Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

Proving that this theory would work became not only a goal, but an obsession. If we accomplished a rendezvous, we would validate the software that controlled the Gemini spacecraft as well as the crew’s fallback manual backups. There was no time to waste; we needed to dramatically improve our learning curve in order to be ready for the far more complex and sophisticated rendezvous and docking procedures necessary for a lunar landing. Within hours of the launch failure of our Agena target and the consequent scrubbing of Schirra and Stafford’s Gemini flight, we were discussing an alternative mission. A proposal from McDonnell’s senior management seemed to offer the most promising option. Walter Burke, the McDonnell vice-president and general manager for space and missiles, and his deputy, John Yardley, suggested we take a page from the Russians’ script by launching two Gemini spacecraft in rapid succession from the same launch pad. He proposed using the Gemini 7 spacecraft, flying the subsequent long duration mission, as the rendezvous target for Gemini 6.

Frank Borman, the commander of the next Gemini mission, overheard the discussion and became an immediate convert. The proposal got a cold reception from the Air Force and NASA Cape management, so Yardley, a close friend of Kraft’s, took the proposal to the MSC director, Robert Gilruth. (The respect for Gilruth was so great that virtually everyone in the program addressed him as “Dr. Gilruth.” Only those very close to him, like Kraft, ever called him “Bob.”) Within twenty hours of the Agena failure, Yardley and Burke convinced Gilruth to give the dual launch concept to his staff. In short order, the NASA Gemini program manager, Chuck Mathews, and Kraft agreed to check it out with their people. In the early afternoon, Hodge called a division staff meeting, apprised us of the dual launch plan, and gave us an hour and a half to see if we could pull it off. I was short on staff since most of my controllers were returning from the remote sites. After a brief meeting with the remnants of my branch, we concluded that it could be done and that the concept was not fatally flawed. I passed the word to Hodge, who passed it to Gilruth: “Flight Control didn’t see anything we couldn’t do, or anything we couldn’t work around.”

Later in the afternoon Gilruth had talked with Dr. George Mueller, the agency’s associate administrator, in Washington. After a day of intense discussions and, only forty-eight hours after the Agena failure, a press conference was held at the Texas White House. Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s press secretary, announced the planned rendezvous of two manned spacecraft. The mission was assigned the designator Gemini 76, combining two Gemini missions into a single mission by using the long-duration Gemini 7 spacecraft as the target for Gemini 6. Within hours of their return from the remote sites, our guys were at their desks writing the data plans, procedures, and site confidence tests.

The mission concept was simple. Borman and Lovell would be launched first (before Gemini 6) on their fourteen-day Gemini 7 mission. Immediately after launch of the Gemini 7 spacecraft two things were scheduled to take place. First, everybody at the launch site would carefully comb the entire area looking for any debris that might have fallen off the booster as well as checking for any damage to the pad. Then the Titan carrying the Gemini 6 spacecraft crewed by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford ( the previous launch of Gemini 6 had been scrubbed after the Agena failure) would be erected on the same pad used to launch Gemini 7 and the pre-launch checkout could begin. If all went well, we would be ready to launch Gemini 6 seven days after Gemini 7.

The day after the press conference Flight Control was in high gear. My branch went about its work with the kind of cheerful exuberance one experiences all too rarely in life. It was like watching Patton’s Third Army break off their offensive, perform a pivotal maneuver, turn, and march 100 miles in the dead of winter to relieve Bastogne. In forty-eight hours, we had redeployed and were back on the attack. The launch was scheduled for early December of 1965.

In order to move ahead to more complex missions while Hodge and I were building up the Flight Control Division, the Mission Planning and Analysis Division was expanding to develop mission concepts, design the trajectories, and write the software for the MCC computers. When I joined the Space Task Group in 1960, the Mission Analysis Branch was the largest organization in Chuck Mathews’s division. The branch eventually grew to a division led by a perfectly balanced pair of leaders, John Mayer and Bill Tindall. They were an unlikely pair and, except for the challenge of space, probably would never have met. Mayer was short, dark-haired, with a nose for finding answers to questions that appeared to have none. He had an air of aloofness until he got to know you. With his sharp features and horn-rimmed glasses, he could pass as an accountant for the IRS rather than a space pioneer. Tindall, the deputy, with the easy manner of a farm boy, was tall, blond, and youthful in spirit and manner. He was gregarious, short-tempered but quick to recover from an outburst. Whatever needed to be done at the cutting edge, these guys could do it. Although the scientists and engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology spearheaded the development of the Apollo guidance and navigation systems and software, many of the technical studies and prototype software were designed by Mayer and Tindall’s division, experience that would come in very handy when we had to come up with alternative ways to achieve our objectives.

This unlikely pair pioneered trajectory design in Project Mercury. They presided over three sections of engineers and mathematicians. The highly talented and resourceful women of the computing unit, Mary Shep Burton, Cathy Osgood, and Shirley Hunt, started out in Mercury with mechanical calculators, manually plotting the results of their measurements and calculations on graph paper. But in Gemini, with key-punched card decks and computers, they started planning every aspect of the launches, the rendezvous, and reentry. They provided us with options that just months before we did not know existed. We had no choice but to believe in the data and methodology they came up with, so our trust in their work was absolute. They designed the mission, then loaded their software in the computers in the spacecraft and in the MCC. Their work had to be perfect—and it was, thanks to increasing computer capacity, speed, and availability.

The rendezvous on the coming Gemini 76 mission was a trajectory show. The Trench and the flight designers from Mission Planning and Analysis were the orchestrators. Mission Control and the launch team followed their lead to the last note, improvising the music only when things fell apart. During a mission, Mayer and Tindall’s division operated a stand-alone computer in the ACR—the Auxiliary Computer Room. Throughout the mission their computer ran in parallel with that of the mission team. If we crashed and couldn’t generate the data, they fed the answers into MCC. The MCC frequently had to load new software into new computers, and the ACR was our only backup if we got into trouble.

Mission deployment for Gemini 76 started November 21. Several of the new remote controllers were Air Force officers assigned to Flight Control to prepare for the Air Force man in space program. Ed Fendell was deploying to Hawaii with Bill (Big Shoes) Bucholz, an Air Force captain assigned to my branch. Bucholz was a blond, broad-shouldered Missourian who croaked when he talked. Both of us graduated from Parks College in 1954 and entered flight training the same year. His family had grown rapidly to eight children, and the only affordable transportation for the entire bunch was an old large black Cadillac hearse that seated twelve. The hearse often served another purpose. After the mission deployment briefings the remote site teams often partied in downtown Houston. When they wanted to come home through the downtown traffic the controllers would form up their cars in a line behind Bill’s hearse and turn on their lights mimicking a funeral procession. The ploy worked every time.