THE BROTHERHOOD
Langley Air Force Base, Virginia
By the time of John Glenn’s flight, time was our greatest enemy at NASA. We had to move ahead as quickly as possible because of President Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the Moon in the 1960s; we also knew that nasty surprises awaited us at every stage in development, no matter how hard we tried to anticipate the most remote contingencies.
Deke Slayton had been selected to fly the second orbital Mercury mission. I had quickly updated the rules based on the Glenn mission and, with the flight planners, was set to give Deke an advance look at the flight rules and the five experiments that had been added. The same scientists who had believed a man’s performance in space would be severely degraded by zero gravity and other factors were now eager to have astronauts perform as many experiments as possible, within the limits of a three-orbit mission. Deke had heard the experiments were coming and voiced his well-founded objections to anyone who would listen. I believed he was right to do so. With only three orbits’ worth of manned experience, most, if not all, of the team felt it was too soon to distract the astronaut with tethered balloons, fluid studies, and a variety of other observations.
I was pulling together a one-page cheat sheet for Slayton on the flight rules, when the word came down that he would be replaced by Scott Carpenter. This news shocked us all, although not nearly as much as it did Deke. I assumed the switch was because he had raised hell about all the added experiments.
But it turned out that Slayton had been scratched because of an irregular heartbeat. The problem, known as idiopathic atrial fibrillation, had been noted when Deke was being tested on the centrifuge (which simulated increased gravity and other stress factors). After an analysis of his data by NASA and Air Force specialists, he was accepted for flight. When it was his turn to fly, the NASA Administrator, James Webb, had his records reviewed for a final time. Three different groups of medical specialists gave their okay—then Webb got three civilian cardiologists from Georgetown University, Washington Hospital Center, and the National Institutes of Health to review his records and give him a brief exam. They recommended his removal from flight status. Moral: if you ask enough people, you’ll find someone who will disagree with the majority and give those nervous about risk a way out. No one doubted Deke’s heart when he was one of the hot test pilots at Edwards Air Force Base, pushing the F-105 to its limits.
Slayton didn’t quit the program. Few expected that he would. His initial assignment placed him as coordinator of the astronaut corps, and his first task involved the selection of the second class of astronauts. In October 1963 he was named the deputy for flight operations, putting him in charge of just about everything that concerned his fellow astronauts. It was a legitimate job and a big one, but you could not avoid suspecting that Deke had been given a consolation prize.
In the trenches at Mercury Control, we probably felt the strongest empathy for him, and for the time and energy he had spent training for a day that was now gone from the calendar and might never come again. He would be cleared ten years later and would finally make it into space as part of NASA’s joint venture with the Russians. But for now, he was the first of the Mercury astronauts to be washed out, and the controllers could not view that setback with indifference.
Scott Carpenter, the backup for Glenn’s mission, was a virtual unknown to most of the controllers. When Scott was given the nod, we were surprised because we had been expecting Wally Schirra, Slayton’s backup, to replace Deke. The mission was rescheduled to accommodate the change in crewman, and additional attitude control tests were added to the flight plan. Glenn’s mission had finally cleared the way for astronauts having hands-on control of the spacecraft in flight. John had not experienced any disorientation, and his troubleshooting of the attitude control problems demonstrated the value of having a human in control of the spacecraft at critical moments. Carpenter’s flight plan was expanded to permit him to perform maneuvers to observe sunrise and sunset, fly upside down to test pilot disorientation, and conduct visual observations of Earth and space phenomena.
We had reached another milestone; two teams were working in concert, more or less, the man in the capsule and the crews in the control room. Both sides were—understandably—a little wary of the scientists.
Now the earthbound Slayton had nearly as much in common with our Flight Control team as his own astronaut corps. We in Mercury Control were like the second-string team in football, who scrimmaged all week and took the banging, but didn’t get to make the road trips. Each time a rocket lifted off the pad, we felt pride and elation . . . and a little envy.
We did not mingle socially with the astronauts. Even if that had seemed a desirable thing to do, none of us had the time. When the astronauts were not in nearly nonstop training, they were flying or racing their sports cars or making public appearances to promote the space program. But as our Mercury Control team acquired as much, if not more, knowledge about the spacecraft as those who would fly them, each mission brought both sides closer together in mutual confidence—and we felt a more personal link with the crews.
The first Mercury orbital mission had been at the core of our lives in the winter of 1961. Now, in the early months of 1962, Gilruth’s newly designated Manned Spacecraft Center was moving to Houston amid a massive reorganization. This new NASA center was charged with the design, development, and flight operations for the newly formed Gemini and Apollo programs. In July 1960 NASA had announced plans to follow Mercury with a program to fly to the Moon. The program was subsequently called Apollo. The Gemini Program, which started in 1961, would bridge the technology gap between the Mercury missions and the far more ambitious Apollo lunar program. In 1962 the MSC was in a period of unprecedented growth and change. It departed the Langley Field facilities with a staff of 750. With the staff more than doubling each year it would increase to 6,000 at the beginning of Gemini operations in 1964. This rapid growth necessitated corresponding changes in the Flight Operations Division. Chuck Mathews, the FOD division chief, was reassigned by Gilruth to form a Spacecraft Research Division to develop the design requirements and the technologies needed for the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft. Chris Kraft replaced Mathews as the FOD chief. John Hodge, the Bermuda flight director, then formed a Flight Control Operations Branch. This branch had the responsibility for the mission rules development and the remote site teams and the MCC systems controllers. Hodge selected me as deputy chief. My role as his deputy did not last long. Two months later Kraft selected Hodge as his assistant, and I became the branch chief for Flight Control Operations. I now had the resources I needed to develop an operations team that was fully capable of taking any actions needed during the course of a mission.
As we were preparing for Carpenter’s flight, Chris Kraft relocated to his temporary offices at the Houston Petroleum Center on the Gulf Freeway. His staff, however, remained at Langley, starting their relocation in the summer of 1962, during the interval between the flights now assigned to Carpenter and Schirra. Many drove with their families from Virginia to Cape Canaveral for Carpenter’s flight, towing rental trailers containing all they possessed. After the mission, they continued on to Houston.
As the space program was rapidly expanding, more land was needed to house people and test the systems being developed. In and around Houston, we had access to water—in the Gulf of Mexico and even at Clear Lake—so we could do drop-testing of the capsules. A key factor in determining the new site was the proximity of colleges and universities, a talent pool from which we could recruit newly graduated engineers and scientists for the rapidly expanding program. (It should also be noted that Houston was in the congressional district of Albert Thomas, the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that oversaw NASA’s budget. He and Vice President Johnson were loyal sons of Texas and highly effective advocates for Houston’s suitability as the location for the new Manned Spacecraft Center.)
As a result, in the early years of space, many of my controllers were out of educational institutions in Texas and the Southwest, not the colleges in the Northeast that supplied many of those in the original Space Task Group. We had a few from as far north as Purdue, but they came in waves off the campuses of Texas A&M, the University of Texas, Rice University, and Lamar Tech (in nearby Beaumont).
Tec Roberts, already in Houston, was designing the new Mission Control Center for Gemini and Apollo. Glynn Lunney had stepped in as his replacement as the flight dynamics officer for the remaining Mercury missions. Glynn was the pioneer leader of trajectory operations, who turned his craft from an art practiced by few into a pure science. In the early years, I envied him for his ability to rapidly absorb complex materials and find alternatives. We competed for the leadership role, Glynn pointing the way through his remarkable grasp of the entire complex picture, while I focused on structure and team building.
Carl Huss, one of our math wizards, was training the remote site controller John Llewellyn as his replacement, and Arnold Aldrich was brought in from remote site systems to relieve Walt Kapryan at the systems console. Eighteen months after our first baby step into the world of space flight, the Mercury pioneers were sliding into new jobs and their successors were entering the fray.
In the midst of the preparation for the launch of Carpenter’s Aurora 7 mission, we were advised to take a trip to find housing for our families. We would be given thirty dollars per diem for thirty days for all expenses. By the time the allowance ran out we had to be relocated.
Manfred (Dutch) Von Ehrenfried was a new recruit who joined us as a procedures officer in time for the Glenn mission. He had been teaching high school physics when President Kennedy set the lunar goal and was itching for a piece of the action. Trying to avoid an unnecessary trip to Houston, I called him into my office and decided to give him a real test.
“Dutch, we have to get settled quickly in Houston,” I advised him. “We need good, cheap housing with low down payments. Scout around and find the best place to live. We can’t afford more than a $250 down payment.”
Dutch did not own a home in Virginia and was as eager as any of us to get his family resettled. He did well as a real estate scout and, during the interval between missions, ten families moved into houses he picked out on Welk and Regal drives, an area in southeast Houston that came to be known in the early 1960s as Flight Controller Alley.
March 1962
President Kennedy had challenged us to go to the Moon and dispel any doubts of America’s leadership, technology, and spirit. The colleges and universities responded. By the spring of 1962, we were flooded with job applications from a generation of young people drawn to the cause.
The newly created Manned Spacecraft Center more than doubled in size, from 750 staffers to 1,800, in three months. Mel Brooks and Jim Hannigan were the first two engineers I hired. Slightly older than the average controller, they had the savvy I needed to lead the young graduates through Mercury and into Gemini.
Hannigan had been a flight test engineer for the Air Force. Brooks, an infantry veteran of the Korean War, had worked with the satellite control of the Air Force’s Agena upper-stage rocket, which had been selected as the Gemini rendezvous target. They were the first to relocate to Flight Controller Alley and were pressed immediately into service. Hannigan was selected as a CapCom assigned to the Kano, Nigeria, site, while Brooks led the training section for the final Mercury missions.
The training classes set up by the Philco monitors were expanded and structured to accommodate the new college graduates being recruited as flight controllers. The two-week, twelve-hour-a-day training program was a crash course in remote site flight control, providing only the most basic background for the work. At the completion of their twelve-hour day, the controllers practiced their Morse code, the last, desperate fall-back for communicating. The astronauts and controllers were trained to use their mike switch to transmit the code. Then, when Morse code training was completed, they were taught speed printing so that their Teletype messages might get to the next controller’s site before the spacecraft. This first formal flight controller training session was designated Class 101. I passed out the certificates to the first six graduates, one of whom was Charles (Skinny) Lewis.
One month after graduating from Class 101 and getting a crash training course, Lewis and his team were sent out to man our remote (and boy, was it remote) site in Zanzibar, the same site where John Llewellyn and his guys had earlier been surrounded by local citizens engaged in “civil disorder” (i.e., rioting). Like many of his fellow accidental tourists, Lewis had never been out of the country before and now was in a place where his military training as a tank commander in the Army Reserve came in handy. Having been briefed on the dangerous conditions in the area, Lewis, along with his surgeon and his systems controller, was returning from the site to his quarters late one night when he saw a roadblock made up of fires burning in oil drums and manned by natives not in uniform. He floored the gas and drove his Volkswagen right through a gap in the blazing obstruction. He survived that and other adventures to eventually become an Apollo flight director.
May 24, 1962, Mercury-Atlas 7
The launch preparation for Scott Carpenter’s mission unfolded with the usual glitches that we had come to expect. We used three launch scrubs wisely in local training. I updated the procedures and flight rules for the next mission, reviewing them with Kraft, the controllers, and the astronauts during slack periods at the Cape. Because of the relocation of our operations to Houston, we lost almost a month of preparation time and we had to get ahead of the power curve. But finally the day came when we were ready to light the fire on Mercury-Atlas 7. (The Mercury spacecraft were given names by the astronauts, but the Mercury-Atlas or Mercury-Redstone designation was used by the launch and flight teams. The word “flight” referred to the spacecraft and booster events from liftoff to landing in the Mercury program. During the Gemini and Apollo programs, the term “mission” was used by the program, launch, and mission teams. “Mission” carried the collective connotation needed when dealing with two or more spacecraft or launch vehicles. Although this was the standard, the terms “mission” and “flight” were often used interchangeably.)
The launch day countdown moved along smartly with few glitches. If you counted orbits, the teams were virtually doubling their experience with each mission. The cumulative lessons of the missions and the training were bringing the controllers to instant adulthood, but as soon as one group made it they moved into new jobs in the rapidly expanding organization and another new team took their place.
In the design of Mercury Control a spare console was located to the left of the flight director. The console was assigned to an assistant flight director (AFD) and the Mercury Control Center procedures manual stated that “The AFD is responsible to the Flight Director for assistance in the detailed control of the mission, and assumes the duties of the Flight Director in his absence.” During the early missions no individual had been designated to that position and the console was primarily used during training by the simulation supervisor, SimSup, or a member of his team. At the conclusion of the training for Scott Carpenter’s flight, Kraft walked over to me at the console saying, “You’ve trained Dutch [Von Ehrenfried] well, and I think he is ready to go at the procedures console. I’d like you to sit here next to me from now on.” Having become Kraft’s assistant flight director, I had to figure out what this new job should cover. In Kraft’s traditional fashion, while he allowed us to develop our own unique style and identity, he was cloning his team with a common genetic code. On that day I started along the difficult road to becoming a flight director. Kraft’s fire and passion for his work had inspired me just as it had inspired every other member of his team. His cause and his victories were mine, and the emotional content of each day carried into the night. It was impossible to slow down.
To the right of the control room, Carl Huss coached Llewellyn through the myriad checks designed to prove the integrity of the launch trajectory system. It was fun and somehow reassuring to see the two of them at work. Llewellyn drove Huss crazy at the console during training. Huss, orderly to the point of distraction, spent his time checking and rechecking every step of every procedure. Llewellyn, in contrast, trusted his instincts, and when a procedure was completed, he left it alone. Each night in our Cape motel room at the Holiday Inn, I would listen to Huss critique Llewellyn’s daily performance. Dancing Bear, facing the end of his career as the “World’s First Retro” (retrofire controller), was convinced that John would never succeed in the position he, Carl, had invented.
Huss, now with real-time trajectory experience under his belt, became a section chief in the Mission Analysis branch, designing lunar trajectories.
The generation of controllers who grew up at the remote sites and were now in Mercury Control were about to be tested—and win their spurs.
The launch came off without a hitch and Scott Carpenter became the second American in orbit. His mission, like John Glenn’s, would be three orbits. The first orbit went by the book; the controllers and teams were sharp. The training program had paid off in solid data flow, and the Teletype messages told the complete story of each site pass. Class 101 was doing well, damned well.
Except for a minor variation in his suit temperature, Scott reported no disorientation as he moved through the visual observations, and was thoroughly enjoying the zero gravity environment. During the sunrise and sunset periods, he described the same “firefly” phenomenon reported by John Glenn on his flight and tried to determine the source of this phenomenon.
Each flight, however, would present us with a new headache. Starting at the Canary Islands on the second orbit, Carpenter indicated that his out-the-window attitude did not agree with his instruments. The Teletype messages I received from the African, Australian, and Hawaii sites indicated errors between the horizon sensor and capsule pitch attitude.
Carpenter was advised to realign his gyros over the Canary Islands and then attempt to correlate his readings with Skinny Lewis’s data over Zanzibar. The site data indicated significant errors.
Horizon sensors detect the difference in infrared radiation between space and Earth. The sensors provide signals to update the gyros that control the pitch and roll, and Aurora 7’s pitch sensor was varying by as much as plus 50 to minus 20 degrees. Carpenter was the only one who could put all of the pieces together by comparing his instrument readings with the spacecraft periscope and the view of the horizon from the capsule window. If the readings were off, like a pilot in an aircraft, he could realign the gyros to the correct position.
The Mercury capsule design provided the astronaut with two attitude control systems—an automatic system containing 12 thrusters and 32 pounds of fuel (hydrogen peroxide), and a less capable manual system with 6 thrusters and 23 pounds of fuel. In Mercury control, Arnie Aldrich was watching the drain of fuel from the tanks. Whether on the manual or automatic attitude control system, the high usage continued and, given the infrequent site contacts with the spacecraft, Aldrich was unable to identify the cause. Carpenter was repeatedly advised to conserve fuel by turning off all control and going into drifting flight. At the start of the third and final orbit the propellants were down to 45 percent remaining in both systems. Kraft’s concern at this time was not the fuel level as much as the control techniques used by Carpenter. Every time he maneuvered the capsule the fuel quantities plummeted. If the trend we were observing continued, Carpenter would run out of attitude control fuel before reentry. Scott was again told to go to drifting flight and conserve his fuel for retrofire and entry. The site reports across Africa and Australia indicated that the fuel usage had stopped.
The news from Hawaii on the final orbit was not good. Their job was to get Carpenter into retro attitude and complete the pre-retro checklist. As Carpenter maneuvered the spacecraft into deorbit attitude with the automatic control system, the controllers were alarmed by the system’s rate of fuel usage. We didn’t have the full picture back at the Cape; only Hawaii could look at the telemetry and communicate with Carpenter at the same time.
We could hear that he was running behind in his preparations for deorbit and, given the low fuel level, we had to bring him home quickly. Then came more bad news. The automatic attitude control system was not functioning properly; Carpenter had to go to manual while the fuel continued to bleed away. With three minutes of contact remaining between Hawaii and the spacecraft, and five minutes left to complete the retrofire checklist, it was a horse race to get into deorbiting attitude if we were to land anywhere near the planned splashdown point.
Each of the Mercury astronauts was made of the right stuff, but all were vastly different. While others would be making last compulsively detailed checks on the spacecraft, Scott might be found sitting on the beach, strumming a guitar. What I knew for sure at this point was that we had an astronaut in trouble, who was way behind the power curve, and if he wasn’t careful he was going to die. Whatever the problem, the real-time California tracking station pass would determine if Scotty lived or died.
(“Real time” is a term used when the capsule is electronically in view of a tracking station. It generally stretches from horizon to horizon as the station antennas track the capsule orbit. The initial contact is called acquisition [ACQ] and real time ends at loss of signal [LOS]. At the low orbital altitudes [between 100 and 200 miles] of the Mercury capsule, the real-time period could range from seconds up to eight minutes. To many controllers it seemed a lifetime.)
As Hawaii was losing the signal from the spacecraft, acting on sheer hope (and maybe a bit of prayer) they continued to read out the checklist. Their hope was rewarded when, well after Scott had passed over the horizon, he contacted Hawaii and told them that he had copied all of their message on the deorbit checklist.
For the first time in what seemed like hours, the controllers at the Cape took a deep breath, wondering what the hell was going to happen next.
Kraft leaned over and punched up the loop to California. “California CapCom, have you been tracking this?” Alan Shepard responded tersely, “Rog, Chris.” Shepard and Ted White had been listening to the Hawaii pass and knew what they needed to do. There was nothing we could say or do at the control center; it was now up to the California team to get him down.
Sixty seconds after Hawaii lost the signal, Shepard made his first call from the California site. “Seven, this is CapCom, are you in retro attitude?” Carpenter replied, “Yes, but I don’t have agreement with the window, Al. I think I’m going to have to do it manually, with the window and the scope.”
Ted White, the systems monitor, scanned the console meters for the attitude indications and exclaimed to Shepard, “Dammit, Al, if he is in retro attitude his gyros are way off. I don’t think he ever did a gyro alignment. His pitch gyro is off by at least 25 degrees.”
Reaching forward, Ted picked up a grease pencil and slashed a line on each of his meters at the current indication he believed represented the retro pitch attitude of minus 34 degrees, zero yaw. Leaning toward Shepard, he pointed at his meters, saying, “He’s about out of manual fuel, automatic is about 35 percent. Attitude is okay in pitch . . . okay, but he’s still moving in yaw.”
Knowing he had to get Carpenter down, Shepard nodded, gave a thirty-second mark, and then began the countdown to retro sequence, “. . . six, five, four, three, two, one, MARK!” Carpenter confirmed, “Retro sequence Green.” Scott made the final attitude check by looking out his window. White checked his meters; Aurora 7 was still moving. Retrofire was designed to be accomplished by the automatic attitude control system. The sequence began but immediately hung up.
Shepard had to pack all his verbal instructions to Carpenter into the next half minute to hit the planned retrofire time: “Try the automatic system, quickly. If your gyros are off, you will have to bypass the attitude interlock.” After hearing Scott confirm, “Gyros off,” Alan continued, “Bypass attitude and use manual.”
At the Cape we heard Carpenter indicate he had fired all three rockets. “I had to punch them off manually,” he said, “and I have a bit of smoke in the capsule.” Ted White confirmed that the retros were firing, but the capsule was well out of attitude in yaw. Seconds later, it seemed to tumble.
Retrofire was only three seconds late, but Llewellyn’s concern was the attitude. If Carpenter was far enough out in yaw or pitch, he would be stuck in orbit with no way home. One way or another, the die was now cast. Carpenter reported, “I think the attitudes held well, Al. I think they were good. I can’t tell you what was wrong about them since the gyros were not quite right.”
Shepard glanced at the fuel quantity meters on White’s console; the manual fuel was reading zero. Less than 20 percent of the fuel remained in the malfunctioning automatic system. Al knew it was going to be close.
Carpenter said, “I’m using fly-by-wire to stop tumbling. I’m out of manual fuel, Al.” Shepard, speaking with deliberate calmness, pronouncing each word slowly and distinctly, responded, “You’ve got plenty of time. Take your time on fly-by-wire to get into reentry attitude.” If the capsule ran out of fuel before getting into the correct attitude, it could enter the atmosphere nose forward and burn up during entry.
Whatever difficulty Scott was in, he could hardly have found himself in better hands. Shepard, in the opinion of just about everyone, was the most unflappable of all the astronauts. The man at his side, Ted White, was one of the pioneering group of Philco technical reps who had been hired as monitors for the Mercury system. He had no peer. He had dedicated himself to acquiring experience in remote site operation, even if it required him to volunteer for the ships and spend weeks at sea.
Llewellyn, now faced with his first emergency as a retro controller, continued to talk to White to get the specific attitude. “It looked like he was okay in pitch,” White explained, “but he was all over the sky in yaw. I thought we lost him when he started to tumble. I’ll get you more data after the pass.”
Llewellyn alerted the recovery teams that the capsule would land long, and searched for data that would give him a better estimate. Shepard continued coaching Carpenter: “You have plenty of time, about seven minutes until .05G, so take it slow and easy.”
At Mercury Control, we heard Carpenter’s response, “Roger. Okay, I can make out very, very small farmland . . . pastureland below. I see individual fields, rivers, lakes, roads, I think. I’ll get back to reentry attitude now.”
Shepard’s response was all business. “Recommend you get as close to reentry attitude as you can, using as little fuel as possible, and stand by on fly-by-wire until rates [capsule motions] develop, over.”
Every controller knew it was going to be damn close. If Scotty had not fired the retros in the correct attitude, instead of coming down in the landing zone he’d be stuck in a slowly decaying orbit, circling for a few hours until his power and oxygen ran out.
With the second critical reentry facing him, Kraft was a study in controlled fury. The mission had been close to perfect until these last few minutes and now everything was going to hell. Yelling over to Grissom, the Cape CapCom, Kraft said: “Dammit, Gus, keep his [Carpenter’s] mind on the job. I think he’s delirious.”
I was standing at the console next to Kraft. There was not much we could do except try to keep Scotty focused on the very few remaining things that would keep him alive, nursing the last few drops of attitude control fuel and maintaining reentry attitude. In the years to come I would often feel the absolute frustration at being helpless during the blackout that concludes every mission. It is like watching your wife in labor . . . there is nothing you can do except hold her hand and pray that all goes well.
Llewellyn looked like a guy juggling raw eggs, trying to interpret Ted White’s report and coordinate the recovery forces and radar trackers.
For his first mission he had drawn a big one. Using high school geometry, and after consulting a plot under the plexiglass cover on his console, John said: “Chris, with the California data I think we’re going to be a couple hundred miles long. We’ll get a good hack when we see what time he enters blackout.”
Shepard chimed in: “This is California. We’re losing you now. Stand by for the Cape.”
After contact three minutes later, Grissom’s dialogue with Scott centered on the fuel status and the few remaining checklist items. Aldrich said quietly, “Chris, he’s down to 15 percent on auto fuel, the manual tank is empty.” After relaying the recovery area weather, Grissom reminded Scott of the impending blackout. The voice loop exchanges were crisp, but the overall mood in Mercury Control was somber as Scotty entered blackout. In the next few minutes, America might lose an astronaut.
At the Mercury Control loss of signal, Llewellyn called Kraft, “Flight, we were about thirty seconds late going into the blackout. We’re long. I’ll give you a better hack in a few minutes.”
Within minutes, Llewellyn had the first landing prediction: “Flight, I’ve got an impact point 250 miles downrange from the predicted target. I have good agreement with all of my tracking radars. This is the best impact point we will get. I’m passing it on to Recovery.”
Bob Thompson, the recovery operations chief, called, indicating that an Air Rescue Service twin engine amphibious aircraft had been launched from Puerto Rico and was flying to the new landing point north of the Virgin Islands.
The wait was agonizing, as it had been on John Glenn’s reentry. I muttered a silent prayer to St. Christopher, the patron saint of travelers, and it seemed everyone was on his second cigarette during blackout. Ten minutes later, we got our first call from Aurora 7. “I’m on the main chute at 5,000. Status is good.” It was if ten tons had been lifted off our backs. We felt like standing and cheering, but that didn’t happen in Kraft’s control room, only in the movies. Chris’s smile was more like the grimace of one receiving a last-minute reprieve from the guillotine. He was not happy about the ending of his second manned orbital mission. A relieved Grissom advised Carpenter, “Your landing point is over 200 miles long. We will jump Air Rescue personnel to you in about an hour.”
For nearly thirty minutes after the landing the press was in a panic, thinking an astronaut had been lost in space, or dropped into a watery grave. When the recovery helicopters got to him, a typically laid-back Scott Carpenter was described as quite comfortable in his raft, even a bit irritated because they had interrupted his contemplation. He was eating a candy bar.
In the rescue process Scott was quoted as saying, “I didn’t know where I was and they [Mercury Control] didn’t, either.” Those were fighting words to a new young RETRO who prided himself on perfection in the emerging art of retrofire control.
“Bullshit,” Llewellyn exclaimed. “The SOB is damned lucky to be alive.”
Carpenter’s words would often be remembered. At beer parties, or during debriefings, if we wanted to get John Llewellyn to tell the story of Aurora 7 and his first mission as RETRO, we would stand and say, “I didn’t know where I was and they didn’t, either.” And the story would commence. Later, Scott Carpenter became entranced by the mysteries of the sea. He lived and worked on the ocean floor for periods of thirty and forty-five days, developing techniques and systems for undersea operations. He retired from NASA in 1967 and was assigned by the Navy to the deep-submergence-systems project.
During mission debriefing, Scott said simply, “I think the reason I got behind at retrofire was because approaching Hawaii at dawn on the third orbit I discovered the source of the fireflies. I took out the camera and tried to get some pictures. I felt that I had time to get that taken care of and prepare for retrofire properly, but time just slipped away.”
The “fireflies” reported on Glenn’s and Carpenter’s missions were simply frozen droplets of water from the evaporators used to cool the cabin and space suits. They were most noticeable at sunrise on each orbit.
Scotty’s mission was close, too damn close. A crewman distracted and behind in the flight plan is a risk to the mission and himself. A major component of the ground team’s responsibility is to provide a check on the crew. The ground had waited too long in addressing the fuel status and should have been more forceful in getting on with the checklists. I also thought we started too early in introducing such scientific experiments as a balloon drag experiment, zero-gravity fluid studies, and photographic observations. Once again, we were lucky—but luck has no business in spaceflight.
June 1962
During these times of endless hours and heavy stress, keeping a marriage intact was no small achievement. I couldn’t have done it without an extraordinary wife. Our newest daughter, Joan, was now almost a year old as we packed up and joined the caravan moving west. As we rolled into Flight Controller Alley in Houston I knew that while the controllers faced many tests, we, too, had “the right stuff ” for spaceflight.
The nature of our work made us develop strong loyalties to each other. Most of us were in our late twenties and early thirties. Outside of wartime, I do not believe that young people had ever been given responsibilities so heavy or historic. We were in jobs that appealed to the adventurer, dreamer, and Foreign Legionnaire in each of us. Over half of the original members of the Space Task Group elected to leave flight operations in the first two years. Many had come from working in aeronautics at Langley and wanted to get back to the airplane business; others did not want to relocate to Houston from Virginia. There were some who handled one or two missions, but the responsibility scared the hell out of them and they left. But those who stayed with the program grew in experience and judgment—and provided the hard-core leadership for Gemini and Apollo.
With the selection of the second astronaut group in September 1962, it was obvious that we were approaching the end of the series of missions that made up the Mercury program. While waiting for the construction of our new offices, the Flight Control Division was located in a sporting goods warehouse on the main freeway between Houston and Galveston. The remaining offices of the Manned Spacecraft Center were scattered at eleven other locations, including a bottling plant, a TV station, a bank, and an electric fan company.
The accommodations for my branch were short on windows, rest rooms, and decent lighting. The first floor was a huge open warehouse on which we located our gunmetal gray government desks. The secretaries were in pay booths just like those in a movie theater at the end of the hall on the second floor. These facilities would be our home as we closed out Mercury and prepared for Gemini.
In August, with their dual launch of two Vostok spacecraft, the Russians had shown us they were in the race to stay. Their spaceships came within less than three miles of each other. We believed they had intended to rendezvous but didn’t execute the final maneuvers needed to fly formation in the same orbit. For the first time, I thought we might have overestimated their technical capabilities. I respected their accomplishments, but the Russians no longer seemed invincible.
Kennedy’s bold commitment to put a man on the Moon had set America on a faster track. Daily we could see progress in developing the computing, communications, and precision guidance and control technologies we needed. I was confident the tools would be there, but I was concerned that we wouldn’t be smart enough, or at least have sufficient hands-on experience to use them well operationally.
September 1962
It was in the interval between the first scrub of Wally Schirra’s launch and the second attempt that President Kennedy made his speech at Rice University that confirmed his commitment. This time I was more attuned to his words. On a makeshift stage erected on the fifty-yard line at Rice Stadium, Kennedy repeated the question that many had raised: “Some have asked, why go to the Moon? One might as well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why sail the widest ocean?”
Kennedy’s words were to echo across the decades, and we, along with the rest of the country, found out that a noble cause brings out a nation’s best qualities. I now believe that Kennedy fully understood the difficulties before us. I listened closely to his speech, feeling that I was ready to do whatever it took to turn his great dream into reality.
Next up for a Mercury mission was Schirra, a known quantity to the controllers, the astronaut with the best feel for the emerging relationship between the flight crews and ground control. Schirra’s six orbits would be the bridge needed to go from three orbits to a full twenty-four-hour mission. (The medical community’s concerns about man’s ability to adapt to zero G led to conservatively planned incremental increases in mission duration during Mercury and early Gemini. In general, we attempted to double the flight duration of each mission.) I believed that the name of his capsule, Sigma 7, symbolized the sum of all the efforts of design, test, and operations necessary for success in space. For us, it signified teamwork.
Since I had hired Mel Brooks at Houston, he had been quietly transforming the training team. Previous training exercises had focused on the controllers’ knowledge of the mission sequence and had tested simple applications of their judgment on the flight rules.
With the perspective he gained from his satellite operations, Brooks had taken over the training of the flight control team with a single-minded zeal. Think of Alec Guinness in Bridge on the River Kwai. Recognizing their youthful naïveté and technical limitations, Brooks’s training staff attacked us individually and as a team. He went after those he felt were short on theory. He picked apart their communications and forced them to own up and say, “I don’t know.”
As we prepared for the final day of training, Brooks decided Kraft was too dependent on my backing up his every move and anticipating his command and data needs. So he took me by the shoulder, walked up to Kraft, and said, “Kranz is in the hospital. He was injured in an automobile accident coming to the MCC today.” My response was quick. “Dammit, Brooks, what the hell do you think you are doing! This is our last training run.” Kraft, amused by the byplay, said, “It looks like you’ve been benched.” Brooks believed that Kraft should conduct Schirra’s final training simulation without his regular wingman. Von Ehrenfried filled in and did well.
Schirra’s was a textbook flight. But within days of its conclusion the world was again on the brink of war, this time over the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. I was glad we were not in Florida. My Air Force Reserve unit, among many others, was put on standby status as a showdown between the Soviets and the United States developed.
For almost two weeks, we in the space program were understandably preoccupied by the blockade and possible invasion of Cuba, which could presage an all-out nuclear conflict with Russia. With the two countries “eyeball-to-eyeball,” in the apt phrase of the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, the Russians backed down, turned their ships around, and removed the missiles.
The textbook flight of Schirra cleared the way for Gordo Cooper’s one-day mission to conclude the Mercury program. Cooper’s flight required two MCC control teams and a relocation of the ships to plug the gaps in the network coverage. The length of the flight represented a different test for all of us. The capsule would be out of communication on several orbits for over an hour as Cooper slept. We had no option but to trust the capsule systems. Still, I was less concerned about this mission than any of the preceding ones. The Mercury spacecraft, if used well, was getting the job done. The knowledge level of the controllers was at an all-time high and the remote site teams had proven that they could respond rapidly. The technology was advancing so rapidly that we could now reliably bring the tracking and telemetry data from the Bermuda, California, and Texas tracking stations to the MCC. Now we had almost twenty minutes of continuous data every time the capsule passed over these stations. Since we no longer had to staff these stations with controllers, we had the resources to make decisions in a much more focused and efficient fashion at Mercury Control.
Early 1963
With the New Year, more changes came. Bob Gilruth, director of the Space Task Group, became the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. He was shifting resources to Gemini and Apollo, so the Mercury office was down to less than fifty people.
Marta was in the hospital in labor with our fourth child and for a change I was holding her hand. I had been in Korea for Carmen’s birth, out to lunch during Lucy’s, and just made it back to Virginia for Joan’s. Now the women in Flight Controller Alley decided it was time for me to do my duty. They selected Jim Strickland, a neighbor and systems controller, to carry the message. “Gene, we can carry on here at work. The Alley has decided you should be with Marta, so get home and take care of your wife!” The handholding was an experience in total helplessness. All I could think was to thank God for the courage women have to go through childbirth. Mark, our son and fourth child, was born in Houston in January 1963. We were staying with the Von Ehrenfrieds at the time we think he was conceived, so we have since concluded that drinking a lot of good German beer and living with a family that had two boys in it had a decisive effect. (Twenty-seven years later I again learned how powerless one can be. Mark was hit by a drunk driver. For an entire night Marta and I held his hand while doctors tested for neurological damage. Mark had to endure without medication. He spent the best part of two years in multiple surgeries and therapy before he recovered.)
With the organization in high gear, I prepared for the final Mercury mission. The Air Force Atlas program had suffered two unexplained flight failures. We could not move ahead until we figured out what had gone wrong. Then the Atlas booster to be used for Cooper’s liftoff failed its rollout inspection in San Diego in January. These setbacks had emphasized the need for support from inside the plant to track design changes.
The second Atlas rollout in March was successful and finally we had the flight elements for the final mission. Gordo Cooper’s Faith 7 mission was the first where we would literally fly beyond the coverage of the ground network. The ships Coastal Sentry and Rose Knot were moved to the Pacific Ocean to provide the mid-orbit communications coverage and to support the capsule retrofire sequence preparation. The two ships provided the majority of the controller support during the middle section of the mission while Gordo Cooper was sleeping.
Chuck Lewis led the Australian team and Ted White had California. At least one team would spot the capsule during each orbit. Cooper’s mission would involve a global effort of twenty-eight ships, 171 aircraft, and 18,000 military personnel, in addition to the support of the ground control crews.
Mel Brooks, in his capacity as SimSup, had achieved a degree of notoriety among the flight control teams as a result of the training exercises for Schirra’s flight. He was forming a new organization for Gemini, and for his farewell training run he unleashed an exercise that tied the control teams and especially the doctors in knots.
Most of the doctors assigned to the remote site teams were military personnel with broad experience; some were Army Airborne and others were Air Force and Navy flight surgeons. Those in Mission Control came from research backgrounds. Brooks was determined to build on their uncommon skills and motivation to create a real-time ready team. While medicine often has occasion for differential diagnoses (i.e., doctors who disagree), Brooks felt that the control teams didn’t need any doctors telling them, “on the one hand . . . but on the other hand.” So he did things like obtain electrocardiograms of people having actual heart attacks and patch those into training tapes. In the final simulation session Brooks had trouble keeping a straight face as tapes peppered with this type of material and instructors simulating astronauts in medical distress ratcheted up the anxiety level in their voices, giving our doctors plenty to think about—and react to. Fast. They quickly learned there was no time to wait until the next pass, and they learned to resolve differing diagnoses very quickly.
Brooks had a field day debriefing the medics and was in a merry mood. His final training run had been a success and now it was time to put on his other hat and become a capsule systems engineer on Hodge’s team for the final Mercury launch.
Shortly before launch, Cooper’s mission was expanded upward from one day to twenty-two orbits, placing the planned landing point near Midway Island in the Pacific. Since Gordo Cooper had been the first astronaut I had met, I was happy to be working his mission and even a tad sentimental about it. I was sure that my remote site controllers were in peak form. With the longer mission duration Kraft and Hodge formed two teams to provide twenty-four-hour coverage at MSC. Only Kraft, Hodge, Huss, Lunney, Aldrich, Llewellyn, and I remained from Kraft’s original Mercury Control team. The new teams were young, but we all were young together in the early years of space.
May 15, 1963, Mercury-Atlas 9
Thirteen seconds after 8:04 in the morning EST, Faith 7 lumbered skyward, and the final mission of the Mercury program was bound for orbit. The early orbits went rapidly. Cooper precisely checked off the procedures for the eleven experiments his capsule carried. On the fourth orbit, he launched a six-inch satellite with a flashing light to test an astronaut’s visual acuity in space. The orbits clicked off, the systems performing perfectly and the early Go NoGo decisions easily made. Mercury Control operated on a two-shift basis for the first time. After the Go NoGo on orbit six, Kraft’s team handed over to John Hodge’s team. In my newly assigned role as assistant flight director Kraft had assigned me to support Hodge’s team. My vision of the flight director’s role in Mercury Control was based on associating with Chris during the pre-mission planning periods and watching him in action during missions. Kraft was called the “Teacher” because of his hands-on mentoring of his young charges. The longer mission duration and infrequent contacts during the mid-orbits of Cooper’s mission allowed me to study another flight director at work, John Hodge. Hodge was different from Kraft, less on edge and more dependent on his team members. I quickly sized up John as a flight director who sought to obtain consensus in selecting a direction and one totally at ease with his people—but not with his role as their leader. John was a damn nice guy.
Cooper, a celestial observer, enjoyed the middle period in drifting flight, with all the capsule systems powered down. His thirty-four-hour mission would take him through twenty-two orbits. With the control center, network, and capsule systems reacting flawlessly, it was easy to get lost in Cooper’s descriptions of the view from orbit.
When things are going well, the controllers slip into a mode of relaxed awareness. You tune your senses keenly to pick up even the slightest departure from the norm; it seems that you have a second sense running in the background, almost subliminal, that can pick up the slightest deviation. It could be a minor glitch in a telemetry measurement, a procedural step overlooked, or an unexpected observation from the astronaut. It can be the tone of voice of another controller. When you are well tuned, a second sense kicks in, looking for something out of order while you proceed with the normal or routine. The mission continued in this fashion through the nineteenth orbit.
Kraft’s team was in charge as the mission entered the gate for the final three orbits. The recovery forces were calling in, and Llewellyn, checking the retro times, anticipated a perfect finish for the final mission.
Emerging from the network coverage gap at Hawaii, Cooper began reporting to Scott Carpenter, his CapCom: “Scott, I wonder if you would relay to the Cape a little situation I had happen and see what they think of it. My .05G telelight came on after the light check. I have turned off both the .05G normal and emergency fuses. Relay it to them and get their idea on it, over.” The telelight was indicating that the capsule was sensing the onset of reentry gravity.
Mel Brooks, seated next to Arnie Aldrich at the systems console, unfolded his schematics and began tracing the .05G circuitry. After a brief consultation with Mel, Arnie reported to Kraft, “Chris, the signal that illuminated on Cooper’s panel changes the operation of the automatic control system. It is used to provide a steady roll rate and dampen the capsule motions during entry.” After giving Kraft a few seconds to digest his input, Arnie continued, “With the .05G indication, the automatic system cannot be used for retrofire. I’d like to do a few tests with Gordo.”
The joint testing began over the Cape and continued through the next orbit, with Cooper reporting the test results to John Glenn, the CapCom on board the Coastal Sentry. The testing confirmed that the automatic system had malfunctioned and was in reentry mode. Cooper was informed that retrofire would have to be performed manually, but after retrofire was completed the automatic system would be usable for the final phases of entry.
So far everything had gone well. The team had responded to the glitch, the controllers smoothly regrouping and updating the retrofire and entry procedures. I kicked into gear, getting the new reentry plans out on the Teletype and setting up the backup communications to the Coastal Sentry.
You can feel the atmosphere of a crisis center; it is almost like sensing the change in pressure when a storm moves in. In Mercury Control it consists of the noise level of the room—conversations change from an informal banter to crisp dialogue, thick manuals thump open, small huddles form at the consoles. The feeling is unmistakable, and when problems developed for Faith 7 I nonetheless felt secure: the teams were poised, professional, and competent.
I was confident that whatever the problem, Mercury Control and the remote site teams could handle it. The last-minute decision to expand from sixteen orbits to twenty-two got Cooper’s mission into the record books as the third longest manned spaceflight. The Russians had flown sixty-four orbits with Andrian Nikolayev, and forty-eight orbits with Pavel Popovich. Cooper’s flight now edged out Gherman Titov’s seventeen orbits. The increased duration however, moved the landing point from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific, resulting in reduced coverage at the time of retrofire and reentry. As the capsule moved toward its deorbit point, only three sites remained on the ground track. Cooper had worked around the small glitch in the .05G circuit by the twenty-first orbit and everything was returning to normal operation. Then all hell broke loose.
Jim Tomberlin’s job at Zanzibar was to complete the stowage and pre-retro checklists so that Gordo had an “all green” capsule, as he coasted to the Coastal Sentry site in the Pacific Ocean south of Japan, where John Glenn was CapCom.
Jim started reading the checklist only to be interrupted by Cooper. “Zanzibar, I have one item for you. My automatic control system inverter has failed, so I will be making a manual entry.” Tomberlin, momentarily startled, asked, “Has the automatic system inverter failed?” Cooper responded, “That is affirmative.”
Like a tennis match, Tomberlin again volleyed, “Have you tried the standby inverter?” Cooper’s response came like a firecracker, “Roger, it would not start.” Mystified, Tomberlin replied, “Roger. Then we better get on with the checklist now. Attitude permission to bypass.”
“Roger, retro rocket arm to manual,” Cooper replied.
The checklist dialogue continued for the next four minutes and when completed, Tomberlin switched gears and started a review of the backup procedures. During the six-minute pass, Gordo and the Mercury team at Zanzibar had prepared Faith 7 for retrofire and reviewed the backup procedure, and a potentially serious problem had been quickly addressed. We had come a long way in the two years and ten days since Alan Shepard’s launch.
Seventeen minutes later, Cooper was holding attitude, using the window horizon as he reported to Glenn on the Coastal Sentry, “Checklist complete except for the pyros.” After a few moments of banter, Cooper continued, “Oh, my automatic inverter failed along with a few other odds and ends. I will shoot the retros on manual and then reenter manually also.”
While waiting for the retrofire time, he added, “I’m looking to get a lot of experience on this flight.” Glenn’s response was laconic: “You’re going to get it.”
Moments later, John issued the retrofire countdown to Faith 7. The Mercury program was coming to a close in the sky over the Pacific. The manual retrofire and reentry were virtually flawless. Forty minutes later, Cooper emerged from the capsule and stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Kearsarge.
Cooper’s post-mission comments said it all. “My analysis of the malfunctions,” he said, “illustrated that the entire Mercury network had developed a concept of teamwork that culminated in an almost perfect example of cooperation between the ground and spacecraft. Almost everyone followed the prestated ground rules exactly, and the radio discipline was excellent.”
Cooper, the loner and rebel against the spaceflight bureaucracy, had pulled off a great mission and a picture-perfect entry. Gordo’s test pilot mentality, coupled with the superb performance of the ground team, was a fitting finale to America’s first manned venture into space.
The final Mercury program party was held at the Old Governor’s Mansion on Galveston Bay on July 27, 1963. It was more formal than most MSC parties and was complete with an invitation worthy of a scrapbook. After a few drinks, Walt Williams began speaking about Mercury. Remembering the first Atlas launch failure and his decision to launch into an overcast sky, he started talking about making risk judgments. Then, in a melancholy tone, he concluded, “You will never remember the many times the launch slipped, but the on-time failures are with you always.” In the years ahead we would have occasion to remember those words.