Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

The first manned flight in a program evokes many emotions in me. Seated at the console next to Kraft, I was about to enter a new age, not unlike the leap from the Wright brothers’ Flyer to the fighter aircraft of the 1930s, bypassing two decades of normal development. With Gemini, we were stepping directly into the future. The incident involving Hunter and Conrad was far from my mind as the countdown progressed smoothly to liftoff. A brief hold just before launch was the only glitch and then the Molly Brown was on its way. Just as every fighter pilot gets to name his aircraft, Grissom and Young assigned that name to their capsule. (Since Grissom had lost his first spacecraft, Liberty Bell 7, when the hatch blew off at splashdown, Molly Brown, the “unsinkable” heroine of a Broadway musical who survived the Titanic disaster, seemed a logical choice of name for his second spacecraft.)

This astronaut combination proved to be a splendid one. Both had only the single desire to fly and were pure joy to work with. A three-orbit mission has to go by the numbers. There is limited time to experiment, troubleshoot, or innovate. Grissom and Young’s first orbit was devoted to abbreviated checks of the spacecraft, and the second included a brief series of experiments. In the third orbit, the propulsion and control systems were tested, gradually lowering the orbit so the deorbit maneuver could be completed with the reaction control jets, if the retro rockets failed. Fortunately, the deorbit was normal.

Molly Brown ’s flight was flawless, with only minor technical problems to be worked out. The press and medics blew one item out of proportion. Just prior to launch, Schirra slipped Young a corned beef sandwich he had purchased at Wolfie’s restaurant. To our amazement, some were offended, up to and including members of Congress. Schirra had thought his catering service was a practical alternative to the bite-size freeze-dried chicken and beef pot roast provided by the medics.

The mission debriefing was held in the auditorium, attended by the staff of the program office, engineering, and the astronauts. After a meticulous walk-through of the pre-launch and flight periods on an event-by-event basis, we listed the open issues for the subsequent mission. At the conclusion of the debriefing, I asked the flight controllers to stay and when all visitors departed, we secured the doors. The room was silent as I again climbed the stairs to the stage. They knew what was coming. “Discipline. If you remember only one thing from this debriefing, I want you to remember one word… discipline! Controllers require judgment, cool heads, and they must lead their team. Leadership, judgment, and a cool head were not evident at Carnarvon. I understand how conflicts can raise tempers, but I also expect control. We are the last line of defense for our crews. We let a small incident escalate into a major flap that involved the entire operation. It was a distraction that we should have put behind us. We lost track of our objective.”

I took a breath and continued, “Our mission will always come first. Nothing must get between our mission and us… nothing! Discipline is the mark of a great controller. That is all!” The auditorium was silent as I stomped off the stage and left the room.

The military has long used the command and control principle and now it was formalized in Mission Control. The Hunter episode finally defined the role of Kraft’s organization. Provoked by the incident, Kraft sat down with Slayton and cut a new deal that gave the crew control of the spacecraft and gave the ground command of the mission. The overall mission responsibility now rested clearly with Chris Kraft, his flight directors, and the remote site CapComs.

Slayton sent his astronauts to the remote sites as observers for one final mission. Hunter transferred to Goddard Space Flight Center and performed as the Madrid tracking station manager during Apollo. Hunter had fought the battle and lost, but he helped to win the war for Flight Control.

As we celebrated the success of Grissom and Young on Gemini 3, the Russians were also celebrating. We would soon learn that five days earlier, Lieutenant Colonel Aleksei Leonov had become the world’s first space walker, venturing outside the cabin and stepping into the void. On his return Leonov delivered a speech from the top of Lenin’s tomb, flanked by the Kremlin leadership. Leonov predicted that “The time is drawing close when people will pass over from orbital flights around the Earth to interplanetary flights, and will go to the Moon, Mars, and Venus.”

The United States had yet to set a manned space flight record. Every member in Flight Control was aware of our opportunity in the Gemini program to set records for rendezvous, docking, duration, and extravehicular operations. We were confident that our turn was coming.

The primary objective of Gemini 4 was to obtain long-term flight experience. We were going to four days in space, which would be longer than all of our flights combined in Mercury and Gemini to that point. The Apollo lunar missions were being planned to last from nine to fourteen days, and we had to prove our capacity for missions of that length. From a Mission Control standpoint, this would be our first full-blown test of the new space center and the new technologies, as well as the first mission to operate on a three-shift basis.

We had three teams operating twenty-four hours a day; the shifts were generally eight hours long, with a one-hour handover at each end. We saw no reason to juggle them much more than that. The crew in the Gemini capsule was awake about sixteen hours and working in flight testing for about twelve hours.

When the astronauts were awake they were in the “execute” phase, so termed because they were executing the flight plan. This was the core of their workday. Kraft would normally cover most of that period with his Red Team. My team’s eight-hour shift covered the systems shift, which started with the Gemini crew preparing for sleep. During this shift we would put the crew to sleep, then look at any glitches in the spacecraft. We would check how much “consumables” had been used—oxygen, water, and so forth—and develop “workarounds” to cope with problems. We used this information to assess mission progress. We had to keep a very careful count of the rate of use of consumables in order to achieve the mission’s desired duration. The third shift—Hodge’s Blue Team—was the planning shift. They took the data we had gathered and devised a daily flight plan, gave the crew a wake-up call, and briefed them on the activities they would be carrying out during their workday.

The Gemini 4 mission, with astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White, was my “coming out” as a flight director, the first operation totally controlled from the new Mission Control Center in Houston. I liked the systems shift; it was an engineer’s dream. My White Team sorted out the problems and developed fixes so that the mission could proceed as planned. During the mission, no one called me Kranz; I now answered to the name of “Flight.”

One week after the Gemini 3 mission, I completed the summary of the flight controller debriefing and carried the report to Kraft’s office. While giving Chris a brief verbal summary, I noticed he was not paying attention. He turned to me and said, “I hope you’re ready as a flight director for Gemini 4 because I have a job I want you to do for me.” He walked across the room and closed the door. Chris wanted to know how things were going as I prepared for my first shift as a flight director. Then he turned to a new subject.