Apollo: The Race to the Moon (45 page)

If it was not a job for just anybody, it was also a job that had no equal. Reminded of all the ways in which working in the MOCR was tiring and even physically painful, Lunney once replied, “I can only say that I loved it. I thought it was wonderful. Remember the Patton movie? He’s standing by the tank with the battlefield full of dead soldiers and he says something like, ‘May God help me but I love it.’ And when he said that I said to myself, ‘I can relate to that.’”

Chapter 21. “There was no mercy in those days”

By the fall of 1967, the apparatus for controlling manned space flight—the MOCR, its support network, the mission rules, the skills—had been evolving for eight years. Mercury had been elementary school, teaching the neophyte flight control team the rudiments, and occasionally showing by harrowing example how much remained to be learned. Gemini, consisting of ten manned flights with two-man crews during the period from March 1965 through November 1966, had given the controllers a chance to become proficient in advanced concepts such as rendezvous, extended flight, and extra-vehicular activity.

Despite all that had been learned, however, and despite the sophisticated apparatus that was in place by 1967, it remained for the Flight Operations Directorate and ASPO to learn how to fly the Apollo missions. North American Rockwell (as it was known by the end of 1967) had produced an Apollo command module that was vastly more complicated than the Gemini capsule, with hundreds of switches that could be thrown and dials that could be turned, a profusion of data that could be computed and displayed, and thrusters and engines that could be burned in numberless permutations. Grumman was producing a lunar module that was even more novel and equally complex. These machines were going to be the first in history to carry men out of the earth’s environment and to an alien place. The question to be answered was: Now what?

First, all the maneuvers and activities had to be planned down to the last switch setting and data entry. Then everything had to be orchestrated between the crew and ground control, because, in effect, each spacecraft had two cockpits: the one in space and the one in Building 30. “It got to be a big flap,” said Jerry Bostick, who as a FIDO was in the middle of it, “a really bad situation between NASA and the contractors and between the flight controllers and the astronauts about who does what and who gives who what data before the flight and during the flight and who does what on the ground and who does what on board and how much onboard data do you need to put on telemetry to give to the flight controllers, how much do they need displayed… . The whole thing was a big mess.”

So George Low created a new job. On August 3, 1967, he posted a memo on the bulletin boards at the Manned Spacecraft Center announcing that Howard W. (Bill) Tindall, Jr., had been appointed to a position called “Chief of Apollo Data Priority Coordination.” It was a typical NASA title, one that could have meant just about anything. “Specifically,” said the announcement, “his job is to determine the operational rules and procedures for properly utilizing the Apollo systems, including primary and backup systems; to investigate the system capabilities and constraints and to evaluate their accuracies; to establish the criteria for system selection during various phases of the mission; and to establish the proper spacecraft and ground displays and use of these displays.” It went on like that for a few more lines. In short, Bill Tindall was supposed to figure out how to fly the missions. His function cut across ASPO functions, Flight Crew Operations, and Flight Control Operations. How he was to do it wasn’t quite clear to anyone. Just do it, Tindall was told. The name that was eventually attached to what he did was “Mission Techniques.”

Bill Tindall had been in the space program since Mercury days, when he had helped to set up the communications network. In the Gemini program, Tindall had been the man who had figured out how to do a rendezvous in orbit. The mathematics of orbital mechanics and of rendezvous itself were well known (Buzz Aldrin, the Apollo 11 lunar module pilot, had written his M.I.T. dissertation on the mechanics of rendezvous). But no one had applied these theoretical findings to the world of hardware and tracking stations, where it was essential that the ground be able to monitor and control a rendezvous. Bill Tindall was responsible for solving what proved to be an extraordinarily complex task. “It was a big deal,” said an official close to the process, “in my mind, one of the major accomplishments of the space program.”

During Apollo, Bill Tindall had continued to be a troubleshooter, officially attached to the Mission Planning and Analysis Division but in reality a free-floating resource. At the time that the Mission Techniques task came up, he had been babysitting the arduous and often tangled development of the spacecraft’s computer software.

Tindall had the exuberance of a seven-year-old on his way to a circus. His friends were “super” and “gangbusters” and “giants” and “really neat” and “just absolutely outstanding,” and he didn’t have any enemies. He saw the Apollo Program as one great long stretch of fun that had by some miracle been given to him instead of work (“It’s just incredible that we’d get paid to do what we were doing!”) and all the stories about the brutal hours and travel schedules as just a cover for men on a lark (“We weren’t working overtime, we were playing!”).

In the process of working with M.I.T. on the guidance software, Tindall had arbitrated among the FIDOs, Guidos, and software people about what displays had to be available to what places. This experience turned out to be ideal for planning mission techniques, partly because computer capacity was at the heart of deciding how to run a mission, and partly because the process of designing the displays had been so contentious. Apollo-era computers had severely limited storage—the computer capacity of the mainframes in the Control Center was smaller than that of some of the desktop systems of the 1980s, and the onboard computers in the command and lunar modules had less capacity than some modern pocket calculators. So the competition for room was fierce. “Every time we’d get a new capability in the computer systems, the flight controllers would start laying their requirements on it,” Cliff Charlesworth said. “In short order, we’d overflow the boxes [exceed computer capacity]. And Kraft would get mad. He’d say, ‘Goddammit, get it back there where it’ll fit, we can’t get any more computers!’ So he’d go get Tindall and he’d say, ‘You go fix that.’”

Tindall had started holding what were known as “Black Friday” meetings. All the people competing for computer capabilities would crowd into one of the conference rooms over in Building 30 and explain in fervent detail just why their particular needs were crucial to the success of the mission and the safety of the astronauts. “We’d all get in there and defend our requirements, and then Tindall would cut them,” Charlesworth continued. “And then we’d cuss him.” And Tindall would grin, and cuss back, and laugh his loud, infectious laugh, and keep right on going.

Tindall took from that experience a conviction that the only way to resolve so many competing interests was to get everybody into the same room and let them fight it out. There was a method to the madness he induced. For John Aaron, then a young EECOM, Tindall’s technique was a model for his own use in later years when he became a senior NASA official and had to do the same thing. In Aaron’s view, Tindall recognized that what matters most to people is not that they get their way, but that they feel they have had a chance to make their case. Somebody would voice an idea, and Tindall would field it, treating it seriously and yet at the same time managing to dispose of bad ideas quickly without putting anybody down. Ideas that weren’t so bad were improved on around the table without bruising egos. Tindall was able to get some very proud engineers to say “Well, I’ll be damned” when it turned out that their pet ideas weren’t as good as they had thought they were, Aaron remembered. They might walk into Tindall’s meetings “polarized and cultures apart,” but Tindall built them into teams.

Tindall himself confessed to no such cerebral theories. As far as he was concerned, the real secret to his meetings was that people weren’t just sitting around making recommendations to forward to the higher-ups. “Everyone knew we were making decisions right there,” he said, decisions that would govern the way the missions were run, and if people wanted to put in their two cents’ worth, they had better be there. It led to a madhouse, sometimes, but Tindall loved playing lion tamer to a room packed with arguing engineers.

For one of the big meetings, there might be as many as a hundred design engineers, astronauts, controllers, and mathematicians from MPAD crowded into the conference room in Building 5, thirty or forty of them crowded around the long table and another fifty or sixty sitting or standing around the perimeter of the room, sometimes spilling into the projection room as well, their faces peering out through the little projector windows. They’d hammer away at each other for hours, filling the blackboards with numbers. “It became a battle for the blackboard,” Tindall recalled. “Whoever would get the blackboard and the chalk, that’s the guy who could win. I was really good at that.”

In all, there were twelve distinct phases to each lunar-landing mission: launch phase, earth orbit (while they checked out the C.S.M.’s systems), translunar injection, midcourse on the way out to the moon, lunar-orbit insertion, lunar orbit (while they checked out the LEM), lunar descent, lunar ascent, lunar rendezvous, trans-earth injection, another midcourse phase, this time on the way back to earth, and entry. Each phase had dozens of specific elements to be worked out.

By Tindall’s estimate, only about ten to twenty percent of the work involved techniques to be employed under nominal circumstances (“nominal,” in NASA, means “without abnormalities”). Most of the time they were worrying about mission techniques under abnormal circumstances—which in turn drove most of the specific mission rules for the Apollo flights. When is a failure a failure? Tindall’s meetings had to ask. If the guidance platform is drifting, but not completely wacko, how much drift is acceptable? How much of the backup capacity has to be available to proceed to the next step?

Tindall raced from one question to another. “He’d take people like me, from Operations, and the theoreticians, and the contractors, and they’d sit in his meetings for hour after hour after hour,” recalled Steve Bales, one of the Guidos who attended. “He’d say, ‘Okay, look. We’ve just got to the moon.’ And he’d draw a big circle on the blackboard. ‘Okay, here’s Rev 1 [the first revolution around the moon]—what are you guys going to do?’” And they would begin to work out in exacting detail everything that needed to be done during the first revolution around the moon—which was one small part of one portion of the lunar-orbit phase of the mission, which was in turn one small portion of the mission as a whole. “Then,” Bales continued, “he’d have another meeting once a week that said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to do in the ascent phase, from LEM takeoff to insertion.’ Another meeting two times a month on ‘Here’s how we’re going to do the rendezvous.’ One on ‘Here’s how we’re going to do guidance procedures on the surface.’ The guy was incredible. Had a thousand-ring circus going all the time.” Not all the meetings had a hundred people at them. He would have smaller ones, almost daily, of half a dozen people. For critical phases like the final descent from 47,000 feet to touchdown, he might hold special meetings twice a week until they had nailed the techniques down the way he wanted.

Out of these meetings came Tindallgrams, so called because they read like no other memoranda in the Apollo Program. They owed their origin to a secretary, Patsy Saur, assigned to Tindall soon after he came to Houston.

“You do dictate, don’t you?” she said to Tindall the first time she met him.

“No, I don’t,” said Tindall.

“Well, you’d better learn, because I’m not going to lose my shorthand proficiency,” she announced peremptorily.

“I’m a meek guy and she was tough,” Tindall reminisced, and for a few days he wrote out his memos the night before and then held them under the desk the next morning, pretending to dictate. But finally he got used to the idea of dictating, and then he found that the memos were sounding the way he talked. They became a sensation around M.S.C.

Who else but Tindall would, in an official NASA communication, describe the magnitude of a required change in spacecraft velocity as “teensy weensy”? Who else would entitle a memo “Vent bent descent, lament!” or “Let’s move the recovery force a little,” or, simply, “Some things about ascent from the moon”? What other engineer at Tindall’s level would, in an official NASA communication, call a top NASA official’s proposal “unbelievable” and proceed to treat it as if it were the work of a crackpot?

The main thing about Tindallgrams was that they said what they meant. “They were wonderful,” Bostick said of the Tindallgrams. “They didn’t have any bullshit, this bureaucratic stuff.” Since everyone loved them (including George Low, who refused to let his secretaries give him a summarized version of anything Tindall wrote), one might have thought that everyone would have started to imitate them. Some tried, but they quit after a while; it sounded as if they were trying to be cute, while a Tindallgram just sounded like Tindall. About a fuel warning light on the lunar module display, Tindall wrote:

“The present LM weight and descent trajectory is such that this light will always come on prior to touchdown. This signal, it turns out, is connected to the master alarm—how about that! In other words, just at the most critical time in the most critical operation of a perfectly nominal lunar landing mission, the master alarm with all its lights, bells, and whistles will go off. This sounds right lousy to me. In fact, [astronaut] Pete Conrad tells me he labeled it completely unacceptable four or five years ago, but he was probably just an Ensign at the time and apparently no one paid any attention. If this is not fixed, I predict the first words uttered by the first astronaut to land on the moon will be ‘Gee whiz, that master alarm certainly startled me.’”