Failure Is Not an Option

by Gene Kranz

  Molly Brown’s flight was flawless, with only minor technical problems to be worked out. The press and medics blew one item out of proportion. Just prior to launch, Schirra slipped Young a corned beef sandwich he had purchased at Wolfie’s restaurant. To our amazement, some were offended, up to and including members of Congress. Schirra had thought his catering service was a practical alternative to the bite-size freeze-dried chicken and beef pot roast provided by the medics.

  The mission debriefing was held in the auditorium, attended by the staff of the program office, engineering, and the astronauts. After a meticulous walk-through of the pre-launch and flight periods on an event-by-event basis, we listed the open issues for the subsequent mission. At the conclusion of the debriefing, I asked the flight controllers to stay and when all visitors departed, we secured the doors. The room was silent as I again climbed the stairs to the stage. They knew what was coming. “Discipline. If you remember only one thing from this debriefing, I want you to remember one word . . . discipline! Controllers require judgment, cool heads, and they must lead their team. Leadership, judgment, and a cool head were not evident at Carnarvon. I understand how conflicts can raise tempers, but I also expect control. We are the last line of defense for our crews. We let a small incident escalate into a major flap that involved the entire operation. It was a distraction that we should have put behind us. We lost track of our objective.”

  I took a breath and continued, “Our mission will always come first. Nothing must get between our mission and us . . . nothing! Discipline is the mark of a great controller. That is all!” The auditorium was silent as I stomped off the stage and left the room.

  The military has long used the command and control principle and now it was formalized in Mission Control. The Hunter episode finally defined the role of Kraft’s organization. Provoked by the incident, Kraft sat down with Slayton and cut a new deal that gave the crew control of the spacecraft and gave the ground command of the mission. The overall mission responsibility now rested clearly with Chris Kraft, his flight directors, and the remote site CapComs.

  Slayton sent his astronauts to the remote sites as observers for one final mission. Hunter transferred to Goddard Space Flight Center and performed as the Madrid tracking station manager during Apollo. Hunter had fought the battle and lost, but he helped to win the war for Flight Control.

  7

  WHITE FLIGHT

  As we celebrated the success of Grissom and Young on Gemini 3, the Russians were also celebrating. We would soon learn that five days earlier, Lieutenant Colonel Aleksei Leonov had become the world’s first space walker, venturing outside the cabin and stepping into the void. On his return Leonov delivered a speech from the top of Lenin’s tomb, flanked by the Kremlin leadership. Leonov predicted that “The time is drawing close when people will pass over from orbital flights around the Earth to interplanetary flights, and will go to the Moon, Mars, and Venus.”

  The United States had yet to set a manned space flight record. Every member in Flight Control was aware of our opportunity in the Gemini program to set records for rendezvous, docking, duration, and extravehicular operations. We were confident that our turn was coming.

  April 1965

  The primary objective of Gemini 4 was to obtain long-term flight experience. We were going to four days in space, which would be longer than all of our flights combined in Mercury and Gemini to that point. The Apollo lunar missions were being planned to last from nine to fourteen days, and we had to prove our capacity for missions of that length. From a Mission Control standpoint, this would be our first full-blown test of the new space center and the new technologies, as well as the first mission to operate on a three-shift basis.

  We had three teams operating twenty-four hours a day; the shifts were generally eight hours long, with a one-hour handover at each end. We saw no reason to juggle them much more than that. The crew in the Gemini capsule was awake about sixteen hours and working in flight testing for about twelve hours.

  When the astronauts were awake they were in the “execute” phase, so termed because they were executing the flight plan. This was the core of their workday. Kraft would normally cover most of that period with his Red Team. My team’s eight-hour shift covered the systems shift, which started with the Gemini crew preparing for sleep. During this shift we would put the crew to sleep, then look at any glitches in the spacecraft. We would check how much “consumables” had been used—oxygen, water, and so forth—and develop “workarounds” to cope with problems. We used this information to assess mission progress. We had to keep a very careful count of the rate of use of consumables in order to achieve the mission’s desired duration. The third shift—Hodge’s Blue Team—was the planning shift. They took the data we had gathered and devised a daily flight plan, gave the crew a wake-up call, and briefed them on the activities they would be carrying out during their workday.

  The Gemini 4 mission, with astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White, was my “coming out” as a flight director, the first operation totally controlled from the new Mission Control Center in Houston. I liked the systems shift; it was an engineer’s dream. My White Team sorted out the problems and developed fixes so that the mission could proceed as planned. During the mission, no one called me Kranz; I now answered to the name of “Flight.”

  One week after the Gemini 3 mission, I completed the summary of the flight controller debriefing and carried the report to Kraft’s office. While giving Chris a brief verbal summary, I noticed he was not paying attention. He turned to me and said, “I hope you’re ready as a flight director for Gemini 4 because I have a job I want you to do for me.” He walked across the room and closed the door. Chris wanted to know how things were going as I prepared for my first shift as a flight director. Then he turned to a new subject.

  “We had a damned good mission,” he said. “The spacecraft did well and now it’s time to stretch a bit more. We’re going for four days, you know that. What you don’t know is that we’re going to try to do an EVA [extravehicular activity]. Since January, Ed White has been in training for a possible space walk. We have scheduled altitude chamber tests with the space suit, chest pack, and umbilical to be run in a couple of weeks. We’ve just about caught up with the Russians—now we can set our own records.”

  Chris never wasted words; his instructions were invariably clear and concise. “I want you to work with the engineering team in the Crew Systems Division. We are going to do an EVA if we can get the equipment ready in time. I want you to write the rules and put together the data package we will need to carry out the mission.” I was reminded of the day when Kraft first sent me down to the Cape, simply telling me, “Here’s a job that needs to be done and I trust you. Do it!”

  Kraft started pacing. “This is risky,” he went on, “but I think it is worth the shot at getting a space walk on McDivitt’s mission.”

  So I began leading two lives in flight control. Daily, I worked at running the Flight Control Branch and preparing as a flight director to lead my team on Gemini 4. I left work at 5:00 P.M., went home for dinner, then returned to work on the EVA plan. Each night I worked with the task force’s spectacular engineers, sitting in on briefings and studying the space suit’s operations, and then went back to my office to work into the night writing the rules for this high-profile mission.

  As I was preparing for flight director duties and developing what I dubbed Plan X for the EVA, Marta had to take on all the work and planning for our move to Dickinson, Texas, ten miles south and about a twenty-minute drive from Mission Control Center. Our family had outgrown our house in Flight Controller Alley.

  The EVA task force was the most powerfully creative effort I had witnessed to date in the space program. Astronauts, technicians, doctors, and engineers in a huddle—one minute discussing wrapping the twenty-five-foot umbilical in a figure 8 layout in its bag, another minute reviewing movies of Leonov’s space walk (obtained from Russian TV), while commenting on his body position and th
e mechanism used to tether him to the ship. The task force had to meet several deadlines and, as more top-level NASA management got involved, it was tough to keep a lid on what was going on in order to prevent leaks to the press. Our objective was to have the hardware qualified and planning for the EVA in place by launch minus fourteen days.

  I was uneasy. I wanted a full briefing on the EVA systems and procedures for the teams prior to deploying to the remote sites. The orders came down: “No briefings.” But Kraft agreed I could use my secretary, Sue Erwin, to type the materials for the flight controllers’ data pack, and use Ed Fendell, assigned to Carnarvon, to prepare a data pack for the EVA Go NoGo sites. Sue was a tough-minded, tough-talking rodeo barrel race rider who had broken a leg when her horse fell on her, but had never stopped competing. Absolutely intolerant of foul language (of which more than a little was heard in the hallowed halls of MCC) and a woman with a radiant smile, she was the key to sanity in the wild world of flight control during the weeks prior to a mission.

  After I had worked many extra hours with the task force for a month, the tight-knit flight controller community started to suspect something was up. The final equipment qualification for the EVA would not be completed before we held the mission deployment briefings. After the mission briefings on May 10, the remote site CapComs were called into my office and handed a double-sealed envelope. Only when given specific direction by me would they open the package. If no direction was given, the packages were to be returned unopened. The CapComs picked up the envelopes, about half an inch thick. Inside the envelope was another package labeled neatly in one-inch letters, PLAN X. The cover sheet for the data pack read:

  The mission rules and flight plan are to be used with the data you already have; however, these rules cover flight plan activities you have not heretofore considered; i.e., booster rendezvous and extravehicular activity.

  This brief note was a hell of a way for the controllers to learn of America’s first EVA. The remote site teams would be on their own, but at the MCC we had the talent of the engineers who developed the EVA equipment at our fingertips. The second element of Plan X involved an attempted rendezvous with the Titan booster to obtain experience in flying formation (close station-keeping with another object in space). With McDivitt flying in close enough, White could use his nitrogen-powered zip gun to propel him toward the Titan booster stage. The zip gun was a T-shaped EVA maneuvering device. It had a pistol grip and two small thrusters at the ends and used nitrogen as the propellant gas. I thought this was pretty sporty for the first American EVA.

  One of my primary responsibilities was team building. I remembered a key method we used in the Air Force to weld rugged individualists into a cohesive working group. A squadron insignia is used to give a group of fighter pilots a unique identity—it binds them together as a team. While I was flying the Super Sabre at Myrtle Beach, Marta and I had volunteered to paint the squadron insignia on the ready room doors. Marta made scarves with our insignia for several of the pilots. She understood the need for team cohesion in a high-risk business. I discussed my concerns about the White Team’s training with Marta one evening. As we talked, she said, “Gene, white is your team color—why don’t I make you a white vest to wear when you are on console? You can use it as your team insignia.” Somewhat skeptical, I told her to give it a shot. I would make up my mind later on whether to wear it.

  The press kit for Gemini 4 was released on May 21, fourteen days before liftoff. In it was a single page describing an EVA from an earlier plan. People immediately started to speculate on the possibility that there would be an EVA on this mission. We had only one final week of training when the word came down from headquarters: “We are Go for EVA.” I transmitted a message to all sites directing the CapComs to open the Plan X package, and I set up an all-sites conference call the following morning.

  Around the globe, the plan was read, no doubt, with murmurs of disbelief that we would try for our first EVA without benefit of any training. The flight surgeons, in particular, were incensed because they had virtually no data on crew performance during the suited altitude chamber tests. Today we would not dare take this kind of risk—but at this point we were determined to at least catch up with the Russians, if not pass them. CapCom Ed Fendell’s team would give the Go for the EVA on the second orbit at Carnarvon, Australia, and then Ed White would step outside the spacecraft at sunrise over Hawaii. The EVA would be concluded over the Cape. The remote site teams burned the midnight oil to learn enough about an EVA to ask the right questions at the scheduled briefing the next day.

  Crew systems engineers briefed the remote site and the control teams on the overall plan and details of the qualification testing. Then I briefed them on the EVA Go NoGo mission rules. Kraft wrapped it up with a brief pep talk. I could feel the confidence grow in the control teams worldwide. Kraft’s ability to use just the right words for the occasion was a rare gift. He was able to convince everyone who worked for him that no matter how steep the odds or how great the risks, we would succeed. Just the sound of his voice on the conference loop would give a young, inexperienced controller at some desolate site the confidence essential for doing his job. All of us who grew up in Flight Control learned how to use our own versions of this confidence-building technique that Kraft taught by example.

  An electric shock passed through John Aaron when he learned of his role during the briefing. John, the son of an Oklahoma rancher father and minister mother, had trained in college to be a teacher of physics and mathematics, but on the advice of a friend applied to the space program at graduation. Now, just one year out of Southwest Oklahoma State College, John was Kraft’s Red Team engineer in charge of the Gemini life support, electrical, and communications systems during the first American EVA. To this day John remains the most respected engineer ever to work in Mission Control. He was a superb mentor for younger, less experienced engineers. He would eventually become NASA’s Space Station manager and then the station’s chief engineer.

  June 3, 1965, Gemini-Titan 4

  The maturing technical prowess of the launch team gave us a nearly perfect countdown, with only a minor glitch in lowering the erector that placed the rocket in a vertical position for launch. After a brief hold, the count resumed and Kraft gave the “Go for launch.” Gemini 4 had a large number of objectives. During a four-day mission, we had scheduled the booster rendezvous, the EVA, an array of in-flight maneuvers, and eleven scientific experiments. Each Gemini mission would explore some of the many unknowns of spaceflight and test the new technologies needed for the eventual Moon landing. With less than two years remaining before the first scheduled Apollo manned launch, we needed to race through our adolescence and grow up fast.

  All three flight directors were in the MCC for launch. Hodge had run the count from booster fueling through crew wake-up, with Kraft picking up when the crew squeezed into the Gemini spacecraft. Shortly after liftoff, the Titan went through a brief period of POGO, a violent chugging that, if sustained, can cause the rocket to break up. During POGO, we had heard Jim McDivitt’s reports in staccato, then it smoothed out as the Titan raced toward engine cutoff. The new control center was humming, the computers cranking out the Go NoGo recommendations to the flight dynamics team, the controllers smoothly reporting to Kraft.

  Five and one-half minutes after liftoff, McDivitt reported booster cut-off. He waited until the booster thrust had decayed and 20 seconds later fired capsule-separation pyrotechnics and then maneuvered away from the booster with the Gemini thrusters. After he turned around, he saw the booster about the length of a football field away. McDivitt braked the Gemini and briefly fired thrusters to close the gap. Minutes later, perplexed, he reported the booster was now moving away and down from the Gemini capsule. In Mission Control, Llewellyn stood up at the RETRO console and started talking over the intercom to Kraft. Gesturing with his hands, like a cab driver in Rome, he was trying to explain what was causing problems for McDivitt.

  As the reports cam
e in, and with night rapidly descending, McDivitt again thrust toward the slowly tumbling booster. The range increased to 2,000 feet, then appeared to decrease and then increase again during the night. Coming into daylight, the booster was now over three miles away. McDivitt checked his fuel quantity, conferred with Kraft, and, observing the cutoff limits, terminated the attempt to rendezvous with the booster.

  As I sat in the MCC, I was baffled by the problems. Unwittingly, Jim had kicked open the door to the mysteries of orbital mechanics, and I had a new respect for Lunney and Llewellyn, who quickly mastered the mysteries of trajectory control. After the mission we reconstructed McDivitt’s maneuvers. Following separation he was ahead of the booster in orbit and as he thrust toward the booster he was performing a retrograde (slowing down) maneuver. As the spacecraft slowed down it went into a lower orbit. To balance the force of gravity, a spacecraft in a lower orbit (no matter how slightly lower) must travel faster than one in a higher orbit. Thus, by slowing down, McDivitt was descending and going faster, pulling away from the booster’s orbit.

  In the trajectory world you have to reset your mental gyroscope; orbital mechanics are counterintuitive, particularly for someone used to flying an aircraft, which follows an entirely different set of rules. I realized then that orbital mechanics was something else I needed to learn a lot more about—particularly if I wanted to be ready for the far more complex orbital maneuvers involved in a rendezvous!