Apollo: The Race to the Moon (39 page)

On launch day, everything changed. Once the Saturn V cleared the top of the umbilical tower, control of the mission shifted from the Cape to Houston. From that moment until splashdown, the sustained drama of an Apollo mission was played out at M.S.C., for it was at M.S.C. that Flight Operations made its home.

“Flight Operations was not born effective,” one veteran reminisced. “It became effective.” Back in 1959, when the Space Task Group was first struggling to put the program together, nothing was yet Standard Operating Procedure. “We accept this Control Center and operations mode that we have now,” said Glynn Lunney, who was part of the Operations Division from the Space Task Group’s first day, “but the truth is, it easily could have [evolved in] any number of other ways, and it could easily have been a failure.”

In the beginning, preparing for Mercury, it wasn’t clear how much Operations would have to do. In the flight-testing of aircraft, which was the closest analogue, the ground’s role consisted of getting the airplane into the best possible mechanical condition, spelling out the day’s test objectives for the pilot, and retrieving the data from the instrumentation after the plane landed. During the flight itself, the people on the ground talked to the pilot and kept track of where he was, but little beyond that.

Thus when the Operations Division at the Space Task Group began thinking in early 1959 about what their job really was, the possibilities were vague and open-ended. Because none of Mercury’s systems was actually operated from the ground, many from the N.A.C.A. envisioned a flight-test operation that would check out the capsule before launch and then let the astronaut do the rest. It didn’t make sense to acquire a lot of real-time data on the ground if nobody was going to do anything with it.

And yet it didn’t seem adequate to stand on the ground with just a voice link to see how things were going. The operations people at Langley began groping toward another, more ambitious understanding of their role. “I don’t know how to describe it exactly,” Lunney recalled, “but we began to realize that, ‘Hey, we’re going to fly this thing around the world!’ and then a number of things began to emerge.” There was already the matter of range safety, for example. If you were launching an unmanned rocket from the Cape, you had range-safety limits. If the telemetry told you that the rocket was outside the safety limits, you blew it up before it descended on downtown Cocoa Beach. The Space Task Group people began to conceive of similar kinds of limits that protected not “the range” or the population of the Cape, but rather the man inside the spacecraft.

Thinking about them quickly led the Operations Division to realize that, whatever these limits were, they would keep changing during the mission. For the first few minutes after launch, the capsule would have its escape rocket; then the escape rocket would be jettisoned and a new set of procedures would come into play. A new concept that focused on the alternative ways of getting the astronaut back at different points in the mission began to emerge. This was the concept of the abort mode.

“We began to realize there were some things we could make decisions about,” Lunney continued. “Like: Was the capsule in orbit or not? If not, we had to decide when to fire the rockets so it would land in a safe place. How you knew it was in orbit was a big problem at the time. Now we just say, ‘You’re go for orbit,’ but then we didn’t know how the hell to do that, or didn’t know if we could do it fast enough or with enough accuracy.”

However they finally did it, they would have to have people on the ground processing the information, and so emerged the concept of a room on the ground with not just a man talking to the astronaut, but many people analyzing tracking data and telemetry data on the status of the launch vehicle and the spacecraft. The name they eventually gave to this place was the “Control Center.”

To get real-time tracking data, Flight Operations had to have tracking stations. At first, the idea around Langley was to rent some truck-mounted radar sets from the Air Force and take them to sites around the world. But they began to realize that it wasn’t good enough to have isolated radar sets. The people back at the Control Center needed a network of linked stations, capable of receiving, processing, and reacting to a variety of voice, radar, and telemetry data.

These people in the Control Center and at the remote sites were named “flight controllers.” Because many different kinds of data would be coming in, flight controllers would have to specialize. One man would keep track of the launch trajectory, one would calculate the retrofire time, another would monitor the performance of the astronaut’s life-support systems. Thus the specific positions in the Control Center began to take shape.

The flight controllers would have to learn to use this information quickly and harmoniously. To be trained, they needed some way to practice. Since they couldn’t practice with real rockets, they would need a good make-believe alternative. Pilots had flight simulators. The astronauts were getting a capsule simulator. Why not have something like that for the team on the ground? So began simulations for the flight controllers.

It was a process of constant invention. Countdowns, for example. The rocket people had countdowns for checking out pumps and valves and pressures. But in 1959 no one had ever written a countdown for a spacecraft. Tec Roberts, the Welshman who was part of the AVRO contingent, recalled sitting down with Chris Kraft, then the assistant director of the Operations Division for “Plans and Arrangements,” and in three weeks creating the first countdown that had ever been written for the Control Center. They looked at how the launch people handled the launch vehicle count and applied the same philosophy to their newly emerging concept of a Control Center, relying mostly on “a good imagination,” in Roberts’s words, and making it up as they went along.

By the middle of 1959, as the Space Task Group struggled to launch Big Joe, train the astronauts, and decide how the flights were to be conducted, it became increasingly obvious that “operations” was different from the kind of thing the Langley people were used to. Operations wasn’t a matter of good design and engineering in the Langley tradition. It wasn’t even a matter of good management. What operations needed, in the words of a Space Task Group member, was “a very tough kind of a guy who’s good at getting things flown, used to dealing with pilots, used to the rough and tumble that goes with making a flight program work, making it safe, and not taking any horseshit.” The Space Task Group also needed someone who could contend with the Air Force. Given the slightest opening, the Air Force, which was making life miserable for Scott Simpkinson’s team crammed into half of Hangar S down at the Cape, would be more than happy to take over manned space flight. Somehow, Project Mercury needed to develop a close working relationship with the Air Force and at the same time avoid getting pushed around, or perhaps even out. Abe Silverstein decided to call in reinforcements.

In 1946, the N.A.C.A. had sent a young Langley engineer named Walt Williams out to the Mojave Desert to open a facility for testing the X-1, the plane in which Chuck Yeager would break the sound barrier. It was called the High-Speed Flight Station, using the Air Force facilities that would later become known as Edwards Air Force Base. On July 30, 1959, Williams’s fortieth birthday, Abe Silverstein called Williams to Washington and persuaded him to return to Langley to work for the Space Task Group. On September 15, Williams reported to Langley as Gilruth’s associate director for Operations.

Williams was indeed the “very tough kind of guy” that the gentlemanly engineers of Langley needed to deal with the Air Force’s brand of bureaucratic infighting. By 1959, Williams was already known in the flight-test business as a man who could work, carouse, cuss, or fight as prodigiously as any test pilot at Edwards. He was also tough in the other ways that Operations needed. “He had the ability to walk up to the problem of putting a man on top of one of these Atlas vehicles, which are really just big metal balloons, and not be cowed by it,” said Lunney of Williams. (“Big metal balloons”: The walls of the Atlas were so thin that they would collapse unless the vehicle was pressurized.) “Williams just walked up and said ‘Goddammit this’ and ‘Goddammit that,’ and got everybody saluting and doing what they should do.” He was a genius of sorts, Lunney reflected, “though if you had to go up against him, he didn’t seem like a genius. He seemed like a bull.”

In those days, he even looked like a bull—over 200 pounds, a powerful man with a square head, dark, close-cropped hair, and heavy brows. Gene Kranz, who himself would scare a few people in his time, never forgot his first encounter with Williams. It happened in 1960, just a few weeks after Kranz had arrived at the Space Task Group. Kranz had been sent over to brief Williams on some work he’d been doing. Kranz, who knew Williams only by reputation, got there early and slipped into a seat in Williams’s office while another briefing concluded. Williams, who was slouched behind his desk chain-smoking Winstons, looked a little like Broderick Crawford in “Highway Patrol”—big, rumpled, and knowing.

The men briefing Williams were not having a good day. Williams sat behind his desk, scowling at the hapless briefers, and “whipsawed them,” Kranz remembered. “Just cut them up. Sliced them off at the ankles, mid-calf, knees, mid-thigh. They went down the tubes and the thing was over.” The objects of these attentions put away their papers and filed out of the office, leaving Kranz and Williams alone. Kranz began his report.

Walt Williams had a curious habit of appearing to fall asleep in the middle of meetings. Williams himself said that it was a device: “I listen to the guy’s voice,” he explained. “If the guy’s trying to bullshit you, or is uncertain, you can hear it in his voice. I don’t want to see his bright blue eyes or anything else.” Did he ever really fall asleep? There were, after all, reports of the occasional snore. Well, Williams said ambiguously, when people had given him a briefing paper in advance, he didn’t “bother even listening to the buildup,” but waited until the guy got to the good part.

Kranz knew nothing of this. After a few minutes, he was getting into his material when he realized that Williams was starting to nod off. His head was slumped on his chest, his eyes were closed. Unbelievable as it seemed, Kranz decided, Williams had gone to sleep.

“In a one-on-one session with a legend, who you have just seen completely assassinate somebody, what the hell do you do?” Kranz would ask later. He decided that the safest course was to pretend nothing had happened and keep on talking. So he did, feeling more confident now that it seemed no one was listening to him. In fact, he was feeling confident enough to sidestep a small issue that he wasn’t absolutely sure about. But what the hell, the man was asleep.

Williams always kept a roll of Necco mints nearby to soothe his smoker’s throat. As Kranz breezed on, Williams’s hand reached out, groping slowly for the roll of Neccos. Williams shook out two of them—eyes still closed—and chomped on them for a while. “And then he proceeded to ask exactly that question that I thought I had skated through very cleanly,” Kranz recalled. “It was just absolutely intimidating.”

Williams had that effect on the Operations Division as a whole. First, he got together with the astronauts, who had been struggling with the design engineers to be treated as pilots, not guinea pigs. Williams had spent his adult life around test pilots, and was sympathetic. (In July, before being offered the Space Task Group job, Williams read in the newspaper that the astronauts were complaining about not having any planes to fly. The Langley engineers should have known, he remarked to his wife, that “you can’t have tigers around and not have raw meat for them.”) Furthermore, it was Williams’s view that the astronauts were the most carefully selected people and probably the most talented people in Project Mercury and it was foolish not to make use of them. From then on, the astronauts were deeply involved in all aspects of the hardware and flight planning. At the same time, Williams conveyed to the astronauts, and made it stick, that in manned space flight there would be a crucial distinction between command and control. The astronaut had control of the spacecraft, but the ground had command of the mission. This would mean a degree of minute-to-minute direction from the ground that had no precedent in flight testing.

Williams radically altered the approach to preparing the capsule. No longer, he decided, would the engineers and technicians who made the spacecraft be the sole judges of their own work. An independent corps of inspectors would watch every step and must sign off on it before work could proceed. Williams went down to Hangar S at Cape Canaveral and pulled Joe Bobik off Simpkinson’s crew to come up to Langley and inspect the work on the capsule being assembled in the Langley shops. “Hey, they’ll throw me out of there!” protested Bobik, and he was almost right, but Williams’s system stuck and eventually grew into the intricate spacecraft inspection system that Bobik would direct during Apollo.

When it came to flight control, Williams took a look at the paper-thin layer of experienced Canadians and the hodgepodge of young American engineers beneath them, and promptly set up classroom instruction, using the senior engineers to instruct the neophytes on the details of the Mercury and Redstone systems—“how they worked,” Williams said, “and more importantly how they didn’t work.” He began talking about mission rules and countdowns and operational requirements. Most of all, Walt Williams made everybody aware that this was not some abstract engineering exercise. He had at least one astronaut attend every Ops meeting. “Look, what you guys have to remember,” Williams would say to them, “is that there’s gonna be a bright, clear morning at the Cape, and that Atlas is gonna be sitting on the pad, there’s gonna be a capsule on top of it, and we’re going to put a guy in that thing and light it. This is not a hobby! This is real! This is what we’re going to do!” To do it, he taught them, would take not just knowledge and good faith, but also a hard-bitten tenacity and self-discipline.