Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

As we were preparing for Carpenter’s flight, Chris Kraft relocated to his temporary offices at the Houston Petroleum Center on the Gulf Freeway. His staff, however, remained at Langley, starting their relocation in the summer of 1962, during the interval between the flights now assigned to Carpenter and Schirra. Many drove with their families from Virginia to Cape Canaveral for Carpenter’s flight, towing rental trailers containing all they possessed. After the mission, they continued on to Houston.

As the space program was rapidly expanding, more land was needed to house people and test the systems being developed. In and around Houston, we had access to water—in the Gulf of Mexico and even at Clear Lake—so we could do drop-testing of the capsules. A key factor in determining the new site was the proximity of colleges and universities, a talent pool from which we could recruit newly graduated engineers and scientists for the rapidly expanding program. (It should also be noted that Houston was in the congressional district of Albert Thomas, the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversaw NASA’s budget. He and Vice President Johnson were loyal sons of Texas and highly effective advocates for Houston’s suitability as the location for the new Manned Spacecraft Center.)

As a result, in the early years of space, many of my controllers were out of educational institutions in Texas and the Southwest, not the colleges in the Northeast that supplied many of those in the original Space Task Group. We had a few from as far north as Purdue, but they came in waves off the campuses of Texas A&M, the University of Texas, Rice University, and Lamar Tech (in nearby Beaumont).

Tec Roberts, already in Houston, was designing the new Mission Control Center for Gemini and Apollo. Glynn Lunney had stepped in as his replacement as the flight dynamics officer for the remaining Mercury missions. Glynn was the pioneer leader of trajectory operations, who turned his craft from an art practiced by few into a pure science. In the early years, I envied him for his ability to rapidly absorb complex materials and find alternatives. We competed for the leadership role, Glynn pointing the way through his remarkable grasp of the entire complex picture, while I focused on structure and team building.

Carl Huss, one of our math wizards, was training the remote site controller John Llewellyn as his replacement, and Arnold Aldrich was brought in from remote site systems to relieve Walt Kapryan at the systems console. Eighteen months after our first baby step into the world of space flight, the Mercury pioneers were sliding into new jobs and their successors were entering the fray.

In the midst of the preparation for the launch of Carpenter’s Aurora 7 mission, we were advised to take a trip to find housing for our families. We would be given thirty dollars per diem for thirty days for all expenses. By the time the allowance ran out we had to be relocated.

Manfred (Dutch) Von Ehrenfried was a new recruit who joined us as a procedures officer in time for the Glenn mission. He had been teaching high school physics when President Kennedy set the lunar goal and was itching for a piece of the action. Trying to avoid an unnecessary trip to Houston, I called him into my office and decided to give him a real test.

“Dutch, we have to get settled quickly in Houston,” I advised him. “We need good, cheap housing with low down payments. Scout around and find the best place to live. We can’t afford more than a $250 down payment.”

Dutch did not own a home in Virginia and was as eager as any of us to get his family resettled. He did well as a real estate scout and, during the interval between missions, ten families moved into houses he picked out on Welk and Regal drives, an area in southeast Houston that came to be known in the early 1960s as Flight Controller Alley.

President Kennedy had challenged us to go to the Moon and dispel any doubts of America’s leadership, technology, and spirit. The colleges and universities responded. By the spring of 1962, we were flooded with job applications from a generation of young people drawn to the cause.

The newly created Manned Spacecraft Center more than doubled in size, from 750 staffers to 1,800, in three months. Mel Brooks and Jim Hannigan were the first two engineers I hired. Slightly older than the average controller, they had the savvy I needed to lead the young graduates through Mercury and into Gemini.

Hannigan had been a flight test engineer for the Air Force. Brooks, an infantry veteran of the Korean War, had worked with the satellite control of the Air Force’s Agena upper-stage rocket, which had been selected as the Gemini rendezvous target. They were the first to relocate to Flight Controller Alley and were pressed immediately into service. Hannigan was selected as a CapCom assigned to the Kano, Nigeria, site, while Brooks led the training section for the final Mercury missions.

The training classes set up by the Philco monitors were expanded and structured to accommodate the new college graduates being recruited as flight controllers. The two-week, twelve-hour-a-day training program was a crash course in remote site flight control, providing only the most basic background for the work. At the completion of their twelve-hour day, the controllers practiced their Morse code, the last, desperate fall-back for communicating. The astronauts and controllers were trained to use their mike switch to transmit the code. Then, when Morse code training was completed, they were taught speed printing so that their Teletype messages might get to the next controller’s site before the spacecraft. This first formal flight controller training session was designated Class 101. I passed out the certificates to the first six graduates, one of whom was Charles (Skinny) Lewis.

One month after graduating from Class 101 and getting a crash training course, Lewis and his team were sent out to man our remote (and boy, was it remote) site in Zanzibar, the same site where John Llewellyn and his guys had earlier been surrounded by local citizens engaged in “civil disorder” (i.e., rioting). Like many of his fellow accidental tourists, Lewis had never been out of the country before and now was in a place where his military training as a tank commander in the Army Reserve came in handy. Having been briefed on the dangerous conditions in the area, Lewis, along with his surgeon and his systems controller, was returning from the site to his quarters late one night when he saw a roadblock made up of fires burning in oil drums and manned by natives not in uniform. He floored the gas and drove his Volkswagen right through a gap in the blazing obstruction. He survived that and other adventures to eventually become an Apollo flight director.

The launch preparation for Scott Carpenter’s mission unfolded with the usual glitches that we had come to expect. We used three launch scrubs wisely in local training. I updated the procedures and flight rules for the next mission, reviewing them with Kraft, the controllers, and the astronauts during slack periods at the Cape. Because of the relocation of our operations to Houston, we lost almost a month of preparation time and we had to get ahead of the power curve. But finally the day came when we were ready to light the fire on Mercury-Atlas 7. (The Mercury spacecraft were given names by the astronauts, but the Mercury-Atlas or Mercury-Redstone designation was used by the launch and flight teams. The word “flight” referred to the spacecraft and booster events from liftoff to landing in the Mercury program. During the Gemini and Apollo programs, the term “mission” was used by the program, launch, and mission teams. “Mission” carried the collective connotation needed when dealing with two or more spacecraft or launch vehicles. Although this was the standard, the terms “mission” and “flight” were often used interchangeably.)