Apollo: The Race to the Moon (41 page)

If, on the other hand, you were part of Flight Operations and decided that it was time to move on to something else, you were likely to be cast into outer darkness. Who could want to leave the best place to work in the whole space program? Kraft would let you know that you were making a mistake. “Young man,” he would begin (to be called “young man” meant you had better listen carefully; to be called “sir” meant that you were already in deep trouble), and then he would launch into an explanation of all the reasons why you were better off in Flight Operations than in this other job, no matter how tempting it might seem from a distance. If you persisted, perhaps you could get him to agree, and in that case he would help you get the transfer and maybe a promotion to boot. But under no circumstances was it advisable to try to go around Kraft and get yourself transferred without his blessing. A few people did that, and soon thereafter they decided to leave NASA, or, at the least, to get out of Houston.

It was all part of being in an exclusive and absorbing club called Flight Operations. “We were on an absolute high,” Lunney said of those days. “You can’t imagine how excited we all were.” Also, being so young helped keep the controllers from being awed by the fact that, after all, they were only kids and there would be live astronauts up there. Lunney again: “We had a few guys who came into Flight Operations who had been around awhile, and they had trouble believing that they were able to do what they were doing. I had a guy who was uncomfortable with it, and he used to ask me, ‘How can you have the confidence to do this?’ My reaction was, ‘Well, how the hell do I know? I don’t go around analyzing that, I just do it!’ The people who’d been around for a while maybe had been blunted. They didn’t do too well. The people who came in new, out of school, they didn’t know any better. They didn’t know they shouldn’t do things or couldn’t do things, or that life was going to beat them up sooner or later.” The confidence and the closeness were to be indispensable to the way that Flight Operations functioned during crises.

The single event that decisively shaped Flight Operations happened on the morning of February 20, 1962, when John Glenn made the United States’ first orbital flight.

For practical purposes, Glenn’s flight was the first test of the Flight Operations system. Shepard’s and Grissom’s suborbital flights, which preceded Glenn’s, were lobs in a ballistic trajectory that lasted only about fifteen minutes each and involved little in-flight decision-making. For Glenn’s flight, the flight control team would have to determine whether he was in a stable orbit and instruct him accordingly, monitor his systems over a period of five hours, and do its part in bringing him safely out of orbit and into the landing area where the recovery ships were waiting.

The flight controllers had never expected it to be an easy flight. Based on the Air Force’s experience to date, they could expect to lose one out of four Atlases during the launch phase. Moreover, the Atlas had recently been displaying a tendency to explode within a few feet of the pad, the most difficult of all times to use the escape tower to lift the astronaut safely away. Some of the explosions had been extremely sudden, giving less warning than they would need to activate the escape tower. Everyone worried about the launch phase. Kraft himself kept an eight-by-ten photograph of an exploding Atlas under the glass of his desk.

But when Glenn actually launched on Tuesday morning at 9:47 A.M., the Atlas worked fine. The problem came instead as Glenn was heading east over the Atlantic on his second orbit. A technician named Bill Saunders, sitting in a room to the side of Mercury Control, was scanning the bank of meters in front of him when his eyes fell on meter number 51—“segment 51”—which registered the deployment of the heat shield.

In the Mercury capsule, the heat shield was designed to fall loose after entry into the earth’s atmosphere so that a bag that would absorb the shock of landing could inflate between the deployed heat shield and the bottom of the capsule. Saunders’s needle should have been pointing at +10, indicating that the heat shield was clamped to the bottom of Glenn’s capsule. Instead, it was pointing at + 80, indicating that the heat shield was unlatched. “I’ve got a valid signal on segment 51,” Saunders said into his headset.

An observer sitting in the glassed-in viewing area behind the Mercury Control Center would have seen nothing unusual, just Kraft conferring with his controllers and Williams walking unhurriedly out the side door. Williams himself would recount the reality later, using the present tense: “It’s almost impossible to describe the raw tension that this news introduces into Mercury Control and continues to build relentlessly during the rest of the Glenn flight… . We are all in a state of shock at the enormity of the situation.” For if the heat shield had deployed, they believed at first, there was not a thing they could do about it. Soon, they would have to tell Glenn what had happened. And shortly after that, Glenn would die. What happened thereafter was an object lesson in how different space flight was from ordinary flight-testing, and how much was yet to be done to make Flight Operations ready to do its job.

Their one hope during the first minutes of the crisis was that the signal was false. Instrument readings were as likely to malfunction as the systems that they were monitoring, and nothing had happened that might have triggered the heat shield to release. It was possible, even likely, that the signal was false—but they had no second data point in the telemetry that would enable them to assess that possibility. Perhaps the microswitch for segment 51 hadn’t been properly set before launch—but they had no way of knowing that.

Then they realized there was a possible way out, even if segment 51 was telling the truth. In the Mercury capsule, the retro-rockets that slowed the capsule for entry were part of an assembly called the retropack that was held against the bottom of the heat shield by stainless-steel straps. The straps themselves were clamped onto the main body of the capsule. Normally, the retropack would be jettisoned after it had slowed the capsule. Suppose instead that they left the retropack in place during the entry? The straps holding the retropack to the spacecraft would burn through, but by the time they did, the forces from the entry might hold the loose heat shield in place. It was at least a hope.

Now they were faced with a classic dilemma: If the segment 51 signal was valid, they would have to leave the retropack strapped on, because it was the only hope for saving Glenn. But if the segment 51 signal was false and they left the retropack strapped on, Glenn could be killed. The shock waves of the burning retropack might damage the heat shield. The extra inertia created by the weight of the pack might change the capsule’s attitude. In short, they had no safe choices.

To choose among the risks, Williams and Kraft needed to know what the odds were that leaving the retropack on would cause a problem. That kind of knowledge was not available in Mercury Control, so the calls went out. Over at Hangar S, the McDonnell engineers feverishly began laying out long strips of schematics on the hangar floor. Telephone circuits were patched up with the McDonnell plant in St. Louis. Williams called Houston, to confer with the man who had been thinking about the aerodynamic characteristics of the Mercury capsule longer than anybody, Max Faget.

No one had ever tested a spacecraft entry with the retropack attached; no one had even thought about it. Faget talked through the problem over the phone with Mercury Control. Later, Joe Shea would be fascinated when Faget recounted his thinking. Faget had a “first-order feel,” in Shea’s words, that leaving the retropack on wasn’t going to be a problem. Faget understood the nature of the pressures and forces on the spacecraft, not by calculation but by apprehending the engineering gestalt of the situation.

Eventually, Williams decided that leaving the retropack on was the lesser of the evils. They would find out later that segment 51 had been misleading them after all and that they could have conducted a normal entry, but by that time John Glenn was safely home, a national hero, and Mission Control was being applauded for its cool professionalism under pressure. Professional, yes: The flight-control team had stayed calm and had done the best they could with the information they had available. But it had been an ad hoc, jury-rigged, scrambling effort, and from that experience came a structure for trying to ensure that they would never have to make those kinds of guesses again.

Chapter 19. “There will always be people who want to work in that room”

During the rest of Mercury and throughout Gemini, the flights became more complicated and so did the resources for supporting them. Beginning with Gemini IV on June 3, 1965, control of the flights shifted from the Cape to new facilities in Houston. Meters gave way to computer screens. Ad hoc conference calls gave way to a nationwide communications network. The modest goal of simply understanding what was happening to the spacecraft gave way to ambitions for solving hardware problems while the flight was still in progress. By the time the Apollo manned flights began, the Mercury Control Center that supported John Glenn’s Mercury flight had been supplanted by a system that was to Mercury Control as the Saturn V was to the Redstone.

During an Apollo mission, the action at the Manned Spacecraft Center centered in Building 30 on the northwest side of the central green. Building 30 had two wings connected by a large lobby. One wing, which overlooked the duck ponds, housed in its three stories the Mission Planning and Analysis Division (MPAD, pronounced “em-pad”), the Flight Control Division, and the Flight Support Division. The other wing, which would have looked out over a parking lot and empty fields if there had been anything to look out of, was a large, windowless concrete block three-quarters the size of a football field, also three stories high.

The working entrance to the windowless block was inside the lobby that connected the building’s two wings. Equipped with the proper badges, a visitor to this wing entered a slow elevator, which rose to the third floor and opened onto a short, nondescript hallway with an alcove filled with vending machines. The short hallway debouched onto an echoing corridor with mustard-colored walls and twelve-foot ceilings. The lighting was flat and shadowless, and that, combined with a knowledge of the business of this place, could create an uncanny feeling—for some, the feeling of being behind a grand stage set; for others, a sense of entering a forbidden sanctum. For still others, it was like returning to a battlefield.

The corridor formed a large rectangle. The outer perimeter of the square was lined with large rooms containing a number of electronic consoles with C.R.T. screens (cathode-ray tubes, the kind used in commercial television sets). These were the Staff Support Rooms, known as the S.S.R.s or more commonly as the back rooms. On the interior of the rectangle were other rooms, some filled with electronic equipment for supporting the back rooms. The SPAN was in this block—of that special room, more later—as was the room where NASA and Navy officials coordinated the recovery operation after the Apollo spacecraft splashed down. But the dominating room in the interior of the rectangle was the large square chamber, sixty feet on a side, formally designated the Mission Operations Control Room, known to the public as Mission Control, and known to the people who worked there as the MOCR.

“MOCR” rhymes with “poker.” It is the most commonly used insider’s term, but not the only one. Sometimes the controllers called it the M.C.C. (for Mission Control Center) or the Control Center. Strictly speaking, both terms refer to the entire wing of Building 30 in which the MOCR was located. Actually, there were two MOCRs. All of the Apollo missions except the first flight were run out of the MOCR on the third floor, but there was a duplicate MOCR on the second floor, right underneath it, where the Gemini missions had been flown. During Apollo, simulations would often be underway on the second floor even as a real mission was being flown out of the third.

Though it came to be seen as the embodiment of high technology in the 1960s and played such a large part in the public’s perception of the space program during Gemini and Apollo, the MOCR was not a comfortable place to work. The C.R.T. screens showed small white numbers on a black background, had poor resolution, and were hard on the eyes. The decor, with its gray walls and the subdued lighting (to avoid interfering with the controllers’ view of their screens), was not cheerful. The constant buzz of voices in the controllers’ headsets often caused hearing loss. “Controller’s elbow,” a kind of bursitis, was a common complaint. But none of this really mattered. As one controller said, “There will always be people who want to work in that room. Regardless of how many headaches it produces, no matter how physically painful, there will always be people who want to work there. It’s in the blood.”

The room was laid out like a small auditorium. The displays were on the front wall, dominated by a display twenty feet long and ten feet high that usually showed a world map while the spacecraft was in earth orbit, the lunar trajectory during the coasts between earth and moon, and a map of the moon during orbit. To either side of the world map were pairs of smaller 10’-by-10’ display screens that could be changed according to the phase of the mission in progress. During a mission’s launch phase, the big screen itself was divided into two 10-foot displays showing trajectory plots.

Below these displays, mounted behind long bench-like working surfaces where the controllers could stack their flight plans, books of mission rules, and the logs they used to record events, were four rows of C.R.T. screens, approximately ten to a row. The front row was at ground level and the other three behind were arranged in tiers so that each row was higher than the one in front of it.

In the back row of the MOCR were four consoles, none of which had anything to do with the minute-to-minute conduct of the mission. At the far left, sitting underneath the stationary television camera that relayed pictures of the MOCR to the outside world, was the console of NASA’s public affairs officer, the P.A.O. He was the voice that the public heard from Mission Control during television broadcasts. The Department of Defense, which was involved in the landing and recovery operation and some of the communications support, had a console at the other side of the back row.