Failure Is Not an Option

by Gene Kranz

  On his return Friday night from Alabama, Kraft, with Low, called the flight designer, Bob Ernull, and Jim Stokes, the computer boss, to his office and got right to the point. “I need launch window data for a December lunar mission, and I need it by Monday morning.”

  With no hesitation, Ernull replied, “I’ll need all the computers in Buildings 12 and 30, and I’ll need them through the weekend.” Kraft turned to Stokes and ordered him to give Bob everything he needed to do the job.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to carry out Kraft’s new marching orders, but Apollo succeeded at critical moments like this because the bosses had no hesitation about assigning crucial tasks to one individual, trusting his judgment, and then getting out of his way. In 1968 computers were still incredibly slow by today’s standards. We sometimes needed a run of six to eight hours to come up with a single answer. Computer data entry was time-consuming and the complexity of the data entry often introduced errors in the data input. The long running time and the drain on the memory often resulted in the machine crashing just before it could crank out the answer. With four mainframe computers at his disposal, running around the clock, Ernull was barely able to generate the mission data. Emerging in the early hours Monday morning, he provided Kraft with options for an Atlantic Ocean splashdown in November, December 1968, and January 1969, and a single Pacific Ocean launch window from December 20 to 27, 1968.

  Early Saturday morning, I received a call to attend another meeting with Kraft. His secretary had already called a half dozen new principals, including Bostick and Aldrich. The meeting was again short. Kraft indicated that MSFC was studying Low’s plan and that he needed a commitment from his four divisions in two days. Leaving the meeting, Aldrich and Bostick were on top of the world, unable to believe their luck—they were going to lead the planning for the first lunar mission. We were fully aware of the intense workload ahead, and the reshuffling of priorities and the risks that we had to address. Our decision processes might seem unstructured and extemporaneous, but those involved, even the very young, had the requisite experience and were masters at the art of risk judgment. All were acutely aware of the consequences of failure. The teamwork used to respond to changes and problems during a mission is the same used to respond to planning actions before the mission. Our technique assured a rapid, competent, and multidisciplinary response.

  Working on weekends had become a habit, at least a half day just to catch up and get ready for the training or testing every Monday. Bostick made a few phone calls when he returned to his office. When you received a call from work on a weekend you dropped what you were doing and just reported in. A half hour later as three controllers walked into his office Bostick began, “A few of us just had a meeting with Kraft. George Low wants to go to the Moon this December. By Monday, Kraft wants to know whether we can do it or not.”

  A full-scale debate erupted: “Geez, Jerry, we’ve never been out of Earth orbit before. We don’t even know if we can compute a lunar injection maneuver. Christ, we don’t even know if the booster guidance can do the job!”

  Unruffled, Bostick rolled on, “I want you to get together a small team of the best people you have, give them the job, and turn them loose. I need an answer by Monday.”

  Bostick then turned to Chuck Deiterich, a young, thin, lanky Texan with a Pancho Villa mustache. “Chuck,” he said, “I’ve tagged you as the lead RETRO for the first lunar mission. You will have my full support.” Deiterich, a specialist in reentry trajectories, had never worked a manned mission. He was momentarily overwhelmed by his new role. His other two teammates would be his section and branch bosses, who would be working for him. Such was Flight Control in the final year before the lunar landing. Assignments and opportunities came like a lightning flash. There were no precedents, no guidelines. All of a sudden you were given a job and you just did it—whatever it took.

  A lunar trajectory consists of a string of maneuvers, one to leave Earth orbit, several to adjust the trajectory en route to the Moon, and then two maneuvers to enter lunar orbit. The return to Earth requires another maneuver that is again adjusted during the return. At the time Kraft asked us for a decision we did not have integrated trajectory software; no maneuver in this sequence had yet been fitted end to end with any other.

  Kraft was in his element Monday morning as he assembled the pieces of the plan, weighed the alternatives, and sorted out his options. Bostick said, “Chris, if the MCC support team can get the lunar programs into the computers, I don’t see any reason why we can’t do it.” I gave Kraft the Go for my division and finished with the staffing plan for the flight directors and the control teams.

  The group then selected the week of December 20 as the launch window. This meant a CSM end-of-mission landing in the Pacific Ocean. This was a major early decision; the Navy could cover only one ocean as the primary landing area. Once the decision was made, we had to live with it for the rest of the Apollo program. The Pacific gave us the promise of a large ocean target and warmer, calmer waters—or so we hoped. The Navy liked the decision and began planning for operations from Pearl Harbor.

  To keep this mission clearly separated from the current plans, I designated Apollo 8 as the X mission. Until the mission was approved, we had to keep all mission data for the originally planned E mission. The X mission was now joining the ranks of the Gemini 4 space walk, the Gemini 76 rendezvous, and Mueller’s all-up Saturn test concept as examples of the high-risk, high-gain leadership we had in the 1960s. The decision to go to the Moon with Apollo 8 was made before we had ever flown a manned Apollo spacecraft.

  The X mission meetings occurred daily, each one pounding another element of the plan into place. By August 16, one week later, the team had expanded and for the first time I felt I was dealing from a full deck. We were continually admonished to keep what we were doing a secret, but it was like hiding an elephant in your bathtub. The constant closed-door huddles, the changing work priorities, and the longer hours gave us away.

  A press conference was held on August 19 to announce the official changing of the mission sequence, moving Frank Borman’s crew into the December launch slot and formally designating the mission Apollo 8. The announcement described this as a high “Earth orbital” mission, with a lunar option. It took only a few seconds for the press to figure out what the plan really was.

  Kraft wanted to use Lunney, Charlesworth, and me for both Apollo 7 and 8. I advised him I intended to stay with the current lead flight director assignments, shifting Charlesworth forward to cover the Apollo 8 mission.

  In the fall of 1968, I was like a guy juggling grenades wrapped in barbed wire. I was grappling with my new duties as acting division chief. I discovered there is a hell of a difference between being a deputy and being the boss. NowI had to cope with politics, budgets, job assignments, and direction of an organization of 400 amid the rapidly evolving flight program. I didn’t know it at the time while I was working as Hodge’s deputy, but Chris and he had had disagreements on a number of policy issues. I believed that Chris thought John was too conservative to be a flight director. Looking back, I see why Hodge let merun Flight Control. I suspect he felt that his days as a division chief were numbered.

  My salvation was Hodge’s former secretary, Lois Ransdell. Lois adopted me into the office and showed me the ropes. Lois was precise and direct, and had a fiercely protective attitude about “her division.” She became my trusted adjutant, the guardian of the office door and my schedule. Years later, she was given an honorary flight director title, selecting the color pink. In the history of Flight Control, only two others, Bill Tindall and John O’Neill, my deputy director during the shuttle era, have been awarded this recognition.

  All around us, the tumult of the 1960s continued. The war in Vietnam had intensified. Television brought the casualties into our homes at night, but we did not yet realize we were losing. Campuses across the land were seething as students protested the war and marched for civil rights. Race riots had broken out in ma
jor cities in the summer of 1967. Then, after Martin Luther King was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, there were riots in more than a hundred cities. In June Robert F. Kennedy was killed while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president.

  Even the space program was picketed and bomb threats were reported. Everything we carried into the Mission Control Center was inspected. Security guards roamed our parking lots during missions. We practiced bomb threat evacuations from Mission Control, always leaving a small team to hold the fort if we had a crew aloft. These events provided a violent background to our final charge to reach the Moon. Fortunately, the public’s support for the lunar program remained high. Apollo was a bright glow of promise in a dark and anxious era.

  Apollo 7 would be the first manned Apollo mission, and the shakedown cruise for the redesigned Command and Service Module. Each of the spacecraft systems would be tested in flight, the recorded data analyzed by both controller and engineer during the only flight test to qualify the CSM before actually going to the Moon. Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele had been assigned as the backups for the ill-fated Apollo 1 two months prior to the pad accident. Now it was their turn to fly after nearly three years of training.

  Schirra, the first astronaut to fly all three programs, was the veteran whose cool performance during the Gemini 6 pad shutdown and whose almost fanatical preparation for missions put him high in the ranks of those regarded as “heavy hitters” by the controllers. Wally, ever caustic, never kept his opinions to himself. While preparing for the mission, he let it be known that he was damned unhappy with the inclusion of the TV camera in the spacecraft and the planned “dog-and-pony shows” that would be broadcast from the command module. He considered it an invasion of the privacy of the crew and the sanctuary of the spacecraft. But Kraft was equally adamant that the American public, which was underwriting the program, get an opportunity to see space flight in action through these live video broadcasts. The TV camera won.

  October 11, 1968, Apollo 7—

  Return to Manned Flight Testing

  A launch countdown takes two days. When it starts, there is relief because the tedium of the training period is over. Once launched, the only option is to move forward, facing problems, identifying solutions, forging ahead. A flight control team is an elite force, playing in a sort of Super Bowl with each mission. The real difference, of course, is that we are not playing a game and losing is never an option. If Apollo 7 succeeded, we would be on schedule for the lunar landing. If we failed, the chances were high that there would be no lunar landing before the decade ended.

  During the final hours before launch, every engineer in the program has the right to voice any and all concerns he might have by sending last-minute memos and making phone calls to tell the flight team what worries him about some aspect of testing or some unexplained glitch. The maiden launch of a manned spacecraft brings many systems on line for the first time. We were given a lot to worry about from the new North American engineers.

  The launch team attempts to give us a perfect system for liftoff. But no matter how hard they try, with thousands of components, 850 crew controls and displays, and 350 telemetry measurements, there is no such animal as a perfect spacecraft. We always have some glitches, some uncertainty. The same can be said for the MCC ground system. We had our share of hiccups.

  The greatest focusing mechanism in the space program was the countdown. Clear, crisp, and unequivocal decisions had to be made during the final hours and minutes. As the count progressed, people in each area of the program came forward. After assessing the technical issues, all made their calls. Everyone swallowed some problems, bit their own bullets. Launch day was like a fresh start, a new day, and I loved it. My team started the countdown and checked out the MCC, then handed over to Griffin’s team for the CSM and Saturn systems testing. Lunney picked up for the launch, the handoffs between the three teams going flawlessly. Shortly after 10:00 A.M. in Houston, the race to the Moon got the wave from the starting flag.

  The launch went smoothly, the Saturn rocket blasting the CSM into a low Earth orbit. To television viewers, as the engines ignited, there appeared to be one heart-stopping moment of hesitation. But because Apollo and its two-stage launch rocket weighed 1.3 million pounds, the launch acceleration was gradual, taking ten seconds to clear the tower.

  The late morning liftoff dictated the orbital shift schedule. Lunney’s team, with all the crewmen generally awake, worked the day shift. I had the swing shift with Donn Eisele on watch in the spacecraft, and Griffin got the graveyard shift, staying in touch with Wally Schirra and Walt Cunningham. Schirra had set up a “duty watch” on board the command module, so that an astronaut would be awake throughout the entire mission. This plan was counter to the experience we had in Gemini and none of the flight directors thought Wally’s “watch” was a good idea. It was tough enough to sleep the first days in space and if someone is awake, rustling around or communicating, it is impossible.

  Glynn Lunney had handed my team a clean spacecraft at the beginning of the sixth revolution. The trajectory experts in the Trench worked the maneuver sequence to set up a rendezvous with the Saturn IVB booster on Lunney’s morning shift. The CSM was troublefree, so my principal concern was a report by our weatherman that a low-pressure system was developing off Cuba, 750 miles south and east of Houston. With Houston’s proximity to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a hurricane could make it tough on Mission Control.

  A half hour before we were to hand over the controls to Griffin’s Gold Team, Schirra said, “Houston, I have developed a head cold and have taken two aspirin. I’ve gone through eight or nine Kleenexes with some pretty good blows. I’m thinking about taking a decongestant or antibiotic.”

  My team surgeon recommended the decongestant only. I took him to the press conference at 2:00 A.M. and was surprised by the large turnout. The doctor turned out to be the star of the show and, with few problems on the spacecraft, Schirra’s cold—the first space illness—made the headlines of newspapers across the country and grabbed time on the network telecasts.

  At liftoff, three flight tests remained before Apollo would go for the lunar landing. We had a lot to get done. The flight control team tracked each objective and added new ones to exploit each opportunity. With a single shot to qualify a spacecraft, little was left to chance. The Apollo 7 flight plan was incredibly precise, breaking objectives down and literally keeping each minute and second chock-full of activity. The mission objectives are listed in a thick manual that spells out every detail of the required test. The flight plan was designed to cover all of these objectives—and if some weren’t accomplished, they would be added to the workload of the next flight. As the flight progressed the test results we received led us to update the flight objectives, add new tests, or modify existing ones. It always has been this way in spaceflight and will continue to be as long as missions are measured in days and weeks. Schirra knew the lunar game plan and understood that we had a lot to get done before we could take the next spacecraft to the Moon.

  As the mission continued, Wally’s cold was as much a test of the flight control team as was flying the mission. The flight directors were hard pressed to satisfy a cranky Schirra and push ahead to clear the deck for the next mission. There was little that pleased Schirra about what we were doing at MCC, and the discomfort and irritability caused by his cold soon made him pretty testy with Cunningham and Eisele as well. Glynn Lunney, in particular, always seemed to be at the helm when Wally was testy with the ground team. By the midpoint of the mission, I realized how lucky I was to be working the night shift.

  The video reports, seven to eleven minutes long, had caught the public’s fancy. They were dubbed “The Wally, Walt, and Donn Show” and aired once each morning during the Apollo pass between Corpus Christi, Texas, and Cape Kennedy, the only two ground stations equipped to pick up the transmissions. By the third day, Schirra canceled the daily TV broadcast with a clipped, “No further discussion.�
� We were left with the task of convincing a skeptical press that all was well between the operations team and the crew. Deke Slayton, embarrassed by Schirra’s outburst regarding the telecasts, murmured on the voice comm: “Christ, Wally, all you gotta do is flip a switch.”

  By the fifth day, the headline in the Houston Chronicle declared, “Captain Awakes Grumpy.” The press started getting in their licks and the controllers counted the days until we could get a new crew. None of the mission rules discussed dealing with a grumpy commander.

  Schirra finally relented on the broadcasts, and at one point the astronauts, trying to make amends, held up crudely lettered signs that read, “Hello from the lovely Apollo room, high atop everything.”

  With Schirra and Cunningham asleep, my team would listen to Eisele talking in a hushed voice from his astronomy lab on high. He identified the stars and remarked on the vista from his platform as his partners, the “sleeping beauties,” rested.

  With the lunar mission scheduled less than two months away, we started releasing our backup computers to the mission designers during the day to check out the new trajectory software coming on line. At night, with the Apollo 7 crew asleep, Charlesworth, using the same backup computers, started launch-abort training one floor above us for Apollo 8.