Failure Is Not an Option

by Gene Kranz

  As the spacecraft flew toward Carnarvon, Australia, the Trench got the next shock. Radar tracking was minutes earlier than expected at Carnarvon. This was not good news, since it could occur only if the command module was in a much lower orbit than expected.

  With a sinking feeling, Jay Greene conferred briefly with Deiterich, trying to resolve two incompatible pieces of data. Griffin had enough problems, so they decided to keep their concern to themselves while they anxiously waited for more tracking data, finally grunting a sigh of relief when they had confirmation that the Yankee Clipper was in the correct orbit. They trusted their gut instincts and they were right. An atmospheric anomaly had bent the tracking data, faking the radar into believing the command module had crossed the horizon early.

  During a brief conversation over Carnarvon, Conrad left no doubt that they had been hit by lightning. “At the time of the event, about thirty seconds into flight, and again at about fifty seconds, I saw some illumination out the window. Inside the spaceship, everything went dark.” At least one of the two flashes of lightning seen by observers at the Cape had hit the spacecraft. Jim McDivitt, who stepped in as Apollo program manager when George Low moved to headquarters, had seen a ground-lightning strike near the launch pad. The strike’s path went from a cloud to the Yankee Clipper and then via the rocket’s exhaust to the ground around the pad. This was the strike that took place thirty seconds into launch. It was not clear if the illumination that took place at fifty seconds was also a strike. Reports of the strikes had been withheld until after the critical launch phase was over.

  Sig Sjoberg, Kraft’s deputy and a gifted and intuitive design engineer, was deeply concerned over the report, visualizing the havoc that a lightning strike could cause in the Apollo spacecraft. Concerned over the inability to make a complete check-out of the CSM and booster prior to the translunar injection, he walked down to the systems row of controllers, talking briefly with the GNC, then with EECOM John Aaron.

  Moving into the Trench, Sig approached Bostick: “Jerry, If you feel uncomfortable in any way about the TLI [translunar injection], speak out.” Fidgeting a bit, he continued, “I will support you if you give a NoGo today.” He then left and moved to the booster controllers, giving them the same speech.

  Kraft, standing next to Griffin, offered the same advice. “Young man, we don’t have to go to the Moon today. It’s your call.” The input of Kraft and Sjoberg immediately removed all political pressure from the decision. Griffin knew all he had to do was make the right technical call. There could be no other way.

  It was impossible to check out the entire spacecraft; that can be done only on the ground. In the short time available Griffin’s team ran a pre-maneuver checklist, realigned the CSM platform, and then, after much discussion with the crew, gave Conrad, Bean, and Gordon their translunar injection Go over Carnarvon. Throughout the mission the MCC and North American, the CSM contractor, continued to analyze the lightning strike, assessing any critical circuitry that might have been damaged or would prematurely fail. The pyrotechnic systems were the principal systems that could not be checked out. Since they were needed only for normal entry, their status had no bearing on the decision to go to the Moon.

  Conrad and Bean made their pinpoint landing on the Moon next to the Surveyor, establishing a new set of space records, increasing the duration of the lunar surface activity—and surviving two lightning strikes. Aaron’s “SCE to Aux” call became legendary and Griffin survived his first launch. All in all, it was a damn good mission.

  Christmas 1969

  Four tough missions, the first lunar landing, and the Apollo 12 save—yes, 1969 had been good to us. A year of world-class performance under pressure and a perfect track record. We were Super Bowl champs and it was time to party.

  After the long and irregular hours, the controllers were at a disadvantage when it came to the splashdown parties after the Apollo missions. After the congratulatory handshake, and puffing the traditional cigar, we secured the MCC consoles and called our wives. Exhausted by the demands of the mission but still pumped up by the adrenaline rush that comes from getting another crew home safely, everyone elected to attend the splashdown parties after the Apollo missions. The controllers’ splashdown parties normally started at the Officers Club at Ellington Air Force Base, about a ten-minute drive from the MCC. Occasionally the Air Force Reserve Squadron would fly up to Maine for crew navigation training purposes, stopping long enough to get a bunch of live lobsters and have them cooked and waiting for the splashdown.

  Aldrich, a properly raised New Englander, provided instructions on the correct way to eat this delicacy. After finishing at Ellington, we moved to either the Singing Wheel or the Flintlock, both located in the small city of Webster, about a three-minute drive from MCC. I think the Flintlock was in cahoots with the Webster cops. The bartenders would keep shoving us the drinks, then when we left for another party, the Webster police were waiting as we pulled onto the highway. Controllers contributed a bunch of bucks to the Webster municipal treasury.

  The debriefing parties were a more private, males-only affair restricted to crews and controllers. (Women engineers inspired by the space program joined the ranks starting in 1971 and now make up about 40 percent of the MCC teams. Four women have become flight directors, three of whom are currently active.) The Hofbraugarten in Dickinson, ten miles south of the control center, was the rallying point. The remote Dickinson location got us away from the crowd, and the Galveston County Sheriff’s Department often looked the other way. The restaurant had a large open-air biergarten, a bakery, and a butcher shop. The formal mission debriefings were not for the thin-skinned, so a few liters of beer softened the edge as we cooked sausages, drank, and continued into the informal debrief.

  Awarding the “dumb shit medals” (DSM) was the focus of the festivity. Flight directors, controllers, and crew compiled a list of errors, both perceived and actual, during the course of the mission. In an elaborate and highly graphic fashion, we stepped forward to make a speech or accept our honors. The Hofbraugarten oompah band often joined in, playing a dirge as the stories got longer and wilder. The awards took many forms—elaborate certificates, dented and broken equipment, photographs, and multicolored ribbons to be worn around the neck. By the end of Gemini, I had enough awards that the controllers presented me a set formatted like the bars of military campaign ribbons.

  One of the highest-order dumb shit medals passed out at the debriefing party was for anyone who missed a pre-sleep checklist item and then had to wake the crew to correct a switch position or pump up the pressures in the tanks. My awards ranged from triggering a fire alarm during a mission when I emptied my ashtray into the wastebasket, to locking the control room doors for launch before all my team members had returned to the room. A common DSM among the flight directors was awarded for leaving the console log behind at the press conference, or for a poor selection of crew wake-up music.

  The festivities often included a chug-a-lug contest or some old-fashioned Indian arm wrestling. The controllers and crews put forward their own champions. The parties reminded me of the fighter pilot hijinks back at the Officers Club in Osan, Korea.

  Emulating the traditions of a fighter squadron, I decided that Flight Control needed to fashion a beer mug. Maureen Bowen, secretary and den mother to Mel Brooks and the Experiment Systems Branch, was recruited to work with the Balfour Mug Company to design a mug for the flight control team. In a typical engineering fashion we provided some specifications: the mug must hold one and a half liters of beer, be decorated with a copy of the crew’s mission patch, and contain the controller’s name and MCC console position. By the time we finished, the beer mug had become grand and unique, containing crew signatures and Armstrong’s words from the Moon landing.

  Maureen started collecting the money, and within weeks she had over $5,000. We had moved beyond the normal coffee pot finances into the big time. She did not want to keep the money around the office so she opened a checkin
g account in the Nassau Bay Bank across from NASA.

  Everything was going nicely. The mugs were ordered and we had raised enough money so that we could afford to throw a party at the Hofbraugarten to christen the mugs when they arrived. Then the roof fell in. The NASA inspector general, located in the Manned Spacecraft Center, and two members of the regional inspector’s office entered Maureen’s office quoting the fines and jail time for violation of NASA directives on the use of the Apollo 11 astronaut badge. It looked as though Maureen, a young secretary, would be terribly old and poor by the time she got out of jail. By the time the bureaucrats were done, Maureen and I were charged with violation of many NASA directives. (The NASA seal, insignia, logo, program, and astronaut and mission operations badges are protected from commercial use or sale.) Maureen was more concerned that the NASA inspectors had confiscated her checkbook, and a lot of bills for the mugs were coming due.

  Neil Armstrong asked Mike Collins to refer all of the mug data to headquarters, confirming that the Apollo 11 crew endorsed the design and gave us permission to use their patch. Once he saw the guns aligned on him, the inspector who started the flap backed off. He even purchased a mug for himself.

  The lesson, as with any mission, was well learned. Over the years, we in the Flight Control Division managed to build the biggest party fund in NASA, and when it grew too big, we donated a lot of money to charity. We sold mugs, lapel pins, and sweatshirts, and threw good-sized parties at fancy places. Although the NASA legal folks watched us, we never had any further problems with the inspector general.

  In 1999, on the thirtieth anniversary of the first lunar landing, we cast the mug for the final time, then broke the mold.

  18

  THE AGE OF AQUARIUS

  April 1970

  “Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” a song from the rock musical Hair, boomed from the stereo speakers of my Cougar daily as I pulled into the parking lot behind Mission Control. The song had temporarily replaced “The Stars and Stripes Forever” as my going-to-work music. The version sung by the group called the 5th Dimension was picked up by the Apollo 13 crew and controllers as symbolic of the energy and momentum of the Apollo lunar program. The song’s signature words, “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,” symbolized the first mission of the new decade as well as the challenge and excitement of the increasingly difficult and risky lunar missions. When the Apollo 13 crew named their LM Aquarius, the song moved to the “top of the pops” for the controllers. The CSM was dubbed Odyssey.

  Lunar exploration began in earnest after the pinpoint landing of Apollo 12. Mission targeting moved to more difficult and hazardous landing areas. The landing point for Apollo 13 was a target 3,000 feet in diameter, located north of a large crater dubbed Fra Mauro. The crater was located in a geologic formation south of the Imbrium Basin. The basin, one of the largest on the Moon, had been formed by a gigantic cosmic collision. Scientists hoped that samples of the material ejected during the collision would establish the date of the Imbrium event.

  Veteran astronaut Jim Lovell commanded the mission. His experience on Gemini 7 and 12, as well as his being one of the first humans to orbit the Moon on Apollo 8, made him a logical candidate to lead a rookie crew. The LM pilot was Freddo (Fred) Haise, a member of the fifth class of astronauts, who had graduated from test pilot school in 1954. Fred knew the LM, especially the software, like the back of his hand. Ken Mattingly, the command module pilot, was a favorite among the controllers for his in-depth knowledge of every aspect of the business. But two days prior to the launch Ken was scrubbed from the mission because he had been exposed to measles. He was replaced by Jack Swigert, a member of the backup crew. During the pre-mission meetings and in training we had spent a lot of time with the backup crews, so Jack was no stranger to the MCC teams. After two days of refresher training he was ready to go.

  I was the lead flight director on Apollo 13, a transition mission in many ways. The new flight directors, Griffin, Frank, and Windler, were pulling more weight, preparing to alternate the lead responsibility for the final four missions. Charlesworth had flown his last mission on Apollo 12 and was forming the Earth Resources Project Office as part of a plan to apply space technology to Earth’s problems. Operations was my business and I liked teaching the young controllers, watching them grow during their four-year training period as they progressed from the back room to the MCC main control room. Every new controller was assigned a mentor to test his knowledge, build his confidence, and prepare him for the painful and necessary lessons he would learn from SimSup. When controllers make it to the ranks of the front room and meet the flight director, they fully understand that the price of their admission is Excellence, and that a spartan set of standards will govern their conduct. Most of all they understand “that suddenly and unexpectedly we may find ourselves in a role where our performance has ultimate consequences.” (From The Foundations of Mission Control, a one-page statement summarizing the values essential to a controller attaining excellence. The text was written by flight director Pete Frank. See page 393.)

  Failure does not exist in the lexicon of a flight controller. The universal characteristic of a controller is that he will never give up until he has an answer or another option. By the time someone graduated to the front room consoles either he was ready—or he was gone before he got there.

  The Apollo 13 flight director chemistry was unique. Windler and I were jet fighter pilots; Griffin flew as a radar operator. For the first time we were working together on a mission. Lunney, the fourth flight director, was the last of the original flight dynamics officers, the master of his craft.

  April 11, 1970, Apollo 13

  Milt Windler, a veteran of three Apollo missions, drew the launch flight director’s assignment. He had earned his spurs as a test director in Kraft’s recovery division and not in Mission Control. His transition was smooth. Absolutely unruffled at the console, Milt emulated Charlesworth’s low-key and patient demeanor. He was fully in command of his team when the moment came to light the fire on Apollo 13.

  The liftoff occurred at 13:13 Central Daylight Time, and proceeded uneventfully through first-stage flight. The five engines of the second stage of the Saturn V ignited and burned smoothly for five and a half minutes. Then the center engine unexpectedly shut down. Milt’s team quickly reviewed the status of the remaining four engines, ran the computations for the new engine cutoff times, and passed them to the crew. When the second-stage engines shut down, the S-IVB stage ignited and got the spacecraft to orbit. After the CSM orbital check-out and updating of the trajectory parameters, Windler gave the Go for translunar injection. We heaved sighs of relief, thinking we had gotten through what probably would be the one major glitch in the mission.

  The crew and control teams rapidly settled into the routine. During the early shifts, we watched and worked with Jack Swigert, calibrating his performance and finding him a very capable stand-in for Ken Mattingly.

  During the translunar coast period both crew and controllers prepared for the events scheduled for lunar orbit when things would get quite busy. As the meticulous check-out of spacecraft and trajectory systems continued, the controllers settled into a state of relaxed alertness. The easy banter among flight director, team, and crew would leave a by-stander thinking that none of these guys had a care in the world, when in fact they were maintaining gimlet-eyed focus on the job at hand while gathering their reserves for what lay ahead.

  With the exception of the live TV broadcast from Apollo 13, my second shift of the mission was also uneventful. Mattingly had been pestering us for access to the MCC, his medical status still indefinite. I decided that if he was showing symptoms of measles at the time of the EVA, we would put him at the network console on the floor of the control room that was not being used on the mission, directly below us, giving him a chance to listen in but not exposing people to contagion. As the crew concluded its onboard TV broadcast just before 8:00 P.M. Houston time I glanced up to the viewing room, an
d could see Lovell’s and Haise’s wives and families leaving. Swigert was a bachelor.

  Lunney’s Black Team was arriving in the control room and there was a rising hum of conversation as the shift handover process began. After talking to his controllers in the trench, Lunney moved into the seat next to me, reading the flight director log for all events since his last shift. I began preparing my handover summary for him while we were getting the crew and spacecraft configured for the sleep period.

  We zipped through the pre-sleep checklist, verifying that each system was set up to enable us to watch over the crew while they slept, monitoring the switch positions and dumping the telemetry records, making sure that once the crew members were asleep we did not have to awaken them. The flight activities officer got a verbal confirmation from the crew for the completion of each checklist page. With little else to do, I was following the checklist closely.

  Earlier on the shift we had a worrisome but minor communications glitch. For a brief period, the CSM high-gain antenna did not work in either of two automatic modes and had to be positioned manually. Then when a spacecraft roll maneuver was performed the antenna abruptly locked up. Now, all of a sudden, it was working properly. There was insufficient time to troubleshoot this glitch prior to the crew’s going to sleep. I hated to leave this as an open item for Lunney.