Failure Is Not an Option

by Gene Kranz

  Meanwhile the low-pressure area had turned into a hurricane, crossed Cuba, and entered the Gulf. We were still keeping a close watch, but it appeared the full force would hit the Mississippi and Alabama coastline and not Houston. But I developed a contingency plan for the control center if the storm moved farther west.

  Schirra continued to make life difficult and by the seventh day of the mission, both Kraft and Slayton were involved full-time, now arguing with Wally over an unsuited reentry. Schirra had been taking his shots freely at the controllers, but I was amazed when he started zinging Kraft and Slayton.

  With a head cold, ear blockage during entry would be annoying at best, and at worst, painful and potentially disabling. If the astronauts reentered without their helmets they could pinch their nose and blow to try and clear the ear blockage. This is the technique used to clear ears when descending in an aircraft. The designers, however, pressed for a suited reentry in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure. It was one of the classic risk trade-offs we run during a mission, but this time the argument was going public.

  While the bosses argued with Schirra on the voice comm, the teams continued grinding away with the planning, chalking off the objectives, patiently explaining each and every “funny” to the crew as we were able to develop answers. Controllers use the term “anomaly” or “funny” to describe something in the CSM or LM systems operations that is not as expected. Every item of this nature is logged and pursued until it is understood, and each is discussed extensively with the crew.

  Lunney set a standard for every future flight director, giving real meaning to the word “discipline” in the flight controller’s vocabulary. Refusing to rise to the bait of Schirra or the press, he kept the flight directors and teams on track. Two days before reentry, after a series of flight plan updates, the mild-mannered Eisele got into the act and complained about a flight plan maneuver update. “I want to talk to the man or whoever it was,” he said, “that thought up that little gem. That one really got us.”

  When Jack Swigert, the CapCom, one of the fifth class of astronauts selected in 1966 responded, “Okay, Donn,” Schirra cut in: “I have had it up here today and, from now on, I am going to be an onboard flight director for these updates. We are not going to accept any new games like adding fifty feet to the velocity for a maneuver, or doing some crazy test we never heard of before.” (Prior to a mission the velocity for each maneuver is specified in the flight plan—but as the mission goes forward the Delta V [change in velocity] is updated to trim the orbit for reentry, as well as to set up daylight conditions at landing.)

  Lunney’s log said it all: “Refer to the crew voice transcript; I can’t stand to write it.” The handover for the first time indicated his frustration. “I have finally had enough of this crew.” In the final days of the mission, the control teams, CapComs, and flight directors, covering for Wally, felt like embarrassed parents of a kid throwing a tantrum.

  In retrospect, some of the exchanges seem sophomoric, except that the stakes were high and discipline and teamwork were victims of this feuding. I regretted it and still do, partly because the pettiness that crept into the mission obscured the fact that Apollo 7 was carrying on with the task that was interrupted by the Apollo 1 fire—a task that had been left unfinished for nearly two years, and one we owed to Grissom, White, and Chaffee.

  My tenth and final shift passed peacefully. Griffin knew that Schirra had been counting the hours till his return to earth and was ready to come home. At crew wake-up on his final shift, Griffin as a joke threatened to keep them up another four days to equal the American space flight duration record set during Gemini. The crew, of course, vetoed the idea, and then Griffin handed them over to Lunney to bring them home, after eleven days. Despite all the interpersonal static, Apollo 7 did the job. Only twenty-six discrepancies were detected in flight. Over half were related to the instruments and communications. This was America’s second longest manned space flight, and the Command and Service Module checked out beautifully.

  I never figured out why Schirra had such a burr under his saddle. Perhaps he just could not deal with the irritation of having something as piddling as a cold invade the trip of a lifetime. In any case, the careers of two younger astronauts suffered. Neither Cunningham nor Eisele flew in space again.

  The control team cheered when Lunney later received a medal for the mission from President Johnson at the LBJ Ranch. His performance went well above and beyond the call of duty.

  Three years later, when we designed the emblem of the flight control team, we remembered our best days with Schirra. As the central theme of the controller’s patch, we used the Sigma from his Mercury spacecraft, representing the unbreakable link between the crew and ground. We made our peace with the grumpy commander.

  13

  THE CHRISTMAS STORY

  The successful Apollo 7 flight cleared the way for us to land on the Moon in the coming year. A lot of flight and ground testing remained, and I was sure that there would be surprises, but we had developed the momentum required to pull off a miracle. Our greatest worry was that we had to complete three virtually flawless missions and achieve every major test objective before we could shoot for the lunar landing. I didn’t think much about the odds, but since every mission would be a first, the odds had to be stacked against our success.

  In the late 1960s our simulation technology had progressed to the point where it became virtually impossible to separate the training from the actual missions. The simulations became full dress rehearsals for the missions down to the smallest detail. The simulation tested the crew’s and controllers’ responses to normal and emergency conditions. It checked out the exact flight plan, mission rules, and procedures that the crew and controllers would use for the flight. The problems thrown at the controllers and crew by the SimSup (simulation supervisor) prepared them for the real crises that might come in any phase of the mission from launch to splashdown. Simulation attempted to make events that could happen in real time—malfunctions in any one of the many spacecraft systems, trajectory problems, or failure in the ground systems—as realistic as possible. With hundreds of possible malfunctions and many time-critical mission events, the training opportunities were limited only by the hours and weeks available to train. We simulated every mission phase under a variety of normal and emergency conditions. By the time the training period for a mission ends, the astronauts and the MCC teams must be thoroughly familiar with the pre-mission plan. They must know what should happen and be capable of making a correct decision to continue the planned mission or execute a mission abort under any set of circumstances.

  A lunar mission consists of a series of time-critical maneuvers strung end to end. Two and one half hours after the Saturn liftoff from the Cape the lunar phase of the mission normally begins with the translunar injection (TLI) maneuver. Midway through the second revolution in Earth orbit the Saturn IVB stage is reignited, increasing its velocity from 25,500 to 35,500 feet per second. After S-IVB engine cutoff, the CSM separates from the booster rocket. The velocity from the TLI maneuver places the spacecraft into an orbit 250,000 miles high with the Moon at the highest point of the orbit.

  The next phase of the mission is called translunar coast (TLC) and lasts about three days. Small maneuvers are performed during this period to trim the trajectory to pass sixty miles in front of the Moon three days after the TLI maneuver. Fifty-two hours into this period, the CSM leaves Earth’s gravitational field and enters the lunar gravitational field. During the TLC phase the Mission Control Center is in continuous communication with the crew.

  Three days after liftoff the astronauts perform the lunar orbit injection (LOI) maneuvers with the CSM service (main) propulsion system engine. LOI consists of two maneuvers that place the CSM into a sixty-mile circular orbit around the Moon.

  After the lunar phase of the mission is completed, the CSM service propulsion system is again used for trans-Earth injection (TEI). The return period is called the trans-Eart
h coast (TEC) and takes about sixty hours prior to reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere and splashdown.

  Eight days after Apollo 7 returned to Earth, Charlesworth and his Green Team began the first lunar mission simulations. The post-mission assessment gave the command module a solid Go. The next spaceship, in a schedule based almost entirely on gut instinct, would go to the moon in less than sixty days.

  As we approached the lunar prize, NASA’s future was far from certain. Starting in 1967, Congress had made significant budget cuts in the manned programs and shortly after the Apollo 7 landing they announced there would be no space program beyond the Apollo Application Program, a planned mini-space station that would use Apollo hardware. Responding to the uncertainty about our future direction, MSC director Dr. Gilruth established an advanced programs organization element within the MSC, which reported directly to him. Since John Hodge had been outspoken about NASA’s lack of planning for the future, Gilruth selected him to lead the effort. Hodge’s new job was to seek out new NASA opportunities in space, develop a rigorous and logical program plan for the future, and establish a more businesslike structure for NASA.

  With Hodge moving into his new job I officially became the chief of the Flight Control Division (FCD), the administrative home for the majority of the MCC flight controllers. I reported to Kraft as one of his four division chiefs.

  The FCD included the MCC flight directors, assistant flight directors, trajectory controllers (the Trench), booster and spacecraft systems engineers, science and procedures officers, and the simulation instructors (SimSup and his team). Sixteen of the twenty-one controllers normally present in the main control room, as well as SimSup and his team, were provided by the division. The FCD comprised seven branches and two small groups corresponding to the major MCC operations functions and had about 300 personnel. The operations branches were Flight Dynamics (trajectory), CSM and LM systems, Experiments, Mission Simulation, Flight Control, and a Requirements branch that assured the MCC configured correctly for simulations and missions. The flight directors and booster engineers from Marshall were two small groups at my staff level.

  The FCD controllers developed the mission strategy, performed pre-mission planning, developed CSM, LM, and experiment schematics and troubleshooting procedures. They wrote the mission rules, supported the design and check-out of the spacecraft and MCC, and performed the integrated crew-controller training. With the exception of the headquarters mission director and mission scientist the remaining MCC controllers were provided by other organizations at the MSC.

  While Charlesworth and Lunney pulled together the teams for the lunar mission, I started preparing with my team for Apollo 9. Mission planning and preparation takes about one year, with the final training starting about three months before launch. The objectives for each mission were vastly different from the preceding mission and now, with the launches spaced at two-month intervals, every flight director and controller was working several missions simultaneously, constantly juggling schedules and priorities. The workload was punishing. Sixty-to seventy-hour workweeks became commonplace.

  From the early days of space virtually all of the trajectory data coded in the MCC originated from the Mission Planning and Analysis Division (MPAD). MPAD consisted of several hundred mathematicians and scientists, supported by a large array of high-tech contractors. John Mayer was the boss and Bill Tindall was the deputy. In late 1968, Tindall was reassigned as a staff engineer for George Low. In the restructuring after the fire, Low gave Tindall the task of uniting the entire Apollo team, civil servants and contractors, into a working group to determine how to use the hardware and software most effectively to achieve each mission’s objectives. Tindall’s genius was his ability to focus on issues and coax diverse people to work together. He combined the friendliness of a puppy with a comic wit. His operational intelligence was brilliant. We formed a particularly strong bond, and our families spent a lot of time together at his beach house. Although our technical backgrounds were very different, we were both emotional about our work, perpetually optimistic, and gave our people unconditional support.

  Bill Tindall swung into the Apollo 8 mission with zest, resolving issues from the simplest to the difficult. While we were slugging it out with Schirra on Apollo 7, Tindall was holding daily meetings to work out how we would navigate to the Moon, and how to get into and out of lunar orbit. Allegiance to Tindall did not come easy for the Trench. For a while, Bostick’s team believed that Tindall was really doing their job. Bostick’s deputy, Phil Shaffer, and Llewellyn complained about these turf issues, while Tindall tried patiently and persistently to gain their support. By the time of Apollo 8, however, the Trench had become Tindall’s most zealous group of converts, actively supporting, debating, and testing his plans, carrying into the training his decisions and mission rules.

  We were, in a sense, in a race against ourselves, every event and decision converging on the launch date. Tindall was unsinkable. Only a month away from the Apollo 8 launch, he was still arguing with Frank Borman on the best way to navigate the return journey from the Moon.

  To the men of the Trench, Apollo 8 was the mission; it would be their greatest achievement. Living in the world of pure mathematics, they were the first generation fully at home with computers—incredibly young, dreamers and visionaries who were venturing in their imaginations and theories with the crew into the unknown, working at the very edge of our knowledge and primed to overcome any difficulties that came their way. Their work, coded into computers and plotted in piles of charts and graphs littering their consoles, was the foundation for every computer instruction in the Saturn rocket and aboard the spacecraft. The Trench and the trajectory designers were totally dependent on the millions of lines of code that they wrote in a variety of computer languages such as COBOL and HAL. These computations would hurl the Saturn toward the Moon, and then would swing the CSM into lunar orbit.

  Apollo 11 would be the flight for the ages, but Apollo 8 was a very big leap that drew on one’s spiritual and moral resolve. For us it would become the second greatest Christmas story every told. Think about the imagery of a rocket soaring through limitless space, so close to heaven the passengers could reach out and touch the face of God.

  After the methodical intensity of the testing, the frequent crisis meetings, the incessant intrusion of the media, and the briefings of “just one more” VIP, the last couple of days before launch always seemed strange. All of a sudden time and motion stopped, as it seems to on a ship caught in the doldrums. I initially welcomed this brief and strange interlude preceding each mission as the final time to catch a breath. Then as the clock kicked over into the last twenty-four hours, the minutes seemed to hang.

  This was my first mission as FCD chief. Success belonged to the team; failure was ultimately my responsibility. Even though I was not flying this mission, I went through the same emotional and physical process as my controllers. It was tough to stay away from the control center—and stay out of the way of the guys doing the job—especially during the final hours before Apollo 8. The team understood my anxiety and called me to report, “The count is on schedule and they are in fueling. Why don’t you have a beer and get some sleep. We’ll call if anything comes up.”

  The evening before the launch of Apollo 8, a visitor arrived whose presence told you something powerful, something historic, was taking place. He was Charles Lindbergh. He belonged to a more romantic time, when flight was still more an art than a science. His career and his life created a kind of vapor trail that stretched across the years. Lindbergh was with us, as he should have been, when Americans reached for the Moon, so long the object of man’s curiosity and dreams. Perhaps more than anyone in the history of flight, he had inspired human beings to explore the skies above them. Commandingly tall, his hair gray and his manner both reserved and modest, he was an honored guest at the invitation of Wally Schirra at a very private party given for the astronauts and a few of their friends.

  The plane L
indbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927 was powered by a single engine. Lindbergh had sailed through uncharted skies, “hacking it out,” as Wally put it, “with the most primitive of technical equipment.” No radio, no radar, a windshield a bird could break. Lindbergh’s presence was a kind of laying on of hands. I felt that he had handed the stick and rudder over to the astronauts.

  December 21, 1968, Apollo 8

  The Green Team started arriving at Mission Control two hours after midnight. Cliff Charlesworth was at the flight director’s console, backed up by a group of Trench controllers barely out of college. To a great extent, this was their show. For the first time, man would leave the Earth’s gravity and be captured by the gravity of another heavenly body. The Trench would provide the guidance and navigation. Working closely throughout the early morning hours with John Mayer’s mission planners, they fine-tuned their equipment, their techniques, and themselves. Mission Control is a big, big space, but there is no room in it for ego, only for flawless teamwork.

  Sitting in the control center and surrounding buildings were a bunch of very nervous designers, engineers, and computer programmers. All of their work since Kennedy’s speech in 1961 was about to be tested. Every assumption, trade-off, and decision they made in creating the system was about to be put on the line. They were threading the needle, shooting a spacecraft from a rotating Earth at the leading edge of the Moon, a moving target a quarter of a million miles away, passing sixty miles in front of it three days after launch.