by Gene Kranz
The CSM also received a facelift. A full bay had been filled with instruments to map the lunar surface, study its physical environment, and investigate its gravitational and magnetic properties. The controllers and the new lunar orbital scientists learned from each other about the science and operations of space exploration, developing the rapport needed for successful missions.
Approaching the end of Apollo, my frustration often surfaced. No one in America seemed to care that we were giving up, surrendering the future of the next generation of young people with stars in their eyes. Often I sat silently, somewhat moodily in my office, rereading President Kennedy’s words, “The United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward, and so will space.” But what if we had not pushed ahead, exploring and opening the American frontier? What sort of nation would we have been? What were the implications for our decision not to push ahead now? How I wished John F. Kennedy were still alive, challenging us to dare and to dream. I feel the same way today; the boldness and scope of his vision is not to be found today in our space program and in our nation.
July 1971
As the budgets tightened and public support waned, NASA was resigned to the cancellation of the Apollo 18 and 19 missions. The tough choices prompted “the grand old man” of lunar science, Harold Urey, to write in the Washington Post, “We wish to finish a job which has beautifully begun and now we get stingy. Because of the additional cost of 25 cents per year for each of us, we are dropping the final two flights to the Moon. How foolish and shortsighted from the view of history can we be?”
The final three missions were no easier than the earlier ones. The complexity of the spacecraft systems as well as the objectives for each mission made it unlikely that any mission would be trouble-free. In retrospect I am still amazed that we risked so much, so often, and came through unscathed again and again. At times, I believed Providence watched over us all.
Kraft was now preoccupied with the future and his inevitable promotion to MSC director. Seated in Kraft’s chair since Apollo 13 was Sig Sjoberg. In many ways, I felt vaguely uncomfortable without Kraft in charge, almost as if he were our bearer of good luck, our talisman in Mission Control.
Sig, invariably accompanied by Bill Tindall, was radically different from Kraft. He was accustomed to being the deputy, not the sheriff. I could get mad at Kraft, standing face-to-face, pounding out my position. Chris had a short fuse. His expression would change to the incredulous, then his face would turn red and he would invariably start with, “I don’t give a damn what you think!” Then he would lay out his position. But then Kraft would always listen. It was great having a boss who felt so emotional about the job, and was willing to engage in a brawl if needed to get to the best answer.
It was tough, almost impossible, to get mad at Sjoberg. He was just too nice. He reminded me of a grandfather with his grandchildren, always giving a kind word of encouragement. Only infrequently did he ever admonish his charges, and then quietly. When I first met Sig, at Langley, my family was growing. One day, he arrived at work and asked me out to his car. When he opened the trunk, I saw a large old tricycle, almost the size of a rickshaw. I had never seen one so large or sturdy. Sig said, “We don’t need it anymore. I would like your kids to have it.” This remarkable man had not only this sweetness of character but real depth and earnestness.
Sig Sjoberg took over the four divisions of Flight Operations in 1969 after Kraft became Dr. Gilruth’s deputy director. Sjoberg and Kraft were born to be together. We were sure that Sig’s position as our boss was only temporary and that he would become Kraft’s deputy for the MSC when Gilruth retired and Chris took over.
July 26, 1971, Apollo 15
After a glitchless countdown, the Cape launch team handed Griffin a virtually perfect command module, named Endeavour. Conscious of the importance of science for their mission, Dave Scott, Jim Irwin, and Al Worden named their craft for the ship commanded by Captain James Cook. That Endeavour sailed in 1768 from England to Tahiti to observe the passage of the planet Venus between the Earth and the Sun. The LM was dubbed Falcon, in honor of the Air Force mascot for an all-Air Force crew.
The launch and orbital checkout of the CSM and booster clocked off in the normally intense timeline. After TLI booster engine cutoff a series of critical events takes place for a half hour, starting with the separation of the CSM from the booster, followed by the turnaround and docking with the lunar spacecraft nestled atop the booster. While taking a breather before extracting the LM, Al Worden looked around the cockpit, casually noting, “The main engine thrust light on the entry monitoring system panel is on. I’m not sure when it came on.”
Instantly, GNC Gary Coen snapped, “Flight, Panel 8, have the crew pull both pilot valve circuit breakers.”
Worden replied, “Okay, they’re pulled.”
Gary continued, “Flight, the engine is now safe. The thrust light indicated the CSM main rocket engine was armed and ready to fire.” An engine start signal triggering actual engine ignition during the critical turnaround, docking, and extraction sequence could have crashed the CSM into the LM or the booster. Pausing briefly, Coen continued, “I think we have an electrical short in the engine start circuit.” With MCC’s preliminary diagnosis and the rocket engine now safe, the astronauts continued the timeline, firing the pyros to release the LM and firing thrusters to maneuver away from the booster stage.
The initial hours on the outward journey of a mission are always busy. There are many housekeeping items, and when they are completed the crew and control teams settle into a groove for the three-day transit to the Moon. Every glitch must be closed out so the work is distributed among the teams. Much of the systems analysis work, like determining the cause and cure of this engine electronics glitch, is assigned to the shift that is on duty when the crew is sleeping.
Griffin handed the thrust problem to Windler. After a brief period of troubleshooting, Windler passed the problem to Lunney’s team to develop the workaround procedures. The workaround had to have three parts: protecting against an unplanned engine start, keeping the engine running during the maneuver, and cutting the engine off at the correct time.
Every system on a spacecraft is critical, but when you had to make up your mind whether or not to go into lunar orbit, the service propulsion system (SPS) in the CSM moved to the top of the list. It must work to get into lunar orbit, and once in orbit it was the crew’s ticket home. The SPS design provided redundant electronics, electrical power, and propellant feed systems, but there was only one engine nozzle and a single set of propellant tanks, so any leaks were cause for rapid mission termination.
Mission rules require full redundancy of the engine control electronics systems to enter lunar orbit and to allow LM separation once in lunar orbit. The job fell to Lunney’s team to make sure that the SPS was fully operable. By the end of Lunney’s first shift, troubleshooting limited the problem to the A engine control circuit. The B control circuit was fully operable. Time is one of the most precious resources of flight directors and, for a change, time was on our side during the three-day translunar coast. Lunney’s team GNC, Joe DeAtkine, was short, quiet, young, and unassuming. Flying his first mission as GNC, Joe felt the weight of the world on his shoulders.
A flight control team develops a keen awareness of situations in which someone needs help. Gary Coen and Jack Kamman were on each side of DeAtkine’s shift. Each extended his shift duties so that they overlapped, giving Joe the coaching and mentoring he needed to survive his first crisis. After developing the workaround Joe emerged with the confidence that he could do it on his own the next time.
Griffin executed the maneuver with the amended procedures and, most importantly, met the criteria for continuing the mission. This uncanny ability at assimilating data, making judgments, and balancing risk versus gain reached maturity in Apollo.
The Hadley Rille landing site was in a mountainous
region of the Moon well north of the equator and on the edge of a mile-wide canyon. Scott and Irwin guided the Falcon through the descent, surprised to find that the landmarks were less sharply defined than expected. As they continued the descent, they searched for their specific landmarks, redesignating the landing location several times, steering to remain short and north of the one feature they recognized, Hadley Rille, a mile-wide canyon seven miles from 18,000-foot-high Mount Hadley. In the final fifty feet, they flew blind through the lunar dust. The round blue lunar contact light triggered Scott to cut off the landing rocket. The LM fell the final feet to the surface and then lurched in an unsettling motion, tilting back and to its right. Two of the landing pads were settled into the edge of a small crater.
My White Team started its shift work during the lunar orbit phase of the mission. A bay of the service module had been outfitted with a pallet of scientific instruments to obtain photographs of the Moon’s surface and map its chemical composition. I worked the same shift schedule as Gerry Griffin. Griffin’s team supported the lunar EVAs, while my team supported astronaut Al Worden’s operation of the service module experiments.
The mission continued smoothly through the first EVA period. Scott and Irwin were out to prove that an astronaut was capable of performing in a scientist’s arena. They were open to every change, driving to set a standard higher than that of any previous crew, and determined to prove that they were up to the demands of Lee Silver and his team.
Griffin, Mission Control, and the lunar scientists were not aware, however, of the price Scott and Irwin were paying to maintain a very heavy workload. By the end of the first EVA, the crew’s hands ached as if they were arthritic. As they continued, the skin under their nails hemorrhaged and turned black, the fingertips tearing from the constant rubbing against the gloves. Every task on the Moon demanded dexterity; this crew was not about to let physical discomfort get in the way of achieving the mission’s objectives.
After their second EVA Scott and Irwin began an intense timeline in their final twenty-four hours. After a six-and-a-half-hour sleep period, the crew was awakened to begin preparation for the third and final activity. The timeline was already short. As the crew in the LM slept, Lunney had worked with Bill Muehlberger and the science team to replan the EVA. To get a reasonable duration, the controllers started cutting bits and pieces of margin from the timeline. Fifteen minutes were taken from sleep, another fifteen from the period after eating, and twenty-five minutes more were snatched from the stowage and ascent preparation to allow a four-hour and thirty-minute EVA and still meet the scheduled lunar liftoff time.
Nearing the end of the final EVA Scott and Irwin had one last, sad duty to perform before they lifted off and returned to Endeavour. Four weeks before their flight, three Russian cosmonauts had died during the reentry of Soyuz 11. They had been in orbit for a record 23 ¾ days (570 hours), and the spaceship made an apparently flawless landing. The three were found unmarked, reclining in their seats as if asleep, killed almost instantly and silently by an oxygen leak. It was an eerie reminder, as if one were needed, of the unpredictable nature of space voyages.
Scott and Irwin left on the Moon a plaque with the names of the three Russian astronauts, adding theirs to the honor roll of others—the Apollo 1 astronauts, the Soyuz 1 astronaut, and all the rest—who had lost their lives in the quest to explore the universe.
Windler launched the crew off the surface, rendezvoused, and then docked before handing over to Lunney on the fifty-first revolution. The crew was on the timeline and there were few apparent problems for Lunney, the kind of shift you pray for. This was a time to catch a breath, clean up the spacecraft problems, and get ready for the trip home. The crew had been awake for sixteen hours, performing physically demanding work, which was followed by the intensity of a lunar liftoff, rendezvous, and docking. The principal activity of Lunney’s shift was to jettison the lunar module and then get the crew to sleep.
Lunney’s problems started during the crew’s seventeenth hour awake. As a precaution for a loss of pressure during the LM jettison, the crew donned helmets and gloves and performed a suit pressure check. Then, to make sure there were no leaks in the hatch seal, the crew gradually depressurized the tunnel connecting the command module (CM) to the lunar module (LM) while the CM pressure was monitored for any decrease.
The initial suit integrity check failed due to a pressure suit leak at the fitting where water is fed to the liquid-cooled garment. After both suits were plugged, the suit integrity test was passed satisfactorily. After a brief verbal update on the depress sequence, the crew continued the preparation for the jettison.
During communications with Mission Control, Scott commented on the difference between the pressures in the command module and in the tunnel. “The tunnel pressure was at 2.7 a while ago,” he said, “and now it is down to 2.0.” Scott was reading the pressure from a small gauge in the tunnel, one normally used by the crew prior to opening the hatch, or when separating the spacecraft. Lunney’s hairs stood on end; many things must be right in space, and cabin pressure is at the top of the list. Lunney, now concerned about the decrease in pressure, ascribed it to a possible hatch seal leak. Given the earlier problems in the suit integrity check, he scrubbed the LM jettison. The crew backed out of the configuration, removed the hatch, and visually inspected the seals. They were then given precise instructions for another command module pressure check.
While the astronauts were performing the pressure checks I was in the orbital science back room talking to the controllers and scientists prior to coming on shift. Dick Koos, my Apollo 11 SimSup, now operating in a new role as an experiments engineer, motioned me to his console. As I leaned over he said, “Lunney’s having a hell of a problem getting the crew through the separation checklist. Something is out of whack.” I thanked Dick for his heads-up and quickly moved to the control room.
At acquisition of the CSM telemetry and voice communications on orbit fifty-three, Scott had unexpectedly vented the tunnel. Lunney, absolutely unruffled, told the crew to pump the tunnel back up. Glynn was getting frustrated; he knew something was wrong and forcefully reminded his controllers to call out every step of the crew’s procedures as they were performed. He wanted his team’s eyeballs in the cockpit with the crew.
Lunney continued with his usual superb, unbridled confidence, his voice never exposing any emotion, so his people never sensed his frustration. Now satisfied with the suit and cabin-pressure check, Glynn gave the “Go for jettison.” I was spooked just listening. Even in the most bloodcurdling simulation I had never seen the crew and ground so out of phase.
The LM jettison delay changed the orbit geometry for separation. Approaching maneuver time, Scott remarked that the planned maneuver took the CSM toward the LM. After an intense discussion with his team, Lunney scrubbed the maneuver. Stoval, the FIDO, quickly planned a new one. “Glynn, have the crew stay in front of the LM, point at it, and thrust away for two-feet-per-second velocity. This will give us enough clearance.”
When Scott executed the maneuver, Lunney showed his only emotion, inscribing in the log, “Hurrah—I felt I was in one of those bad dreams where you can’t wake up and you can’t get anything to go right!” Even though I had come in only for the last two hours, I had the same creepy feeling. At no time on the console had I ever felt so apprehensive.
Throughout the pressure check and maneuver fiasco, Dr. Chuck Berry had been standing and talking to Dr. Gilruth and Kraft at the console behind us. With the maneuver completed, Berry approached the flight director’s console. I was sitting next to Glynn reading his log and preparing for shift handover when Dr. Berry pulled up a chair. When the surgeon visited the flight director for a powwow, you knew he was unhappy about something. In a hushed voice he said, “Glynn, we saw a bunch of heart irregularities on Irwin. We also saw some on the moon during the third EVA.”
Those sitting next to the flight director cocked an ear, edging over to hear what was going on. Berry
continued his discussion, now using words that were new and strange to us. He talked of a “bigeminal” rhythm, where both chambers of the heart try to contract at the same time. Berry said they had also seen PVCs, premature ventricular contractions, probably caused by the crew’s working to near-exhaustion levels. Glynn and I were doing a slow burn; we should have been told about this much sooner.
To control the risks of spaceflight, the flight director must have all the facts from his team members, and he must get them in a timely fashion. In this case he did not. If Lunney had been aware of the medical problems, he would have given the crew a rest period, delayed the jettison, or simply had the crew go to sleep. We were going to remain in lunar orbit for two more days; we could have given the crew some slack—if we were given the information in a more timely manner. The surgeons’ concerns about medical privacy, and their consequent reluctance to give the flight directors the full story, almost got us into a heap of trouble.
Slayton had been previously alerted to the medical problem. After instructing Irwin to downlink the biomed data, Deke got on the air-to-ground loop: “I want the commander and the lunar module pilot to each take a Seconal and get a good night’s sleep.” This was the typical Slayton imperative. Irwin said, “Thanks, Deke.”