Gene Kranz - Failure Is Not an Option

I, too, was tired as I looked into Slayton’s grizzled face; his heavy black beard stubble was starting to show. We glowered for a few seconds, but before I could respond, Kraft started in. “I want you to get the spacecraft powered down. You’re calling it too damn close on the batteries!” My team was approaching our thirty-fourth hour; we also were running out of gas. I turned to Slayton and snapped, “Crew sleep and power-down are gonna have to wait. We won’t get them home if we let everything freeze up. I’m gonna do the PTC.” Slayton and Kraft were not used to being shouted at. Before they could respond further, I motioned them away and returned to my seat at the console. “CapCom, read the crew the PTC procedures,” I ordered.

Slowly, Kraft and Slayton retreated to a position at the console above me. Max Faget, the chief of engineering, sat down next to Kraft. I think spacecraft analysis had sent him out to lobby on behalf of our plan if the argument got too heated. Faget’s earnest Cajun voice carried. “Chris, that’s the right thing to do,” he said. “There is no use getting the spacecraft back if the systems don’t work when we reenter.” I envisioned Max patting Kraft on the hand, telling him to settle down.

Every second of delay stole time, power, and badly needed sleep for the crew. The spin-up maneuver had to be perfectly set up, very deliberate. Doing it using the LM jets was like trying to thread a needle with bad eyesight. After about forty minutes the crew fired the thruster to start the roll. We watched the resultant motion, and within minutes it started wobbling. To head off a repeat visit from Kraft and Slayton, I roared, “Okay, CapCom, tell the crew we’re gonna have to do it again!” I could hear Kraft and Slayton grumbling on the console above me, probably muttering in my direction, “We told you the crew was too damn tired!” This was a good test of the flight director’s mandate. I respected both Kraft and Slayton for not second-guessing me and letting me get on with my job.

The second spin-up attempt worked, and we initiated the complete power-down of the spacecraft. It was now twenty-six hours after the explosion. The crew and my team could finally get to sleep. I tried not to think about how cold it was going to get for the crew, but I knew we had decided on the right option, staying powered up until we went around the Moon.

With the shift over, I called a brief meeting of the White Team in Room 210. Aaron’s battle plan had the crew powering down to a twelve amp load (about a quarter of the power consumed by a household vacuum cleaner) for the return journey. It would be an ordeal for the crew. It would get cold, damned cold, but there was nothing we could do. Crew comfort was our last priority; they would have to tough it out. The power numbers had improved as a result of the work of Peters and Aaron, but we were still too tight on water. When we ran out of LM water we planned to use waste water and urine for cooling, if needed.

Engineering gave a status report indicating that they were close to a solution on another problem. The crew’s breathing was slowly poisoning the cabin atmosphere with carbon dioxide. We had run out of the cylindrical air scrubbers used in the lunar module, and engineering was testing an adapter for the square command module canister that was being fabricated from cardboard, a plastic bag, a sock, and a hose from one of the crew’s pressure suits. You have to picture a plasticized flight plan cover, to funnel air flow, curved over the top of a lithium hydroxide air scrubber (for removing CO 2) and a hose attached to the scrubber’s bottom, which in turn ran down to a small fan, which pulled air through the scrubber and sent it through the sock, which served as a filter. The device was all held together by duct tape, a commodity which, fortunately, was always carried in the spacecraft.

By the time we arrived at this rather bizarre but functional contraption, we had been awake for a day and a half, so I told the White Team to get six hours’ sleep. Then we would start working out the final set of procedures for the reentry phase. I had developed a habit on previous missions of resting in the viewing room when we had problems. The room was as cold as a meat locker, quiet except for the crew and flight director voice loops, and with few occupants except during major events. I staked out the upper corner of the viewing room as my home base when I wanted to rest, and after a thirty-to forty-five-minute catnap generally got back on track quickly. Since there were a lot of people in the third-floor room, I went down to the second-floor viewing room. It was also close to the action if someone needed me.

The final phase of the struggle to return the crew now began. Flight Control had fought a delaying action. We had stabilized the situation and protected the options. We had a pretty good idea of the resources available in both spacecraft. The show now belonged to Aldrich, Peters, and Aaron. Their job was to manage the resources, trade off the options, build margins wherever possible, and finalize the detailed procedures for the final entry phase of the mission. If ever there was a trio prepared for battle it was this one.

The ebb and flow among the design, test, and operations communities provided answers to the questions we had yet to ask, problems we had yet to identify. Aaron Cohen and Owen Morris, the NASA spacecraft program chiefs, rolled up their sleeves and joined with their counterparts Dale Myers from North American and Tom Kelly from Grumman. Together they directed a superb effort to solve a complex technical problem in a very tight time frame. These four engineers were the highly respected generals who commanded the engineers in the factories, laboratories, and test facilities. I believed that this team could move mountains. The flight directors had worked with all of them during the spacecraft redesign after the Apollo fire and subsequently in preparation for the missions. The trust among program manager, designer, and mission control was absolute.

Added to this respected group were two other great engineers, Don Arabian and Scott Simpkinson, whose pedigrees traced back to the early days in Mercury Control. They were well versed in real-time troubleshooting and were fully aware of the high-stakes poker we were playing. Above all, they knew that you had to have answers before the clock ran out.

This task force worked in the SPAN (spacecraft analysis) room, focusing on only one thing—how to get the crew home. They provided the missing pieces we needed. The handovers between engineering and operations were smoother than on an Olympic relay team and we did it repeatedly for almost four days. There were a lot of heroes but the SPAN team never got the gold medal and the recognition it deserved.

Aldrich was the scribe, watching the clock, assembling the pieces, listening to the debates, then deciding when enough was enough and it was time to put the plans on paper. Aaron was the accountant, keeping a meticulous balance sheet on the precious resources. Aaron became critical for power, Peters critical for water. Aaron checked every procedure entry, exercising his sole and absolute power of veto, often sending the controllers back to square one, telling them, “Your input was not good enough. Give it another shot and be back to me in an hour with your bottom line.” Aaron, with his veto authority, soon became the dominant player in the return planning. The LM water available for cooling dictated an extremely low power level during the return journey. As a result it soon became clear that we could make it home with the LM battery power.

When Aaron recognized we would now have some power to spare he wanted to recharge the command module batteries. The three CM batteries would be the sole power source for the final hours of reentry. Since the batteries had provided the CSM power in the minutes after the explosion, they were no longer fully charged. Aaron wanted to find a way to charge them to maximum capacity.