Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program
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Highways Into Space
The Early Years of Inventing the
Mission Control Center, Achieving the First
Interntional Docking Mission &
Deploying Skylab, the First U.S. Space Station
Glynn Lunney at Console Apollo XIII
Glynn S. Lunney
1st Edition 2014
Table of Contents
Highways Into Space
Copyright Page
Dedication
Credits
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Prologue
Part One: Origins
Chapter One: Early Times
Years of Formation
Coal Miner
Chapter Two: Leaving for The University and The Co-op Experience
Chapter Three: Graduating to the NACA Lewis Research Center
Part Two: Joining The Space Task Group, Projects Mercury & Gemini
Chapter Four: The Fight Dynamics Branch
Chapter Five: The People and Moving Towards Operations
John Llewellyn
Mercury Redstone
Back to Inventing the Discipline at STG
Christopher Columbus Kraft
Moving Towards Operations
Chapter Six: 15 Months to John Glenn on Mercury Atlas 6
Chapter Seven: Completing Mercury and Hello Houston
MA-7
Cliff Charlesworth
Moving to Houston
Completing Mercury
Chapter Eight: Gemini Begins, and FDP Staffing Up
Chapter Nine: Gemini Training Ground for Apollo
The Flight Dynamics Team Tackles Gemini
Bill Tindall
Debriefing at the HofBrau Garden
Chapter Ten: Family and The Trench
Chapter Eleven: Back to Gemini Flights
Part Three: Apollo
Chapter Twelve: The Apollo Fire
The Apollo Fire
Chapter Thirteen: Coming Back
Chapter Fourteen: Apollo VII
Chapter Fifteen: Apollo VIII
Chapter Sixteen: Apollo IX and X
Chapter Seventeen: Apollo XI
Chapter Eighteen: Apollo XII
Chapter Nineteen: Apollo XIII
One final note
Chapter Twenty: Apollo XIV and XV
Apollo XIV
Apollo XV
Chapter Twenty-one: The Last Apollo Flights: Apollo XVI and XVII
Apollo XVI is Next
Apollo XVII
Part Four: Moving Into Project Management
Chapter Twenty-two: Early Stages of Skylab
Chapter Twenty-three: Going to Moscow
History Recap
October 1970 Meeting
Chapter Twenty-four: 1971: Year of Project Definition
January 1971 Meeting
June 1971 Meeting
Preparing for December 1971 Meeting
Setting Up Working Groups
Not Understanding Their Organization
Chapter Twenty-five: 1972: Year of U.S./U.S.S.R. Summit
President and Premier Consider
We Had Leverage
Time for the ASTP Team to Implement
Twenty-six: 1973: Year of ASTP Mid-term and Skylab Flights
More Momentum to the ASTP Team
Skylab 1
Skylab 2
Skylab 3
Skylab 4
Alex Tatischeff
More Meetings Scheduled for Moscow
The ‘73 Mid-Term Closed the Soyuz 11 Issue
The Last Months of 1973
Chapter Twenty-seven: 1974 and 1975: Years of Completion
1974
1975-Flight Year
The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel
ASTP Launch Day Is Here
Perspectives
Epilogue
Leadership
Teamwork
Preparation
Attitude
Family
About The Author
HIGHWAYS INTO SPACE
Copyright © 2014 by Glynn S. Lunney. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9907127-2-5
Please send your comments to the address below.
Thank you in advance.
Glynn S. Lunney
Email: glunney@gmail.com
Printed in the United States of America.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the publisher except for brief quotations used in reviews, written specifically for inclusion in a newspaper, blog, or magazine.
Requests for information should be addressed
to the above address.
To All Those Who Worked on the Beginnings of the
Human Space Program and Turned Impossible
Dreams into Reality
Credits
Credit to this source in capturing the detailed story before the author role began and as a reference for the timeline of events, minutes, and participants throughout the project.
Book title: The Partnership: A History of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project by Edward Clinton Ezell and Linda Newman Ezell, 1978, NASA History Office.
Credit to this source in providing the detailed history of the Skylab program development and as a reference timeline for events, decisions, and participants throughout the project.
Book title: Living, Working in Space, a History of Skylab by W. David Compton and Charles D. Benson, 1983, NASA History Series.
Credit to NASA for the use of photos throughout the book.
Credit to Jim Jaax for his WG-5 photo collage.
Credit to Virginia Tech, Special Collections Archive, Chris Kraft material.
Acknowledgements
Over years, my wife, Marilyn, pursued a continued suggestion that I should capture my recollections of the early times in the manned space era. At an event in Seattle in 2009, the idea of a book took a big step towards reality. Six members of the original Flight Dynamics Branch agreed to write their stories in a collaborative effort, and so we had the peer incentive to actually start. We decided to write for our families and those who would join the families in time to come. For her perseverance, Marilyn was rewarded with being my typing and editing partner.
Dave Reed volunteered to provide the IT know how to prepare the product to the printer’s specs. Jerry Bostick was the inspirational psychologist for all of us. Jerry Woodfill provided an early prototype book so we could see what it might look like. Besides Dave and Jerry, Chuck Deiterich, Maurice Kennedy, Bill Boone and Bill Stoval assumed the new role of authors also. The first edition was published in 2010 and titled From the Trench of Mission Control to the Craters of the Moon.
At more urging from Marilyn, Arnie Aldrich and Dave Scott, the remaining Apollo flights, including my best work, Apollo XIII, and my role in Skylab and Apollo/Soyuz are now added to my original story that concluded at Apollo XI. We found new typing help from granddaughters Macy and Erin. Shea helped with the cover design. Abbey was indispensable as the excutive editor in managing the getting-ready-to-go-to printing. Thanks to Arnie and John Aaron for their help on Apollo XIII specifics and Arnie and Len Nicholson for recollections of Apollo/Soyuz. Milt Windler helped with Skylab and Ken Young with rendezvous.
Thanks to Rebecca Wright of the JSC history office for all things historic, and Mike Gentry an
d Jody Russell of the JSC Media Resource Center for their recall of the right photo for the right occasion.
As always, Chris Kraft was there for support and encouragement.
Thanks to all of you and the many others who gave moral support.
—Glynn Lunney, Black Flight
Foreword
By Chris Kraft
The start up of the NASA Space Task Group (STG) in 1958 required a large number of young engineers to initiate Project Mercury. The result of this recruitment was a rewarding experience for all concerned because it enlisted a group of very capable young men who were talented and eager to work on new ideas and new approaches to solving the myriad of problems that placing a man in space for the first time created. Glynn Lunney was one of these young men who came to the STG by way of the NACA Lewis laboratory in Cleveland, Ohio.
He had recently come to NACA and thereby became engaged in some of the technical issues facing a reentering spacecraft from orbital speeds. As a result, he found himself travelling to Langley Field, Virginia, in a makeshift NACA air transport on a weekly basis to aid in the studies being done regarding trajectory analysis for the launch, orbit determination and reentry of the Mercury spaceship. This early work placed him in a position to be selected to join the STG on a permanent basis. This was a very fortuitous event for both Lunney and NASA because he became one of the stalwarts who was responsible for developing the plans and test procedures for the Mercury Program.
The concept of real time flight control of a vehicle in space was a new field of operations and required the development of engineers and electronic equipment to make it happen. Lunney became intimately involved in this work. Because of his understanding of the Mercury flight test design and his knowledge of orbital mechanics his inputs to this work were very useful. In addition, as the need for engineers to become a big part of the flight control activity the unique personnel requirements made him one of the prominent leaders.
It was this early work that brought Lunney into the upper levels of STG management and gave him the opportunity to excel in the world of manned spaceflight. His work ethics and leadership qualities were a great asset to the work on Gemini and Apollo that led to landing men on the Moon, returning him safely to earth and fulfilling President Kennedy’s goal that he so boldly made.
Lunney was chosen to lead a number of other critical activities associated with the U.S. Space Program, including the highly visible flight with the Russians in the mid ‘70s. He was a major factor in the success of all of the space activities conducted by the Unites States in its first 3 decades and particularly the exemplary work he did as a Flight Director for Apollo XIII.
Glynn Lunney has chosen to record the salient parts of his private and professional life in a book. Those interested in the early days of the space program and interested in its history will find his writing a fascinating tale.
Prologue
It is daunting to try to do something like capturing history. In reading many of the books people have written about the space program, it is always impressive to realize the differences in the landscape that we each see. How it looks depends on our technical and emotional involvement in a particular set of events, and our place in the organization, which is a measure of how much scope we are exposed to. And then we have our own backgrounds, which are personal prisms for remembering and interpreting the events we were part of.
This book was written in two stages. The first was started in 2009 with a number of us who worked together to invent the trajectory control function in the Mission Control Center (MCC). We joined in a collaboration to capture our recollections of the early times in the human space program. Our intended audience was our families and descendants who might like to know how it was to participate in Apollo. The plan was to cover the events up to and including the Apollo XI lunar landing flight as a “mission accomplished” response to President Kennedy’s 1961 goal. Most of the other nine authors went past that point and completed their career histories. I was not that fast and always planned to finish later. This first effort was completed in book form and titled From the Trench of Mission Control to the Craters of the Moon.
My text from that book remains as the first part of this expanded version outlining more of my career. That book does have a “band of brothers” flavor, appropriate for young men, bound together in facing the almost overwhelming challenges of Apollo. Our crucible was the Mission Control Center and all that it took to be ready to perform and succeed in that arena. I had hired almost all of the other authors in the Trench book and most of the others who served in the MCC flight dynamics discipline for Gemini, Apollo and Skylab. It still feels like family after fifty years.
In a way, Apollo was a pivot point in history. This group of young men and their parents and grandparents came from a time before widespread electricity, cars, planes, phones, indoor plumbing, charge cards and fast food restaurants. It was a world much more like the one people lived in during previous centuries. Our children, grandkids and subsequent generations live in an entirely different world (i.e. the modern one that came into being in the second half of the twentieth century). This pivot coincided with the Apollo era, when all things suddenly seemed possible.
For me, the second career stage moved quickly in the transition from MCC operations to program management in both the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) and the first U.S. space station, Skylab. However, in the twilight of my time in operations, I had the opportunity to significantly contribute to the successful recovery of the Apollo XIII crew – a very satisfying exclamation point on my time in MCC. The transition to program management was unexpected and happened quickly. And, it became the mainstream agenda for the rest of my NASA career and my time later in Industry.
In retrospect, we in the MCC were a very small unit in the much larger enterprise that it took to get to the moon. All of us, and certainly, I believe that I was most fortunate and privileged to participate in this singular and most historic achievement that is the NASA human space program. It was a truly grand adventure. I loved it.
Part One: Origins
GLYNN AND DAD BILL
Chapter One: Early Times
My earliest memories were of the big yellow house on Main Street, in Old Forge Pennsylvania. It was the home of my mom’s parents, but my grandfather Joseph Glynn had already died in May, about six months before I was born. My grandmother, Winifred Hennigan Glynn, was the lady of the house, and we lived upstairs. It was common in those times for three or more generations to live in the same house, at least for some time.
Life was simple, compared to later times – no cars, no phones, not much indoor plumbing and the only packaged entertainment was the movies on Saturday afternoon. Restaurants were also extremely scarce and very rarely visited. In an interview with our mom sometime in the late ‘90s, we asked how things were during the years of the depression before the war. She offered that, “it was not so bad, we had enough to eat and, after all, everybody was in the same boat.” And that was the way Mom looked at life.
In terms of recollections, some simple and sometimes vague things come to mind:
All of the families had vegetable gardens in their yards.
The horse drawn wagon carried large blocks of ice for the ice boxes.
There were no refrigerators.
Outhouses were prevalent in all back yards.
Doctors made house calls.
We did not have a car until after the war. Hardly anyone did.
The town was divided along ethnic walls, not ethnic lines.
Everybody inside the Irish ethnic wall seemed related.
Everybody in the house ate at the big table at the same time, except Aunt Bea, who ate separately.
The smell of baking bread.
Mom singing.
Mountains cradling the valley.
Going to St. Lawrence Church on Sunday.
The smell of grass in the summer.
Terrible squeals as the next door neighbors slaughtered th
eir hog.
Deep snow in winter.
Scary roots grew out of the potatoes in the cellar.
Catching fireflies in a jar.
Watermelon in the yard.
Swings and rocking chairs on porches.
And that was the way it was.
By the time of the war, I had two brothers Bill and Jerry. (At my age, it was hard to figure what little brothers were good for – although I did later.) In all our early photos, we were far over on the skinny side of life and it looked like cameras must have scared us. Clearly, no movie talent there. Once the war started, we moved first to Bethlehem where Dad worked at U.S. Steel. And soon, we moved to Philadelphia where Dad worked in the Navy shipyard, making submarines. We boys had a pretty good time in Philadelphia at 32nd and Pearl in a first floor apartment unit. The apartment was just a few blocks away from the University of Pennsylvania campus. There were a lot of kids on our block for kicking the can and playing stickball with. The idea of the war did not penetrate much at our age.
We also enjoyed the neighbor couple upstairs, Mabel and Grady Jones and Mabel’s mother, Floss. We thought Grady was cool. He was from North Carolina and had this drawl we tried to imitate. No matter how much Grady instructed us, we did not pass. Grady laughed at that a lot. He had a lot of funny, country sayings and was fun to be with. It was the first time that I ever met anybody from the South. Our parents always seemed to have a good time with Mabel and Grady and our folks continued to visit with the Joneses after we moved back to Scranton. Grady drove his 51 Ford sedan – a really cool car – up for a visit. He even let me drive it on the hill at the Old Forge home. It was the first time I ever saw an automatic transmission, let alone drove one. Also, it was on that visit that Grady bought me my first razor and showed me how to shave. They were great friends to our parents and us kids.