Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

The early lessons were always quick in coming. Throughout the EVA, the hatch seal had been exposed to deep space, and with the cold, the seal lost its flexibility. It was a real struggle to get the hatch closed and latched. Once it was closed and the cockpit repressurized, the team decided not to open it again to jettison the EVA equipment. Another rule in Mission Control was “Don’t press your luck.” With the hatch closed, it was time for me to occupy the flight director’s chair for the first time. Kraft handed me the logbook as if it were a baton in a race. With a broad smile, he gave me a nod. “Young man, it’s yours,” he said, then left on a high for the post-EVA press conference.

Mission Control was mine. My White Team members completed their handovers, and Kraft’s Red Team left for a well-deserved celebration. Marta’s resplendent white vest hung behind the console. No one had seen me bring it into the MCC. What the hell, I made up my mind to put it on. I felt like a matador donning his suit as I put on the vest.

Dutch Von Ehrenfried, seated to my left, was the first to notice. Rolling his eyes, he buried his head in his arms, then scooted his chair over to mine and said, “If you’re not careful, they’re going to haul you away, then I’ll be in charge.” He rolled back to his console, made a remark on the intercom, and then I noticed the control room TV turn and zoom in on me. Moments later my picture at the console, resplendent in a white vest, was on television throughout the center, as well as the press area. One by one, the controllers reported to me, “Nice vest, Flight!” The next day, a photo of me wearing the vest made newspapers across the country.

Now that I had decked myself out in Marta’s vest, it was time to clean up the open items, resolve the “funnies,” or anomalies and glitches, get the spacecraft configured for drifting flight, and put the crew to sleep. It was time to go to work as a flight director.

Throughout the eight hours of my shift the capsule’s orbit, combined with the Earth’s rotation, would take the spacecraft off range and into sparse tracking coverage. At the end of the shift, only the Rose Knot Victor tracking ship would “see” (that is, be able to contact) Gemini 4, once every ninety minutes. (Our official call signs or designators for the two tracking ships were RKV— Rose Knot Victor—and CSQ— Coastal Sentry Quebec.) This period in the mission, with the infrequent contacts, the spacecraft in drifting flight, and the crew asleep, provided an opportunity for detailed analysis of the spacecraft systems and orbital trajectory.

Mission Control borrowed technology from many eras. Most of the systems the controllers used were cutting-edge, only months removed from the laboratories. One notable exception was borrowed from turn-of-the-century technology. A pneumatic tube system provided the means to transmit messages of all types between the three floors and the work areas used by controllers and computer operators. The P-tube carriers were aluminum cylinders, twelve inches in length and three and one half inches in diameter. A spring-loaded hinged door allowed messages to be placed in the tube.

The flight dynamics team was a principal user of the P-tube system, exchanging hundreds of messages daily within the complex. During a particularly hectic shift, when Llewellyn and his console partners fell further and further behind in unloading and returning the P-tube carriers, the empty canisters lay scattered on the floor about the consoles. Surveying the litter of canisters Llewellyn, a former Marine, stood up, stretched, and in a voice for all to hear declared: “I think I am back in the trenches again with my fire control team, surrounded by empty 105 howitzer canisters.”

Inspired by this colorful analogy, “The Trench” was subsequently adopted as a nickname by the flight dynamics team, who used it in their reports and media interviews. Within weeks “The Trench” matchbooks were circulating within the control teams’ ranks—and each subsequent mission contributed fresh additions to their lore and legend. The stage was set for competition among the mission control specialties. The Trench had thrown down the initial gauntlet.

My White Team quickly settled down to the business at hand. One of the black arts in the Trench, and one of the most critical, was orbit trajectory propagation. As the spacecraft circled the globe, numerous forces worked on the orbit, twisting and shifting it. It is necessary to forecast the spacecraft position hours and often days ahead for flight and maneuver planning. Now flying our longest mission and with only two Gemini missions remaining before the first attempted spacecraft rendezvous, Ed Pavelka, the FIDO, plotted the data, directing the computer controller to periodically input precise changes to the atmospheric drag constants. He worked with the same precision he used when tuning the engine on his hot rod.

As my shift progressed, Gary Coen, my GNC (guidance, navigation, and control) engineer, calculated how much propellant had been used during the Titan rendezvous. Then he turned to forecasting the usage throughout the remainder of the mission. All engineers were reviewing the telemetry for the entire mission, looking for anything, even the slightest deviations from the expected. As they worked, they smoked, and soon the usual pall of blue smoke hung in the air over the consoles. Stale cigarette butts, cold coffee, and day-old pizza made up the scent of Mission Control.

Mission Control was windowless. No clock referenced us to local time in Houston. Greenwich Mean Time, the local time in England, synchronized us to our stations around the world. Then as now, every action, both in the spacecraft and on the ground, worked to time that started ticking after liftoff—mission elapsed time (MET). Our bodies were the only laggards, responding to the need for food and rest on a schedule corresponding to a sun we couldn’t see.

Besides the team in the control center, I had Skinny Lewis stationed on the Coastal Sentry Quebec midway between Hawaii and Japan, and the team on Rose Knot Victor also stationed in the Pacific, 1,200 miles southwest of Lima, Peru. The ships on their lonely vigil were the only source of information about the spacecraft’s status for the MCC throughout the last half of my shift.

Tec Roberts’s new control center was working to perfection. After the Teletype of Mercury, the new Mission Control Center was a giant leap, a window to the New World of space. The Gemini telemetry list had doubled from Mercury. With 225 measurements, I could now review, during a remote site pass, one or two samples of the data seen by the controllers at the site. Trend monitoring of the spacecraft systems was becoming a reality due to the computer and communications breakthroughs generated by the space program.

The eight hours passed swiftly and my relief was palpable as I started shift handover to Hodge. In many ways, my first shift was like flying an aircraft for the first time. It was great to get back on the ground in one piece. My first shift as a flight director was over and, thank God, it was uneventful. I took off my vest and hung it on the rack at the side of the room. It was a good start.

Each flight director had another ordeal to endure. After a ten-hour shift (including handovers), he was expected to spend at least an hour at a press conference, feeding news to the hundreds of reporters covering the mission. I depended on the public affairs officer (PAO) just as I relied on my controllers. He would help me through press conferences (they sometimes felt like interrogation sessions) and make sure that the right word got out—and that the flight director’s tail was covered. The PAO really earned his pay when things went wrong. He was our first line of defense—and fortunately we had PAOs who were very good, and unflappable when things got a bit dicey during a mission. They would prep us on how to answer questions likely to come our way, show the flight director how to put his best foot forward—and keep the other one out of his mouth! I never quite got used to seeing my face on TV and in newspaper photos—but Marta assured me that I was the handsomest flight director she had ever married.