Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

After the successful lunar landing, it did not take the Apollo program office long to establish more, and more demanding, objectives for the next lunar flight. Gerry Griffin was teamed with Pete Frank, Glynn Lunney, and Cliff Charlesworth for the second Moon landing. This would be Charlesworth’s last mission; he was moving on to a role in management.

The lunar module was targeted to set down next to Surveyor 3, an unmanned spacecraft that had landed three years earlier. The craft was sitting in a 700-foot-wide crater in the Ocean of Storms. Apollo 12 had an all-Navy crew, Pete Conrad, Dick Gordon, and Alan Bean. Conrad and Bean would perform a landing that required a manual guidance update. Landing near the Surveyor 3 spacecraft required a high degree of precision. Small errors in navigation or guidance could cause the crew to land beyond walking distance from the Surveyor target. The LM computer was not very bright by today’s standards, so shortly after starting the lunar descent the Trench, using radar tracking data, computed an update to the landing site range for the LM computer. The update was voiced to the LM crew for manual entry into the computer. As usual, Bill Tindall was in the middle as the developer of the technique, one that I considered pretty fancy for only our second landing.

Griffin was the launch flight director—for the first time. No matter how much you train, you will never forget a moment of that first launch. As you approach liftoff, you just pray that all goes well. If you have a problem, you hope it is one you have aced before in training. I was plugged into the assistant flight director’s console, sitting behind Griffin on the steps to his left. Every launch, especially a Saturn, was a major, awesome event. They never lost their thrill—or their risk; seven and one half million pounds of thrust is a hell of a lot of energy.

The weather at the Cape was marginal at best, with heavy rain, but Gerry did not show any strain under the pressure he must have been experiencing. A hold was called twenty-two minutes before launch to review the rules and the weather forecast. A weather decision is a classic risk-versus-gain trade-off. Griffin listened closely to his controllers, mindful of his launch window and recycle options. Walt Kapryan, one of the members of the original Mercury team, moved into launch operations and, like Griffin, was in the hot seat for the first time. Kappy had moved up a notch into the launch test conductor chain when the previous launch director moved to headquarters.

As I listened to the weather briefing I could clearly visualize the conditions; low ceilings and intermittent cloud cover were the bad news. The good news was that the winds were light at all altitudes. There were no thunderstorm or lightning reports. During the hold, the public affairs officers commented that President Nixon was in the VIP area, his first and only visit to the Cape to view a launch.

There were few black-and-white decisions in launch control and I did not envy Kapryan. We had had a near perfect countdown. Every scrub and recycle takes its toll in flight hardware and in people, increasing the chance that we will have a hardware failure, or slip into the next monthly launch window. Kappy gave the Go to continue the count. The test conductors started their polling, the clock started its countdown through the final twenty minutes. I had been there before and thought, “Well done, Kappy.” At times it takes more guts to say Go than NoGo.

Griffin’s controllers had purged their kidneys during the weather briefing hold; the enormous front screen displays were called up, glowing brilliantly against their black background. After the traditional command to “lock the control room doors” the team settled in, intently scanning the displays during the final seconds as Griffin called, “Recorders to flight speed!” Kapryan had committed Apollo 12 to launch. Within seconds, Pete Conrad’s crew and the command module, Yankee Clipper, would be in the hands of Mission Control.

At 10:22 A.M. in Houston, Apollo 12 began its journey to the moon’s Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms, thundering from the launch pad into an overcast sky. Conrad could not restrain his glee at once again leaving the Earth, reporting, “This baby’s really moving!” Within seconds, the Saturn disappeared into the overcast. The clouds muted the sound and glowed for a few seconds with a red-orange fire. The tempo of the air-ground communications indicated the Yankee Clipper was off to a good start.

Dick Gordon reported, “Looking good. The sky is getting brighter.” This message was followed by a brief, “Uh-ohhh!” At that instant, the controllers saw a brief glitch on their TV displays.

In the command module, glaring amber lights in the upper right quadrant of the caution-and-warning panel flashed on. Conrad yelled to Gordon and Bean, “What the hell was that?” (We didn’t hear this exclamation on the ground because the crew had an internal intercom that allowed them to talk to one another without Houston listening in. We only heard this later when we reviewed the tapes that recorded those onboard exchanges.)

“We lost a bunch of stuff,” Gordon responded on the closed loop of the internal intercom. “We had a whole bunch of the buses drop off.” (Electrical power is provided by the CSM batteries and fuel cells to a bus or distribution point. There are two main buses and ten secondary buses for power distribution to the CSM equipment.)

Thirty-six seconds after launch, observers saw a brilliant flash of lightning in the vicinity of the launch complex. Initially, they did not report it to us because we were just too busy.

On the Mission Control systems row, John Aaron was seated at the console in front of Griffin, monitoring the cabin pressure as the Saturn continued its ascent. Rapidly scanning his displays and event lights, John was about to advise Griffin on the cabin pressure status when his displays stopped updating. Data drop-outs were not uncommon during launch, but when the data returned a few seconds later many of his electrical measurements were scrambled. Aaron had seen this unique pattern only once before in his life. During a pad test a year earlier a technician inadvertently switched off a power supply, which scrambled the data. Intrigued by the data funny, John traced it to a power supply operated by a little-used switch. The switch had two positions, primary and auxiliary, and ultimately provided power to fifty-one CSM telemetry measurements.

Griffin needed answers. Nearly everyone was scrambling to nail down the source of the data loss. Sixty seconds after launch, and twenty-four seconds after the data drop-out, Conrad said, with surprising calm, “We got a bunch of alarms. We’ve lost our platform. I don’t know what happened.” (A platform is a set of gyroscopes that provide a reference for navigation. The platform is aligned using reference stars and is essential to determining spacecraft orientation and velocity, and in performing maneuvers.) Platform loss during launch phase is a serious problem.

The master alarm and caution and warning reports from the crew indicated big troubles on board the Yankee Clipper . With the navigation system unusable, the crew was down to the backup system in case of an abort. The only thing keeping the launch phase going was the Saturn guidance and computer system at the booster’s forward end. The CSM gyros were tumbling, useless as a reference for either the crew or the guidance system. The crew was literally flying blind, without instruments they could trust.

Gerry Carr, the CapCom, relayed the reassuring news that the Saturn was still accelerating on the proper trajectory toward orbit. This was the only piece of good luck so far. In the command module, every electrical warning light was glowing. As the seconds clicked by, time was not on Aaron’s side. The backup batteries had taken over and Aaron prayed that whatever happened had not shut off the flow of the oxygen and hydrogen to the fuel cells. If the fuel cell valves had closed, the lunar mission was over unless the fuel cell flow could be restored within 120 seconds.