, so getting in and out of it was a challenge. With construction on Building 5 finally finished, Stanley Faber, head of the Simulation Branch, was anxious to get the simulator installed in its rightful place. But he got the runaround from the trades union about who was supposed to actually move it. Frustrated, Faber finally just decided to relocate it himself with a little help from his friends who worked in the Simulation Branch.

  The “Vomit Comet,” a NASA aircraft, flies a series of parabola patterns over the Gulf of Mexico to provide opportunities for astronauts and scientists to experience brief periods of weightlessness. Credit: NASA.

  “My crew, which numbered something close to forty or fifty,” said Faber, “picked up all the cables, took them across the street on their shoulders and spread them out on the floor in Building 5, and they rolled the cabinets across the street—they were all on wheels—over a Saturday and Sunday. On Monday morning when the union reps came storming in, we were finished and back in operation.”

  Besides being in trouble with the union and NASA management, Faber figures he probably broke a few child labor laws too.

  “I had my two little boys crawling under the suspended floor, checking where wires went,” Faber said. “We couldn’t do it; we were too big. But they could fit under the floor. We’d hear a little voice, ‘The wire’s over here,’ and we’d lift up that floor section and so we could get everything installed.”

  New astronaut class in 1964, “The Fourteen.” Front row (from the left): Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., William A. Anders, Charles A. Bassett II, Alan L. Bean, Eugene A. Cernan and Roger B. Chaffee. Back row (from the left): Michael Collins, Walter Cunningham, Donn F. Eisele, Theodore C. Freeman, Richard F. Gordon Jr., Russell L. Scweickart, David R. Scott and Clifton C. Williams Jr. Credit: NASA.

  NASA SELECTED A THIRD GROUP OF astronauts, who reported to Houston in the spring of 1964. The new group called themselves “The Fourteen”—bringing the total Astronaut Office headcount to thirty. The new hires were Buzz Aldrin, Bill Anders, Charlie Bassett, Alan Bean, Gene Cernan, Roger Chaffee, Mike Collins, Walt Cunningham, Donn Eisele, Ted Freeman, Dick Gordon, Rusty Schweickart, Dave Scott and Clifton Williams. The Fourteen weren’t just military test pilots: Eight carried advanced degrees and two—Cunningham and Schweickart—were considered civilians, even though they had experience as military pilots. The group was selected from approximately 500 military applicants and 225 civilian applicants.

  The astronauts arrived in Houston just in time to move into brand-new buildings at MSC. Construction of most of the facilities were finally completed, and from February through June 1964, more than twenty-five hundred employees relocated from their temporary offices and moved on-site at MSC.

  “My first day in the office side of Building 30, there was stuff piled everywhere,” said Shelley. “The hallways were littered with all the office supplies, from copying machines to papers. Everyone was just moving in and it seemed like there wasn’t enough room.”

  Most of 1964 was chaotic until everyone got settled. With thousands of employees now arriving at one location to start the day, traffic jams and parking problems ensued, so staggered work hours were instituted, starting in May. But those who were already putting in long hours were seemingly unaffected by the change in work hours. For Miller and the Sim Group team, their typical day was twelve hours long, and they worked most weekends as well. Several Sim Group members and flight controllers commiserated about the fact Building 30 didn’t have any windows, but it was just as well. They worked such long hours, they hardly saw any daylight anyway.

  The world went on with most everyone at MSC oblivious to anything going on outside of NASA. Race riots gripped several cities when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. Boxer Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali and the heavyweight champion of the world. President Lyndon B. Johnson escalated US involvement in the Vietnam War, and the Beatles took America by storm. Jay Honeycutt of the MSC simulation team would later say that he has absolutely no recollection of any music of the 1960s—he was just too busy to listen to the radio.

  Aerial View of the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1964. Credit: NASA.

  But one new facility at MSC allowed a brief respite from work, giving employees a chance to chat and catch up with their friends at work. The opening of the cafeteria—aptly named The Cafeteria—was a big deal, with a several-page spread of pictures and information about the menu written up in the Space News Roundup newspaper. The MSC staff greatly appreciated not needing to drive off-campus to eat lunch. The food was good and considered reasonably priced, with breakfasts ranging from fifteen to sixty-five cents and luncheons from fifty-five cents to a dollar. It also offered a place to get together for impromptu meetings or for a chance to see who might be at MSC that day. MSC started hosting several educational events for students and teachers, and The Cafeteria offered a good place for the students to perhaps catch a glimpse of an astronaut.

  For the employees, though, the astronauts were just part of the workforce. Seeing them at The Cafeteria was a chance to ask about the latest change order for a specific component or get an update on when they would be available to take part i
n a systems test. Norman Chaffee ran into Roger Chaffee at The Cafeteria one day and introduced himself. The astronaut invited the engineer to join him for lunch and they discussed family trees. “We ended up having lunch together several times, often looking back at our lineage to see if we might be related. We never found a connection, but we did become good friends,” said Norman Chaffee.

  Classroom training for astronauts. Credit: NASA.

  WITH THE NEW ASTRONAUTS’ ARRIVAL, John Painter and George Hondros prepared for another communications-training class, this time a two-week session, with two-hour classes each afternoon. The astronauts would also receive extensive instruction in rocket propulsion, aerodynamics, astronomy, physics, environmental control systems, survival and rendezvous and docking techniques. The primary objective of all training was to teach the astronaut trainees about their spacecraft and to familiarize them with flight conditions like acceleration, noise, heat, vibrations and disorientation.

  At the first meeting of the communications class, Painter sized up the new group and quickly found they all had a sense of humor.

  “I passed a blank sheet of notebook paper around, ostensibly to take a class roll, although I knew their names,” Painter said. “What I really wanted was their autographs, but when I read the names, I laughed like crazy. Included were Bolivar P. Shagnasty, J. P. Four [a jet fuel] and Flash Gordon.” Unfortunately, the signed sheet flew out an open window of Painter’s 1955 Ford a couple days later.

  The new astronauts kept Painter pressed up against the blackboard with their questions. He was especially impressed with Roger Chaffee, who seemed to quickly grasp communications theory and kept Painter on his toes. Rusty Schweickart was the most personable of the group and just as technically sharp. The third astronaut who drew Painter’s attention was a quiet, slightly balding guy, who didn’t say much. But Painter knew Buzz Aldrin had done his PhD work in the theory of spacecraft rendezvous, and they chatted briefly about the concept. The most notable aspect of the group, in Painter’s mind, was that no one in this class went to sleep.