Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

With Hodge moving into his new job I officially became the chief of the Flight Control Division (FCD), the administrative home for the majority of the MCC flight controllers. I reported to Kraft as one of his four division chiefs.

The FCD included the MCC flight directors, assistant flight directors, trajectory controllers (the Trench), booster and spacecraft systems engineers, science and procedures officers, and the simulation instructors (SimSup and his team). Sixteen of the twenty-one controllers normally present in the main control room, as well as SimSup and his team, were provided by the division. The FCD comprised seven branches and two small groups corresponding to the major MCC operations functions and had about 300 personnel. The operations branches were Flight Dynamics (trajectory), CSM and LM systems, Experiments, Mission Simulation, Flight Control, and a Requirements branch that assured the MCC configured correctly for simulations and missions. The flight directors and booster engineers from Marshall were two small groups at my staff level.

The FCD controllers developed the mission strategy, performed pre-mission planning, developed CSM, LM, and experiment schematics and troubleshooting procedures. They wrote the mission rules, supported the design and check-out of the spacecraft and MCC, and performed the integrated crew-controller training. With the exception of the headquarters mission director and mission scientist the remaining MCC controllers were provided by other organizations at the MSC.

While Charlesworth and Lunney pulled together the teams for the lunar mission, I started preparing with my team for Apollo 9. Mission planning and preparation takes about one year, with the final training starting about three months before launch. The objectives for each mission were vastly different from the preceding mission and now, with the launches spaced at two-month intervals, every flight director and controller was working several missions simultaneously, constantly juggling schedules and priorities. The workload was punishing. Sixty-to seventy-hour workweeks became commonplace.

From the early days of space virtually all of the trajectory data coded in the MCC originated from the Mission Planning and Analysis Division (MPAD). MPAD consisted of several hundred mathematicians and scientists, supported by a large array of high-tech contractors. John Mayer was the boss and Bill Tindall was the deputy. In late 1968, Tindall was reassigned as a staff engineer for George Low. In the restructuring after the fire, Low gave Tindall the task of uniting the entire Apollo team, civil servants and contractors, into a working group to determine how to use the hardware and software most effectively to achieve each mission’s objectives. Tindall’s genius was his ability to focus on issues and coax diverse people to work together. He combined the friendliness of a puppy with a comic wit. His operational intelligence was brilliant. We formed a particularly strong bond, and our families spent a lot of time together at his beach house. Although our technical backgrounds were very different, we were both emotional about our work, perpetually optimistic, and gave our people unconditional support.

Bill Tindall swung into the Apollo 8 mission with zest, resolving issues from the simplest to the difficult. While we were slugging it out with Schirra on Apollo 7, Tindall was holding daily meetings to work out how we would navigate to the Moon, and how to get into and out of lunar orbit. Allegiance to Tindall did not come easy for the Trench. For a while, Bostick’s team believed that Tindall was really doing their job. Bostick’s deputy, Phil Shaffer, and Llewellyn complained about these turf issues, while Tindall tried patiently and persistently to gain their support. By the time of Apollo 8, however, the Trench had become Tindall’s most zealous group of converts, actively supporting, debating, and testing his plans, carrying into the training his decisions and mission rules.

We were, in a sense, in a race against ourselves, every event and decision converging on the launch date. Tindall was unsinkable. Only a month away from the Apollo 8 launch, he was still arguing with Frank Borman on the best way to navigate the return journey from the Moon.

To the men of the Trench, Apollo 8 was the mission; it would be their greatest achievement. Living in the world of pure mathematics, they were the first generation fully at home with computers—incredibly young, dreamers and visionaries who were venturing in their imaginations and theories with the crew into the unknown, working at the very edge of our knowledge and primed to overcome any difficulties that came their way. Their work, coded into computers and plotted in piles of charts and graphs littering their consoles, was the foundation for every computer instruction in the Saturn rocket and aboard the spacecraft. The Trench and the trajectory designers were totally dependent on the millions of lines of code that they wrote in a variety of computer languages such as COBOL and HAL. These computations would hurl the Saturn toward the Moon, and then would swing the CSM into lunar orbit.

Apollo 11 would be the flight for the ages, but Apollo 8 was a very big leap that drew on one’s spiritual and moral resolve. For us it would become the second greatest Christmas story every told. Think about the imagery of a rocket soaring through limitless space, so close to heaven the passengers could reach out and touch the face of God.

After the methodical intensity of the testing, the frequent crisis meetings, the incessant intrusion of the media, and the briefings of “just one more” VIP, the last couple of days before launch always seemed strange. All of a sudden time and motion stopped, as it seems to on a ship caught in the doldrums. I initially welcomed this brief and strange interlude preceding each mission as the final time to catch a breath. Then as the clock kicked over into the last twenty-four hours, the minutes seemed to hang.

This was my first mission as FCD chief. Success belonged to the team; failure was ultimately my responsibility. Even though I was not flying this mission, I went through the same emotional and physical process as my controllers. It was tough to stay away from the control center—and stay out of the way of the guys doing the job—especially during the final hours before Apollo 8. The team understood my anxiety and called me to report, “The count is on schedule and they are in fueling. Why don’t you have a beer and get some sleep. We’ll call if anything comes up.”

The evening before the launch of Apollo 8, a visitor arrived whose presence told you something powerful, something historic, was taking place. He was Charles Lindbergh. He belonged to a more romantic time, when flight was still more an art than a science. His career and his life created a kind of vapor trail that stretched across the years. Lindbergh was with us, as he should have been, when Americans reached for the Moon, so long the object of man’s curiosity and dreams. Perhaps more than anyone in the history of flight, he had inspired human beings to explore the skies above them. Commandingly tall, his hair gray and his manner both reserved and modest, he was an honored guest at the invitation of Wally Schirra at a very private party given for the astronauts and a few of their friends.

The plane Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927 was powered by a single engine. Lindbergh had sailed through uncharted skies, “hacking it out,” as Wally put it, “with the most primitive of technical equipment.” No radio, no radar, a windshield a bird could break. Lindbergh’s presence was a kind of laying on of hands. I felt that he had handed the stick and rudder over to the astronauts.