With this kind of information, the RSO could make a decision that the vehicle was approaching a destruct limit line. The RSO could then send the destruct command that would initiate the firing of a set of shaped charges usually running lengthwise along the tank or outer structure of the launch vehicle. These destruct systems were quite effective in splitting the stage open and spilling the propellants until the whole vehicle turned into a fireball. His action to destruct the vehicle was designed to protect property and people and, in a similar fashion, I was working on the problem of defining the limits of trajectory deviations that could imperil the safety of the astronauts.
The spacecraft had different abort modes, consider them escape routes for the crew, and our efforts turned towards assuring that those escape routes were not compromised by any trajectory deviation, hence some of our eventual limit lines. We also tried to control the location of the landing in case of a launch abort. Late in the launch phase, there was also some limited ability to vary the time of retro fire and control the landing point of the spacecraft to a designated recovery area in the Atlantic. Observing the RSO operation and knowing how often he had to take destruct action certainly underlined the importance and urgency of our efforts to develop a sound approach for limit lines that would protect the crew.
Eventually, the Mercury-Redstone countdown picked up and continued towards T-0. My stomach did not get any better. The countdown clock finally arrived at T-0 and there was considerable smoke on the launch pad. However, as the smoke cleared, it became clear that the Redstone rocket was still sitting on the pad and parachutes were being deployed from the Mercury spacecraft. This put the whole situation in a really high-risk condition. For unknown reasons, the Redstone had apparently begun to ignite its engines and then shut down. Although I didn’t figure all this out at the time, the spacecraft reacted as it should have following a normal shutdown of the rocket at the end of its planned firing. This resulted in the jettisoning of the escape tower and, since the barostats sensed an altitude below ten thousand feet (the normal altitude for chute deployment), out went the parachutes.
MR-1 Escape Tower Fires
So we ended up with a rocket that had been pressurized, armed, fired and released for flight and it was still sitting on the pad unconstrained by any hold-down device. On top of that precarious condition, the concern was that the parachutes would fill in the breeze and perhaps pull the vehicle over and cause it to collapse on the pad. The Redstone team in the blockhouse was scrambling to decide on a course of action to stabilize and “safe” this condition. I did not hear those conversations but I do know of one option that was being discussed with the range safety officer. Since all the ground umbilicals to the vehicle had been released for flight, there was really no way for the blockhouse to exercise any control. The option being discussed involved shooting a high-powered rifle at the Redstone tank and letting the fuel spill out.
I was completely new to this environment and knew nothing of “safing” techniques. But this did not sound like safety. My gut reaction to this rifle scheme was really negative. It was soon set aside.
The team in the blockhouse considered an option involving reconnecting the umbilicals. This approach involved sending some people, maybe only one, out to reconnect the umbilicals with a completely fueled vehicle precariously balanced on the pad. This was dropped soon also. Eventually, since the wind was very light and forecast to remain so, the concern about filling the parachutes and causing a tip-over seemed less threatening. Finally, it was decided to simply wait, let the launch vehicle batteries drain down and this would cause some of the valves to go to the safe position. There was risk with this path, but it was the one selected and resulted in the complete “safing” of the vehicle by the next day.
Up until this event, I had a rather constrained view of what my job as a flight dynamics officer might entail. This experience drove home the fact that unplanned failures or events could really happen, and that the automatic system, or the crew, or some intervention by the ground crew could start another chain of events. All of a sudden, the preparation for effectively operating in the MCC took on several more dimensions than I had been imagining. This was much more of a lesson than I had expected on my very first day of limited operations involvement. From that day on, my thinking and that of my colleagues embraced the idea that the unexpected could happen and things could get even more complicated from there.
Back to Inventing the Discipline at STG
Besides these lessons from the RSO world, another important job on the ground was to make sure that the spacecraft was in a suitable and safe orbit. We spent considerable time deciding what conditions had to be met in order to consider the orbit safe and give it a “GO.” The geometry of the launch phase was such that the point at which the launch vehicle was commanded to be shut down and the spacecraft was in orbit occurred halfway between the Cape and the station at Bermuda. These and other trajectory-related conditions were the responsibility of the console operator known as Flight Dynamics Officer, call sign “FIDO.”
Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral
By this time, the planning for control of the spacecraft in orbit had evolved to the concept of a Mercury Control Center (MCC) at the Cape and connected to multiple ground and ship-based stations around the world. The MCC – an acronym that worked equally well for the later Mission Control Center in Houston – was the command center at the hub of this network of facilities. It also received the telemetry and A/G voice from the local facilities at the Cape. The MCC was also supported by the Real Time Computing Center (RTCC) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland. This computing center’s primary function was to process raw radar data and provide position, velocity and other derived parameters to the MCC, in support of the “FIDO” and “Retro” positions. The telemetry processing was not performed by the RTCC but was routed directly from the analog telemetry ground system to display devices, such as meters, strip charts or discrete events lights for review by the spacecraft systems controllers.
The implementation of the RTCC was a landmark case of multi-organizational cooperation. It involved the mission analysis people for the requirements for analytical tools and software formulations. Carl Huss and I represented the needs of the console operators for the definition of the content of displays, limit lines, abort mode actions, propulsion maneuver targets, mission events to sequence the programs and other operational parameters for MCC monitoring and control. Since the computers at the time were severely limited by memory capacity, balancing a useful requirement set within that constraint became a daily struggle. The management of the implementation was performed by Langley employees like Jim Donegan who eventually moved to GSFC to oversee the RTCC work. IBM won the contract for the hardware and software work. Lynn Dunseith, originally from Lewis like me, was the STG interface to the implementation team at GSFC and Lynn performed this role superbly well into the Shuttle flight program. Modern observers will be amused at the memory size constraint but the system was at the edge of the state of the art at the time. It was a regular cause for management review and a real test of the STG, GSFC and IBM team. But, the effective interaction of all the involved parties was driven by a uniform dedication to the same goals and was a tribute to the competence and professionalism of this team.
The network stations, referred to as remote sites, would be in contact with the spacecraft for a maximum of five minutes, often less, each time the spacecraft passed in their vicinity. The remote sites were capable of receiving telemetry and voice, sending commands and tracking the spacecraft by radar. The stations were also manned by a small cadre of operators whose job was to function like a mini-MCC, for the time the spacecraft was in contact with their station. In effect, they were the eyes and ears and more of MCC as the spacecraft traced its ground path over the globe. The remote stations sent data back to MCC after the pass on a teletype system, but it was mostly a manual capture of a standard set of parameters plus news of any a
nomalies or significant items. It was tedious and slow, but the guys made it work as well as it could. Voice quality between the MCC and the remote stations was mixed – some were good, but some had a habit of dropping out at inopportune times. The orbit was such that the spacecraft would traverse and flyover most of the globe in about twenty-four hours.
We had thirteen of these stations and the manning, training and logistics were major tasks in themselves. There were usually three to five operators called flight controllers at each one of these stations. The tasks were monitoring of the onboard systems, the health of the crew, a capcom and sometimes a designated leader of the team for sites involved in critical mission coverage such as retrofire. This effort was a significant training and logistics problem to manage. Gene Kranz earned his spurs and more in the orchestration of this global infrastructure of intelligence gathering and real time response to the frequent problems of early space flight.
The Bermuda station was additionally configured with a set of plot boards driven by the local radar and identical to the plot boards at the Mercury Control Center at the Cape. These were the tools by which we were going to assure that the spacecraft was safely in orbit or to assist in a few specific abort conditions. With the support of John Mayer, I was selected to be the flight dynamics officer at Bermuda and served on three unmanned Atlas launches and on John Glenn’s flight, designated MA-6. The station worked very well for this purpose and gave clear confirmation of safe orbit, which was also verified by the tracking displayed in MCC.
This was great operational experience for me and taught me how to get a station ready for its mission. All of our learning curves were very steep and I went on to be the Flight Dynamics Officer in MCC at the Cape for the next three flights, MA-7, -8 and -9. The early opportunity to serve at Bermuda was a great assist to my knowledge and confidence. With all of the other stations around the world, it was also a great opportunity for STG to develop many of our young engineers into competent and confident operators ready to take their place in the MCC for Gemini and Apollo.
Christopher Columbus Kraft
No record of these times can be remotely complete without testimony to the pervasive influence that Christopher Columbus Kraft had on the programs, the organization, and especially all of us, his young followers. Whatever his various titles were during those years, he was our leader – “the” Flight Director – and our role model. His influence was always a lesson in leadership, and we strove mightily to emulate the same.
Over five decades, while he and I were sometimes in different organizations but still associated, Chris demonstrated over and over again that great leadership cannot be overrated. Chris had the skill of clarity of thought in defining issues and solutions. In a world of many new and compounding complexities, Chris reduced problems to a crisp definition, to a few options and then a decision. He often left me wondering, “Why didn’t I think of that?” His calibration of his people at all levels seemed unerring and he located people where their talents were a match to the assignment. To others, he seemed to delight in stretching them to levels that they did not know they were capable of. Decisions were often quick and always crisp, “Yes, we’ll do it that way.” On personnel matters, he would ask, “So you want to move to this job? Tell me why.” Listening and then, “Fine, I agree, the discussion is over.” And I never saw Chris avoid a difficult decision; he seemed to enjoy them and even to seek them out. Once made, everybody moved on. Things were not allowed to fester or to sit on hold.
Chris had real respect for his troops and it showed in how he dealt with subjects that might impinge on them. On one occasion after a scrub and a launch delay of several days, he decided that all of us at stations around the world would stay at our respective sites and forgo travel back home. We did have one higher-level management person from a different organization who was in Bermuda to observe. He asked for an exception in his case, on the communication loop, essentially in front of the rest of us, and we all knew immediately how dumb that was. And, yes, he stayed deployed with all the rest of us. Perhaps the strongest demonstration of Chris’s leadership was his trust in us. That trust actually empowered and challenged us. You did not want to be found unworthy.
The work itself forced us to strive for crisp, clear communications. This was best illustrated in our mission rule discussions of what level of failure would cause a major deviation to the plan. As most of us came to operations work, there was a natural tendency to avoid or stall on a decision. Usually this manifested itself as a discussion of symptoms or preliminary troubleshooting steps, but not the final decision on a failed or failing system. This learning stage was often made apparent by the admonition, “Yes, but after all those preliminaries, what do you want me (or the crew) to do?” Since we had all been there, we recognized the clarity on the final recommendation being sought, and the implied rebuke to the stall tactic. By the way, this constant need for clarity in discussions, decisions, et cetera probably inhibited the already meager poetic in us and, I would guess, frustrated the interviewers who were always trying, properly so, to evoke some expression of feeling and/or emotion from us.
The benefit of the impassioned debates over the mission rules was real and enduring. The discussions forced out all aspects of any applicable considerations and there were always champions for more or less risk or response to each of all the failures under consideration. It was not apparent at first but after months of this, we began to be able to generalize what was evolving. For example, we wanted enough redundancy so that we could still tolerate one more specific failure and still recover the crew safely. In the early days, these were aimed at deciding the redundancy levels necessary to continue on-orbit, or conversely to terminate the mission early. As these rules were tested in the integrated simulations with the crew in the simulator and the MCC, they eventually became, in essence, a code of ethics that defined the risk-reward tradeoff. All of the operators and the crews gradually came together on a deep understanding of our compact with each other as to how we would manage risk. It was the process of going through each and every postulated condition and response, and testing of that framework in simulations that built the team confidence. The payoff is in invoking the familiar thought and judgment process when something outside the mission rules discussions occurs. And the unexamined conditions did happen. In those cases, we got to an answer consistent with our risk-reward framework.
The understanding that the team created was sometimes underappreciated. There were several occasions in the future when a compulsion to manage and be the decision maker would infect people. This usually showed up as HQ people attempting to inject themselves into operational decisions. It is probably a common disease, but, in these cases, they skipped all the prior steps that created a common understanding of the risk-reward trade. They probably viewed it as more of a prerogative matter and less as a culmination of the invention and training process. The foray never lasted long enough before correction so that it never did any harm, but it could have. Some incidents were testy and there will be more on some of those later.
Chris relished the give-and-take, the arguments, the new insights from our flight experience and all the other factors informing us of ways to improve the rules and the process. A favorite of Chris’s was the simulation (sim) ordeal. After each sim, there was always a debriefing – what was done well or badly and why. These sims were a baptism by fire – the palms always got sweaty; any decision had to be justified, and one’s honor was at stake, naked in front of his peers and the boss. And, most all of us spent some time in that naked position. But, it did raise one’s determination to avoid screwing up. These screw-ups were also the feedstock for ridicule afterward at every opportunity. Sympathy and propriety norms were uncommon. We had adult leadership role models all around us. Another of those, mentioned earlier, was Tecwyn “Tec” Roberts. Tec came by way of Canada and the AVRO windfall to STG. Originally from the country of Wales, he was raised in the small town of Trefnant Bach, Llanddaniel. He was th
e branch chief and leader of the Mission Control Center branch. He was about ten years older than the rest of us in the unit. But he patiently required our boisterous opinions to be backed up and reinforced by well-studied background, compelling logic and reasoning to support any positions we took. It was a maturity lesson that we all internalized very well and enjoyed using to the fullest with our other colleagues who did not have the benefit of Tec’s coaching. He was a quiet spoken man, but did not shy away from pushing a discussion to what he thought was the correct conclusion. And he did it with grace, charm and a kind of impish style with which one could not be angry.
All twenty-two-year-olds should have an engaging, talented role model like Tec to start their career with. We would all be better off. When I went to meet with Tec at my request, he often started with, “Well, Mr. Lunney, what are you trying to sell to me today?” Guilty as charged. To whatever extent I was successful at the art of framing and selling ideas, Tec was the teacher who got me started. I sometimes am unhappy with and disagree with what I say or write, but looking back on my oral history interviews, I was happy with these comments about Tec, only slightly edited for clarity.
Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program Page 6