Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

Six hours after liftoff, on the fourth revolution over the Hawaii site, and following nine maneuvers, Schirra smoothly braked to a standoff position on Gemini 7. Sensing history in the making, Jerry Bostick, the rendezvous FIDO, wanted an American flag for each of the mission controllers to celebrate the world’s first rendezvous. Unable to find several hundred flags in the stores, he had sent his secretary on the rounds of funeral homes in the Clear Lake area, collecting the flags they mounted on the fenders of cars for military funerals. As the two spacecraft closed together, Bostick started walking between the consoles passing out small flags to each controller. As Schirra closed to within feet of Borman and Lovell, Kraft gave the command and the flags were raised over each of the consoles. I mentally savored the moment of America’s triumph like a fine wine.

With the rendezvous complete, Kraft handed over to my team, and for the next four and a half hours the two spacecraft continued their aerial ballet like two friends celebrating a reunion, only this time in space. Just prior to sleep, Schirra performed a pair of maneuvers to establish a standoff position that separated the spacecraft by ten miles.

My shift was brisk and there was little time to celebrate. My team needed to get the final planning together to bring Stafford and Schirra home the next day, and when this was done, review the status of Borman and Lovell’s spacecraft to make sure it could stay in space for the planned duration of the mission. At the conclusion of Kraft’s press conference, reporters offered a champagne toast to Kraft’s team and America’s new space record. I watched the celebration on the TV at my console.

At the conclusion of my shift’s press conference, Martin Caidin, one of the great pioneers in aviation writing, Jim Maloney, and others in the press corps stood up and passed out champagne glasses just as I had seen them do for Kraft’s conference. Caidin passed me one wrapped in a red, white, and blue ribbon, then filled my glass and then the others at my press table. He poured from a bottle wrapped in a towel until the glasses were brimming, the liquid straw-colored and bubbly. It looked good, and as they offered me a toast, my ego soared. As I drank deeply the taste was familiar, but it sure as hell was not champagne. Caidin then unwrapped the bottle and set it in front of me. It was Canada Dry ginger ale. I had been had, a press gotcha on the White Team. There was no alternative but to laugh with them. It was that way with the media on Gemini; they were a great bunch of talented and dedicated professionals. (My mother came down for the lunar landing years later. Meeting ABC correspondent Jules Bergman was the highlight of her trip. She talked about it for years afterward. I mean, Gene Kranz was a guy she had known since he had been born—but Jules was a star!) Gemini 76—the biggest and riskiest one so far—had worked. We had calculated the risks and, in space and on the ground, won our bet. It was one hell of a great day.

Borman and Lovell continued their heroic mission. Borman finally got out of his suit, two of the three fuel cells ceased operations, two thrusters failed, and we were down to 4 percent of the orbital fuel when Gemini 7 came home. Their mission was longer than any of the planned Apollo missions and would hold the U.S. duration record for the next eight years. It was a great triumph.

All too soon, it was another time of change. Glynn Lunney launched the first Apollo Saturn developed by the Marshall team from Mission Control Center’s second-floor control room as Hodge and I were preparing for Gemini 8. Kraft turned the last five missions over to his students and began preparation for Apollo flight director duties. Hodge planned to leave for Apollo after Gemini 8, and I would follow him after Gemini 9. We would join Kraft for the first manned Apollo mission. Flight directors Glynn Lunney and Cliff Charlesworth would close out the final three Gemini missions.

Due to staffing limitations, Hodge and I elected to support Gemini 8 on a two-shift basis. This was the dumbest staffing decision we ever made. With the planning, training, mission reviews, and the press conferences, by the time we were ready to fly we were flat-out exhausted. The two-shift arrangement, however, fitted in with the Agena team’s staffing. They had only two teams of controllers.

The astronauts for this mission were Dave Scott and Neil Armstrong. Scott, a former Air Force pilot, later flew on Apollo 9 and Apollo 15 as well, racking up more than 546 cumulative hours in spaceflight and more than twenty hours doing EVAs. Armstrong had done it all. Neil was a decorated Navy combat pilot in Korea. Then as a civilian, he spent seven years as a test pilot at Edwards AFB and was one of the few who had flown the X-15 to the fringe of space. He was the first civilian pilot hired into the astronaut corps. Neil would spend more than 205 cumulative hours in space, and would be the first man on the Moon. He had worked with Buzz Aldrin as a CapCom on my Gemini 5 team. With the successful rendezvous on Gemini 76, it fell to the Gemini 8 crew, supported by Hodge’s and my teams, to capture the next big objective: the physical docking of two spacecraft. If all went well, we would attempt our second space walk during orbit.

At last the Agena target performed as advertised, rising from Pad 14 and then five minutes later separating from the Atlas and reigxniting its engine to maneuver into a 180-mile circular orbit. At cutoff, Brooks was all smiles when the Agena responded to his commands. Hodge’s attention now turned to the astronauts, Armstrong and Scott, and the Gemini on Pad 19.

Since I was spending most of my time planning for Gemini 9, I had little experience with this crew. Hodge had debated the mission rules, run the simulations, and briefed the pilots. My association with the crew was limited to the handful of reentry simulations to get my team pulled together for the mission.

For Gemini 8 we had an experienced Gemini team, a novice Agena team that had never seen a spacecraft in orbit, a crew that would be docking with an Agena for the first time, and MCC and remote site computer systems running brand-new software. Adding to the level of concern was the fact that the Agena had failed on its previous mission—many at MCC considered it the potentially fatal weak link.

The Gemini 8 launch was textbook. Hodge’s team smoothly guided the crew through the rendezvous maneuvers to the handover point where the crew took it in on their own. The mission was progressing smoothly, and I arrived for my twelve-hour shift just as the crew and the MCC were comparing data for final rendezvous maneuvers. The Agena was performing flawlessly. During the docking it would be positioned perpendicular to the direction of orbital travel.

To maneuver the unmanned Agena from the ground we had to send time-tagged commands known as stored program commands (SPC) to its onboard computer. The commands were prepared at the MCC and sent to the remote sites. When the sites transmitted the commands to the Agena there was a complicated error-checking routine on board the Agena to make sure the commands were correctly inserted into the Agena computer’s memory, which the ground controllers could read using the site computer and could automatically compare with the commands transmitted from the site. This was a new computer program, used for the first time on Gemini 8. As a backup the site recorded the commands as they left the antenna and checked these automatically with the intended command load. We called it an echo check. The favored technique was always to compare the commands actually in the Agena’s memory. If you couldn’t automatically compare the data, the Agena controller could perform a manual data comparison using the recorded telemetry of the Agena memory. This process, however, often took several hours. To avoid glitching the mission time-line, the controllers would normally give their Go based on the echo check if the auto memory comparison failed.