Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

The launch simulation got off to a good start. When the S-IVB stage engine ignited, SimSup started a leak in the CSM propulsion system. My GNC recognized the leak a few seconds later and started monitoring the pressure decrease to compute the leak rate. So far the team was responding smoothly and we had done everything right. SimSup then shut down the S-IVB engine at the precise moment when we had an abort mode overlap. Reed had two choices, light the CSM engine and continue to orbit, or turn around and use the engine to deorbit the spacecraft in the Atlantic Ocean near the west coast of Africa. The GNC, however, had not computed how much fuel was available with the leaking tank to accomplish the maneuver.

The CSM, now near orbital velocity, was racing toward the African coast, covering five miles in each second we delayed. With no data from the GNC, Reed could not make up his mind which abort option to select.

I had been monitoring the FIDO-GNC communications and, at the same time, watching the giant plot boards. Reed was hesitating. With no call from FIDO I stepped into the breach, saying, “CapCom, Mode III abort… Mode III.” The crew executed the abort but by the time I made my call it was too late to land in the Atlantic. All the crew could do was prepare for a land impact.

There is no feeling in the world to compare with the feeling you get when you know you blew it, and you have to explain in excruciating detail during simulation debriefing why you acted as you did. There are no excuses. The astronauts, controllers, training team, and MCC staff listened to the debriefings. When I finished mine, SimSup came up on the voice loop and rubbed the final salt in the wound. “Flight, the crew was killed. The landing point was in the Atlas Mountains in western Morocco. Those mountains are 14,000 feet high, the parachutes don’t open until 10,000 feet.”

I had blown it. I had killed the crew… the astronauts knew it… my controllers knew it. I knew it. I had acted like a rookie.

Marta does a lot more than make my mission vests. In the final few days before a launch, usually after supper, she will say, “Gene, I think it is time for your mission haircut.” After leaving Langley I could not find a barber who would clip my hair short enough. Frustrated, I bought a hair clipper, and standing in front of the mirror I could cut the sides and top the way I liked it. Marta then stepped in and finished the top and shaved my neck. In December 1972 Carmen and Lucy at a family meeting told me, “Dad, you scare the boys away. They see you with the short haircut and they are afraid to come to the door. Couldn’t you let it grow a bit longer.” Marta nodded her agreement. Their plea was so earnest that I had to acquiesce. For the next seven months I sported somewhat longer hair, combed in a 1950s style. I finally rebelled when they asked me to get it styled. In August 1973 the kids asked me what I wanted for my birthday. My response was “I want to cut my hair!” The next day Marta and I collaborated on a crew cut, and I was happy again. The kids found out what Marta already knew: my hair length made no real difference. The boys were still afraid of meeting me at the door.

Surveying my launch team as the countdown progressed, and looking at the enormous beast we were about to launch, I felt a disconcerting mixture of confidence and humility. I am sure that the pad team did also. The Saturn V on the television screen in front of me was the world’s most powerful machine, towering 363 feet above the flat Florida shoreline. My team, whose average age was twenty-six, just a few years out of school, had within its hands the power to change the direction of history.

On the launch pad, ice from the liquid oxygen tanks’ condensation glistened in the searchlights; mist swirled around the umbilical tower and platforms. At the top was the CSM, with the detachable escape tower for the command module at the very tip of it all. Buried in the tapered adapter section below the CSM and atop the launch vehicle was the lunar module, the spacecraft we would shortly test. Weighing over 6.5 million pounds, the Saturn rocket consumed twenty-three tons of kerosene and oxygen before it started to move. As it climbed along the launch tower, a ton of frost was shaken loose from the tanks, falling past the swing arms into the flame bucket. When the rocket exhaust hit the streams of water pouring into the flame bucket to absorb the intense heat, steam billowed along the flame trench that directs the exhaust heat away from the launch complex. By the time the Saturn booster shed its first stage, two minutes and forty-one seconds into flight, it had consumed almost five and a half million pounds of fuel.

When you turned loose the energy of a Saturn rocket, you simply had to have trust in your crew, your team, and in yourself. Through trust you reach a place where you can exploit opportunities, respond to failures, and make every second count. As gigantic as the machine was, and as puny as we humans were measured against its towering bulk, the human factors balanced the technology on the scale. It would be this balance that would be, indeed had to be, maintained successfully throughout manned spaceflight operations.

The control room contained twenty-one team members, but the decision process during a Saturn launch focused on ten: the three Booster engineers, FIDO, RETRO, GUIDO, two CSM systems engineers, the CapCom, and myself, the flight director. We had a bewildering set of options facing us during the twelve minutes of powered flight. My mission rules were perched on the right corner of the console, a multicolored, two-inch-thick document containing several thousand rules for the conduct of the mission. These rules had been whittled down to less than a hundred for launch. We knew from the pre-mission studies and simulations that a launch abort was the final and often risky option to terminate a mission. The nighmarish scenario we faced was making a wrong decision and placing the crew into orbit with no way to return to Earth. An equally nightmarish outcome was executing an abort that either was not necessary or that, if executed improperly, might also kill the crew. With only seconds to assess a situation and then pick a path, we had to determine clearly the course of action before we launched. Except for trajectory problems that allowed no alternatives, our judgment was that things had to be going to hell in a handbasket in the spacecraft or booster before we would abort the launch.

The count progressed. In the final fifteen minutes, you could feel this incredible pressure build; all controllers felt it. Once the Saturn was launched, we would be tied to our consoles for at least a half hour. I gave the controllers their final chance for a pit stop before the doors were locked. We made a final rush to the rest room, standing in line, then sprinting back to the consoles. When I returned, I put on my white vest while inwardly I was marching to the cadences of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

During most of powered flight, our decision time frame was about twenty seconds, sometimes less. With our training, twenty seconds was a lifetime. In that time you can detect a problem, hold several crisp conversations, select displays, make a decision, and issue the command/ voice instruction—all in less time than it takes to air a short television commercial.

Nearing launch, an internal clock kicked in as auto sequence started. I could feel the sweat on the palms of my hands. This was, after all, my first manned Apollo launch as flight director. At launch minus fifty seconds, the electrical power transfer from the launch pad to CSM fuel cells and batteries was complete. This brief period was the time that I hated; I always hated it. I had a long list of ground equipment I needed for launch, scattered around the world, much of it mandated by the mission rules. I prayed it all held together for the next twenty seconds. I established my personal cutoff for killing auto sequence at launch minus thirty seconds. My risk judgment told me that the MCC must suffer a crippling failure before I would I call the launch team with a NoGo at this point, terminating the automatic launch sequence. I bowed my head briefly and made the sign of the cross as the engines roared and the crew called, “Liftoff; the clocks have started.”