Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

A lunar trajectory consists of a string of maneuvers, one to leave Earth orbit, several to adjust the trajectory en route to the Moon, and then two maneuvers to enter lunar orbit. The return to Earth requires another maneuver that is again adjusted during the return. At the time Kraft asked us for a decision we did not have integrated trajectory software; no maneuver in this sequence had yet been fitted end to end with any other.

Kraft was in his element Monday morning as he assembled the pieces of the plan, weighed the alternatives, and sorted out his options. Bostick said, “Chris, if the MCC support team can get the lunar programs into the computers, I don’t see any reason why we can’t do it.” I gave Kraft the Go for my division and finished with the staffing plan for the flight directors and the control teams.

The group then selected the week of December 20 as the launch window. This meant a CSM end-of-mission landing in the Pacific Ocean. This was a major early decision; the Navy could cover only one ocean as the primary landing area. Once the decision was made, we had to live with it for the rest of the Apollo program. The Pacific gave us the promise of a large ocean target and warmer, calmer waters—or so we hoped. The Navy liked the decision and began planning for operations from Pearl Harbor.

To keep this mission clearly separated from the current plans, I designated Apollo 8 as the X mission. Until the mission was approved, we had to keep all mission data for the originally planned E mission. The X mission was now joining the ranks of the Gemini 4 space walk, the Gemini 76 rendezvous, and Mueller’s all-up Saturn test concept as examples of the high-risk, high-gain leadership we had in the 1960s. The decision to go to the Moon with Apollo 8 was made before we had ever flown a manned Apollo spacecraft.

The X mission meetings occurred daily, each one pounding another element of the plan into place. By August 16, one week later, the team had expanded and for the first time I felt I was dealing from a full deck. We were continually admonished to keep what we were doing a secret, but it was like hiding an elephant in your bathtub. The constant closed-door huddles, the changing work priorities, and the longer hours gave us away.

A press conference was held on August 19 to announce the official changing of the mission sequence, moving Frank Borman’s crew into the December launch slot and formally designating the mission Apollo 8. The announcement described this as a high “Earth orbital” mission, with a lunar option. It took only a few seconds for the press to figure out what the plan really was.

Kraft wanted to use Lunney, Charlesworth, and me for both Apollo 7 and 8. I advised him I intended to stay with the current lead flight director assignments, shifting Charlesworth forward to cover the Apollo 8 mission.

In the fall of 1968, I was like a guy juggling grenades wrapped in barbed wire. I was grappling with my new duties as acting division chief. I discovered there is a hell of a difference between being a deputy and being the boss. NowI had to cope with politics, budgets, job assignments, and direction of an organization of 400 amid the rapidly evolving flight program. I didn’t know it at the time while I was working as Hodge’s deputy, but Chris and he had had disagreements on a number of policy issues. I believed that Chris thought John was too conservative to be a flight director. Looking back, I see why Hodge let merun Flight Control. I suspect he felt that his days as a division chief were numbered.

My salvation was Hodge’s former secretary, Lois Ransdell. Lois adopted me into the office and showed me the ropes. Lois was precise and direct, and had a fiercely protective attitude about “her division.” She became my trusted adjutant, the guardian of the office door and my schedule. Years later, she was given an honorary flight director title, selecting the color pink. In the history of Flight Control, only two others, Bill Tindall and John O’Neill, my deputy director during the shuttle era, have been awarded this recognition.

All around us, the tumult of the 1960s continued. The war in Vietnam had intensified. Television brought the casualties into our homes at night, but we did not yet realize we were losing. Campuses across the land were seething as students protested the war and marched for civil rights. Race riots had broken out in major cities in the summer of 1967. Then, after Martin Luther King was shot and killed on April 4, 1968, there were riots in more than a hundred cities. In June Robert F. Kennedy was killed while campaigning for the Democratic nomination for president.

Even the space program was picketed and bomb threats were reported. Everything we carried into the Mission Control Center was inspected. Security guards roamed our parking lots during missions. We practiced bomb threat evacuations from Mission Control, always leaving a small team to hold the fort if we had a crew aloft. These events provided a violent background to our final charge to reach the Moon. Fortunately, the public’s support for the lunar program remained high. Apollo was a bright glow of promise in a dark and anxious era.

Apollo 7 would be the first manned Apollo mission, and the shakedown cruise for the redesigned Command and Service Module. Each of the spacecraft systems would be tested in flight, the recorded data analyzed by both controller and engineer during the only flight test to qualify the CSM before actually going to the Moon. Wally Schirra, Walt Cunningham, and Donn Eisele had been assigned as the backups for the ill-fated Apollo 1 two months prior to the pad accident. Now it was their turn to fly after nearly three years of training.

Schirra, the first astronaut to fly all three programs, was the veteran whose cool performance during the Gemini 6 pad shutdown and whose almost fanatical preparation for missions put him high in the ranks of those regarded as “heavy hitters” by the controllers. Wally, ever caustic, never kept his opinions to himself. While preparing for the mission, he let it be known that he was damned unhappy with the inclusion of the TV camera in the spacecraft and the planned “dog-and-pony shows” that would be broadcast from the command module. He considered it an invasion of the privacy of the crew and the sanctuary of the spacecraft. But Kraft was equally adamant that the American public, which was underwriting the program, get an opportunity to see space flight in action through these live video broadcasts. The TV camera won.

A launch countdown takes two days. When it starts, there is relief because the tedium of the training period is over. Once launched, the only option is to move forward, facing problems, identifying solutions, forging ahead. A flight control team is an elite force, playing in a sort of Super Bowl with each mission. The real difference, of course, is that we are not playing a game and losing is never an option. If Apollo 7 succeeded, we would be on schedule for the lunar landing. If we failed, the chances were high that there would be no lunar landing before the decade ended.

During the final hours before launch, every engineer in the program has the right to voice any and all concerns he might have by sending last-minute memos and making phone calls to tell the flight team what worries him about some aspect of testing or some unexplained glitch. The maiden launch of a manned spacecraft brings many systems on line for the first time. We were given a lot to worry about from the new North American engineers.

The launch team attempts to give us a perfect system for liftoff. But no matter how hard they try, with thousands of components, 850 crew controls and displays, and 350 telemetry measurements, there is no such animal as a perfect spacecraft. We always have some glitches, some uncertainty. The same can be said for the MCC ground system. We had our share of hiccups.