Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

The greatest focusing mechanism in the space program was the countdown. Clear, crisp, and unequivocal decisions had to be made during the final hours and minutes. As the count progressed, people in each area of the program came forward. After assessing the technical issues, all made their calls. Everyone swallowed some problems, bit their own bullets. Launch day was like a fresh start, a new day, and I loved it. My team started the countdown and checked out the MCC, then handed over to Griffin’s team for the CSM and Saturn systems testing. Lunney picked up for the launch, the handoffs between the three teams going flawlessly. Shortly after 10:00 A.M. in Houston, the race to the Moon got the wave from the starting flag.

The launch went smoothly, the Saturn rocket blasting the CSM into a low Earth orbit. To television viewers, as the engines ignited, there appeared to be one heart-stopping moment of hesitation. But because Apollo and its two-stage launch rocket weighed 1.3 million pounds, the launch acceleration was gradual, taking ten seconds to clear the tower.

The late morning liftoff dictated the orbital shift schedule. Lunney’s team, with all the crewmen generally awake, worked the day shift. I had the swing shift with Donn Eisele on watch in the spacecraft, and Griffin got the graveyard shift, staying in touch with Wally Schirra and Walt Cunningham. Schirra had set up a “duty watch” on board the command module, so that an astronaut would be awake throughout the entire mission. This plan was counter to the experience we had in Gemini and none of the flight directors thought Wally’s “watch” was a good idea. It was tough enough to sleep the first days in space and if someone is awake, rustling around or communicating, it is impossible.

Glynn Lunney had handed my team a clean spacecraft at the beginning of the sixth revolution. The trajectory experts in the Trench worked the maneuver sequence to set up a rendezvous with the Saturn IVB booster on Lunney’s morning shift. The CSM was troublefree, so my principal concern was a report by our weatherman that a low-pressure system was developing off Cuba, 750 miles south and east of Houston. With Houston’s proximity to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a hurricane could make it tough on Mission Control.

A half hour before we were to hand over the controls to Griffin’s Gold Team, Schirra said, “Houston, I have developed a head cold and have taken two aspirin. I’ve gone through eight or nine Kleenexes with some pretty good blows. I’m thinking about taking a decongestant or antibiotic.”

My team surgeon recommended the decongestant only. I took him to the press conference at 2:00 A.M. and was surprised by the large turnout. The doctor turned out to be the star of the show and, with few problems on the spacecraft, Schirra’s cold—the first space illness—made the headlines of newspapers across the country and grabbed time on the network telecasts.

At liftoff, three flight tests remained before Apollo would go for the lunar landing. We had a lot to get done. The flight control team tracked each objective and added new ones to exploit each opportunity. With a single shot to qualify a spacecraft, little was left to chance. The Apollo 7 flight plan was incredibly precise, breaking objectives down and literally keeping each minute and second chock-full of activity. The mission objectives are listed in a thick manual that spells out every detail of the required test. The flight plan was designed to cover all of these objectives—and if some weren’t accomplished, they would be added to the workload of the next flight. As the flight progressed the test results we received led us to update the flight objectives, add new tests, or modify existing ones. It always has been this way in spaceflight and will continue to be as long as missions are measured in days and weeks. Schirra knew the lunar game plan and understood that we had a lot to get done before we could take the next spacecraft to the Moon.

As the mission continued, Wally’s cold was as much a test of the flight control team as was flying the mission. The flight directors were hard pressed to satisfy a cranky Schirra and push ahead to clear the deck for the next mission. There was little that pleased Schirra about what we were doing at MCC, and the discomfort and irritability caused by his cold soon made him pretty testy with Cunningham and Eisele as well. Glynn Lunney, in particular, always seemed to be at the helm when Wally was testy with the ground team. By the midpoint of the mission, I realized how lucky I was to be working the night shift.

The video reports, seven to eleven minutes long, had caught the public’s fancy. They were dubbed “The Wally, Walt, and Donn Show” and aired once each morning during the Apollo pass between Corpus Christi, Texas, and Cape Kennedy, the only two ground stations equipped to pick up the transmissions. By the third day, Schirra canceled the daily TV broadcast with a clipped, “No further discussion.” We were left with the task of convincing a skeptical press that all was well between the operations team and the crew. Deke Slayton, embarrassed by Schirra’s outburst regarding the telecasts, murmured on the voice comm: “Christ, Wally, all you gotta do is flip a switch.”

By the fifth day, the headline in the Houston Chronicle declared, “Captain Awakes Grumpy.” The press started getting in their licks and the controllers counted the days until we could get a new crew. None of the mission rules discussed dealing with a grumpy commander.

Schirra finally relented on the broadcasts, and at one point the astronauts, trying to make amends, held up crudely lettered signs that read, “Hello from the lovely Apollo room, high atop everything.”

With Schirra and Cunningham asleep, my team would listen to Eisele talking in a hushed voice from his astronomy lab on high. He identified the stars and remarked on the vista from his platform as his partners, the “sleeping beauties,” rested.

With the lunar mission scheduled less than two months away, we started releasing our backup computers to the mission designers during the day to check out the new trajectory software coming on line. At night, with the Apollo 7 crew asleep, Charlesworth, using the same backup computers, started launch-abort training one floor above us for Apollo 8.

Meanwhile the low-pressure area had turned into a hurricane, crossed Cuba, and entered the Gulf. We were still keeping a close watch, but it appeared the full force would hit the Mississippi and Alabama coastline and not Houston. But I developed a contingency plan for the control center if the storm moved farther west.

Schirra continued to make life difficult and by the seventh day of the mission, both Kraft and Slayton were involved full-time, now arguing with Wally over an unsuited reentry. Schirra had been taking his shots freely at the controllers, but I was amazed when he started zinging Kraft and Slayton.

With a head cold, ear blockage during entry would be annoying at best, and at worst, painful and potentially disabling. If the astronauts reentered without their helmets they could pinch their nose and blow to try and clear the ear blockage. This is the technique used to clear ears when descending in an aircraft. The designers, however, pressed for a suited reentry in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure. It was one of the classic risk trade-offs we run during a mission, but this time the argument was going public.

While the bosses argued with Schirra on the voice comm, the teams continued grinding away with the planning, chalking off the objectives, patiently explaining each and every “funny” to the crew as we were able to develop answers. Controllers use the term “anomaly” or “funny” to describe something in the CSM or LM systems operations that is not as expected. Every item of this nature is logged and pursued until it is understood, and each is discussed extensively with the crew.