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Tampa, Tranquility Base Here . . .

On 25 May 1961, President John F. Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and uttered the thirty-one most important words in NASA’s history.

First, I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.

No single sentence ever moved the agency further and faster. There was no fuzz on the mandate, no chance of misunderstanding its meaning. The goal of going to the moon was clear and concise, with a firm deadline front and center. Kennedy had just told NASA where to go and when to get there, but there was a catch—there was no mention of how it was going to get done. That was the biggest challenge of all, and for somebody else to figure out.

There would most likely have to be some sort of rendezvous involved, or maybe it would just be a direct shot to the moon. Rendezvous might take place either in Earth orbit or around the moon. Important pieces of the technological puzzle that nobody yet realized were needed were far from being invented. The sum total of the nation’s experience in human spaceflight was a single fifteen-minute suborbital hop by Alan Shepard flown just twenty days before, leaving it woefully behind the Soviet Union in the Cold War space race.

None of that seemed to matter to the influx of NASA hires heading to Houston, who seemed to share one trait in particular. They did not know that it could not be done.

For a time, nobody knew where it would be done, either. Houston had almost always been a candidate for the Manned Spacecraft Center, but not necessarily the favorite once NASA officials decided once and for all in early 1961—before an American had ever actually flown in space—that the Space Task Group (STG) would not remain headquartered at Langley Research Center in Virginia. There were plenty of other possibilities, and given the momentous events and iconic lines that were to come, what might have been can seem something just short of sacrilegious.

Try this one on for size.

Tampa, Tranquility Base here . . .

Or maybe this one.

Bogalusa, we’ve had a problem . . .

So why Houston?

STG had been attached to Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and that appeared at one time to at least be in the running for its permanent base. It was a bad political move for STG, leaving its head Robert R. “Bob” Gilruth reporting to Goddard center director Harry J. Goett rather than directly to NASA headquarters in Washington. It was not long before the concept for a separate $60 million complex that would employ an initial estimate of three thousand people came into being.

Even then, the location of a permanent MOCR remained in doubt. Would it stay at the Cape, closest to where the country’s crewed spaceflight missions would begin? Surely, that would be the best bet. Goddard, maybe? That was where NASA’s earliest computers were located, plus it was a bonus—to some, at least—that it was located so close to the bosses down in DC. Or, finally, should the MOCR go where the rest of STG went and keep everybody in one place? However, there might have been another factor at play—good ol’-fashioned hardball politics—when Chris Kraft made a pitch for mission control to stay put in Florida. “Chris wrote a letter to Gilruth that said essentially, ‘It doesn’t make any sense for us to go to Houston. We need to go to the Cape—what’s more, the flight crew,’” remembered John Hodge, who took over for Kraft as chief of the Flight Operations Division a year after arriving in Houston. “And Gilruth said, ‘Absolutely not. I don’t care how logical it is, how much it makes sense. If I own the astronauts, I own the program. And we’re going to Houston.’”

As closely as Kraft and Gilruth would work, and as powerful as Kraft was already, he was evidently overruled when it came to the location of the MOCR. Gilruth was as respected an individual as there was at NASA in those days, but he was not the sort who was going to be run over very easily. “Gilruth always comes across as, you know, a nice, quiet old man,” Hodge continued. “Gilruth was not a nice, little old man. I mean, he was a real tough cookie. He was a nice tough cookie, but he played politics with the best of them. That was one example where there was absolutely no question.”

The hunt was on for STG’s—and mission control’s—new home. To be considered, sites needed to have certain criteria in place:

Access to waterways big enough for large barges. Houston had that, of course, located on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

Commercial jet service. With one major airport already in town and another not far off in the future, Houston had plenty of passenger planes coming and going.

A well-established industrial complex. Houston was located in the heart of Texas oil country.

A culturally attractive community with institutes of higher education. Check.

A strong electric utility and water supply. Check again.

At least 1,000 acres of land. If there is one thing Texas had plenty of, it was land.

A moderate climate. Houston was hot and humid in the summer and prone to hurricanes that came in from the Gulf of Mexico, so if there was a mark against the area to be found, its weather might very well have been it. Other than that, Houston fit the bill almost perfectly.

The proposals that inundated Congress were at first whittled down to nine locations—Houston; Jacksonville, Florida; Tampa, Florida; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Shreveport, Louisiana; Victoria, Texas; Corpus Christi, Texas; San Diego, California; and San Francisco, California. With the addition of four other possibilities near St. Louis, Missouri; two more in Houston; Bogalusa, Louisiana; Liberty, Texas; Beaumont, Texas; Harlington, Texas; Berkeley, California; Richmond, California; and Moffett Field, California, a NASA selection team had plenty of sites from which to choose. Each was visited between 21 August and 7 September 1961, and the front-runners soon became MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, followed by the site donated by Rice University in Clear Lake, in southeast Houston. The Benicia Ordnance Base near San Francisco was third.

That all changed when the air force opted to keep the doors open at MacDill. Houston moved to the top of the list, and there were plenty of high-level and powerful Texas politicians turning up the heat to bring the center to their state, including Lyndon B. Johnson, vice president of the United States and chairman of the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences; Albert R. Thomas, chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, who had lobbied for a NASA “laboratory” in Houston as far back as October 1958; Robert R. “Bob” Casey and Olin E. Teague of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics; and Speaker of the House Samuel T. “Sam” Rayburn. On 19 September 1961, a thousand-acre plot just south of the city donated by Rice University was officially announced to the public as the site of NASA’s new Manned Spaceflight Center.

The decision was met with indifference, if not an outright coolness, by some in the Space Task Group. Some were understandably hesitant to leave their homes in Virginia, but others were left in stunned amazement by the aftermath of Hurricane Carla. A category 4 storm when it struck with winds of 145 miles per hour on 11 September 1961, just eight days before the announcement, Carla left forty-three fatalities and more than $325 million in damages in its wake. “There were boats in the trees and snakes,” remembered Arnie Aldrich, who briefly considered staying at Langley. “The hurricane didn’t just hit Houston. It hit Clear Lake. It hit the very area where the Johnson Space Center is located. It was interesting in Life magazine to see that.”

Another 620 acres adjacent to the property was soon acquired, and construction on underground utilities and roadways began in earnest in March 1962. The area where MSC would be located was home to a cattle ranch, a simple two-lane paved road leading into and out of the area that would one day become NASA Road One, maybe an oil rig or windmill here and there, and not much else. One reporter showed up at the site and promptly came across a coyote hunter. Picture every deserted setting from every Western B-movie ever made, complete with tumbleweeds blowing across the screen and a lonely dirge for background music, and that was pretty much the original setting for MSC. One of the first things Jerry Bostick did when he hit town was to drive down and check out where he and his family would be living. He came away with the distinct feeling that it was out in the middle of the boondocks, and if the truth be known, that is exactly where it was.

This was where NASA was going to base its manned spaceflight program?

The Bosticks’ house was one of the first in Nassau Bay, a subdivision located across the road from the center and just one of several communities that sprang up in the area. Within months of the formal announcement, Gene Kranz dispatched Dutch von Ehrenfried to Houston to scout the area’s real estate situation. Housing had to be adequate but relatively inexpensive, with down payments no more than $250. He wound up reporting back to Kranz that three-bedroom houses could be had for $16,500. “Dutch did not own a home in Virginia and was as eager as any of us to get his family resettled,” Kranz wrote in his autobiography. “He did well as a real estate scout.” Ten families eventually moved into houses picked out by von Ehrenfried in an area that came to be known as Flight Controller Alley. The development was a few miles north of MSC, and von Ehrenfried borrowed $250 for his down payment on a corner lot. With a salary of nearly $7,000 a year, he thought he could swing it.

Glynn Lunney had not been wowed by his time in Virginia, so he was not tied to the area. If NASA needed him to move to Houston, Texas, that was fine by him. “There are all these clichés about the Texans, but they really were gregarious, outgoing, and so happy that we were here,” Lunney said. “The people in Houston just turned out and were very, very helpful. They gave all the help that they could to our people for settling in here and doing things for them, putting priority on roads or whatever they had to do.” It was that kind of attitude that most impressed Lunney. “They’re a very can-do people,” he continued. “They tend not to sit around and wait for somebody to tell them what to do, and they get after it. They like to be independent. It was such a change from what we’d just come out of [in Virginia], where we were sort of tolerated as opposed to embraced.”

A huge Fourth of July barbeque welcomed NASA to Houston in 1962, with a sixty-car parade taking dignitaries from the Sam Houston Coliseum and back again. A little more than two months later, an even grander NASA welcome took place when 25,000 people greeted President Kennedy at the airport on 11 September. A day later, 200,000 lined city streets as the man who had set the nation on its path to the moon made his way to Rice Stadium. The speech Kennedy gave that afternoon in the baking Texas heat was iconic, ranking right up there with the one before Congress more than a year earlier.

Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

It was then that Kennedy really lowered the boom, as he was interrupted by applause.

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Future flight controllers and other MSC and contractor employees continued to move into the area, one family right after another, almost faster than anybody could possibly ever count. By July 1962, there were 1,600 people working at the center, and that number had doubled just a year later. Another thousand were on site by the end of 1964. Many of the fresh, young engineers who would be manning the MOCR were straight out of such far-flung universities as Montana, Louisiana State, Texas, Texas A&M, Iowa State, Southwestern Oklahoma State, and Mississippi State, among plenty of others. In the Trench, they came to NASA at the rate of about one a month for a year and a half. Glynn Lunney liked to say they simply showed up and hired themselves, and better yet, did not sit around and wait for a job description. That, they pretty much wrote themselves. Many interviewed, if you can call it that, and were employed over the telephone having never before stepped foot in the Lone Star State.

As construction continued on MSC, temporary office space was leased at a dozen or so locations scattered throughout Houston. Gilruth hung out his shingle at the Farnsworth and Chambers Building, the center’s interim headquarters, on 1 March 1962. A mile away on South Wayside Drive, just across the Gulf Freeway, was Site Five—which included the temporary base of Flight Operations and mission control, located in the 12,600-square-foot former Stahl and Myers Discount Appliance Center, while several had offices right next door in the Houston Petroleum Center.

That is where Jerry Bostick had his, and it was from there that he watched as President Kennedy’s motorcade passed by on the freeway on 21 November 1963. One day later, the president was dead. “Homer Scott, an aide to Chris Kraft, came running into our room screaming, ‘The President has been shot!’” Bostick remembered of that terrible day. “We listened to the radio for a while, then I went home. I had just pulled in my parking spot when I heard that the president had died.”

The accommodations at the Stahl and Myers building—which not only housed Flight Control but also served as a warehouse for the Oshman’s Sporting Goods Company—were something less than posh. “We were on the second floor, and we had to climb stairs to get up to it—no elevator,” Charley Parker said. “The stairs were creaky. I mean, you walked up those stairs and they creaked every step you took. The wooden floor on the second floor, it creaked. Everybody thought it was going to fall down one day, but you know, that building stood for years and years and years before it was demolished.”

The best of the young guns coming on board had an innate ability to make accurate split-second decisions, while others were able to pick it up through the relentless grind of simulations and studying on their own. Some thrived in that kind of environment, and there were those who eventually decided—or had it decided for them—that being under such pressure was not their particular cup of tea and moved on. “At the time, it was a very, very rewarding thing,” remembered Lunney, who not only was chief of the Flight Dynamics Branch but a flight director as well by the early mid-1960s, just as Project Gemini was gaining a full head of steam. “We brought young folks in there, and I can’t give myself credit. I had another job besides running a branch, building it up, teaching a whole bunch of new people what all this trajectory, guidance, going to the moon, and rendezvous was going to be all about.”

Spaceflight was obviously a new venture, which meant that everyone was learning the ropes. What NASA wound up doing in many cases was the next best thing when it came to hiring experience and laying a foundation for Flight Control. Tech reps were brought in from the Philco Corporation to build the agency’s worldwide tracking network during the Mercury program, and they eventually also designed, built, and installed the MOCR’s consoles in Houston. Then, when Avro Canada found its contract for the CF-105 Arrow canceled in February 1959, thirty-two of the company’s Canadian and British engineers came south to Langley. Among them were John Hodge, the future flight director and chief of the Flight Control Division; and Tecwyn “Tec” Roberts, who served as an original FIDO before becoming a force behind the design of the MOCR in Houston.

It was that kind of knowledge base upon which much of the rest of the control team was built. Lunney had worked his first flight as a FIDO under Roberts on 20 February 1962, for John H. Glenn Jr.’s famed three-orbit journey. He soloed at the Cape console for M. Scott Carpenter’s 24 May 1962 flight, and then took Cliff Charlesworth under his wing for L. Gordon Cooper Jr.’s May 1963 Project Mercury finale. John Llewellyn and Jerry Bostick were gaining steam on console too, and together they all stretched the newer guys, throwing them into the deep end of the pool to sink or swim, and then some.

Okay, you’re now in charge of flying the Apollo launch phase out of Houston’s new control center. Go figure out rendezvous, guided reentries, and retrofire calculations.

Hired in droves, fresh-faced rookies became grizzled veterans who were making life-or-death decisions on console in the span of a year, eighteen months, max. “It was a wonderful time, a really wonderful time,” Lunney continued. “It was a very great pleasure to see how rapidly these young people just jumped in and learned what they had to learn. They were very, very aggressive and hard-working guys.”

They were aggressive and hard-working, yes, but what some also wanted was a piece of the action in this grand adventure of space travel. Steve Bales had been incredulous when the Soviet Union launched Sputnik on 4 October 1957, and that, combined with a Walt Disney–produced television program on the future of human spaceflight changed the course of his life. He landed a gig as a summer intern at MSC from June to August of 1964, giving tours. The place was so new, not a single console had yet been placed in the MOCR when he first walked in. To better acquaint people with what would be taking place in the room, Bales learned the responsibilities of each console by chatting with the controllers who would work them. It was a great way to get the information he needed—and to get his foot in the door as a potential operator himself. He met Lunney, the Flight Dynamics Branch chief; Gene Kranz, who headed up the Flight Control Operations Branch; and Arnie Aldrich, chief of the Gemini systems branch. “You talk about falling into a tub of butter,” Bales quipped. “I found out (a) I would like to work there, I thought, and (b) I could pick the branch I wanted to work in. They were staffing up like crazy, and when I applied, they knew at least who I was.”

Bales needed a few credits in the fall quarter at Iowa State, and it was during that quarter that he applied to work at NASA full time. His application came complete with a reference from Lunney, and in December 1964 he was hired. Bales had at least a few things going for him at that point.

He came in at the end of preparation for the Gemini program, so he had the chance to sit in a room with a mix of guidance and flight dynamics officers, listen to them talk, and soak it all in. The team had been working on a procedures manual that was not exactly high level with a lot of details, but it at least gave him an idea of where to start. And after only about a month, he could watch sims from a back room. In the beginning, he hardly knew what anyone was talking about, but with plenty of OJT—on-the-job training—he was ready to move onto the guidance console for the June 1966 flight of Gemini 9.

The main responsibilities of Gemini’s guidance computer came during ascent, rendezvous, and reentry, and there was not much to do otherwise unless there was an emergency. “I had been in the back room and then I had plugged in next to Charley Parker,” Bales said. “Charley hardly ever made a mistake, but some of the younger guys who were learning, I’d say, ‘Boy, I could have done that a little better.’ That’s what you think. You might have done one little thing better, but they were doing four and five things at once.”

Bales had talked himself into a sense of confidence, but when it came his turn in the hot seat during training for an actual mission, he knew with an almost guaranteed certainty that something bad was going to happen. “You talked yourself into, ‘I can do this,’” he added. “But the first time you sit down and it’s you, and you’ve got to talk to the flight director; you’ve got to talk to the computer room; you’ve got to talk to the flight dynamics officer; your first thought is, ‘What am I supposed to do? What the heck do I do next?’ It’s really hard to get things to slow down. Things just seem to be coming at you real fast.” If Bales did not perform, he felt that he would either go back to the end of the line or get out of the line altogether.

Bales was maybe two months ahead of Maurice Kennedy, who had already accepted another job offer in West Palm Beach, Florida. He and wife Trudy were almost literally headed out the door of their married student housing at the University of Texas in Austin for good when the phone rang, and as he went to answer, his first response was one of frustration with his wife because he thought she had already had the phone turned off. Luckily for him, though, she had not. The call was from the personnel office at NASA, asking him to come to Houston for a series of interviews. The first was with Lunney, and afterward, Kennedy immediately asked that the others be canceled. Kennedy, who like several of his soon-to-be MOCR coworkers had built homemade rockets in his youth, had found a home in the Flight Dynamics Branch.

Like Bales, J. Gary Renick had been struck by the launch of Sputnik and knew that he wanted to somehow, some way, work in a space program that did not exist back then. When he arrived in Houston in January 1965 to begin a NASA career that eventually led him to the guidance console, he did so at a salary of less than $7,000 a year. It was his dream in life at that point to someday make the unimaginable, astronomical sum of $10,000 a year. If only he could reach that golden ring, he would have it made.

The Trench was getting full, and so was the rest of the room. Still, as many new hires as seemed to be flooding into the place, Arnie Aldrich never figured that there were too many. He needed as many people as he could get for the Gemini Systems Branch set up on the right-hand half of the second row. “We had a blend of people, and they all came in fast,” Aldrich remembered. “They would show up. I wasn’t out interviewing. I was too busy doing the things we were doing, and we got a very capable, competent group. They all worked well together. We built a fairly large team quite rapidly and supported a lot of flights in a fairly short period of time over those first few years.”

Kranz had the task of hiring for the remote sites scattered all over the world, and the controllers would then filter into the MOCR itself. Experience during the Mercury era provided a starting point for remote-site controllers, whether they happened to be in the John Llewellyn or Chuck Lewis mold. “Basically, we could pretty much characterize the personalities,” Kranz said. “If the personalities were matched up with a good skill set, then we said, ‘Yeah, this is probably a pretty good guy.’”

A psychologist chimed in and told Kranz that what he was looking for was someone who wanted to do something rather than someone who wanted to be something—in other words, Kranz needed to steer clear of those who were driven by their egos. While other NASA centers concentrated on recruiting new hires in other parts of the country, Kranz had the Midwest. “Basically, I got farm boys, first in the family ever to go to college, so they had a hell of a work ethic,” he recalled. “If you take a look at mission control, there were very few people who came in from MIT or Stanford. Basically, we found out that the people at MIT, Stanford, and those kinds of schools were absolutely brilliant, but they weren’t great team players. Basically, the people we got were maybe not quite as brilliant, but they were great team players and they would work together to solve a problem.”

Like the Trench, the systems branch was getting its fair share of quality applicants as well. After getting his degree from Lamar University in Texas in January 1960, Rod Loe and his new bride, Tina, packed up and moved to Seattle. There he went to work for Boeing’s engineering development program and eventually pitched in on the company’s proposal for the Lunar Module. A transfer meant moving to New Orleans and the Michoud Assembly Facility, home to Boeing’s S-IC first stage, in the midst of the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. There was a small problem when he and his expecting wife arrived in Louisiana—nobody was needed in the engineering development program, and there was a long way to go before hardware was going to be ready for testing. Instead, he went to work for what amounted to customer service, writing manuals for the S-IC’s ground support equipment. He was not a happy camper.

At Christmas that year, Loe was at home in Beaumont, Texas, when he ran into a friend who worked at NASA. “I remember thinking, ‘He’s not any smarter than I am,’” Loe said. “I had lost my mom and my dad was living in Beaumont. I was an only child, so he was by himself. This was a good opportunity to get closer to home.”

Years later, Loe would jokingly accuse Kranz of putting on a show for him once he arrived in Houston for his interview. The scene is not hard to imagine, given the near chaos of the time. Kranz, standing in front of a blackboard with all kinds of names headed to all kinds of exotic locations around the world, was barking orders into the phone when he motioned for Loe to enter. Somebody was stuck in New York needed a passport, and he needed it pronto. Loe was sold, then and there. “That really impressed the heck out of me,” admitted Loe, the soon-to-be EECOM. “To think I might be a flight controller looking at these spacecraft that we were working on, that seemed like the ultimate test to me. I said, ‘Yeah, I think I’d sure like to come over here.’”

He took the job, thinking he might stay for a couple of years for the experience, and then depending on how his dad was doing, move on to go see some more of the country. He had seen Seattle and New Orleans, and he was on his way to being settled in Houston. Might somewhere in New England be next?

Half a century later, New England was still waiting on Rod Loe to arrive.

John Aaron, another up-and-coming EECOM, very nearly left NASA early in his career. But once he started to get his feet under him, a handful of mentors were instrumental in continuing that growth process. They saw something in Aaron, a quality that would one day fully blossom. They took him under his wing, and he was not alone. There were plenty of new guys on the block being taken under plenty of wings. That is the way it worked in those days. “I think they recognized my potential, and it just grew from there,” Aaron said. “Then, I had some real mission experiences being a controller in the Gemini program. I worked all the Gemini flights and made a contribution. The mentors took me under their wing. If it hadn’t been for that, I probably would’ve gotten discouraged and went back to pursue my dream to be a cattle rancher.”

One of Aaron’s mentors was James F. “Jim” Moser, one of the Philco tech reps who helped him out during an early Gemini simulation at the Kauai tracking station in Hawaii. Moser showed Aaron the ins and outs of the spacecraft, and its communications systems in particular. As always, Aaron was like a sponge. Moser went back to Houston, and, according to Aaron, “had some good words to say about me. That really started the process of being recognized by Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, and so forth. They took an interest in me and then started mentoring me in all aspects of NASA.”

Arnie Aldrich was also there for Aaron early on, beginning what would become a close lifelong friendship. Aaron had never before written a memo when he joined NASA, and when the rookie attempted one on his own, Aldrich was not impressed with the results. The draft was thick with one redline correction after another, so much so that very few phrases remained unchanged. What separated Aldrich was the fact that he did not just hand it back to Aaron and expect him to start from scratch again. The two of them sat down for what Aaron called a two-hour crash course in Technical Memo Writing 101—how to introduce it, how to get the message across, how to get the request, and how to sign it all off.

A friendship might have seemed unlikely between Aldrich, a native of the Boston area, and Aaron, the midwestern country boy. Yet that is exactly what happened. Their children were about the same age, and their families enjoyed many a camping and fishing trip together. “The first time we went camping, I caught fish, fried fish, and made a big pot of beans with jalapenos in it, he fell in love with pinto beans,” Aaron recalled with a laugh. “He taught me many things. I don’t know that I taught him a whole lot, but I did teach him how to make pinto beans.”

Learning how to write a technical memo versus cooking a pot of pinto beans? It was a good trade. “I’ve been blessed that I have what I would call some very close, real friends in my life,” Aaron concluded, turning serious. “It’s not a long list, but Arnie Aldrich is on it.”

Aaron was also forevermore linked with Gerry Griffin in NASA legend for their roles during the launch of Apollo 12 on 14 November 1969. First, though, they had to get up to speed in their respective roles.

Griffin was commissioned in the air force once he graduated from Texas A&M, but too many pilots and the tight screening process that resulted caused his 20/25 vision to prevent him from being a pilot. He did the next best thing by going to navigator school. Griffin got his wings, underwent radar intercept training, and wound up flying backseat in both the F-89J Scorpion and F-101B Voodoo. When Griffin got out of the military in 1960, he landed first at Lockheed. Classified satellites were already being launched out of Vandenburg Air Force Base, and while almost as many went into the drink as made it to orbit, Griffin nevertheless became an expert on the company’s Agena rocket upper stage. He interviewed with Kranz as early as 1962, but when the two could not get together on money, Griffin headed to General Dynamics/Fort Worth to be a part of the company’s fledgling initiative to get into the space business.

Griffin’s move was a ploy of sorts. Yes, it was a job, but Fort Worth was also closer to Houston—and a space program that was already in existence. Two years later, Mel Brooks heard about Griffin’s Agena expertise and reached out to him. He wanted to work at NASA so badly, he took a small pay cut to do just that. Only a month or so after arriving in Houston and some very basic work as an Agena controller, Griffin was asked by Arnie Aldrich to serve as a GNC.

If working as a GNC meant working at NASA and in mission control, that was absolutely fine with Gerry Griffin.

The native Texan was a little bit older and had experience in a control room—albeit it had been for an unmanned vehicle—during his stint at General Dynamics. Although he had never had any courses in orbital mechanics, space systems, or anything of the sort, he took to the GNC assignment with gusto. Being a flight controller in the MOCR was like being in the backseat of a jet fighter in the air force. The technical background had to be there, and so did a couple of other very important factors—confidence and not being afraid to make decisions. “Quite often, you were exposed. There was nobody else there to answer for you,” Griffin began. “Being a flight controller was not for everybody. The people who left the control center, went to the back room, or went to another job, they usually eliminated themselves. It was a lot of pressure.”

Griffin was not all that much different from the astronauts whose flights he helped oversee. The possibility of making a critical mistake in front of his peers was an all-encompassing driving force for Griffin to keep learning and improving. “Fighter pilots are very much the same. They don’t want to ever have it said that they didn’t do something right,” Griffin continued. “The big fear of the astronauts and flight controllers was that they didn’t want to screw up. You didn’t want something to happen bad that you caused. We worked long, hard hours. We took hours to understand the systems we were responsible for and how they worked. We went over test data. We went over all kinds of test procedures. It was constant. You just didn’t want to make a mistake.”

What separated Griffin from those who did not make it in the MOCR was this—he loved being in such a predicament, so much so that he eventually became a general aviation pilot with a commercial license and instrument rated on single- and multi-engine aircraft and helicopters. Pressure? What did Gerry Griffin know about pressure? He ate up that kind of stuff. “I still like those kinds of positions where I have to be out front,” said Griffin, who was named as a flight director in 1967. “I don’t mean that in a boastful way. I still fly my own airplanes. It’s kind of the same thing. You’ve got to make decisions. You’ve got to make things happen. You’re in control, instead of somebody else. Something starts to happen, and it happens in a hurry that you didn’t expect. You’ve got to be able to roll with the punches.”

By late January 1963, work on the foundation of Building 30—what was then called the Integrated Mission Control Center (IMCC)—had begun. Plans called for the three-story building to accommodate 805 people and have a total of 245,000 square feet of enclosed floor space, including two nearly identical MOCRs on the second and third floors that measured approximately 4,315 square feet each. Construction costs amounted to $6,940,939. Two months later, a NASA press release announced that a contract had been signed “definitizing” the Philco Corporation’s role in fitting the building with its consoles. “Philco will provide the ‘pulse’ of the IMCC—all the complicated internal electronic flight information and control display equipment,” continued the release. It also noted that the contract amounted to a whopping $33,797,565, including a fixed fee, as well as the fact that the first-floor Real-Time Computer Complex would be outfitted by IBM.

What the controllers were getting was an extraordinary leap in capability from the Mercury Control Center. The Cape’s facility was as state-of-the-art as state-of-the-art could get when it was constructed, and it worked well during flights—and maybe that was the truly extraordinary aspect of what had been accomplished, given what controllers had to work with. When John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth during the legendary flight of Friendship 7 on 20 February 1962, Dutch von Ehrenfriend spent most of the day hustling back and forth between his console at the Cape and a teletype room to send messages to remote sites monitoring issues that plagued the mission. The messages would be written out by hand and taken back to Robbie Robertson, who staffed the teletype room and tapped out the messages. A reply from the other end was just as laborious, and the whole process took minutes to complete. Voice communications, when and where they were available, were often spotty.

Neil Hutchinson went to work for NASA in 1962, just in time to visit the control center at the Cape a couple of times during simulations. To him, tracking a spacecraft in orbit and doing so on a flat map seemed almost like science fiction.

Star Trek never had it so good.

Given the ingenious complexities involved, the group display at the front of the room was something of a Rube Goldberg machine. On the display was a backlit flat map of the world, with expected trajectories drawn pre-mission. The flight’s progress was tracked from the left of the map to the right by a miniature spacecraft with a small light bulb at its center, suspended by four wires to move it up, down, right, and left. The light bulb flickered on every time the spacecraft came in contact with a remote site, but what happened when the plastic spacecraft reached the right edge of the map was the kicker. “So how do you get the spacecraft from one side to the other?” Hutchinson asked. “Well, you run all the servos at full blast, the spacecraft jumps up to the top of the world map, zips back to the left, drops back down to the proper place on the map on the ground track, and it makes a big noise when it does that. It goes zing! Zing! Zing! Zing! And it’s back on the other side.” His reaction to the whole thing was simple. “I was awed by the crudeness of that device,” Hutchinson admitted. “I’m sure there were people who were so proud of that thing, that they figured out a way to put a ground track on a flat map and move a spacecraft along.”

5. Although Mercury Control Center was state of the art for its time, it was a far cry from the rooms that would be built in Houston. Courtesy NASA.

Compare that to Houston’s sparkling new group display, which featured one of the world’s first rear-projection systems. If there was a most obvious difference between the two control rooms, that was probably it. A very close second would have been the advent of consoles in Houston that featured digital data displays, as opposed to the Mercury era’s analog gauges and dials. The original consoles had room for maybe fifteen to twenty measurements at the most, while the digital possibilities were virtually endless. The RTCC’s computers could take a signal from the computer that was new to the Gemini spacecraft, do a few calculations, and turn it into a raw number that measured, for instance, how much fuel remained in either percentage or pounds. A handful of mechanical measurements gave way to hundreds of digital ones, which led to a huge effort to determine such things as what information everyone needed to see versus the requirements of an individual position.

Everyone needed to know Ground Elapsed Time, but FIDO did not necessarily care how much propellant remained in the control officer’s Lunar Module thrusters. “The difference was night and day,” Bob Carlton said. “When I saw this computerized thing and the ability to put your schematic on the display, man, that was fantastic! I was exuberant. I jumped on board that in a hurry. The beauty of it was, you could have a tremendous amount of data where you could see almost every parameter you had on your schematic. When you’re troubleshooting a problem, having it laid out like that is a terrific tool.”

Others were not quite so quick to accept the change, and went so far as to have computers draw digital meters on their screens before finally making the switch to all digital data, all the time. “To a great extent, many of the early people that we had in Mercury had very little background or experience in working with computers,” Gene Kranz said. “To a great extent, we were technical dinosaurs. Young folks like John Aaron, Phil Shaffer, and Don Puddy, that generation came in with a background with that type technology.”

Gone also were the days when von Ehrenfried was forced to trot here and there with messages. Now in place was yard after yard of pneumatic tubes that could zip canisters to and from the MOCR. The dispatches were always of the utmost importance—or not. “People would start putting all kinds of crap in there, not just messages,” von Ehrenfried said. “They would put a hot dog in there or a sandwich. We started getting things clogged up, so they said to knock that shit off.”

What it all amounted to was this. The MOCR was based very much on the Mercury Control Center at the Cape, with the same basic layout, only expanded. Jerry Bostick thought he had died and gone to Heaven. “The capacity of the computers when we moved to Houston was several times larger,” he began. “We had a lot more displays, and they were closer to real time than they were at the Cape. The room itself was probably twice as big.” It was a far, far cry from the primitive flight-monitoring trailers—the never-used predecessor to the control centers in both Florida and Texas—that Arnie Aldrich had worked on when he first arrived at NASA. So rudimentary was the task that Aldrich’s father, Mark, once asked him when he was going to get a real job.

On 20 February 1964, 280 employees began the process of moving into the MSC’s new facilities, and five months later, during the weekend of 6 and 7 June, nearly 80,000 people attended an open house. The relocation from Virginia to Texas had cost the program time, as construction, hiring, and training continued at a lightning pace in Houston. More than a year had passed since Gordon Cooper’s Mercury finale, and Gemini would not begin for another nine and a half months.

Plenty of potential controllers had been hired to staff a control center that was ready to roll, and in September 1964, Glynn Lunney and Gene Kranz became flight directors in order to help Chris Kraft and John Hodge oversee it all. The two men joined the fledgling Space Task Group at roughly the same time—Lunney in 1959, Kranz the following year—and a healthy sense of competition developed between them as they became legends at the flight director’s console over the next several years.

Members of the Trench tended to gravitate to Lunney because he was one of them, while on the other hand, Kranz was admittedly more attuned to the world of the systems controllers. What developed was not necessarily Team Kranz versus Team Lunney—the last thing either of them wanted or needed on their hands was a mission control divided. Kranz called their rivalry friendly but intense, very much the way he had competed for one of two available spots in Fighter Weapons School after graduating from flight training in the air force. “Glynn was the smartest guy I ever knew,” Kranz said, emphasizing every word. “He was probably the smartest guy who ever worked in mission control. He had an intuitive feel for the job. I think it was an acknowledged competition, but basically, good people compete for jobs. If you don’t get it this time, you’re going to get it next time. I think the beauty of the thing was that if I was going to launch somebody and got that job, he knew he’d get a launch the next time.”

Who might get to lead this or that flight? What about the high-activity phases, like launch or maybe somewhere down the road, a lunar landing? Kranz and Lunney both wanted as much of those kinds of things on their plates as possible, just the way every subsequent flight director did. “The competitive part was only at the very start of the program, because by the time we got into the program, we were so damn busy that we were just glad somebody else was going to pick it up for the next mission,” Kranz concluded. “I just respected Glynn because he was so damn smart. He didn’t have to run around with three notebooks under his arm all the time.”

The 23 March 1965 flight of Gemini 3 with astronauts Gus Grissom and John W. Young on board was the first manned launch of the program, and it was to be the final mission controlled from the Cape. Controllers in the MOCR on the third floor of the MCC in Houston monitored data and communications. One flight later, the roles would reverse—the third-floor MOCR was prime, the Cape backup. From that point on, through the end of Apollo’s epic lunar landings, flights were controlled almost exclusively from the third floor. The only exceptions were three unmanned Saturn IB tests, one unmanned Saturn V shakedown, and Apollo 7, all of which were flown out of the MOCR one floor down. Otherwise, it was used for simulations. Why were so many flights flown out of the third-floor control room, leading it to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places, rather than the one on the second? They were, after all, essentially one and the same. Had there been some reason, or had it just worked out that way by chance?

No one seemed to know, except for Kranz.

“The third floor was used for two reasons,” he began. “That’s where the simulation control area was, and that’s where the recovery room was. As a result of that, if you wanted to talk to the sim supervisor, you could walk right out of the room, talk to the sim supervisor, and get back. That facilitated the debriefings. The simulation team could look right out the window at us, see who they wanted to talk to, and call them up. We could walk over to the recovery room and do the same thing. It was generally the location of the three major facilities in one floor.”

There you have it.

As advanced as the new Houston MOCR was, spacecraft tracking had not yet caught up with the technological tide. Because of that, a number of tracking stations located around the world were either held over or added since the days of Mercury. Primary sites that gave direct commands to the spacecraft included:

Bermuda, which confirmed orbits and recommended go/no go decisions;

The Cape, from which missions, of course, were launched;

Carnarvon, in northwestern Australia;

USNS Coastal Sentry, originally a C1-M-AVI class freighter ship and known in NASA circles as Coastal Sentry Quebec—every other tracking station had a three-letter call sign, so the two ships in use had to, as well;

Corpus Christi, located at Rodd Field in Texas;

Grand Canary, located 120 miles off the coast of Africa and 28 miles north of the equator, a critical location had an abort been commanded by Bermuda;

Guaymas, on the Gulf of California in Mexico;

Kauai, the northernmost major island in Hawaii;

Point Arguello, forty miles north of Santa Barbara, California;

Tananarive, located in the Malagasy Republic off the coast of southeast Africa;

USNS Rose Knot, known to its NASA inhabitants as Rose Knot Victor—if the ships had to use three-letter call signs, nobody seemed quite sure where the “Quebec” and “Victor” came from in Coastal Sentry Quebec and Rose Knot Victor;

and, of course, the control center in Houston.

It was at best a challenging proposition to coordinate control of a flight between the MOCR in Houston, tracking sites scattered to the four corners of the earth, and a spacecraft whizzing by overhead at a rate of some five miles per second. Windows of opportunity lasted maybe three to five minutes while the capsule was in range, and a lot had to get done in a short amount of time. Timelines were drawn up pre-mission, planning for what could be done and when—an orbit could be updated here, retrofire there. If there were any funnies to check out, a systems controller might ask for a reading on such and such a gauge. “It was very time constraining,” said Jerry Bostick, who remained in Houston throughout the Gemini and Apollo programs. “We didn’t have any training in this. We just knew that we had a limited amount of time to convey information. So we tried to be as precise and clear as we could, to shorten any questions, any updates or anything.”

Overall control of a flight was still exercised out of Houston, but there were mission rules in place that took into account life-threatening emergencies. The capcom, who was in charge at the tracking station, could make just such an emergency call without running it by Houston. “But that was very, very rare,” Bostick added. “Otherwise, everything would be run by the flight director back in Houston before they took any action.”

The sites were in many cases staffed by newcomers who were getting their feet wet in the NASA universe. Gary Scott was born and raised in Binger, Oklahoma—also the home of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Bench, who picked cotton for Scott’s father, and Bench’s brother, William, was in the same high school class as Scott. After graduating from Southwestern Oklahoma State University with fellow future flight controllers John Aaron and Tom Weichel, Scott set sail out of Puerto Rico; Trinidad; Lima, Peru; and Hawaii; and he worked Carnarvon and Grand Canary as well. “It was an awesome feeling for a country boy,” he concluded. “It was really neat getting to travel and see a little bit of the country. Pretty much, you went there and you came back, but you got to see a little bit along the way.”

Duty on board the two tracking ships in the middle of the ocean might have been a nightmare for some, but that was not the case for Bob Heselmeyer. He ate it up. Never mind the fact that the Coastal Sentry Quebec once had to sail around a typhoon and then get back on station. That was no big deal, at least not to Heselmeyer. “For me, it was great. I loved it,” he explained. “Ohhhhh . . . that’s where I learned that I liked being on ships. It was impressive that the ship could be where it needed to be. I didn’t consider that a hardship at all.”

And then there was Ed Fendell. Just a few weeks after Fendell joined the agency, Dutch von Ehrenfried dropped a book on his desk. He opened it and one of the first things he saw was an electrical schematic, complete with buses, circuit breakers, the whole nine yards. He asked von Ehrenfried the most obvious question.

What is this for?

The reply was every bit as obvious.

That’s the Gemini spacecraft.

What am I supposed to do with this?

You’ve got to learn this to be a capsule communicator, because when they have problems, you’ve got to know what they’re talking about.

Fendell could not believe what he was hearing. A capcom? No way. Unlike many of the rookies filing into Houston, Fendell had been around the block a few times. That did not mean, however, that he was ready for this gig. Von Ehrenfried was merciful. He told Fendell to get himself a book on basic electronics, copy layouts onto a piece of cardboard, and then use crayons to color the buses yellow, the circuit breakers another color, and so forth.

That was how Ed Fendell learned to read a schematic, with a box of crayons that cost maybe a dime.

As Herculean a task as it might have been, he was at the capcom console in Carnarvon for the legendary four-day flight of Gemini 4 in early June 1965. Australia . . . Hawaii . . . Mexico . . . the Gemini years were good to Fendell. “The capcom was like the flight director at the site,” he said. “When he arrived at the site, even the station manager worked for him. He was like Chris Kraft or Kranz arriving on site. It was an incredibly great job. I mean, it was the best job I ever had.” It was easy to get the impression that when a position in the MOCR became available, it did so with Fendell kicking and screaming and not wanting to come back to Houston. He was having too good a time out in the world.

In that respect, Fendell had plenty of company in those who enjoyed life on the road. Working the tracking stations was enjoyable to others, but at the same time, a means to the end of one day sitting a MOCR console back in Houston. Regardless of the circumstances—whether the new guys were in Houston, on the road, or on the road and wanting to get back to Houston—one theme seemed common to them all. They all wanted to prove themselves worthy, and they wanted to prove themselves worthy in conditions that were not always the greatest. Many countries in Africa were marking the end of the British Colonial period by engaging in what seemed like almost constant civil war or revolutions. Others on their way to NASA’s remote sites had to travel through areas under Communist rule.

Regardless, these were people who had a job to do. “When you went out to those remote sites, you were the only ones that had the data—it was on you,” said Merlin Merritt, who worked at Carnarvon and chased a few kangaroos before moving to Houston as EECOM for the flights of Gemini 5, 9, and 12. “You didn’t have this mass network of the support structure that we had when we were in the MOCR. In a sense, you were kind of proving yourself.”

There would be plenty of things to prove during Gemini.