Failure Is Not an Option

by Gene Kranz

  Windler and Charlesworth come to the console during the T3 Stay NoStay processes, and prepare to step in if the crew requests an early EVA. There is controlled confusion as elements of two teams circle the consoles, unsure of which team is in charge until I hand over. Tindall walks over, his eyes moist, offers a handshake and says, “Damn, Geno, good show!” The lunar landing techniques were his. I made no proprietary claim on whose show it was. It was a victory for the tens of thousands who worked on and believed in Apollo.

  Before leaving for the press conference, I walk to the simulation control room to thank Koos and the training team. The instructors are unbelieving that the last problem given us in training is the one big problem during the landing. (I also learned that Koos, in his haste to get to the MCC for landing, rolled his new red Triumph—a TR3. I thanked God he came out all right.)

  While walking across to the press conference with Ward, I finally have time to absorb the full reality of it, in a moment of silence when there is no busy chatter on comm loops and my mind can move into a reflective, rather than reactive, mode. We have just landed on the Moon. In a way, I feel cheated that I didn’t have the chance to savor those seconds as deeply as those who watched. I thank God for being an American, and I think of my team and the way they performed during the landing. More than ever, I appreciate the great training, the unrelenting pressure put on us in getting ready for Apollo 11.

  All I want to do is get the press conference over, so I can get back to Mission Control. Today we were perfect, devouring each problem and grasping for each opportunity. When I get back to the control room, Milt Windler is in the process of orchestrating the planning to get the EVA preparation started in about three hours. Cliff Charlesworth is already bringing his team on line. The world is about to witness an explorer setting foot on a New World. I sit with Charlesworth, awaiting Armstrong’s descent from the lunar module to the surface. I am sure of it now—this is the best day of my life.

  On July 20, 1969, at 9:56:20 P.M. Houston time, Neil Armstrong steps from the ladder to the surface and, as his boots touch the lunar dust, he declares, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” It was worth every sacrifice for this moment. I remember President Kennedy’s words, “We choose to go to the Moon. . . . We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, and do other things . . . not because they are easy, but because they are hard!”

  I was more teary-eyed in the months after Apollo 11 than at any time in my life. Every time I heard the National Anthem, or looked at the Moon, or thought of my team, I got misty. On August 13, just a few days short of my thirty-sixth birthday, Marta and I were invited along with program managers, designers, controllers, and astronauts to a presidential dinner at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. The Army Drum and Bugle Corps, in their brilliant red jackets, shiny brass, and blue pants kicked off the ceremony with the ruffles and flourishes. If ever I was on a high this was it. After a marvelous evening, a series of awards was presented by President Nixon. Steve Bales, my twenty-six-year-old, bespectacled guidance officer, accepted the Medal of Freedom on behalf of the entire team for flight operations.

  I don’t think anyone outside the program ever expected us to succeed on our first attempt at landing on the Moon. Now that we had set the standard we were expected to do it again . . . and soon.

  With six children—some of the girls playing in the band, some cheer-leading, and Mark playing—I spent a lot of time at high school football games every fall. As the harvest moon rose over the stands in the east, I never failed to stare at it with the binoculars, picking out the Apollo 11 landing site, hoping that someday we would continue what we started. I pray that my children will someday feel the triumph, the joy, and the shiver I felt the day we painted the Moon with our Star-Spangled Banner. Their day will come when we put men on Mars or accomplish some other feat where the human factor makes it possible to achieve something that technology, no matter how brilliant and advanced, cannot. We have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” and our destiny will ultimately lead us to the stars that glow in our deep black night sky, like diamonds scattered on a field of velvet.

  17

  “WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?”

  Fall 1969

  On the Moon there was a flag from the Earth, and on Earth there were pieces of rock and soil from the Moon. It seemed a fair exchange.

  The days after a mission, and sometimes the weeks, are tough. The euphoria of the missions, coupled with the emotional intensity of the parties and the debriefing with the crew, is followed by a strange kind of emotional decompression, as if you are a diver who has come up from the pressure of the deep sea and has to gradually adjust to the sudden absence of that pressure. We did not have much time to decompress. We also felt like we had pushed our luck; solving the Apollo 11 problems and then landing with only seconds of fuel left was a lot tighter than any of us expected. After the string of successes that started with Apollo 7, I had a nagging premonition that we were about to break this lucky streak. When you get this feeling you keep it to yourself and move forward. That kind of feeling has no place in our business.

  The lunar program now focused on pinpoint landings, extending the duration and complexity of the surface activities, and mapping the Moon. There was enough action for everyone. The systems controllers were the crew chiefs for the spacecraft. They were by nature and training tinkerers, mechanics. Living on government pay and raising a family was not easy, so a lot of us saved money by doing our own auto repair work, swapping tools and skills as necessary. You could identify the houses of the NASA guys who personally kept their old, but well-maintained, cars and motorcycles humming along by the oil stains on their driveway. Smooth-running engines and the harmonic rhythm of the valve train were music to their ears.

  Whether it was a car or a spacecraft, the systems guys were the experts in diagnosis and providing quick fixes, using the materials and tools at hand. They had a gut knowledge of why things worked and why they broke down. They grew up with the legacy of Aldrich, Brooks, Hannigan, Fendell, and Aaron, the taskmasters who learned their trade in Mercury and Gemini. They were the kind of people you liked to have around when things unraveled. They worked like detectives, suspicious of anything that did not seem to fit, doggedly tracking down every glitch, relishing the opportunity to explain what was, to the rest of us, inexplicable. They would soon prove themselves the ultimate backup when their own systems let them down.

  November 14, 1969, Apollo 12

  After the successful lunar landing, it did not take the Apollo program office long to establish more, and more demanding, objectives for the next lunar flight. Gerry Griffin was teamed with Pete Frank, Glynn Lunney, and Cliff Charlesworth for the second Moon landing. This would be Charlesworth’s last mission; he was moving on to a role in management.

  The lunar module was targeted to set down next to Surveyor 3, an unmanned spacecraft that had landed three years earlier. The craft was sitting in a 700-foot-wide crater in the Ocean of Storms. Apollo 12 had an all-Navy crew, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean. Conrad and Bean would perform a landing that required a manual guidance update. Landing near the Surveyor 3 spacecraft required a high degree of precision. Small errors in navigation or guidance could cause the crew to land beyond walking distance from the Surveyor target. The LM computer was not very bright by today’s standards, so shortly after starting the lunar descent the Trench, using radar tracking data, computed an update to the landing site range for the LM computer. The update was voiced to the LM crew for manual entry into the computer. As usual, Bill Tindall was in the middle as the developer of the technique, one that I considered pretty fancy for only our second landing.

  Griffin was the launch flight director—for the first time. No matter how much you train, you will never forget a moment of that first launch. As you approach liftoff, you just pray that all goes well. If you have a problem, you hope it is one you have aced before in training. I was plugged into the assistant flight directo
r’s console, sitting behind Griffin on the steps to his left. Every launch, especially a Saturn, was a major, awesome event. They never lost their thrill—or their risk; seven and one half million pounds of thrust is a hell of a lot of energy.

  The weather at the Cape was marginal at best, with heavy rain, but Gerry did not show any strain under the pressure he must have been experiencing. A hold was called twenty-two minutes before launch to review the rules and the weather forecast. A weather decision is a classic risk-versus-gain trade-off. Griffin listened closely to his controllers, mindful of his launch window and recycle options. Walt Kapryan, one of the members of the original Mercury team, moved into launch operations and, like Griffin, was in the hot seat for the first time. Kappy had moved up a notch into the launch test conductor chain when the previous launch director moved to headquarters.

  As I listened to the weather briefing I could clearly visualize the conditions; low ceilings and intermittent cloud cover were the bad news. The good news was that the winds were light at all altitudes. There were no thunderstorm or lightning reports. During the hold, the public affairs officers commented that President Nixon was in the VIP area, his first and only visit to the Cape to view a launch.

  There were few black-and-white decisions in launch control and I did not envy Kapryan. We had had a near perfect countdown. Every scrub and recycle takes its toll in flight hardware and in people, increasing the chance that we will have a hardware failure, or slip into the next monthly launch window. Kappy gave the Go to continue the count. The test conductors started their polling, the clock started its countdown through the final twenty minutes. I had been there before and thought, “Well done, Kappy.” At times it takes more guts to say Go than NoGo.

  Griffin’s controllers had purged their kidneys during the weather briefing hold; the enormous front screen displays were called up, glowing brilliantly against their black background. After the traditional command to “lock the control room doors” the team settled in, intently scanning the displays during the final seconds as Griffin called, “Recorders to flight speed!” Kapryan had committed Apollo 12 to launch. Within seconds, Pete Conrad’s crew and the command module, Yankee Clipper, would be in the hands of Mission Control.

  • • •

  At 10:22 A.M. in Houston, Apollo 12 began its journey to the moon’s Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms, thundering from the launch pad into an overcast sky. Conrad could not restrain his glee at once again leaving the Earth, reporting, “This baby’s really moving!” Within seconds, the Saturn disappeared into the overcast. The clouds muted the sound and glowed for a few seconds with a red-orange fire. The tempo of the air-ground communications indicated the Yankee Clipper was off to a good start.

  Dick Gordon reported, “Looking good. The sky is getting brighter.” This message was followed by a brief, “Uh-ohhh!” At that instant, the controllers saw a brief glitch on their TV displays.

  In the command module, glaring amber lights in the upper right quadrant of the caution-and-warning panel flashed on. Conrad yelled to Gordon and Bean, “What the hell was that?” (We didn’t hear this exclamation on the ground because the crew had an internal intercom that allowed them to talk to one another without Houston listening in. We only heard this later when we reviewed the tapes that recorded those onboard exchanges.)

  “We lost a bunch of stuff,” Gordon responded on the closed loop of the internal intercom. “We had a whole bunch of the buses drop off.” (Electrical power is provided by the CSM batteries and fuel cells to a bus or distribution point. There are two main buses and ten secondary buses for power distribution to the CSM equipment.)

  Thirty-six seconds after launch, observers saw a brilliant flash of lightning in the vicinity of the launch complex. Initially, they did not report it to us because we were just too busy.

  On the Mission Control systems row, John Aaron was seated at the console in front of Griffin, monitoring the cabin pressure as the Saturn continued its ascent. Rapidly scanning his displays and event lights, John was about to advise Griffin on the cabin pressure status when his displays stopped updating. Data drop-outs were not uncommon during launch, but when the data returned a few seconds later many of his electrical measurements were scrambled. Aaron had seen this unique pattern only once before in his life. During a pad test a year earlier a technician inadvertently switched off a power supply, which scrambled the data. Intrigued by the data funny, John traced it to a power supply operated by a little-used switch. The switch had two positions, primary and auxiliary, and ultimately provided power to fifty-one CSM telemetry measurements.

  Griffin needed answers. Nearly everyone was scrambling to nail down the source of the data loss. Sixty seconds after launch, and twenty-four seconds after the data drop-out, Conrad said, with surprising calm, “We got a bunch of alarms. We’ve lost our platform. I don’t know what happened.” (A platform is a set of gyroscopes that provide a reference for navigation. The platform is aligned using reference stars and is essential to determining spacecraft orientation and velocity, and in performing maneuvers.) Platform loss during launch phase is a serious problem.

  The master alarm and caution and warning reports from the crew indicated big troubles on board the Yankee Clipper. With the navigation system unusable, the crew was down to the backup system in case of an abort. The only thing keeping the launch phase going was the Saturn guidance and computer system at the booster’s forward end. The CSM gyros were tumbling, useless as a reference for either the crew or the guidance system. The crew was literally flying blind, without instruments they could trust.

  Gerry Carr, the CapCom, relayed the reassuring news that the Saturn was still accelerating on the proper trajectory toward orbit. This was the only piece of good luck so far. In the command module, every electrical warning light was glowing. As the seconds clicked by, time was not on Aaron’s side. The backup batteries had taken over and Aaron prayed that whatever happened had not shut off the flow of the oxygen and hydrogen to the fuel cells. If the fuel cell valves had closed, the lunar mission was over unless the fuel cell flow could be restored within 120 seconds.

  John Aaron likened his role that day to that of a medical intern treating a gunshot victim in an emergency room at midnight, plugging the hole in a man’s heart with his finger to stop the hemorrhaging as his emergency room team sprang into action. John’s next call made him a legend in Mission Control.

  As Conrad’s voice reports continued, Aaron suddenly remembered the instrumentation funny from a year earlier. John now translated this single obscure event into a train of actions that would save the Apollo 12 mission.

  Griffin was no longer writing in the log. His hand was now clenching a black government ballpoint pen. Like Aaron, he knew he had little time to make a decision. “How is it looking . . . EECOM, what do you see?”

  Aaron paused in the middle of an exchange with his support staff, stared at his displays, then made the decisive call, “Flight, have the crew take the SCE to Aux.”* The words tumbling over the loop from Aaron were alien to Griffin, alien to the entire team. Taken aback Griffin stated, “Say again, SCE to Aux?” ending his statement with a question mark. This time more firmly and slowly, Aaron repeated himself.

  When the CapCom, Gerry Carr, passed on Aaron’s recommendation, it made little sense to Conrad, who blurted out, “What the hell is that?”

  *The signal-conditioning equipment (SCE) is a small redundant power supply that provided voltage to forty-six critical instrumentation points in the electrical, booster, control, fuel cell, and cryogenic systems. If the normal power supply fails, an auxiliary supply can be switched on.

  Carr repeated the instruction, emphasizing “S-C-E to Auxiliary.” During powered flight, the command module switches and controls are allocated to the crewman who can see and reach them. This switch was Al Bean’s responsibility. Reaching forward, Al firmly toggled the switch down, and confirmed, “SCE is in Aux.”

  Moments later, Aaron announced, “I got va
lid data, Flight. It is looking good.” Interspersed with the discussion, the Trench continued to rock through the abort mode calls. For a few seconds, Griffin worried that Aaron might give him an abort call, but when none came, Griffin exhaled a loud sigh of relief. In less than sixty seconds, the fuel cells were back on line, and Griffin had a Go from all his controllers to keep pressing on to orbit.

  Aboard the command module, Conrad reported, “We’re pretty well straightened out now. Not sure what happened. I think we got hit by lightning.” Conrad’s suspicion was soon proved to be correct.

  The CSM power was back, but with the status of the spacecraft uncertain, Griffin’s team gave a sigh of relief when the third stage of the rocket pushed Apollo 12 into orbit. “That may be one of the better sims,” was Conrad’s appraisal after achieving orbit. “We were chuckling about it up here. We had so many lights we couldn’t read them all.”

  The Saturn guidance and propulsion had done a fantastic job. Griffin’s team settled down and started a meticulous check-out of the spacecraft. The question now was, Could we muster enough confidence in the spacecraft to fire up the engines and shoot for the Moon?