Apollo: The Race to the Moon (42 page)

The rest of the fourth row was reserved for senior management, people like the mission director from Washington, the head of M.S.C.’s Flight Operations Directorate, the head of ASPO, and the M.S.C. center director. These were the hummers, according to one of the flight controllers—as information about what was happening was passed to them, they would nod their heads gravely and say, “Hmmm.” One of them, the mission director, was intended to have an important role. “They originally thought he was really going to be the director of the mission,” a flight director reminisced. “The controllers just said, ‘Aaah, get out of the way,’ you know. They just did not have any patience for that.” The mission director quickly became a liaison person for telling headquarters what was happening, mildly useful and no longer in the way.

The viewing room was immediately behind the fourth row, separated from the MOCR by a large window. This was where important visitors were permitted to watch the action. It could seat seventy-four people. Sometimes the viewing room would be filled with senior NASA people, sometimes with senators and assorted celebrities. A hummer could be helpful in keeping them happy. Bill Tindall, a resident of the back row after he became head of the Flight Operations Directorate, recalled that he was useless in the MOCR from an operational point of view—the last thing the guys at the consoles needed was help from the boss—“but the glass would be right behind you, and you’d knock on the glass to whoever was sitting back there and say [mouthing the words], ‘It’s all right,’ that kind of crap.” The V.I.P.s ate it up.

The action in the MOCR began in the third row and, as a general rule, got progressively more intense as the rows descended.

At the far left in the third row was TelCom (changed to INCO halfway through Apollo), the communications systems officer in charge of monitoring the instrumentation and communications systems on board the spacecraft. For the lunar landing missions, TelCom also controlled the television camera on the lunar surface (and of course became known as Captain Video).

To his right was the operations and procedures (O&P) officer, who was constantly checking activities during the flight against the mission rules and mission techniques established beforehand. The O&P officer also had a variety of peripheral duties such as overseeing the projection of displays on the front wall.

Next to the O&P officer sat the assistant flight director, filling the least popular job in the MOCR. “I hated it,” remembered one man who was briefly in the position. “You weren’t really an assistant flight director, you were assistant to the flight director.” It felt a lot like being a flunky, something that no self-respecting flight controller could stomach.

Next came the flight director’s console. The flight director, called simply Flight when addressed by a controller on duty, ran the MOCR and the mission. More about him in the next chapter.

To the right of the flight director was the flight activities officer, a representative from Flight Crew Operations who made sure that the activities being initiated from the ground were consistent with the routines the astronauts were trained to follow. On the right-hand side of the third row sat the network controller, who coordinated the ground stations around the world that acquired the telemetry and tracking data for transmission to Houston.

In the second row, at the far left, was the physician, called Surgeon on the loops, who monitored the health of the astronauts in flight and tended to the medical needs of the controllers as well. During Gemini and the early Apollo missions, there was a room over the lobby of Building 30 with about a dozen bunks for the controllers plus showers and a little cafeteria. The result was that the controllers haunted the Control Center. They just would not go home, and they refused to keep regular hours. They came off shift still taut and keyed up; then when they finally got to sleep, they would constantly be awakened by people coming in or going out. To keep the controllers functioning, the Surgeon dispensed “whoa and go pills,” downers and uppers. Some of the Surgeons, especially the older military ones, thought the whoa pills were a lot of nonsense and prescribed little airline-sized bottles of “mission whiskey” instead.

Next to the surgeon and just in front of the flight director was CapCom, the spacecraft communicator, still called by the name he had held during Mercury days, when CapCom was short for Capsule Communicator. CapCom was always an astronaut, usually one who had been on the backup crew for the flight in progress. He was the link between the crew in space and the people on the ground. The flight director could speak to the crew if he chose, as could Chris Kraft, and occasionally it happened, but otherwise (save for the occasional Presidential phone call) no one on the ground except CapCom spoke to the crew.

Sitting to the right across a little aisle from CapCom was the controller in charge of the C.S.M.’s electrical and environmental control systems. Known as EECOM (originally standing for electrical, environmental, and communications—another archaic acronym, since he no longer dealt with communications), this controller monitored the spacecraft’s life-support, electrical, instrumentation, and mechanical systems. An Apollo EECOM, John Aaron, acknowledged that “in the context of the image of the Control Center and where the glory was, the systems guys had a back seat. We were the guys who were supposed to keep everything going and keep everything on line, so the flight dynamics guys could go roaring off where they wanted to go.” But it was no contemptible job, Aaron continued. “When you look at EECOM being all the electrical systems, all the power systems, all the instrumentation, which is your eyes and ears into that spacecraft, all the life-support systems, all the cryogenics, all the fluids, you basically have to know the whole spacecraft. So in order to be a good EECOM you had to know the whole spacecraft and then know a lot about … how you affected everybody else in case something in one of your systems failed. That builds a lot of capabilities.” A good EECOM, said Aaron, must above all be curious—curious “not only about what you were responsible for, but how you affected everybody else. The more curious you tended to be, the better EECOM you were.”

The guidance, navigation, and control officer, G.N.C., sat next to EECOM. G.N.C. didn’t keep track of where the spacecraft was or where it was going, but rather watched over the guidance hardware and made sure that it was working properly. G.N.C. also had to worry about the hardware for the in-flight propulsion systems such as the reaction and control system jets and the engine in the service module.

Sitting to the right of the EECOM and G.N.C. were two parallel consoles for the lunar module. Their names on the loops were Control (the LEM’s G.N.C.) and TELMU (the LEM’s EECOM). Together, EECOM, G.N.C., Control, and TELMU formed the core of what were known as the “systems guys,” as opposed to the “trajectory guys.” The trajectory guys sat in the front row of the MOCR, which was known throughout the Flight Operations Directorate as the Trench.

Three positions at the left-hand side of the front row were for the men from Marshall assigned to Houston to monitor the performance of the Saturn V. The lead man, called Booster 1, sat in the right-hand seat of the three. The three Boosters disappeared after the burn for translunar injection, when the last of the three stages on the Saturn V had been expended. These outlanders from Marshall were conceded by the Houston trajectory people to be good folks, but they were only honorarily part of the Trench. The real Trench consisted of the next three consoles, Retro, FIDO, and Guido, all of which were part of the Flight Dynamics Branch.

Retro, short for retrofire officer, sat next to Booster. The name Retro went back to Mercury days, when Retro’s main function was to calculate the time of the burn of the retro-rockets that would bring the spacecraft back to earth. On the first two-thirds of a lunar mission, Retro had a psychologically strange job: He spent hours on end at the console making plans that were continually becoming outdated, minutes after he finished them. If an emergency occurred that called for the mission to be aborted, it was Retro’s responsibility to tell the flight director what had to be done to return the spacecraft to earth. Retro had to know the attitude the spacecraft must assume, the burn that would be required, and how to work around the malfunctioning system. Moreover, all of these parameters changed continually as the spacecraft launched to earth orbit, left earth orbit and headed out toward the moon, passed the equi-gravisphere, and entered lunar orbit. For the first part of the translunar coast to the moon, the spacecraft could come back to earth on a direct abort, meaning that the command and service module would be turned around and the big service propulsion system engine would be used as a brake. As the spacecraft prepared for lunar-orbit insertion, Retro had to plan aborts—meaning, what do you do if, right in the middle of the burn to put the spacecraft into lunar orbit, something goes wrong?

Only when the spacecraft was safely in lunar orbit did Retro perform the first task that he could be sure would be used, the planning for trans-earth injection. And then, when the spacecraft had successfully begun its trans-earth coast, Retro could finally begin overseeing the entry. In the case of a lunar mission, this meant working out the trans-earth corrections needed to bring the spacecraft safely into its narrow entry corridor at 25,000 m.p.h., getting the spacecraft into the proper attitude prior to entry, and working with the recovery team to select the best ocean recovery area.

Next to Retro sat the flight dynamics officer, FIDO, the lead man in the Trench during a shift. The “I” in FIDO didn’t stand for anything. For some reason, the same organization that could pronounce DPS as “dips” without feeling obliged to stick in a vowel usually abbreviated Flight Dynamics Officer as FIDO. Among the members of the Trench, it was assumed that FIDO was also the controller who had the most fun job in the Control Center except (a reluctant concession) the flight director’s. During powered launch, FIDO constantly monitored the trajectory for deviations and planned the maneuvers to get to orbit in the case of a malfunction (while Retro was planning abort maneuvers in case getting to orbit was not possible). FIDO planned the translunar injection. During translunar coast, he analyzed the trajectory and planned the midcourse corrections and lunar-orbit insertion. During lunar orbit, he planned the lunar module’s ascent and descent, and its rendezvous with the command module. The astronauts were in control of the spacecraft (another reluctant concession), but the FIDOs decided where it was going and when.

Over at the far right of the Trench sat the guidance officer, “Guido” informally, “Guidance” on the loops (“Guido” sounded too much like “FIDO” over the headsets). Guido was the ground navigator for the spacecraft. It was Guido who monitored the position of the spacecraft as determined by the ground stations and constantly compared it to the position shown by the onboard guidance system. Guido suggested stars for the crew to use in checking their attitude. Guido watched over the second-by-second performance of the LEM’s computers and onboard guidance system during the descent and ascent phases of the lunar missions, and prepared the command loads for the onboard guidance computers. The distinction between Guido and G.N.C., as one controller put it, was that “Guido was looking at it from the standpoint of ‘Is the guidance taking me where I want to go?’ and G.N.C. was looking at it from the standpoint of ‘Are those systems working properly and telling us the right information?’”

The origin of the term “Trench” is shrouded in the mists of time. Some people think that it started in the old Mercury Control Center at the Cape, where the first FIDO, Tecwyn Roberts, and the first Retro, Carl Huss, sat off to one side of the room by themselves, facing their plotters (there was no Guido then). Another theory is that it started after they opened the MOCR at Houston, where these controllers first began to sit below everyone else.

The story with the most votes is that John Llewellyn named the Trench. Llewellyn, who in other incarnations operated a flame thrower in the Korean War and tried to raise cattle in Belize, was a capable and conscientious Retro within the walls of the Control Center and prone to the most outrageous adventures everywhere else—“Butch Cassidy born a hundred years too late,” as another controller described him. Even within the walls of the MOCR, Llewellyn had his own way of doing things. For example, Retro was supposed to count down to retrofire in the usual “ten, nine, eight …” pattern, but with Llewellyn, you never knew. Once he started at fifteen. Another time he began “ten, eight,” and, when the puzzled FIDO looked over at him, quickly added “nine, seven …” Sometimes he got behind, and so the count would end up “five, four, one, retrofire!” But he always got to “Retrofire!” at the right time, and was otherwise an exemplary Retro—inside the MOCR. Outside was another story, or dozens of stories. He is said to have broken a few bones falling from a collapsing drainpipe as he climbed back to his motel room after the front door had been locked on him at the Nigerian remote site—or was it in Australia? He is said to have found a man with his lady friend, thrown him out of a second-story window, and then, intent on inflicting further damage, jumped out after him. There are at least three different stories, involving three different bodies of water, in which Llewellyn submerged cars. Llewellyn himself was no help in sorting out truth from fiction in all this, smilingly denying someone’s account of a Llewellyn escapade, then suddenly throwing in a correction that was more improbable than the original version. In any case, it is said that Llewellyn used to get mad at the O&P guy sitting up in the third row of the MOCR. O&P would inquire of him whether his retrofire times were completed yet, and Llewellyn would tell him belligerently, “Y’all oughta get your ass down here in the trench workin’ this instead of sittin’ up there,” and the name stuck.

However the Trench came to be, its members were clannish, cockily self-confident, and on occasion well-nigh insufferable. They lit their cigarettes using elegant cream matchbooks embossed in gold “The Trench.” Their business cards had “The Trench” printed neatly on the line after their job title. They thought of the systems guys as “mechanics” and the computer guys as “electricians.” If the flight controllers in general had the esprit of men in an Army combat unit, the members of the Trench were the Marines.