by Gene Kranz
On a personal level, this was the start of my journey to the lunar landing. The mission brought me face-to-face with the team of controllers that would take an American to the lunar surface. I dove into the mission as if it were the last one before the Moon. My Apollo 5 White Team was a curious mixture of youth and experience. Jerry Bostick was breaking in a new FIDO, Dave Reed, while John Llewellyn had an old grizzled World War II bomber pilot, Jim I’Anson, under his tutelage. The contrast between Reed, a city slicker, quick to respond, and I’Anson, a bushy-mustached West Texas rancher with a slow drawl, set the extremes of the team. Jack Craven and Don Puddy were my LM systems controllers.
The mission was a flight controller’s dream, consisting of a Saturn launch followed by a continuous string of eight maneuvers spread over five orbits. The entire mission was scheduled for only eight hours. If all went well, the mission would be flown totally under the command of the LM computer. This was the first mission for the new LM team and the most complex unmanned test we would ever fly. The LM’s contractor, Grumman, was also new to the space program. Grumman was understandably nervous, and they worked very closely with my team to get through the first flight of their frail but essential contraption. I anticipated, per Murphy’s Law, that if anything could go wrong it would. In the months before the first test I put heavy emphasis on making sure that if the LM automatic systems failed, the MCC team could take over and do the job. By the time we approached launch readiness, we had developed several different routes to achieve the primary mission objectives, incorporating eight ground-commanded alternates to the basic mission plan.
Three days before launch I faced a new problem. Jack Craven, my LM control engineer, responsible for the guidance, navigation, attitude, and propulsion systems, had been in a traffic accident. His Volkswagen was demolished, with Craven taking the steering column in the chest. There were no broken bones, but he was beaten up. Just breathing hurt. He was unable to speak beyond a hoarse, raspy croak. With only a single team, I was faced with scrubbing the planned Apollo 5 launch. Since unmanned missions were executed by ground control, the loss of an experienced controller made us terribly vulnerable. Craven, a former Navy “hurricane hunter,” was one of the most technically qualified controllers ever to step up to a console. Older than the rest and often a bit cranky, he had come from the recovery division to Flight Control in order to get a piece of the action. What we didn’t know at this time was that he was suffering from an increasing hearing loss. Even so, as Apollo progressed, he was given a troubleshooting job, often assigned as second man at the console for critical events. Dwight Coons, my flight surgeon, trained in medicine at the University of Toronto, volunteered to get Craven ready to fly the mission.
A launch countdown is a massive undertaking, like writing the score for a symphony. Putting one together for the first time is an experience not easily forgotten. The Apollo 5 lunar module, launch support equipment, software, and procedures were exercised in an integrated fashion for the first time in a countdown demonstration on Thursday, January 18. The one-day test stretched to almost three days and, without a gap in testing or a day’s break, we began the launch countdown. One of the many things NASA operations at MCC had in common with the military was that rest was a scarce commodity. If you are standing watch and then doing ship’s work at sea you run on about six hours of sleep in twenty-four; same goes in intense aircraft operations or field deployment in the infantry. You learn to live with fatigue for very long periods—and not let it erode your focus or dull your edge.
At the launch-minus-one day review Dr. Coons reported that Craven could support the mission, but he would be virtually immobile and have difficulty speaking. Bob Carlton drew the job of responding to Craven’s grunts and mumbled comments, selecting displays, issuing commands, and communicating to the control team. Bob would later become my LM control systems engineer for the lunar landing.
January 22, 1968, Apollo 5
Late in the afternoon, after a ragged countdown and six hours of delays, I finally gave the call to the test conductor: “MCC is Go for launch.” Dr. Coons had done well. Craven was at the console in a stiff-backed chair, headset on, incredibly erect, unable to move head and body. He was a big-time coffee drinker and I knew his body was aching as much from lack of caffeine as it was from Coons’s therapy. Seated next to him was Carlton, serving as his voice and hands. The stakes were high, but failure was not on my mind. We had been virtually wedded to the LM and Saturn booster for a week.
The launch was smooth as satin. The LM, once separated from the booster, coasted through the second and into the third orbit, the control team snuggling up to their consoles. The only sound was a periodic hoarse grunt from Craven to Carlton. As the ship off the Australian coast acquired telemetry, the CapCom, Jim Fucci, reported, “Signal strength good . . . mission sequence five cued . . . clocks in sync.” After a final check with his controllers, he said, “Flight, we’re Go.” I acknowledged, listening as Fucci counted down the final seconds to the first test of the LM’s engine. The action was about to begin.
Fucci called out the final events: “The computer is in control . . . engine arm . . . plus X jets firing . . . engine start . . . 10 percent.”
I instantly thought, Go for it! Then Fucci suddenly called “SHUT DOWN!” The words came almost as an expletive, something that we were not expecting. In seconds, Fucci transmitted commands to secure the system, then more commands to burrow into the guts of the LM computer to find out what had happened.
We were now getting the telemetry in the MCC from Australia. After briefly assessing it, Gary Renick, my guidance officer, came on line. “Flight, we had two alarms, ‘DPS DELTA V’ and ‘FORGET IT!’ ”
I thought, What the hell are they?
A quick check of the LM showed no apparent problems, then Craven grunted instructions to Carlton. Precisely measuring his words, Carlton said, “The alarm indicates that the thrust did not build up fast enough. The time set in the computer for thrust buildup was too short. We need to change the computer timer.”
Renick said, “That makes sense, Flight. The FORGET IT alarm indicates that when the command was given to throttle the engine, nothing happened.”
I was proud of my guys. Within minutes of the alarm, they had decoded the problem—caused by an incorrect computer instruction—and were moving toward an answer.
The tracking station coverage was soon going to go to hell. We had only three and a half more hours before the lunar module went beyond the ground network. While the LM crossed the Pacific to the United States, we developed a plan to change the computer timer, delay the mission plan a revolution, and attempt to return to automatic LM computer control.
On the third pass over the States, a problem that had been previously just a nuisance now became critical. Mission Control was having difficulty commanding the spacecraft. The signal strengths were so poor that it took three or four tries for each command. We quickly decided to start a go-for-broke ground command sequence on the fourth and final pass across the States. The control teams struggled to get the target up-dates and maneuver information into the lunar module computer, punching the commands in manually from the consoles.
Kraft and the Apollo program manager, George Low, joined me at the console as we rapidly discussed the options. Kraft, unfamiliar with the team’s jargon, said, “I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep it up . . . good luck!” Then he returned to his console behind me. Low remained at my console, asking me what I intended to do. I said, “George, I am going to try a Hail Mary pass. I am going to go for the full set of objectives using manual sequences. I will have a backup if we run out of time and tracking stations.” Kraft motioned Low to move away from the console and give me room to work. I said a prayer that we could get the ground commands in when needed.
I was at a crossroads. I wanted to accomplish every LM test objective, but I could not risk the loss of the fire-in-the-hole test. To hedge my bet, I set an MCC wall clock counting down to the
time of the final tracking station pass where I would settle for the last-ditch plan.
The team’s dialogue between positions in the last minutes became so rapid, crisp, and intense that I could hear Craven yelling instructions to Carlton, completely ignoring his pain. Other controllers, their work done, hunched over their consoles, trying to figure out how to help us. I would select the mission sequence, the commands would be executed by Renick, my GUIDO, and the event calls would come from Carlton. The three of us had to be perfectly synchronized. The fact that the schedule for the lunar landing was now hanging in the balance never entered our minds. We were committed to success. We were after the whole enchilada. Time no longer had a meaning; we were locked into orbits, elapsed time, targets, and command sequences. We had to get the engine testing and the fire-in-the-hole objective completed in the next orbit or the mission was a failure.
A new problem was bugging Reed, my flight dynamics officer, as he edged up to my console: “Flight, on the next maneuver, if the engine burns too long we will splash the LM in the Atlantic Ocean. We have to get the engine cutoff in at the right time.” I nodded to Reed, silently assuring him that somehow we would get the commands to the LM to stop the burn. If it didn’t, we would lose all of our flight test objectives. This was no time to take counsel of our fears.
The ship off the coast of California sent a command that started the descent engine. Renick and Carlton, in perfect sync, called out events, and times and snapped out the backup commands. The descent engine shut down after one minute, twenty seconds, coasted, and then restarted. As the engine continued to burn my mind clocked the objectives as each milestone passed by. The call from Carlton—“Fire-in-the-hole, abort stage . . . we are stable”—made me smile and several of the controllers gave a brief cheer. I heard Craven’s chuckle over the hubbub in the room as the LM ascent engine burned briefly, then shut down as planned.
Reed reported, “Flight, the engine shutdown occurred at the right time in orbit. The high-speed tracking indicates we have passed minimum perigee [lowest altitude point]. The altitude is now increasing.” You could feel the collective sigh of relief that we had not splashed into the Atlantic. A half orbit later we commanded the final ascent engine maneuver, completing all of the LM objectives for the mission.
As a result of the command problems, we had ruptured a control fuel tank, blown a jet nozzle off the LM, tumbled the gyros, and expended all ascent rocket fuel. But we had satisfied all objectives in our last-ditch maneuver sequence. I was so ecstatic I felt like starting our party in Mission Control. As the LM left our telemetry screens, the spacecraft was heading toward its fiery reentry off the west coast of Panama.
It was past midnight when we finished, but not too late to say thanks to a great bunch—young kids and two salty old-timers. I regretted that the Singing Wheel was closed because of the late hour, denying me the chance to buy my team a few well-earned beers. Although this was just an unmanned mission, the lunar module showed the resilience, the flexibility, the margin we would need to go to the Moon. We had dodged bullets before, but this time we caught one in midair and spit it out. The morning newspapers declared, “APOLLO MISSION A SUCCESS, LUNAR PROGRAM ON TRACK!”
I am poor at committing to memory vast amounts of information, so I developed a series of indexed handbooks that I could refer to instantly at the console. These documents were my bridge to the controllers. I color-coded the books and highlighted the key constraints. By the time a flight was ready to launch, I had spent hundreds of hours with my systems handbook, mostly at night at home, long after Marta and the kids were asleep. I wanted to know the guts of the spacecraft the way I had known about the components of the aircraft I had flown. By acquiring this knowledge in detail I was able to communicate with my systems controllers at a level deeper than the other flight directors. This enabled me to get answers faster and make decisions quickly in real time.
My greatest fear approaching launch day was that I would lose one or more of my books. To assure that they were easy to find, I used pictures of various striking young women from the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition for all my book covers. The controllers knew about my book covers and, if one were missing, this virtually guaranteed a prompt return. I went back and forth daily between the office and Mission Control with my four large distinctively covered volumes under my arms.
No final lunar schedule was yet in place when Kraft called a surprise staff meeting on April 8, 1968. We had flown three unmanned Apollo missions since the fire, all of them little noticed by the public and the media. At the meeting, Kraft reviewed the results of the missions up to Apollo 6, then he started to speculate on a possible alternative sequence if problems kept pushing against the timetable for the lunar landing. Finally he drove right to the core: “The lunar schedule is in trouble. We must understand and fix the problems with the Saturn.” (Apollo 4 and 5 had gone very well, but on Apollo 6 we had first-stage rocket thrust oscillations that caused the Saturn to bounce like a pogo stick. Minutes later, two of the second-stage engines shut down, and when we got to orbit we could not restart the S-IVB engine.) Kraft then continued, “The LM is overweight and the software for its computer is not ready.”
None of this was news to me and I wondered where he was heading. Kraft then continued, “Each mission in the flight sequence from now on must clearly resolve some flight unknown or add a new capability to our missions. The E mission does not make sense to me. It only goes to a 4,000-mile apogee [highest point of the orbit]. That is not high enough to check out the CSM lunar navigation and verify the navigation and tracking software we will use in the MCC during a lunar mission. If we are going to do the E mission, I don’t see why in the hell we don’t go to the Moon and test the techniques and software we will use for lunar navigation and tracking.”
The chief of mission planning, John Mayer, had been waiting for this opening. Within hours of the meeting, his conceptual flight planners were on their computers. Within a month, Mayer’s team had developed a basic plan with a lunar flyby and a lunar orbit alternative. Satisfied with Mayer’s planning, Kraft directed the work to continue and to be expanded to involve all of his divisions. Chris, always the master at balancing risk and building options, now had a lunar mission alternate, and, given the opportunity, I was sure he would use it.
12
THE X MISSION
August 1968
I was suddenly the acting division chief for flight control. The Manned Spacecraft Center director, Dr. Robert Gilruth, concerned about the lack of planning for the post-Apollo era, assigned John Hodge to study how the Manned Spacecraft Center should be organized to meet the space programs of the future.
I had my hands full juggling flight director and division chief duties when I received a call to report to Kraft’s office for a one-on-one meeting on Friday morning, August 9. I was hoping that the meeting would be short and it was. With no preamble, or even hello, Kraft announced, “George Low wants to fly a mission to the Moon this year. He believes he can have a CSM available in December.” The shock on my face must have been evident as Kraft continued, “George wants to drop the E mission from the schedule and then use the Apollo 8 crew for a lunar orbit mission using the CSM from Apollo 9. Your [Apollo 9] mission will be slipped two months to get training for Borman’s crew.”
Kraft had accomplished much of the mission planning with the studies he had commissioned in April. Now in a gutsy move George Low picked up Kraft’s lunar mission plan. Low saw that it provided a way to continue to move forward on the lunar landing schedule and flight-test the lunar navigation and tracking while the LM program resolved its problems. The LM spacecraft deliveries were lagging due to a broad range of developmental problems. I recognized Low’s plan as a bold move that would let us get to the Moon by the most direct path and buy us some badly needed schedule time . . . provided it worked.
Kraft asked me to give him a list of the minimum number of people needed to assess the plan. After reflecting a few moments I
gave him names of five controllers. Kraft’s response was succinct: “We don’t need to get the training, booster, or LM people involved yet. Let’s keep it to Bostick and Aldrich. [ Jerry Bostick and Arnie Aldrich were flight controllers in my division.] I’m flying to Huntsville with Low and Slayton this afternoon to see if they can get a Saturn ready for the mission. We need to get Marshall Center leadership behind the plan.” As he motioned me out of the office he concluded, “I will need your assessment by Monday if not earlier. Keep this under your hat.” I walked away thinking that Wernher von Braun’s Germans and my trajectory team were in for one hell of a surprise.
I had mixed emotions returning to my own office. I am conservative in my planning and had long believed in a thoroughly planned and incremental approach to the lunar goal. Personally, I believed the best track to reach the Moon was the current sequence. Low’s plan would heighten the risks, but by moving ahead on several fronts at once, it would buy us time.