Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

The Green Team started arriving at Mission Control two hours after midnight. Cliff Charlesworth was at the flight director’s console, backed up by a group of Trench controllers barely out of college. To a great extent, this was their show. For the first time, man would leave the Earth’s gravity and be captured by the gravity of another heavenly body. The Trench would provide the guidance and navigation. Working closely throughout the early morning hours with John Mayer’s mission planners, they fine-tuned their equipment, their techniques, and themselves. Mission Control is a big, big space, but there is no room in it for ego, only for flawless teamwork.

Sitting in the control center and surrounding buildings were a bunch of very nervous designers, engineers, and computer programmers. All of their work since Kennedy’s speech in 1961 was about to be tested. Every assumption, trade-off, and decision they made in creating the system was about to be put on the line. They were threading the needle, shooting a spacecraft from a rotating Earth at the leading edge of the Moon, a moving target a quarter of a million miles away, passing sixty miles in front of it three days after launch.

Buried in the dungeons of the auxiliary computing room was Hal Beck, an early entrant to the Space Task Group. Now he was the chief of the lunar mission design. His work of almost a decade was about to come to fruition. This was payback for the years of freezing at his desk, thermostats turned down to cool the computers in their office complex. Wrapped in sweaters with a heater at his feet in the midst of a broiling Houston summer, Hal represented the labor, the frustration, and the exuberance of almost eight years of work by the mission planners.

Chances are you have never heard of Hal Beck, who grew up, as many of us did, believing in Buck Rogers. He was one of the unsung heroes of Apollo, of whom there were many. It may not stretch the truth to say that without the likes of him we would not have made it to the Moon.

The next morning, shortly after dawn, I found myself in Mission Control, wearing a green vest hand-tailored by Marta (on occasion I wore a vest the color of the other leads for their flights). In the Trench, FIDO Jay Greene, RETRO Chuck Deiterich, and Gran Paules—the GUIDO—were racing the clock. The three had joined Flight Control after Gemini and had grown in their skills during the Apollo unmanned missions. Greene and Paules flew their first manned mission on Apollo 7. When the countdown resumed after the planned hold, Jay Greene finished configuring his displays for launch. After he gave the command, “Flight, FIDO is Go for launch,” he muttered a silent prayer that it all worked. In Mission Control, for a few moments, time seemed suspended, everything happening in slow motion. Then in a collective fashion, the momentum built and Mission Control surged forward. Today we would go to the edge of the Moon.

It was at moments like this that we counted on “Captain Refsmmat,” our imaginary mascot. In the Trench a “refsmmat” is shorthand for “reference to stable member matrix,” a set of equations used among controllers, crews, and flight designers as the mathematical means to determine angles with reference to navigational stars. It is the one constant that ties together all of the other reference systems used during a mission, often as simple as a line drawn from the center of the Earth through the launch pad. With data from navigational stars and a refsmmat, the crew can determine the spacecraft’s position and velocity in space with the spacecraft computer. The guidance officer at the control center is the keeper of the refsmmats during the mission, synchronizing the ground and spacecraft updates so that the computations will always agree.

The Captain was born during a discussion between John Llewellyn and a newcomer to the Flight Dynamics Branch. Standing by the coffee pot, the rookie asked Llewellyn the name of a controller who had just placed an IOU in the cup next to the pot. Llewellyn responded instantly, “Sheeet, man—that’s Captain Refsmmat, the ideal flight controller! He’s the best we’ve ever had in the Trench.” The new guy nodded knowingly, glad to pick up the name of his new working partners, especially one considered the model for the Trench.

Ed Pavelka, a gifted FIDO of the Gemini era, heard of Llewellyn’s joke and decided to sketch a picture of Captain Refsmmat for the branch. Within days, a two-foot cartoon was hanging in his office. Almost immediately, ideas from other Trench inhabitants poured in and Captain Refsmmat was outfitted in the tools of his trade. He wore a pot helmet with a hinged top opening to a radar antenna and truth-seeking glasses with a black line inscribed across the lens showing the correct deorbit attitude. He had a supply of refsmmats in a pouch on his belt and a variety of awards and decorations, consistent with his august status as the ideal controller.

The Captain was a patriot. He wore a crisp military jacket with captain’s bars on the lapel and a pair of khaki shorts. With knobby knees, tennis shoes, and a broad military brassard, he was an apt replica of the ideal. For all of the things wrong in the world, Captain Refsmmat stood for what is right. Pavelka hung the cartoon on a gray metal locker in the hallway, and within days graffiti started to appear, expressing the various controllers’ thoughts, opinions, gotchas. Over the weeks and the months, the graffiti provided an outlet for the working guys’ feelings about their work, their bosses, and life in general.

Captain Refsmmat lived in Flight Control during the Apollo and Skylab years. He flew our missions, earning his medals for tough assignments and new worlds he had conquered. Today he was the fourth member sitting with the trajectory team in the Trench.

At 6:51 A.M. Central Standard Time, less than an hour after dawn, Apollo 8 lumbered skyward with Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders on board. The earth orbital check-out and maneuver injecting the spacecraft onto a lunar trajectory was uneventful.

I was just an observer for this mission but I remember the feelings of pride and relief the instant the Apollo 8 crew left Earth for the Moon. After the launch, my feelings hit a new peak when the translunar injection time came and went. Then when I heard the crew report the maneuver’s completion, it really hit me. I had to get up and walk outside because I was so happy I was crying. Being a bystander in Mission Control is tough—and doubly tough on a flight director and new division chief who had nothing to do except wait and hope and pray.

Observer status for me was a living hell. I never liked the viewing room, which was reserved for families, politicians, and the wheeler-dealer contractors. I have never felt comfortable with the high rollers, so if I was not on a console I roamed the back rooms, looking for a place to plug in my headset.

Apollo 8 was one of the best spacecraft ever produced by North American. The systems controllers continually searched their telemetry for the slightest fault, constantly reassuring themselves and their flight directors that, “No, Flight, we don’t have any funnies.” On the second manned flight of the CSM, only seven spacecraft discrepancies were noted. None was major.

In the early afternoon of December 23, after a brief countdown, a Mission Control wall clock clicked over to 00:00:000—“all balls” in the controllers’ idiom—and civilization crossed another boundary. Now only 30,000 miles from the Moon the Apollo 8 crew had left Earth’s gravity field. At 2:29 P.M. Central Standard Time, mankind for the first time was captured by the Moon’s gravity. The celebration was brief; the pressure mounting, the controllers were already computing the critical lunar orbit insertion maneuver to be executed in fourteen hours.