On the afternoon of 22 November 1963, Dallas businessman Abraham Zapruder excitedly awaited the arrival of President Kennedy’s motorcade in Dealey Plaza. In his hands was his trusty eight-millimeter camera, primed and ready to capture a home movie of the big event.
The 486 frames Zapruder shot that Friday lasted a mere twenty-six seconds, but in those six feet of film were images of a gruesome murder, the end of Camelot, and the start of one of the most turbulent periods in American history. Life magazine purchased still and motion-picture rights to the film before the weekend was over and published thirty-one frames—excluding the most graphic—in an issue that hit newsstands just three days after the tragedy. More than twenty years would pass before the complete film was viewed by the public at large, and the reaction was one of complete and utter shock.
Few losses of life would ever be recorded in quite so troubling a fashion, except, maybe, for audio of the Apollo 1 fire on 27 January 1967. No video images have ever been discovered of the accident, but its sounds are nevertheless very deeply disturbing.
The plugs-out test had not gone well that day, and moments before the flame that was to claim his life broke out, command pilot Gus Grissom could not contain his growing frustration.
How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between three buildings?
There was no response from Clarence A. “Skip” Chauvin, the test conductor capcom who was located not 240,000 miles away, but a mere handful in the Operations and Checkout Building at the Cape. Ed White, the all-American hero of Gemini 4 spacewalking fame, was quick with a quip.
They can’t hear a thing you’re saying.
Grissom was not happy.
Say again?
How are we going to get to the moon if we can’t talk between two or three buildings?
Another minute passed, during which possible indications of crew movement could be heard in the crackling comm. At four seconds past 6:31 p.m. on the Florida launch pad, a voice rang out in alarm. Some thought it was rookie Roger B. Chaffee, others White.
Hey!
Two more calls, these likely from White.
I have got a fire in the cockpit!
The next began with either the singular pronoun I or possibly the plural we, while the next four words seemed unmistakable.
. . . have a bad fire!
The final voice transmission was determined to have come from Chaffee, and it was the most terrible, the most heartbreaking, the most sickening of all. It was a primal howl, perhaps attempting to actually say something or perhaps not, as the side of the Command Module ruptured with the force of the blaze.
Hundreds of miles away in Houston, flight controllers monitoring the test from the MOCR on the second floor heard every brutal second.
If heading into Apollo was not exactly starting over from scratch, it seemed to be something very much like it after the successes of the Gemini program. The way John Aaron put it, things just were not as crisp as the program that had just concluded. McDonnell Aircraft constructed both the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, while the Apollo Command and Service Module contract went to North American Aviation. Experience in building spacecraft did not carry over from the first two programs to the third, and North American’s original Block 1 spacecraft turned out to be what Charley Parker not-so-delicately termed “really a mess.”
Gene Kranz was shocked by how far Rockwell’s Block 1 capsule had to go before it could fly with the same kind of quality as the Gemini spacecraft. “All of our experience had been with McDonnell, and Rockwell was used to building fighter airplanes, rolling them out of the factories, et cetera, and they weren’t about to listen to anybody that wasn’t a test pilot, okay?” he said. “So the astronauts were able to influence, to a great extent, Rockwell. We had virtually no influence out at Rockwell on the next system.” The people on the ground had to know the craft that was going to be flown, and before the Apollo 1 fire changed everything, that simply was not happening.
That was only one part of the problem. There were simply too many cooks in the kitchen. Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation built the Lunar Module, while the Boeing Company, North American, and Douglas Aircraft Company combined to construct the monstrous Saturn IB and Saturn V launch vehicles. The Saturn IB flew three unmanned test flights before the end of the Gemini program. Gemini flight controllers were busy flying missions, while a separate group of planners worked on all things Apollo. The result was that Gemini controllers had experience on console, but little if any background in Apollo systems and procedures. Those who had been studying such things on Apollo, in turn, tended to have comparatively little real-time experience in the MOCR. The two groups mixed as Gemini came to an end and Apollo began, but not very well at the outset.
There were three full years remaining in the decade, but the slain president’s deadline was in dire jeopardy. “We had what people thought was plenty of time, but there wasn’t,” said Bob Carlton, who was making the switch from Gemini Agena flight controller to Apollo Lunar Module control officer. “We were not getting ready fast enough, and it was compounded by a whole bunch of factors. Everything was in limbo.”
Then came that horrific night.
Dutch von Ehrenfried left NASA in January 1966 to move to Denver, Colorado for a much better paying job, but after the excitement of Gemini 8, he realized just how much he missed flight control. After just four months away, Lunney gave him a job at the guidance console in the Trench.
That was where von Ehrenfried found himself on the night of the accident, alongside Will Presley. John Aaron was working his very first Apollo shift that night, having swapped with fellow EECOM Rod Loe, who was celebrating his anniversary by playing bridge with wife Tina and a few other couples. Arnie Aldrich and Gerry Griffin, both GNCs who would have been sitting right next to Aaron, were in the room as well. Bill Gravett handed the retro console over to Chuck Deiterich and was on his way to a date when he heard. Gravett called Deiterich and asked if he needed to come back in, but the answer was no.
There was nothing he could do.
Gene Kranz was dressing for a dinner date with his wife, Marta, when next-door neighbor and LM branch chief Jim Hannigan knocked at his front door and told him the news. Rushing to MSC, he found Building 30 locked down and got in only after bulldozing his way past a security guard and taking a freight elevator up to the second floor. Glynn Lunney had dinner plans with astronaut William A. “Bill” Anders, Jerry Bostick, and their wives. FIDO Dave Reed had been on an earlier shift for the test, and headed home after grabbing a few checklists from his office. Ed Fendell got off work, too, and went across the street with a few others to hit the bar at the local Holiday Inn. FIDO Jay Greene was in downtown Houston at a joint called the LeCue Pool Hall. Charley Parker, the MOCR’s original guidance controller, heard the news on his car radio.
Chris Kraft, returning one more time to the flight director’s role that he invented, had also left the second-floor MOCR to catch up on some work in his office. He was still an operations guy at heart, and could take pushing papers for only so long. Around 4 p.m. or so, he went back to the control room.
Like every other person who was there that night, Kraft heard the chaos of the fire unfolding in his headset. Their heads shot up, looking at each other in stunned disbelief. Surely, they had not heard what they had just heard.
What was that?
Did somebody just say fire?
Kraft began praying harder, he said, than he ever had in his life. Part of him wanted to get on the loop to the Cape to ask what was going on, but he did not, knowing that the pad workers already had their hands full. “Around me in mission control, there was an awful silence,” Kraft wrote in his autobiography. “Every member of my team sat white-faced and rigid, every ear tuned to the terrible sounds coming from the Cape. We were nine hundred miles away and helpless. This was not an emergency that mission control could handle.”
Another test conductor, George F. Page, was in the smoke-filled White Room surrounding the spacecraft. He gave a quick report to Kraft, who could hear the despair in Page’s voice. After waiting a couple of minutes, Kraft could stand it no longer and asked about the crew. Page’s reply shot through the MOCR.
Not much hope, Flight. We’ll have the hatch open in a minute.
After another couple of minutes, another message from the launch pad confirmed the worst. Kraft could not tell if the voice was Page’s or maybe somebody else’s, not that it really mattered.
The crew is dead.
“My stomach lurched and I felt sick all over, so weak and drained that I almost collapsed into my chair,” wrote Kraft, who served as a pallbearer at Grissom’s funeral. “People had these stares, looking at each other like, ‘What the hell?’” von Ehrenfried remembered. “It wasn’t a big, fast, emotional thing, but by the time I left, I was in tears.” Von Ehrenfried was later assigned to the program office as a staff engineer for the flight of Apollo 7. He also became an Apollo pressure suit test subject, and in late 1969 he applied to the astronaut office. That night, however, Jerry Bostick found von Ehrenfried in the parking lot outside the building, repeating the same word, over and over.
Terrible.
Terrible.
Terrible.
John Aaron’s wife, Cheryl, called Loe and asked if he could go pick her husband up at the control center. He charged out to MSC and found Aaron, who had repeatedly gone over the data from the accident to see if he might figure out a root cause. Emotionally and physically drained to the point of no return, Aaron was in no shape to make the drive home. By Sunday, Loe was on a NASA Gulfstream jet bound for the Cape to assist in the investigation. He heard the cockpit recordings, as did several others. “We’d had a pretty long run of real success in Mercury and Gemini, and it was a bolt out of the blue,” said Arnie Aldrich, who was asked by Kraft to review the tapes. “Nobody expected it, and it was devastating. It caused doubts about ourselves we hadn’t had before.”
On the Monday following the accident, Gene Kranz told John Hodge that he was calling a meeting in a Building 30 auditorium. His initial shock had turned to anger. Three astronauts were dead—astronauts that many in the MOCR knew well—and he had an inescapable sense that the control team had somehow let them down. After a few remarks by Hodge, Kranz climbed the four steps to the stage. Searching at first for words, he began.
Spaceflight will never tolerate carelessness, incapacity, and neglect. Somewhere, somehow, we screwed up. It could have been in design, build, or test. Whatever it was, we should have caught it. We were too gung ho about the schedule and we locked out all of the problems we saw each day in our work. Every element of the program was in trouble and so were we. The simulators were not working, mission control was behind in virtually every area, and the flight and test procedures changed daily. Nothing we did had any shelf life. Not one of us stood up and said, “Damn it, stop!”
As he continued speaking, the passionate fervor in Kranz’s countenance took on that of a tent-revival preacher. He did not know what the review board chaired by Langley Research Center director Floyd L. Thompson would determine as the cause of the accident, but Kranz knew what he thought as he continued:
We are the cause! We were not ready! We did not do our job! We were rolling the dice, hoping that things would come together by launch day, when in our hearts we knew it would take a miracle. We were pushing the schedule and betting that the Cape would slip before we did.
The two words Kranz wanted ingrained in everyone’s mind from there on out were “tough” and “competent.” Those present were told to write them on the blackboards in their offices, never to be erased, as a reminder of the sacrifice that had been made by Grissom, White, and Chaffee. No matter how many people actually obeyed the command, its impact was the same. “When you hear about Kranz and his speech after the fire, that sounds like this great big hoo-rah thing,” said Ed Fendell, ever the wordsmith. “That’s an unbelievable speech. You’ve just killed three people, and some guy you work for carries everybody in his organization, even the secretaries, into this auditorium and commenced to tell them that we’re all at fault. It’s not only the vehicle. What kind of an individual does that? Is that an ordinary guy? That’s not an ordinary guy.”
Fendell’s remarks were not a criticism of Kranz by any stretch of the imagination. Fendell went so far as to equate the flight director with Joshua L. Chamberlain, an ordinary antebellum college professor turned Civil War hero who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions on the Gettysburg battlefield.
NASA was forced at every level to take a step back and reexamine itself to the point where there was one agency before the fire and an almost completely different one afterward. The first order of business was making the decision to not end the American march to the moon then and there, a move that was actively considered in some corners. “Imagine if it had turned out the other way,” Glynn Lunney began. “Suppose Apollo ended with the fire and the loss of three people, and we turned away from the challenge. How would the Cold War have turned out? What would that have looked like if we’d just said, ‘We’re done. We’re getting out of this competition’? How would that have looked in history?”
A specific cause was never determined for the Apollo 1 fire, but plenty of kindling was found—a cabin pressurized with 100 percent pure oxygen and filled with flammable materials. Never again would those kinds of catastrophic components come together on an American spacecraft. For many, years of reflection and hindsight showed that had it not been for the loss of the Apollo 1 crew and the top-to-bottom improvements that came with it, Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade deadline would probably not have been met. “From our perspective in the control center, we said, ‘We’re never going to let anything like that happen again. If it’s not right, then we’re going to make it right before we commit a crew to it,’” said Charley Parker. “That’s the way we approached it, and I think that’s the way a lot of people did.”
A 3 April 1968 press release announced that Glynn Lunney had been assigned as lead flight director for Apollo 7, the first manned flight of the redesigned program, while Gene Kranz was scheduled at that point to handle the second, Apollo 8.
There were no surprises there, but it was the next piece of news that had already raised more than a few eyebrows in and around the MOCR. Joining the ranks of flight directors were M. P. “Pete” Frank III, Milton L. Windler, and Gerry Griffin—Frank and Windler flew jets in the marines and air force, respectively, while Griffin was an air force backseater. At first glance, their time in the air appeared to be the only thing the three men had in common. Frank was chief of the Lunar Missions Analysis Branch in the Mission Planning and Analysis Division at the time, while Windler came to the job from the role of chief of the Operational Test Branch in the Landing and Recovery Division. Technically, both were part of Flight Operations, but neither Frank nor Windler had ever had so much as a second’s time on a MOCR console.
For some in the control room, that was cause for, if not outright resentment, then certainly surprise. Definitely, Gene Kranz disagreed. “I believed all flight directors should be selected from the ranks of mission control and was surprised by the selection of two virtual unknowns,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Since they would need time to come up to speed, I successfully lobbied Kraft to add Gerry Griffin, a top-notch Gemini controller, to the list so we could get some immediate help.”
Kranz knew neither Frank nor Windler, and for Frank at least, all he knew of Kranz was his hard-driving reputation. That gave him more than a moment’s pause when approached about the job—could he put up with Kranz? “His personality was totally different from mine,” said Frank, who died 22 February 2005 after being involved in an automobile accident. “I’m really pretty casual and not exactly laid-back, but don’t get real excited about things and not very intense in dealing with things. Gene is a very intense person. You get that message real quick.”
It marked the beginning of an extraordinary journey for Frank, who was initially completely befuddled by the MOCR’s intercom system. Observing during a Gemini mission, he plugged in but did not know how to operate the console. “I pushed one of the buttons, and it started flashing,” he recalled. “I thought, ‘God, what have I done?’ I’d punch it again and it kept flashing.” If that was his introduction to the control room, his baptism of fire came the day that Glynn Lunney had to be in two places at once—a meeting over in Building 2 and a launch-abort simulation in the MOCR. Lunney went to the meeting and handed the sim off to Frank. Lunney left him with a pep talk. There is nothing to it, he told Frank. The guys know what they are doing, so just respond to their calls.
Frank sat down for the simulation, felt lost, and called it a “horrible day.” Despite all that, however, Frank managed to get through it. “I felt like an idiot and looked like an idiot,” Frank admitted. “There’s these guys that someday you’re supposed to be down there running this thing telling them what to do. Here they’re seeing you do this and you don’t know what you’re doing.” Frank would go on to sit down with controllers at each of the consoles in the room, learning their responsibilities and problems. After the native of Bryan, Texas, sat his first shift during the May 1969 flight of Apollo 9, he came into his own. He was lead flight director for both Apollo 14 and Apollo 16, and by the end of the lunar landings, he was chief of the Flight Directors Office and lead for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project as well.
From 1974 to 1982, he served as chief of the Flight Control Division—a role once held by Kranz. “I have a lot of respect and admiration for him,” Frank said. “Once you get beyond this outward façade that he has—it’s not really a façade, he’s truly what he says he is—he’s also a really kind, decent person behind all that. He’s not just a martinet that he runs by, you wind him up, and he does things. He’s a real human being.”
Windler joined NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, in 1954 after graduating from Virginia Polytechnic Institute—Kraft’s alma mater, which is now Virginia Tech—with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He specialized in location aids and operational testing in Landing and Recovery, and when he was called in and asked if he might like to be a flight director, Windler did not have to think about it.
Yes.
Windler would insist that he was never aware of any controversy that might have come with his being named to the job. “Among the troops, the people that had been doing that kind of thing, yeah, they probably said, ‘Pete who? Milt who?’ Most of them probably didn’t have any idea who we were, but nobody ever said anything to me,” Windler began. “It never really became a factor in my mind.” Like Frank, Windler found training to be intense. Griffin had a systems background, and Windler had to get one, not only in the Command and Service Module but also in the Lunar Module and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the Saturn V booster. His first flight on the flight director’s console was Apollo 8, during coasts to and from the moon. To Windler, the lower-activity phases of the mission were not nearly as exciting as his first solo flight, or the first time he strapped into a high-performance F-86 Sabre jet fighter.
That was solo, too, because it had no backseat.
After the fire and during the almost total overhaul of North American’s Command and Service Module, Griffin spent most of the next year going back and forth between Houston and Downey, California, and helping remove as much flammable material from its cockpit as possible. Becoming a flight director was not something he sought or even expected, but if somebody had asked him beforehand if he might be interested in the position, his response would have been a rapid one.
Somewhere along the line, he got a phone call from somebody—it might have been Kranz, but Griffin was not sure—that changed the course of his life.
Hey, we want to make you a flight director.
Griffin mulled the offer over for all of a second or two before responding.
Fine!
Kraft had been the decision maker on every other flight director, but Griffin understood that he had somebody else in his corner, at least when it came to his selection. “Gene Kranz got into it a little, probably even when I was selected, or maybe even quite a bit,” Griffin figured. One way or the other, John Hodge was in sharp disagreement with what was taking place, and, in fact, he ended up moving on at least in part because of it. His issue was not necessarily that Windler and Frank came from outside the close-knit circle of MOCR controllers, but rather that he had known nothing of the assignments, experience or not. “I didn’t mind at all the idea that somebody was coming from outside,” Hodge said. “I was just annoyed that [Kraft] didn’t consult me on it. He said he thought I’d disagree with him on it, and I said, ‘Yeah. That’s what I’m supposed to do. I didn’t think I’d change your mind, but my job was to argue with you on those kinds of positions.”
A 14 May 1968 press release announced that Hodge had been reassigned as director of the newly established Lunar Exploration Working Group, in which he would “be responsible for coordination and direction of all MSC activities relating to lunar exploration” in Houston, at NASA headquarters in Washington, and with other outside groups involved in the Lunar Exploration Program. In his place as division chief went Gene Kranz, who figured that Hodge’s decision to move on was partly personal, partly organizational, and partly policy related. In the end, he believed that Kraft felt Hodge was too conservative to be a flight director.
Hodge eventually left NASA in 1970, the highest-ranking member of a contingent that went to work at a new research center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, operating under the auspices of the Department of Transportation. While he returned to the agency in 1982–86, working as director of the Space Station Task Force and as acting associate administrator, some thought there had been more to his departure from the Flight Control Division in the first place. A graduate of the University of London with First Class Honors in engineering, there was no doubting the Englishman’s pedigree. He was a nice guy and maybe a little too nice to corral the competitive energies of a go-getter group like those who worked in the MOCR. Other branches within Flight Operations complained about working with a bunch that could at times come across as a bunch of know-it-all prima donnas. Once Kranz took over, it was up to him to make it right. They could either work things out among themselves, or he would step in and make whatever call needed to be made.
Nobody was going to intimidate Gene Kranz, but he did not become an autocratic dictator either. “Kranz always thought that whatever he did was right, and if somebody didn’t like to do it his way, that’s fine, they could challenge him,” said a former flight controller who asked that his name not be used. “He was the first guy I ever worked for that if he came up with some plan, you could tell him right to his face, ‘That plan’s no good.’ He’d say, ‘Okay, show me why.’ If you did show him why, he’d change it. If you didn’t, he won and you went by his plan.”
That kind of character trait did as much as, if not more than, anything else to gain Gene Kranz the respect of those who worked under him. He was a tough-as-nails boss, yes, but more important, an approachable one.
From the first time that Bill Gravett sat the retro console late in the Gemini program, he had been confident about the situations and emergencies for which he had trained over and over and over again. Those sims could be rough, no doubt about it. God help you if you sent the wrong command at the wrong time.
The loops would go into bedlam, the Cape, SSR, test conductors, and the flight director all wanting to know what had happened and what was going to be done about it. There was not a hint of sarcasm or irony in Gravett’s voice when he said that sims were not a restful, easygoing atmosphere at all. Yet that was where mistakes were supposed to be made, where things were supposed to go wrong. When he made it out to the front room for the last four flights of the Gemini program, there were butterflies to be sure, but he felt sure he could handle virtually anything that had ever been thrown his way in a sim. A nagging question, though, always seemed to be haunting him in the back of his mind.
What about the situations that the real world is going to throw at me for which I have not received training?
The unmanned Saturn V test flight of Apollo 6—officially known as AS-502—turned out to be exactly Bill Gravett’s worst nightmare.
The first time the Saturn V flew, on 9 November 1967, those in the second-floor MOCR had been astounded by how well it performed. The flight of Apollo 4 was “perfection,” Gravett said, getting off the launch pad as though it had been flying a million years. After Apollo 5—another unmanned Saturn IB test with a working LM that was controlled out of the second-floor MOCR in January 1968—it was Gravett’s turn on Apollo 6. “I guess the management said, ‘The first one went so good, we’ll kind of ease ol’ William Gravett in here. We’ll let him be on the launch team for the next one, and that should be a piece of cake,’” he said. According to Gravett, he and a handful of others were being groomed for the Moon Platoon, a group of controllers who would handle the early lunar landings, if not the first. After Gemini, he had hit the ground running to get Apollo figured out.
How do you do an abort out of a lunar orbit?
How do you do an abort halfway between the earth and the moon to get home?
What kind of computer processors and displays do you need to have to do all that?
He was already scrambling when engineer Jon C. Harpold walked into his office a couple of days before the launch of Apollo 6. A glitch had been found in the vehicle’s reentry software program.
Oh?
The software was showing the vehicle with more lift than what was actually available, and during the final phase of reentry, the problem was being discovered too late to do anything about it. But do not worry about it, Harpold told Gravett. Multiple failures had to take place in the mission before it would ever actually happen in real time.
Oh?
Come launch day, Gravett was at the retro console in the third-floor MOCR. Next to him was FIDO Jay Greene, with Neil Hutchinson working the guidance console. On the far left of the Trench was Bob Wolf, the booster engineer from Marshall, with backup Frank Van Rensselaer situated between Wolf and Gravett. Wolf smoked constantly and tended to call people “Bud,” never by their name. To the rest of the Trench, he became “Bud the Cigarette.”
The flight went perfectly for all of two minutes, at which point severe oscillations began to shake the Saturn V so badly that pieces were falling off the area around the Spacecraft/Lunar Module adapter that connected the Command and Service Module to the rest of the stack. The problems did not stop there. Five minutes, nineteen seconds into the flight, thrust on the S-II second stage’s Engine Number 2 dropped significantly due to a ruptured igniter fuel line. Just short of a minute later, the eleven-foot-tall Rocketdyne J-2 engine shut down altogether. Less than two seconds after that, Engine Number 3 followed suit. Greene noticed the depressed trajectory and mentioned it to Hutchinson and Gravett. Hutchinson saw the vehicle steering way more than normal, gimbals moving around all over the place, trying to make up for the oscillations and engine cutouts. Gravett heard Wolf talking to his SSR over the comm loop.
You lost what?!? You lost an engine?
Gravett turned to Greene.
Booster is saying we lost two engines on the S-II.
Sure enough, the Trenchmates saw altitude starting to peel off and the vehicle flying “low and slow,” remembered Gravett. Both Greene and Hutchinson had gotten on the loop to let flight director Cliff Charlesworth know what was taking place when Wolf chimed in. “About that time, Bud the Cigarette comes on—and of course, he knew this maybe fifteen or twenty seconds before he said it—and said that, yes indeed, an engine had gone down,” Hutchinson remembered, and nearly half a century later, he could afford to chuckle. “I was always proud of the fact that me and the flight dynamics officer—actually, I’m sure that we didn’t figure that out before Bud, but he was so reticent to get on the loop and say, ‘Hey, man, one of my big S-II engines crapped out.’”
Guidance software had been set up to compensate for a single failed engine, but not two. Greene watched the whole episode, knowing that two engines out should have meant an abort. He had the capability to call one, and so did Wolf. “We’re sitting there on pins and needles, man,” Gravett said. “I kind of had a funny feeling in the back of my mind that said, ‘I think it’ll be a cold day in hell before Marshall Space Flight Center authorizes an abort on their baby up there.’” He remembered the ensuing conversation between Charlesworth and Wolf.
Okay, booster. It’s your call.
Flight, it seems to be flying along. My bosses say as long as it’s not a safety problem, let’s let her go and see what she’ll do.
The range safety officer located at the Cape was seeing the same thing as the MOCR. The vehicle had not violated any limits, so Charlesworth held him off. The loss of the two engines caused the remaining three to burn for nearly fifty-eight seconds longer than normal, and then the third-stage S-IVB also had to burn for an extra twenty-nine seconds. The problems continued to pile up. “The vehicle lofted, and then got on third stage and it started to dive straight at the earth,” Greene said. “Based on that, I had a limit line that we were approaching and had my sweaty little fingers on the abort switch. The thing finally straightened out and it made it to orbit. Probably the first time we ever inserted into orbit going backwards, based on the way the guidance missed its target box. It just kept trying until it got there.”
The Command and Service Module and S-IVB stack was placed into an oddly shaped elliptical orbit of 107.5 miles by 223.6 miles above the earth, instead of the intended circular orbit of 115 miles. “That S-IVB woke up, and it said, ‘I am very low, and I am very slow, and I’ve got to get with it,’” Gravett continued. “It went to a super-rich fuel mixture, and it screamed up to orbit.” Everything looked copasetic, Greene said, and the S-IVB engine was reignited for a boost to an altitude of nearly 14,000 miles so that the Command Module’s heat shield could be tested at lunar reentry speeds.
The time came for the partial trans-lunar injection (TLI) maneuver, and the time went. The S-IVB engine would not fire.
This was the worst of simulations unfolding on a real mission. Greene threw a switch to separate the CSM from the S-IVB, and the big Service Propulsion System engine at the back of the service module kicked in the additional 7,000 mph or so needed to get to a suitable altitude for the reentry test. Not enough fuel remained, so rather than hitting the atmosphere at 37,000 feet per second, it could only manage 4,000 feet per second less. One final difficulty was facing Gravett, and as a retro officer, it was perhaps the most serious of all. He could not tell anybody where the capsule was going to land. His landing points were literally all over the map. “One of the tenets in being a flight controller that was taught to us by the teacher, Chris Kraft, was you gather as much data as possible and you do not make the decision any earlier than you absolutely have to,” Gravett said. He was pressed for a landing point, and then pressed again.
His best guess was that the capsule was going to come down approximately a hundred miles short. On that word from Bill Gravett, the USS Okinawa recovery ship lit its boilers and hustled to the new splashdown point. It had already been a long day, a tough one, and Gravett was frazzled as the capsule hit the earth’s atmosphere. He listened carefully for word from the radar operator on board the carrier, located where he thought Apollo 6 was going to come down. The call was not the one for which he had hoped.
The spacecraft is directly overhead.
Because the capsule was still reentering the atmosphere, there was at that point no way of telling where it might actually hit water. The carrier wheeled around and headed back to where it had been initially, and Advanced Range Instrumentation Aircraft (ARIA) were sent out to begin a search. One ARIA spotted what was thought to be the spacecraft, but it instead turned out to be a whale. Nearly ten hours after launch, the Apollo 6 capsule was found fifty miles from where it had been expected. The spacecraft had one last surprise in store—it was in the Stable 2 position, nose down into the water and its heat shield facing up. Three flotation bags automatically inflated, and that, along with the ocean’s waves, brought the capsule upright well before the recovery ship arrived.
The date was 4 April 1968, the day civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed as he stood on a Memphis motel balcony.
Afterward, Bill Gravett chose to step away from the retro console. How would he have felt, he asked himself, about sitting in the MOCR for a manned mission and getting bit the way he had on Apollo 6? He had hurried up to catch up during Gemini, and it was starting all over again on Apollo. Could he emotionally and physically handle it? He called up the simulation team and asked if he might be of use. “I didn’t feel nearly the stress that I did,” Gravett concluded. “Basically what I would do was come up with training cases to throw at the guys in the Trench. It was still a lot of pressure and a lot of weird hours, but it wasn’t the pressure of being out there in that seat.”
Apollo 6 was over. The next time a Saturn V left the launch, there were three human beings at the pointy end, headed for the moon.