Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

The launch phase of the mission was the toughest to prepare for. The flight director, the Mission Control team, and the astronauts had to be tuned to perfection for this phase to make the most fundamental decisions—continue the mission or abort. The real-time decisions were made with the entire world listening and watching. So our simulation dress rehearsals had to come as close to reality—and the unpredictable—as possible. We took a quantum leap forward when we got digital computers and systems that worked faster and faster with each new upgrade. They brought us into that virtual reality that made simulation training almost indistinguishable from the real thing, particularly as the missions became more complex. This technology also replicated the atmosphere—the tension and intensity—that prevailed in actual missions.

Technology and training were pushing us to the ultimate standard: failure was not an option. In simulation and in real time controllers knew that if the team made the right decisions, we would accomplish the mission and bring our men home safely. If we were wrong in real time, we would ruin the mission and the crew might be killed.

In the course of an abort training session, for example, eight to ten simulated launches were run in a six-to eight-hour day. Some sessions might be only seconds in duration, demanding instant decisions for an on-or near-the-pad abort. These were perhaps the most intense. I remember one when Kraft, in the middle of a training run, his nerves and reflexes set at a hair-trigger level, unexpectedly threw the abort switch and shouted “Abort! Abort!” After the crew in the capsule simulator got the abort information from Control and responded right on the money, Chris got on the intercom and asked, “Who said ‘abort’?” In a somewhat embarrassing postmortem debriefing, it turned out that no controller had called and there was no reason to perform an abort. The only voice Chris had heard was his own. We kidded him about this for years afterward—but we all knew that any one of us, when we were primed and on edge, could have done the same thing. Not doing it was an important part of what a simulation was all about. As a Catholic, I found debriefings were almost like confessing my sins to a priest—except that this was done over a microphone, so the whole “congregation” heard my mea culpas, particularly when I had to say what all of us learned to say: “I don’t know.” Knowing what we didn’t know was how we kept people from getting killed.

The Gemini 9 mission was a brute, and the two-month turnaround went far too swiftly. Gene Cernan and Tom Stafford were my crew. Cernan was the easiest of the third group of astronauts to know. On the first four Gemini missions, he worked as the booster tanks monitor or a CapCom.

In the eyes of the controllers, Gene was one of us. I knew Cernan in a different way. The Catholic priest at my church, Father Eugene Cargill, was also Gene’s chaplain. The padre was invited to the Cape for launches and was a familiar face at the crew’s splashdown parties. Father Cargill followed our missions closely and always gave a special blessing at the morning mass before my missions as flight director.

Although I knew Cernan, Stafford, with a wide smile and a perpetual hoarseness to his voice, was a bit harder to get a fix on. He kept his opinions to himself, generally letting Cernan talk. Tom was in the second astronaut class, out of the Air Force, studious and balanced, while Cernan’s antics were characteristic of Navy pilots who land airplanes on aircraft carriers. Cernan was my favorite for his carefree and jovial attitude, unabashed patriotism, and close personal relationship with the controllers. He was also a skilled systems guy.

Gemini 9 had virtually everything packed into the first seventy-two hours of the mission—three different rendezvous techniques being tested for Apollo, a docking, and a space walk by Cernan with a jet backpack. The Air Force proposed that Cernan fly the jetpack without being tethered to the Gemini. Slayton and Kraft made their position clear: “He will fly without a tether over our dead bodies.” The Air Force lost that argument.

Things did not go well on the Atlas/Agena launch. Twenty seconds before cutoff, we lost control when the Atlas engines swung abruptly to the side, spinning the rocket. For the second time, the Agena target was reduced to junk as bits and pieces crashed into the Atlantic. There was no question the controllers were beginning to feel snake-bit as we passed the word to Stafford and Cernan and scrubbed the Gemini countdown. Before we left Mission Control, we had received orders to develop a backup mission. There was no party that night at the Singing Wheel, but by now our team had developed a resilience that we believed could overcome this and any other difficulty.

The Gemini program office had directed McDonnell Aircraft to develop a backup rendezvous target. The target was called the augmented target docking adapter (ATDA). It was assembled using the nose (aerodynamic) shroud, docking collar, and command system from an Agena and a reentry attitude control package from a Gemini. The whole lashup was launched on an Atlas rocket. The backup could perform every Agena function except on-orbit maneuvering. The most distinguishing characteristic was the ten-foot aerodynamic nose shroud that opened like a clamshell and was jettisoned after launch phase to expose the docking system. My control team, aware of the backup option, had developed procedures, rules, and plans for the mission. The remote teams were advised to remain at their sites and we began a two-week turnaround for the backup mission. To keep the paperwork straight, the mission was renamed Gemini 9A.

The ATDA launch on June 1 went well, reaching the planned circular orbit at an altitude of 160 nautical miles. I passed the good news to Stafford and Cernan on Pad 19 and continued counting down to the second launch. As the target passed in its orbit over Bermuda, the ATDA controller, Jim Saultz, passed a warning on to me. “Flight, I think we’ve got some problems with the ATDA. We’re using the attitude control fuel like crazy, and I did not see telemetry indications of the nose shroud separation.” Five minutes later, after reviewing the target’s telemetry data, the Canary Island CapCom advised me, “Flight, we’re really hosing out the fuel. I recommend we secure the attitude control jets before we lose it all.” My response was brief, “Go ahead, shut it off.” In less than twelve minutes of flight we had used one of the two tanks that supplied fuel to the ATDA attitude thrusters.

I turned to Saultz and ordered, “Jim, keep me advised of any further developments. I’m going to follow the Gemini-Titan launch countdown from now on.” The mission rules for launch were simple: as long as the ATDA was in an orbit suitable for the three planned rendezvous demonstrations we were Go to launch the Gemini 9. Docking with the ATDA was considered a secondary objective.

The Gemini countdown entered the scheduled hold at launch minus three minutes, while waiting for the precise liftoff time needed to set up the orbital conditions for rendezvous on the third orbit. During the brief hold in the countdown, the ground test equipment computed the exact steering information to guide the Titan into the ATDA orbit. When the countdown resumed, the ground support equipment failed to provide the update to the Titan guidance. The launch was scrubbed for forty-eight hours.

During the two-day turnaround period, we conducted several tests with the ATDA using ground commands to extend and retract the docking mechanism and fire the attitude control jets to kick the shroud loose. We concluded that the target nose shroud was only partially deployed. While we regrouped, the Titan team fixed the electronics box that had failed to send the update.