Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

I was the lead flight director on Apollo 13, a transition mission in many ways. The new flight directors, Griffin, Frank, and Windler, were pulling more weight, preparing to alternate the lead responsibility for the final four missions. Charlesworth had flown his last mission on Apollo 12 and was forming the Earth Resources Project Office as part of a plan to apply space technology to Earth’s problems. Operations was my business and I liked teaching the young controllers, watching them grow during their four-year training period as they progressed from the back room to the MCC main control room. Every new controller was assigned a mentor to test his knowledge, build his confidence, and prepare him for the painful and necessary lessons he would learn from SimSup. When controllers make it to the ranks of the front room and meet the flight director, they fully understand that the price of their admission is Excellence, and that a spartan set of standards will govern their conduct. Most of all they understand “that suddenly and unexpectedly we may find ourselves in a role where our performance has ultimate consequences.” (From The Foundations of Mission Control, a one-page statement summarizing the values essential to a controller attaining excellence. The text was written by flight director Pete Frank. See page 393.)

Failure does not exist in the lexicon of a flight controller. The universal characteristic of a controller is that he will never give up until he has an answer or another option. By the time someone graduated to the front room consoles either he was ready—or he was gone before he got there.

The Apollo 13 flight director chemistry was unique. Windler and I were jet fighter pilots; Griffin flew as a radar operator. For the first time we were working together on a mission. Lunney, the fourth flight director, was the last of the original flight dynamics officers, the master of his craft.

Milt Windler, a veteran of three Apollo missions, drew the launch flight director’s assignment. He had earned his spurs as a test director in Kraft’s recovery division and not in Mission Control. His transition was smooth. Absolutely unruffled at the console, Milt emulated Charlesworth’s low-key and patient demeanor. He was fully in command of his team when the moment came to light the fire on Apollo 13.

The liftoff occurred at 13:13 Central Daylight Time, and proceeded uneventfully through first-stage flight. The five engines of the second stage of the Saturn V ignited and burned smoothly for five and a half minutes. Then the center engine unexpectedly shut down. Milt’s team quickly reviewed the status of the remaining four engines, ran the computations for the new engine cutoff times, and passed them to the crew. When the second-stage engines shut down, the S-IVB stage ignited and got the spacecraft to orbit. After the CSM orbital check-out and updating of the trajectory parameters, Windler gave the Go for translunar injection. We heaved sighs of relief, thinking we had gotten through what probably would be the one major glitch in the mission.

The crew and control teams rapidly settled into the routine. During the early shifts, we watched and worked with Jack Swigert, calibrating his performance and finding him a very capable stand-in for Ken Mattingly.

During the translunar coast period both crew and controllers prepared for the events scheduled for lunar orbit when things would get quite busy. As the meticulous check-out of spacecraft and trajectory systems continued, the controllers settled into a state of relaxed alertness. The easy banter among flight director, team, and crew would leave a by-stander thinking that none of these guys had a care in the world, when in fact they were maintaining gimlet-eyed focus on the job at hand while gathering their reserves for what lay ahead.

With the exception of the live TV broadcast from Apollo 13, my second shift of the mission was also uneventful. Mattingly had been pestering us for access to the MCC, his medical status still indefinite. I decided that if he was showing symptoms of measles at the time of the EVA, we would put him at the network console on the floor of the control room that was not being used on the mission, directly below us, giving him a chance to listen in but not exposing people to contagion. As the crew concluded its onboard TV broadcast just before 8:00 P.M. Houston time I glanced up to the viewing room, and could see Lovell’s and Haise’s wives and families leaving. Swigert was a bachelor.

Lunney’s Black Team was arriving in the control room and there was a rising hum of conversation as the shift handover process began. After talking to his controllers in the trench, Lunney moved into the seat next to me, reading the flight director log for all events since his last shift. I began preparing my handover summary for him while we were getting the crew and spacecraft configured for the sleep period.

We zipped through the pre-sleep checklist, verifying that each system was set up to enable us to watch over the crew while they slept, monitoring the switch positions and dumping the telemetry records, making sure that once the crew members were asleep we did not have to awaken them. The flight activities officer got a verbal confirmation from the crew for the completion of each checklist page. With little else to do, I was following the checklist closely.

Earlier on the shift we had a worrisome but minor communications glitch. For a brief period, the CSM high-gain antenna did not work in either of two automatic modes and had to be positioned manually. Then when a spacecraft roll maneuver was performed the antenna abruptly locked up. Now, all of a sudden, it was working properly. There was insufficient time to troubleshoot this glitch prior to the crew’s going to sleep. I hated to leave this as an open item for Lunney.

The crew continued the close-out, terminating the command module battery charge. During the previous sleep period, an alarm monitoring pressure in a hydrogen tank had awakened the crew. After considerable debate in the MCC, we did not reset the alarm out of concern that it might inadvertently trigger again and wake up the crew. As a result, a cryo pressure warning indication was illuminated in the spacecraft and also on Sy Liebergot’s console. During the translunar phase we were in continuous voice and data communications, so Sy intended to stand watch over the pressures from the ground during crew sleep.

Liebergot was my EECOM, having moved up to the front line during Apollo 8. Now, after a year’s experience, he was considered a veteran controller. He had a second glitch he was working. The telemetry gauge in oxygen tank 2 had been reading normal at 80 percent through the mission, then during our shift the gauge went through four rapid up-and-down cycles, finally failing and sticking at a constant reading of 100 percent. We no longer had a valid reading from the sensor.

Cryogenic oxygen and hydrogen mixed and reacted in the three fuel cells in the service module to provide electrical power. The reaction also provided pure water used for drinking and for cooling the CSM systems. The only other source of power to the command module was the three reentry batteries, normally used only for the final two hours of the mission. The oxygen and hydrogen, maintained in a liquid state at temperatures below-300 degrees Fahrenheit, were stored as liquids in spherical tanks insulated by a vacuum between the outer and inner walls. As the mission progressed, the oxygen and hydrogen went through a progressive change from a liquid to a gas.

At the time of launch the cryogenics in the service module tanks were a dense super-cold liquid, but now, two days into Apollo 13, the cryos were a thick soupy vapor, part liquid and part gas. Fans were located internal to the cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen tanks. The fans were periodically activated by the crew, at the request of the MCC, to stir up the mixture and allow precise tank quantity measurements. Heaters were located in the tanks to raise the tank pressure. The heaters could be activated either automatically or manually by the crew.