by Gene Kranz
Frank Borman, the commander of the next Gemini mission, overheard the discussion and became an immediate convert. The proposal got a cold reception from the Air Force and NASA Cape management, so Yardley, a close friend of Kraft’s, took the proposal to the MSC director, Robert Gilruth. (The respect for Gilruth was so great that virtually everyone in the program addressed him as “Dr. Gilruth.” Only those very close to him, like Kraft, ever called him “Bob.”) Within twenty hours of the Agena failure, Yardley and Burke convinced Gilruth to give the dual launch concept to his staff. In short order, the NASA Gemini program manager, Chuck Mathews, and Kraft agreed to check it out with their people. In the early afternoon, Hodge called a division staff meeting, apprised us of the dual launch plan, and gave us an hour and a half to see if we could pull it off. I was short on staff since most of my controllers were returning from the remote sites. After a brief meeting with the remnants of my branch, we concluded that it could be done and that the concept was not fatally flawed. I passed the word to Hodge, who passed it to Gilruth: “Flight Control didn’t see anything we couldn’t do, or anything we couldn’t work around.”
Later in the afternoon Gilruth had talked with Dr. George Mueller, the agency’s associate administrator, in Washington. After a day of intense discussions and, only forty-eight hours after the Agena failure, a press conference was held at the Texas White House. Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s press secretary, announced the planned rendezvous of two manned spacecraft. The mission was assigned the designator Gemini 76, combining two Gemini missions into a single mission by using the long-duration Gemini 7 spacecraft as the target for Gemini 6. Within hours of their return from the remote sites, our guys were at their desks writing the data plans, procedures, and site confidence tests.
The mission concept was simple. Borman and Lovell would be launched first (before Gemini 6) on their fourteen-day Gemini 7 mission. Immediately after launch of the Gemini 7 spacecraft two things were scheduled to take place. First, everybody at the launch site would carefully comb the entire area looking for any debris that might have fallen off the booster as well as checking for any damage to the pad. Then the Titan carrying the Gemini 6 spacecraft crewed by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford ( the previous launch of Gemini 6 had been scrubbed after the Agena failure) would be erected on the same pad used to launch Gemini 7 and the pre-launch checkout could begin. If all went well, we would be ready to launch Gemini 6 seven days after Gemini 7.
The day after the press conference Flight Control was in high gear. My branch went about its work with the kind of cheerful exuberance one experiences all too rarely in life. It was like watching Patton’s Third Army break off their offensive, perform a pivotal maneuver, turn, and march 100 miles in the dead of winter to relieve Bastogne. In forty-eight hours, we had redeployed and were back on the attack. The launch was scheduled for early December of 1965.
In order to move ahead to more complex missions while Hodge and I were building up the Flight Control Division, the Mission Planning and Analysis Division was expanding to develop mission concepts, design the trajectories, and write the software for the MCC computers. When I joined the Space Task Group in 1960, the Mission Analysis Branch was the largest organization in Chuck Mathews’s division. The branch eventually grew to a division led by a perfectly balanced pair of leaders, John Mayer and Bill Tindall. They were an unlikely pair and, except for the challenge of space, probably would never have met. Mayer was short, dark-haired, with a nose for finding answers to questions that appeared to have none. He had an air of aloofness until he got to know you. With his sharp features and horn-rimmed glasses, he could pass as an accountant for the IRS rather than a space pioneer. Tindall, the deputy, with the easy manner of a farm boy, was tall, blond, and youthful in spirit and manner. He was gregarious, short-tempered but quick to recover from an outburst. Whatever needed to be done at the cutting edge, these guys could do it. Although the scientists and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spearheaded the development of the Apollo guidance and navigation systems and software, many of the technical studies and prototype software were designed by Mayer and Tindall’s division, experience that would come in very handy when we had to come up with alternative ways to achieve our objectives.
This unlikely pair pioneered trajectory design in Project Mercury. They presided over three sections of engineers and mathematicians. The highly talented and resourceful women of the computing unit, Mary Shep Burton, Cathy Osgood, and Shirley Hunt, started out in Mercury with mechanical calculators, manually plotting the results of their measurements and calculations on graph paper. But in Gemini, with key-punched card decks and computers, they started planning every aspect of the launches, the rendezvous, and reentry. They provided us with options that just months before we did not know existed. We had no choice but to believe in the data and methodology they came up with, so our trust in their work was absolute. They designed the mission, then loaded their software in the computers in the spacecraft and in the MCC. Their work had to be perfect—and it was, thanks to increasing computer capacity, speed, and availability.
The rendezvous on the coming Gemini 76 mission was a trajectory show. The Trench and the flight designers from Mission Planning and Analysis were the orchestrators. Mission Control and the launch team followed their lead to the last note, improvising the music only when things fell apart. During a mission, Mayer and Tindall’s division operated a stand-alone computer in the ACR—the Auxiliary Computer Room. Throughout the mission their computer ran in parallel with that of the mission team. If we crashed and couldn’t generate the data, they fed the answers into MCC. The MCC frequently had to load new software into new computers, and the ACR was our only backup if we got into trouble.
Mission deployment for Gemini 76 started November 21. Several of the new remote controllers were Air Force officers assigned to Flight Control to prepare for the Air Force man in space program. Ed Fendell was deploying to Hawaii with Bill (Big Shoes) Bucholz, an Air Force captain assigned to my branch. Bucholz was a blond, broad-shouldered Missourian who croaked when he talked. Both of us graduated from Parks College in 1954 and entered flight training the same year. His family had grown rapidly to eight children, and the only affordable transportation for the entire bunch was an old large black Cadillac hearse that seated twelve. The hearse often served another purpose. After the mission deployment briefings the remote site teams often partied in downtown Houston. When they wanted to come home through the downtown traffic the controllers would form up their cars in a line behind Bill’s hearse and turn on their lights mimicking a funeral procession. The ploy worked every time.
The afternoon before the final Gemini 6 simulation, while drinking beer with his Hawaii team, Fendell had been approached by the site-training chief, who proposed that Fendell fake a heart attack during the training run to see if Bucholz and the backup flight surgeon, Dr. Warren Prescott, were capable of taking charge of the site team. Fendell returned to the Hawaii site, conferred briefly with the training boss in Houston, then put the plan into action.
The final network simulation was a full-blown mission dress rehearsal, involving all sites and teams in the MCC. During the second simulated Hawaii pass, as the Gemini 6 spacecraft was closing preparatory to the rendezvous, Fendell turned to the Hawaii surgeon and said he did not feel well. Moments later, he stood up from his chair, grasping his chest, emitted a groan, and then crumpled to the floor.
The team momentarily forgot the simulation as the flight surgeon ministered to Fendell in the course of their own little simulation. Struggling into the CapCom’s chair amid the tangle of headset cords, Bucholz stepped on Fendell’s chest, punched in his headset, and croaked on the voice loop, “Chris, Fendell just had a heart attack.” Kraft, momentarily startled but wise to the tricks of simulation, called the simulation supervisor and asked. “SimSup, is this some of your doing?” Since he had not originated the plan, SimSup responded, “Not mine, Flight!” Kraft then punched up the lo
op. “Hawaii, keep me apprised. Have the surgeon give Fendell’s status to the MCC surgeon.” Although deeply concerned about his CapCom, Kraft knew that the clock was ticking to launch and, with the whole tracking network up and operating, not even a heart attack could be allowed to interfere with the mission preparation.
Bucholz passed the test. With Fendell on the floor at his feet, he took control of the site’s part of the simulation, provided support to Gemini 7, then reconfigured to support Gemini 6. For the next hour and a half, despite everyone in the loop worrying about Fendell, the simulation went forward flawlessly. As the third Hawaii pass approached, Fendell rolled over, got to his feet, and placed his headset back on. The startled Hawaii team was speechless, then relieved, then concerned how they were going to break the news to Kraft. Kraft was angry, but Fendell, with an ear-to-ear grin, was delighted that his new protégé, Bucholz, had come through.
Bucholz, a pilot, got the critical assignments on the old merchant ships for the remaining Gemini missions. At the end of Gemini, he returned to combat duty flying C-123 transports to relieve the pressure on the Special Forces based in Vietnam. Many young heroes passed through Flight Control in the 1960s. The Air Force transfers were some of the best, adding seasoned backup to the recent college grads in the evolving Brotherhood.
As rapid as the technology developments were in the entire program, the human factor was still key to our success in Gemini and Apollo—and in integrating the contractors for both into our data and operational loops. From the first Mercury mission through Gemini, the personal, gut-level knowledge each controller brought to his console from liftoff through completion of mission was the key to success—and to survival when things went to hell. Years later, it was the human factor that would save us when technology could not.
It wasn’t always easy to get contractors to play the game our way. North American Aviation, for example, was one of the new Apollo contractors, and they strongly resisted the transfer of design engineering data to Flight Control. They grew up building fighter airplanes that were always delivered with their own write-ups of flight manuals and procedures. Control of this function was even more important to them in building a spacecraft. They didn’t believe that flight controllers had sufficient knowledge to put together the manuals and procedural documentation. I fought a long battle (as I had with contractors in Mercury) to get two North American engineers assigned to Flight Control to set up a data pipeline linking our offices at the MSC with the North American factories. In any complex and high-risk program like Gemini or Apollo, there is always an understandable reluctance to share the intimate design details and detailed test data. The contractor’s design teams often doubted that the flight controllers were technically capable of understanding and correctly using the data. The team building and trust between designer and flight controller demanded sharing the information openly.
December 4, 1965, Gemini 7
Given the magnitude of the change in mission content and direction, it was remarkable the way the launch, flight, and contractor teams collaborated. There are times when an organization orchestrates events so perfectly that the members perform in perfect harmony. It is part of team chemistry, where communication becomes virtually intuitive, with teams marching to a cadence, the tempo increasing hourly and the members never missing a beat.
The cadence continued unbroken and at 1:30 P.M. Central Standard Time on December 4, 1965, the Gemini double launch mission began.
The Gemini 7 flight was a saga of human endurance and spirit. Borman and Lovell were cooped up in a spacecraft smaller than the front seat of a Volkswagen Bug. The ejection seats and instrument panels limited their range of motion. The seats were canted 12 degrees outboard and 8 degrees forward. A console, with the pistol grip attitude controller much like a gearshift in a modern-day sports car, was between the seats. The crew would be virtually immobile for fourteen days. Try to imagine yourself stuffed into a confined space like this for fourteen hours, much less fourteen days.
The crew wore new lightweight suits designed for use only inside the spacecraft. The most recognizable aspect of the suit was the soft hood that replaced the traditional hard helmet. According to the manual, in an emergency, the crew could don the suit in fifteen to twenty minutes. In fact, after much effort, it turned out to be more like an hour.
Food was as limited as the rest of the crew systems, consisting of simple rehydratable meals (“add water and ignore the taste”) in a squeeze bag with a feeder spout. The bite-sized foods were dry and tended to crumble. The fourteen days in the spacecraft were like a primitive campout, minus the ability to shower, stand, stretch, or take a walk. Through every day of Gemini 7, the controllers’ hearts were with the crew in the spacecraft, and we worked hard to cheer them toward their fourteen-day flight goal.
As soon as the Gemini 7 Titan had cleared Pad 19, the launch turn-around for Gemini 6 started. Both stages of the Gemini Titan arrived at Pad 19 within two hours of the previous launch. The race was now on.
Kraft, Hodge, and I were following the team rotation pattern we had established on the two previous missions. During Kraft’s shift, Borman and Lovell flew formation with the Titan upper stage, and then methodically started on the flight’s medical experiments. Kraft’s handover was smooth, and soon I was up and working my third mission as flight director. The technology of space was sprinting forward, especially in communications. The ships on my shift were in their familiar locations in the northwest Pacific near Japan and in the southeast Pacific off the coast of Chile. For the first time, we used a satellite communications relay from Chuck Lewis’s team on the Coastal Sentry.
I had a new controller working on the White Team for Gemini 76, who would become a key player on many of my Apollo teams. Gerry Griffin was an experienced Lockheed Agena engineer and in the military flew as a “scope dope” (radar and weapons officer) in the supersonic McDonnell F-101 Voodoo interceptor. Griffin followed in the footsteps of Aldrich as a Gemini GNC (guidance, navigation, and control engineer).
My shift broke down into three distinct activities. The trajectory team worked to pinpoint Borman and Lovell’s orbit to support the rendezvous targeting. Griffin and my EECOM split their time between spacecraft support and updating the telemetry, command, and display data for the subsequent Gemini 6 launch. The challenge to the MCC procedures team was to integrate the pad test and controller training schedules for the coming Gemini 6 launch into the team shifting and daily operation of the Mission Control Center as we continued the support of the flight of Gemini 7.
After Kraft’s Go NoGo on day three, Lovell removed his suit. We had planned to get both astronauts out of their suits but NASA management got involved, and the decree came down that one crewman would be suited at all times, and both would be suited for rendezvous and reentry. By day four it was obvious that Lovell was a hell of a lot more comfortable and was sleeping better than Borman. The message was clear—the cockpit was cramped, the suit was hot, and it was again time to challenge headquarters’ decision. By compiling medical telemetry and data from both men we were able to show the marked difference in things like blood pressure, pulse rate, and quality of sleep between Frank Borman, sweating and uncomfortable in his suit, and Lovell. We even deliberately raised the issue at press conferences, but NASA’s top management remained adamant. Kraft finally brokered a sort of compromise—Borman and Lovell would take turns wearing the suit.
We also had to follow NASA’s directive to let the media—and through it, the whole world—listen to virtually all communications between the spacecraft and the ground. We had to make some exceptions to give us privacy in certain communications involving things like mission risk discussions or direct conversations between flight surgeons and crew members, so we developed a code word. If the MCC or the crew wanted a private conference either side could request or schedule a “UHF-6” test, which we gradually wove into the daily flight plan, hoping that the media would pay little attention to the “test.”
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nbsp; Early in the mission the UHF-6 passes went well, and we were pleased that we could conduct needed mission communications in private. When the UHF-6 was requested, the surgeon at the MCC went to the back room with the communications technician and all lines to the controllers and outside the center were disabled. After the UHF-6, the surgeon briefed the flight directors privately. We thought we had pulled it off and got a bit cocky. We were wrong. Reporters are a sharp and nosy lot (after all, that’s why they’re reporters). They started to become suspicious and pressed Kraft to explain the UHF-6 business. After repeated queries, Kraft finally said, “Ask Kranz at his post-shift conference. He’s the one with the details of the test.” At my press conference I tried to bury it in a highly technical discussion of communications and antenna patterns, but I knew the jig was up when a reporter finally asked, “Is UHF-6 a code name for a private medical conference?”