by Gene Kranz
Rusty Schweickart was a virtual unknown to us. He had spent little time in the Mission Control Center and, while involved and friendly, was deferential about taking a position or arguing a policy, an understandable attitude for a newcomer.
McDivitt established another first by designating astronaut Stu Roosa as the full-time representative of the crew for all topics. Given the complexity of this mission, McDivitt felt there was too great a chance for something to slip through the cracks. Roosa acted as a sounding board to keep policy issues constantly in the forefront. These steps seem elementary, but in the rapidly moving flight program, with the constant parade of crews and expanding control teams, we were hard pressed to do anything but the fundamentals for each mission. We were learning by doing, with little time to reflect, only to respond.
February 1969
My Apollo 9 teams were a mixed bag in terms of experience. One of the flight directors, Gerry Griffin, had been a superb Gemini GNC flight controller. Now, fresh from his first mission as Apollo 7 flight director, he was raring to go. Pete Frank, the rookie flight director, had been carrying most of the flight planning and mission rule work while Griffin and I were working with Lunney on Apollo 7. The flight control teams always stepped into the breach to help the flight directors, especially the rookies.
The primary objective of the mission was to flight-test the lunar module. The testing of the LM began shortly after getting to orbit. During launch, the LM is bolted into a long tapered adapter atop the forward end of the Saturn IVB rocket stage. The CSM sits atop the adapter and once on orbit, the command and service module separates from the adapter, turns around, and flies formation with the rocket. The four sections of the tapered adapter open like huge flower petals before being jettisoned, exposing the docking mechanism at the top of the ascent stage of the booster. It looks like something out of a James Bond movie. The crew maneuvers the CSM to carefully dock to the LM and then extracts it from the adapter.
The workload got so heavy in the final six weeks that Cliff Charlesworth, coming off Apollo 8, was drafted to fill in on the shift schedule and give us a hand. There were only so many trained and experienced people to go around. Once again, the clock was our enemy.
You learn never to relax during simulations. About the time that you think your team is really humming and ready to launch, SimSup pokes a hole in your bubble. We were about halfway through the training for Apollo 9 when Gerry Griffith, the SimSup, taught me a lesson I never forgot.
I had worked with my FIDO Dave Reed only once before, on Apollo 5. This mission was Reed’s first manned launch. The Saturn launch period is extremely complex. The flight director and FIDO have four major abort options during launch and several of the abort options overlap. At any one second you may have two methods to terminate the mission, so the timing of executing aborts between the FIDO and flight director is critical. The FIDO uses five large-screen displays and his TV data to select the abort options. The flight director uses the same displays for launch phase timing and as a memory jogger on the abort mode boundaries. Griffith had observed that the handoff between Reed and me was not going smoothly and decided to give us a test.
During training, a FIDO has to learn to communicate with the flight director so Flight knows his intentions before critical points are approached.
The goal during launch is to get to orbit if possible. Orbit represents a stable point where we can gather our wits and figure out what to do next, or if necessary, how we will get home. An abort involves moving from the time-critical launch sequence to an even more time-critical abort sequence. This is an irreversible process, and doing it with problems on board the spacecraft is pretty tricky. The control team and crew spend a lot of time during training to get the decision process and timing right.
The launch simulation got off to a good start. When the S-IVB stage engine ignited, SimSup started a leak in the CSM propulsion system. My GNC recognized the leak a few seconds later and started monitoring the pressure decrease to compute the leak rate. So far the team was responding smoothly and we had done everything right. SimSup then shut down the S-IVB engine at the precise moment when we had an abort mode overlap. Reed had two choices, light the CSM engine and continue to orbit, or turn around and use the engine to deorbit the spacecraft in the Atlantic Ocean near the west coast of Africa. The GNC, however, had not computed how much fuel was available with the leaking tank to accomplish the maneuver.
The CSM, now near orbital velocity, was racing toward the African coast, covering five miles in each second we delayed. With no data from the GNC, Reed could not make up his mind which abort option to select.
I had been monitoring the FIDO-GNC communications and, at the same time, watching the giant plot boards. Reed was hesitating. With no call from FIDO I stepped into the breach, saying, “CapCom, Mode III abort . . . Mode III.” The crew executed the abort but by the time I made my call it was too late to land in the Atlantic. All the crew could do was prepare for a land impact.
There is no feeling in the world to compare with the feeling you get when you know you blew it, and you have to explain in excruciating detail during simulation debriefing why you acted as you did. There are no excuses. The astronauts, controllers, training team, and MCC staff listened to the debriefings. When I finished mine, SimSup came up on the voice loop and rubbed the final salt in the wound. “Flight, the crew was killed. The landing point was in the Atlas Mountains in western Morocco. Those mountains are 14,000 feet high, the parachutes don’t open until 10,000 feet.”
I had blown it. I had killed the crew . . . the astronauts knew it . . . my controllers knew it. I knew it. I had acted like a rookie.
Marta does a lot more than make my mission vests. In the final few days before a launch, usually after supper, she will say, “Gene, I think it is time for your mission haircut.” After leaving Langley I could not find a barber who would clip my hair short enough. Frustrated, I bought a hair clipper, and standing in front of the mirror I could cut the sides and top the way I liked it. Marta then stepped in and finished the top and shaved my neck. In December 1972 Carmen and Lucy at a family meeting told me, “Dad, you scare the boys away. They see you with the short haircut and they are afraid to come to the door. Couldn’t you let it grow a bit longer.” Marta nodded her agreement. Their plea was so earnest that I had to acquiesce. For the next seven months I sported somewhat longer hair, combed in a 1950s style. I finally rebelled when they asked me to get it styled. In August 1973 the kids asked me what I wanted for my birthday. My response was “I want to cut my hair!” The next day Marta and I collaborated on a crew cut, and I was happy again. The kids found out what Marta already knew: my hair length made no real difference. The boys were still afraid of meeting me at the door.
March 3, 1969, Apollo 9
Surveying my launch team as the countdown progressed, and looking at the enormous beast we were about to launch, I felt a disconcerting mixture of confidence and humility. I am sure that the pad team did also. The Saturn V on the television screen in front of me was the world’s most powerful machine, towering 363 feet above the flat Florida shoreline. My team, whose average age was twenty-six, just a few years out of school, had within its hands the power to change the direction of history.
On the launch pad, ice from the liquid oxygen tanks’ condensation glistened in the searchlights; mist swirled around the umbilical tower and platforms. At the top was the CSM, with the detachable escape tower for the command module at the very tip of it all. Buried in the tapered adapter section below the CSM and atop the launch vehicle was the lunar module, the spacecraft we would shortly test. Weighing over 6.5 million pounds, the Saturn rocket consumed twenty-three tons of kerosene and oxygen before it started to move. As it climbed along the launch tower, a ton of frost was shaken loose from the tanks, falling past the swing arms into the flame bucket. When the rocket exhaust hit the streams of water pouring into the flame bucket to absorb the intense heat, steam billowed along the flame trench that d
irects the exhaust heat away from the launch complex. By the time the Saturn booster shed its first stage, two minutes and forty-one seconds into flight, it had consumed almost five and a half million pounds of fuel.
When you turned loose the energy of a Saturn rocket, you simply had to have trust in your crew, your team, and in yourself. Through trust you reach a place where you can exploit opportunities, respond to failures, and make every second count. As gigantic as the machine was, and as puny as we humans were measured against its towering bulk, the human factors balanced the technology on the scale. It would be this balance that would be, indeed had to be, maintained successfully throughout manned spaceflight operations.
The control room contained twenty-one team members, but the decision process during a Saturn launch focused on ten: the three Booster engineers, FIDO, RETRO, GUIDO, two CSM systems engineers, the CapCom, and myself, the flight director. We had a bewildering set of options facing us during the twelve minutes of powered flight. My mission rules were perched on the right corner of the console, a multicolored, two-inch-thick document containing several thousand rules for the conduct of the mission. These rules had been whittled down to less than a hundred for launch. We knew from the pre-mission studies and simulations that a launch abort was the final and often risky option to terminate a mission. The nighmarish scenario we faced was making a wrong decision and placing the crew into orbit with no way to return to Earth. An equally nightmarish outcome was executing an abort that either was not necessary or that, if executed improperly, might also kill the crew. With only seconds to assess a situation and then pick a path, we had to determine clearly the course of action before we launched. Except for trajectory problems that allowed no alternatives, our judgment was that things had to be going to hell in a handbasket in the spacecraft or booster before we would abort the launch.
The count progressed. In the final fifteen minutes, you could feel this incredible pressure build; all controllers felt it. Once the Saturn was launched, we would be tied to our consoles for at least a half hour. I gave the controllers their final chance for a pit stop before the doors were locked. We made a final rush to the rest room, standing in line, then sprinting back to the consoles. When I returned, I put on my white vest while inwardly I was marching to the cadences of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
During most of powered flight, our decision time frame was about twenty seconds, sometimes less. With our training, twenty seconds was a lifetime. In that time you can detect a problem, hold several crisp conversations, select displays, make a decision, and issue the command/ voice instruction—all in less time than it takes to air a short television commercial.
Nearing launch, an internal clock kicked in as auto sequence started. I could feel the sweat on the palms of my hands. This was, after all, my first manned Apollo launch as flight director. At launch minus fifty seconds, the electrical power transfer from the launch pad to CSM fuel cells and batteries was complete. This brief period was the time that I hated; I always hated it. I had a long list of ground equipment I needed for launch, scattered around the world, much of it mandated by the mission rules. I prayed it all held together for the next twenty seconds. I established my personal cutoff for killing auto sequence at launch minus thirty seconds. My risk judgment told me that the MCC must suffer a crippling failure before I would I call the launch team with a NoGo at this point, terminating the automatic launch sequence. I bowed my head briefly and made the sign of the cross as the engines roared and the crew called, “Liftoff; the clocks have started.”
The Apollo 9 mission was sheer exhilaration for both the astronauts and Mission Control. While docked during the first four days we thoroughly checked out and tested the propulsion systems of both spacecraft. Then Rusty Schweickart and Dave Scott performed an EVA between the docked spacecraft before starting the rendezvous. The LM maneuvered to rendezvous with the CSM just as it would have to do in lunar orbit.
No Apollo crew was better prepared than McDivitt, Scott, and Schweickart. They had been in training since 1966, when they were initially assigned as the backup unit to Apollo 1 until replaced by Schirra’s crew. If anything went awry during the lunar module testing, Jim and Rusty could have found themselves adrift in space in a machine with no capability of returning safely to Earth. In that event, Scott, flying the command module, would have been called upon to make the first space rescue in history. Scott knew his spacecraft better than any prior command module pilot. If he had had to initiate a rescue attempt, you could be damn sure he would have succeeded.
Combining two rendezvous techniques developed on Gemini 9, we flew the most complex rendezvous to date. The LM rendezvous radar, computer, and propulsion systems passed every flight test. LM emergency power-down checklists and techniques for using the lunar module engine while docked to the CSM were developed and tested. These rudimentary “lifeboat” techniques would provide get-home alternatives for certain CSM failures and would be vital during later missions. The mission debriefing proved that the lunar module, in a zero-G environment, was a remarkably sturdy space buggy. The only problem we had was that Schweickart was space sick for four days. Overall, it was a damned good mission with a great crew.
Several times during the mission I reached task saturation with the control of two spacecraft, while planning and executing the mission. I was convinced that the only way to ensure effective support for spacecraft operations when the LM and CSM were separated in lunar orbit was with two separate teams in the MCC, one following the CSM and the other the LM. Two complete communications sets were available at each console to support shift handover. When the CSM and LM were operating independently, I believed that one flight director could work with the GNC and EECOM, the other with CONTROL (lunar module guidance, attitude control propulsion, and navigation) and TELMU (LM electrical, environmental, and EVA systems). Lunney and Charlesworth were both skeptical that two flight directors could work side by side on the same mission from the same console.
A decision on the dual flight director arrangement was deferred until we could test the concept on Apollo 10, which would set the stage for the final push to the Moon.
Lunney led the team for the Apollo 10 mission, with Milt Windler and Pete Frank on the wings. I closely followed every event in the mission. The procedures, plans, and rules were virtually the same ones we would use on Apollo 11.
Tom Stafford and Gene Cernan took the Apollo 10 LM to within ten miles of the lunar surface, then staged a rendezvous with John Young in Charlie Brown, the mother ship. After thirty-one orbits of the Moon, Apollo 10 left for home. The flight plan, navigation and tracking techniques, and the exact procedures were used in an end-to-end basis to shake out any problems and further reduce the risks of the landing mission. Every MCC maneuver computation, every controller display, and even the team shifting scheme was tested.
By the time of the Apollo 10 splashdown we knew that the total mission system—the crew, controllers, and spacecraft—was ready to go. The only remaining uncertainty was the lunar landing and the subsequent liftoff. Lunney’s and Charlesworth’s experience at the flight director’s console during the mission persuaded them to agree to the dual flight director approach once the LM was on the Moon’s surface.
15
SIMSUP WINS THE FINAL ROUND
There are luminous points in memory that are as fresh and vivid as if they had just happened. This is the way I remember the day I was commissioned in the Air Force, the day I got my wings, and the day I was married. I remember the first time I flew a Sabre and the hour of my bittersweet last flight. I remember meeting Marta, our joyous reunion upon my returning from Korea, and the births of each of our children.
In space, I remember the “Four-Inch Flight,” my first mission as flight director, Ed White’s EVA, and Apollo 1. Some of these moments tore my heart out while others were pure joy, an opportunity to share an instant with Marta or my team. Still, others were purely visceral, the thrill of doing something for the first ti
me, being involved in a great event or leading in a great cause. Between the flights of Apollo 8 and 9, a brief meeting joined the list of those moments I will never forget.
As 1968 came to a close, I realized that if all the remaining missions went well, I would be a flight director for the first lunar landing. Every controller wanted to be a part of this historic mission and all had been jockeying for some position since early in the Apollo program. Although we were incredible team players, each of the flight directors wanted a challenging and historic mission. A position in Mission Control was the next best thing to being in the spaceship. More than just working the mission, however, I wanted to lead the team that would take the first Americans to the Moon.