Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

There have not been many years in American history to rival 1969. Richard Nixon moved into the White House and across the globe from Northern Ireland to Southeast Asia it was a dangerous world. Senator Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, probably ending his chances for the presidency. Even more amazing, the Mets won the World Series. Yet it really was the Year of Apollo. The ecological movement kicked into high gear. Apollo 8’s stunning images of the Earth in vibrant color, images never before seen by man until we pushed our way into space, brought home the reality of what we had accomplished in sending men to the Moon. It provided the environmental movement a powerful visual expression of the concept of “Spaceship Earth.”

Now the images indeed seemed real to those of us who had helped send this craft to the Moon. For a brief moment in December 1968 we had united all humanity. In the coming months, in the greatest adventure of mankind, we would attempt to place two Americans on the surface of the Moon.

The fast-track effort for Apollo 8 put us behind for the Apollo 9 launch, now just two months away. Our holiday celebrations were brief. My White Team began training two days before the new year. We faced two missions before we could make the landing attempt. I had the Earth orbital flight test of the lunar module, and then on Apollo 10 Lunney would pull the pieces together in a full dress rehearsal of the lunar landing. These were the final months of the campaign to reach the Moon. Although we had few details, the death of the cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in the flaming crash of the Soyuz 1 capsule in Central Asia in 1967 indicated that the Russians were having problems with their space systems. After an eighteen-month hiatus, the next Russian manned missions, Soyuz 2 and 3, in October 1968, accomplished a rendezvous, but the spacecraft were unable to dock. Docking, an essential technique for space operations, was finally accomplished in January 1969 on the Soyuz 4 and 5 mission. It looked like the Russians were almost three years behind us in operational manned capability.

My staff kept the division humming as my team prepared for Apollo 9, the last in Earth orbit. It was like Wally Schirra’s flight in many ways, but this time it was a shakedown cruise of the lunar module, the last test before we went to the Moon. The lunar module had no heat shield; it could not return to Earth. The test required the CSM and LM to separate to test the LM engines and practice rendezvous, then the two spacecraft had to re-rendezvous and dock for the crew to transfer back from the LM to the CSM for return to Earth. We practiced solo rendezvous with Dave Scott in the CSM in case we had to rescue the LM crew. We had two manned spaceships to operate, a lengthy rendezvous, and a lot of engine testing. As the flight director I would be working with a team of twenty-one personnel, the largest MCC control room team in history. I was concerned that the span of control might be too large for rapid and correct decision making.

From now through the lunar landing, the missions were on two-month intervals with both MCC control rooms on the second and third floors operating simultaneously. We had a great Apollo crew, and the delay due to moving Apollo 8 into our slot let us get much better acquainted. Our crew consisted of Jim McDivitt, Dave Scott, and Rusty Schweickart. McDivitt and Scott were Gemini veterans and had spent time as CapComs in early Gemini. With the advent of dual spacecraft missions, we referred to the commander of the mission, McDivitt, as CDR; the lunar module pilot, Rusty Schweickart, as LMP; and the command module pilot, Dave Scott, as CMP. Since Scott, like McDivitt, had come up through the program as a CapCom in Mission Control, he was close to the controllers and sent them his pilot’s notes drawn up during preparation for the mission. The controllers would check them for accuracy. Their review helped him create a damn good handbook for future CMPs.

Rusty Schweickart was a virtual unknown to us. He had spent little time in the Mission Control Center and, while involved and friendly, was deferential about taking a position or arguing a policy, an understandable attitude for a newcomer.

McDivitt established another first by designating astronaut Stu Roosa as the full-time representative of the crew for all topics. Given the complexity of this mission, McDivitt felt there was too great a chance for something to slip through the cracks. Roosa acted as a sounding board to keep policy issues constantly in the forefront. These steps seem elementary, but in the rapidly moving flight program, with the constant parade of crews and expanding control teams, we were hard pressed to do anything but the fundamentals for each mission. We were learning by doing, with little time to reflect, only to respond.

My Apollo 9 teams were a mixed bag in terms of experience. One of the flight directors, Gerry Griffin, had been a superb Gemini GNC flight controller. Now, fresh from his first mission as Apollo 7 flight director, he was raring to go. Pete Frank, the rookie flight director, had been carrying most of the flight planning and mission rule work while Griffin and I were working with Lunney on Apollo 7. The flight control teams always stepped into the breach to help the flight directors, especially the rookies.

The primary objective of the mission was to flight-test the lunar module. The testing of the LM began shortly after getting to orbit. During launch, the LM is bolted into a long tapered adapter atop the forward end of the Saturn IVB rocket stage. The CSM sits atop the adapter and once on orbit, the command and service module separates from the adapter, turns around, and flies formation with the rocket. The four sections of the tapered adapter open like huge flower petals before being jettisoned, exposing the docking mechanism at the top of the ascent stage of the booster. It looks like something out of a James Bond movie. The crew maneuvers the CSM to carefully dock to the LM and then extracts it from the adapter.

The workload got so heavy in the final six weeks that Cliff Charlesworth, coming off Apollo 8, was drafted to fill in on the shift schedule and give us a hand. There were only so many trained and experienced people to go around. Once again, the clock was our enemy.

You learn never to relax during simulations. About the time that you think your team is really humming and ready to launch, SimSup pokes a hole in your bubble. We were about halfway through the training for Apollo 9 when Gerry Griffith, the SimSup, taught me a lesson I never forgot.

I had worked with my FIDO Dave Reed only once before, on Apollo 5. This mission was Reed’s first manned launch. The Saturn launch period is extremely complex. The flight director and FIDO have four major abort options during launch and several of the abort options overlap. At any one second you may have two methods to terminate the mission, so the timing of executing aborts between the FIDO and flight director is critical. The FIDO uses five large-screen displays and his TV data to select the abort options. The flight director uses the same displays for launch phase timing and as a memory jogger on the abort mode boundaries. Griffith had observed that the handoff between Reed and me was not going smoothly and decided to give us a test.

During training, a FIDO has to learn to communicate with the flight director so Flight knows his intentions before critical points are approached.

The goal during launch is to get to orbit if possible. Orbit represents a stable point where we can gather our wits and figure out what to do next, or if necessary, how we will get home. An abort involves moving from the time-critical launch sequence to an even more time-critical abort sequence. This is an irreversible process, and doing it with problems on board the spacecraft is pretty tricky. The control team and crew spend a lot of time during training to get the decision process and timing right.