10

Living on the Moon

It is a little less than five hundred miles from Boyle, Mississippi, to Houston, but for EECOM Bill Moon, the towns might as well have been on opposite sides of the universe.

In a room full of people who had taken a multitude of paths to work in the space program, Moon’s was one of the most remarkable. Moon’s father, Jew Or Ning, arrived in the United States from China on 3 September 1908 in search of the gam sahn—in English, the golden mountain—that he hoped life in the country would afford them. Although he was refused entry and returned to China due to an eye infection, Jew Or Ning tried again a little more than two years later.

This time, he was able to settle near Sacramento and found work on farms, ranches, sawmills, and as a camp cook for 20 Mule Team Borax Smith’s Tonapah and Tidewater Railroad. He returned to his home country a handful of times, married, and was widowed before he could bring his wife or their children back to the States. He went into business and moved to the Mississippi Delta in 1925. Fourteen years later, a twenty-year-old woman named Wong She moved to America to be his wife. Jew Or Ning had eight children—one of them Jew Yui Wie, or William Joe “Bill” Moon—and the family all lived in the back of a grocery store they ran in Boyle. By age six, young Bill was working, waiting on customers and making change for their purchases.

His parents had a built-in abundance of help with that many kids running around, so they would often “loan” him to a nearby grocery store, where his real-life education continued. At ten years old, he was making five dollars a day, learning to butcher steak and chicken, and was eventually trusted enough to run the store with the help of only one other fifteen-year-old employee. Moon attended Boyle High School through the ninth grade, and after that district was consolidated with another, he moved to nearby Cleveland High School. He found acceptance, both at Cleveland High School and at Mississippi State University, where in 1960 he became a charter member of the Acacia social fraternity.

The fact that he was a minority . . . in a social fraternity . . . in the Mississippi Delta, in the heart of the Jim Crow Deep South . . . in the early 1960s . . . seems as extraordinary an accomplishment as being an integral member of a team that landed men on the surface of the moon.

After graduating from Mississippi State in 1964 with a degree in electrical engineering, Moon had a NASA job offer at the Cape but chose instead to go to work in St. Louis for McDonnell Aircraft on the electrical design for its Phantom F4D jet fighter. While visiting his brother in Houston, he swung by MSC to fill out yet another application. A month later he had another offer, and this time he took it. From that point on, Moon’s was a fairly typical route to the MOCR. He worked the remote sites late in Gemini and during an unmanned Saturn flight, before moving into the vehicle systems SSR for the CSM—that was where the brains were, he joked.

Once in the back room, his goal was clear. Moon wanted a shot at proving himself in the MOCR. When his daughter was born around the time of Apollo 9, Moon turned his SSR console over to a coworker just long enough for him to make the trip to the hospital and back. “I found how to sell myself was to take responsibility for everything that I did,” Moon said. “Every assignment, you made it like you owned it and you did it to the best of your ability. I liked being in a leadership position, and that’s how you proved yourself on all the assignments you were given.”

Although Moon was the first minority to work a console in the MOCR, it was not a fact upon which he dwelled. “I achieved my promotions based on how well I did my actions,” he said. “I don’t feel like I got anything given to me because I was Asian. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even feel like an Asian. Among the guys, I was treated like normal. Some people may have perceived it different, but I’m always crossing the lines.”

He never worked an Apollo launch—after the Apollo 12 lightning strike, that was John Aaron’s domain—but on Apollo 16 and 17, Aaron slid to the side for Moon to take over at the console. He took part in making history. He was just twenty-nine years old when Apollo 14 flew, and he dressed the part of the MOCR flight controller—white shirt, skinny tie, pocket protector, and horned-rim glasses. He traveled the world and the country, far, far away from his childhood home in rural Mississippi. He and his brothers and sisters were taught by their parents to strive toward their goals, and seven of the eight Moon children got college degrees.

19. Bill Moon (shown here with Sy Liebergot on the left) had an extraordinary journey to the MOCR. The son of Chinese immigrants, Moon grew up in rural Jim Crow Mississippi and eventually joined a social fraternity in college. Courtesy NASA.

As much as Jew Guie and Wong She hoped and dreamed their children might one day accomplish, they could never have imagined that one of them would one day take part in something like Apollo.

Nine and a half months passed between the splashdown of Apollo 13 and the launch of Apollo 14, and significant changes were made to the CSM—construction of its oxygen tanks was modified, and a third oxygen tank and an auxiliary battery were added.

Although that solved the problems that plagued Apollo 13, it appeared that the following flight would again fall short of the moon. It was not the life-and-death struggle that faced the MOCR just a few shorts months before, but it was frustrating nevertheless. Just shy of three hours and fourteen minutes after CDR Alan Shepard, CMP Stu Roosa, and LMP Edgar D. Mitchell left the pad in Florida, and early in the coast on the way out to the moon, Roosa brought the Kitty Hawk Command and Service Module in for a docking with the Antares Lunar Module housed in the S-IVB third stage.

It had become a routine maneuver on a lunar flight, but this time, the CSM’s conical-shaped probe bounced in and out of its drogue target at the top of the LM four separate times in just sixteen seconds. No joy. The contact left faint scratches in the drogue that the crew would later examine to begin figuring out what went wrong.

Roosa’s voice was calm as he reported back to capcom C. Gordon Fullerton.

Okay, Houston. We hit it twice and sure looks like we’re closing fast enough. I’m going to back out here and try it again.

He tried twice more in the next couple of minutes, and still, the latches would not catch. The time had not yet come to get nervous, but it was getting close as Roosa got back on the loop.

Man, we’d better back off here and think about this one, Houston.

Seven minutes later, another unsuccessful try came and went. Nearly an hour and a half later, the same thing. The implications were obvious. If Shepard and Mitchell could not get into the LM, the moon landing was off for the second flight in a row. What might that mean to the program? “Apollo 14, I guess, was the first time I really had a problem that could have been very critical occur, and that was when we were trying to dock up with the Lunar Module,” said Pete Frank, the mission’s lead flight director. “Like all those problems, you’re never expecting something to happen. You’ve got a very routine operation going on at the dock, and it didn’t capture. Well, let’s back off and do it again. It didn’t capture. Uh-oh. This is—wait a minute now.”

In the CSM vehicle systems SSR, Jim Kelly was considered an expert on the probe. John Aaron called him to the front room, and they went off the loop so they could talk and mull things over. What could possibly be the problem, and more important, what could they do about it? The probe was purely a mechanical device, so it had no instrumentation to check and diagnose what might be keeping it from latching.

20. A balky docking probe during the flight of Apollo 14 was not the life-or-death crisis of Apollo 13, but it could very well have derailed the mission nonetheless. Here, Charlie Harlan discusses a probe mockup with astronauts Gene Cernan (left) and John Young (right). Courtesy NASA.

From the outside looking in, the easiest way to bring the two spacecraft together might have been to back Kitty Hawk up, come at Antares with a full head of steam, and then slam the drogue home. If the theory sounded simple enough, in practice, it would not have worked. “The most fragile part of all this was not the Command Module,” Kelly said. “It was not the probe. The fragile part was a piece of aluminum foil hanging off the end of the drogue called the LM. We were concerned about coming in too fast, at the wrong angles, in shear motions. The LM was our concern.”

Another idea was taking shape, but it was a last resort. Why not have the crew put their suits and helmets back on, depressurize the cabin, and either bring the probe inside to see what might be wrong with it or reach through the tunnel and bring the CSM and LM together by hand? The first American in space seemed willing to give it a shot.

Houston, 14. I’m sure you’re thinking about the possibility of going hard suit and bringing the probe inside to look at it, as we are.

Fullerton told him to stand by, that he might just have one more procedure for the crew to try. Less than five minutes later, Apollo 14 backup commander Gene Cernan had momentarily replaced Fullerton at the capcom console.

Hey Stu, this is Geno. Do you read?

Yes, loud and clear.

Okay. We . . . we got one more idea down here before doing any hard suit work, and let me throw it out at you, and you come back with your impressions.

Roosa would very slowly close on Antares, and when he made contact, he would fire his thrusters to hold the CSM in place while flipping a switch to retract the probe. After discussing it at length to make sure the crew understood exactly what to do and when to do it, Apollo 14 tried docking for a sixth time one hour and forty-three minutes after the first.

At first, there was no response in the cabin, but then, barber pole. The word came down from Roosa.

We got a hard dock, Houston.

There was a sigh of relief in the MOCR, but now the concern was about having to go through all that headache the next time the CSM and LM had to dock, after Shepard and Mitchell returned from their explorations of the lunar surface. The docking had finally been successful this time, but what about the next, while the crew was in lunar orbit? They might not be so lucky.

After docking, the probe was brought inside the Command Module and inspected by the crew. They could see nothing wrong with it. “We were comfortable that it was working okay,” Kelly said. “When you find something that’s busted, and it kind of fixes itself, there’s always an uncomfortable feeling of ‘What did we fix?’ That rattlesnake is still there under the rock.” Later, the post-lunar landing docking went perfectly. The best anybody could figure was that some sort of contamination or debris caused the failures, and a covering was afterward added to protect the probe tip from foreign material.

The rest of the coast to the moon was relatively uneventful, leaving time for the MOCR’s version of the “gotcha” game. Wally Schirra was notorious for his love of practical jokes, but that was not the kind of thing that was limited just to the astronaut corps. Oh, no. Not by a long shot.

Sy Liebergot had arrived for an Apollo 14 simulation and noticed a bright-yellow stamped label on a nearby locker that read “Capcom Locker.” He felt sure it was Bruce McCandless, and then and there, a plan was hatched. Liebergot made sure he got to work for their first shift of the flight before McCandless, and proceeded to place similar stickers on each and every one of the forty-seven others in the room. He did not stop there, either, as he provided helpful directions to McCandless’s work station.

This way to the capcom console.

You’re getting nearer to the capcom console.

Here’s the capcom console.

You’re here.

The finishing touches were to the console itself. The armrests of McCandless’s chair featured “Left” and “Right” stickers, and Liebergot had also helpfully pointed out its “Front” and “Back.” Last but not least, he placed a “Capcom TV Monitor” sticker over the console tubes. “Bruce was not amused,” Liebergot wrote in his autobiography. “He was fuming as he took his seat at his console which was only a couple of feet to my left.” The best was yet to come.

Barely nine hours into the flight, Shepard’s voice drifted down from the spacecraft.

Bruce, we’ve been wondering if you found your headset all right when you got back to the MOCR.

There was laughter as McCandless replied.

Yes, I’ve got it on. I didn’t notice anything wrong with it. You may be a little subtle for me, but go ahead.

It was Roosa’s turn to gig McCandless.

You obviously found it. It is working.

The joke was all but forgotten when another piece of debris, this time a tiny bit of solder, caused another round of headaches in the MOCR as Shepard and Mitchell prepared for their descent to the surface. A light blinked on in the LM cabin, and it was not a good one—the PGNS computer was receiving an errant signal.

Abort.

If Shepard and Mitchell had been on their way down to the surface in Antares, the computer would have started its procedures to head back uphill and find Roosa and Kitty Hawk. Jack Knight was on duty at the telmu console, and his reaction was easy enough to understand.

This is not good.

If that was easy to understand, so was the first attempt at a fix. If it was something like a piece of lint, a solder ball, something small and metallic that was not supposed to be inside the electrical component, that might be causing a false electrical contact. “At that point, I seem to remember Bob Carlton said to have them tap the panel,” Knight said. Haise passed the suggestion up to the crew, the panel was tapped and the light went off, but not for long.

Abort.

Tap the panel.

Abort.

Tap the panel.

Abort.

Tap the panel.

Another abort situation was facing Gerry Griffin, who would work three of the last four descents to the lunar surface as flight director for the Gold Team. He was the only person who handled more than one. “My team was attuned to landings,” Griffin said proudly. “We kind of got a feel for it, kind of like driving your own car or flying your own airplane. We knew those vehicles in and out, for that phase of the mission, exactly what they had to do.” By Apollo 8 or 9, he would have taken anybody to work on his team and felt comfortable with it. By that time, he said, the MOCR had gotten down to the “hard core” controllers who thrived on the business of flying human beings to the moon and back. There were probably personality differences, but he did not seem to notice.

He was having too much fun.

This abort-switch problem was no laughing matter. Griffin waved off the descent for an orbit, and if Shepard and Mitchell were going to land, something had to be done as soon as possible. “Some kid at MIT,” Griffin said, reworked the computer program to bypass the switch. The “kid” was Don Eyles, and the sixty-one DSKY key strokes needed for the change were read up to the crew by Haise. “I had written the code that monitored this discrete,” Eyles said. “The workaround simply changed a few registers, first to fool the abort monitor into thinking that an abort was already in progress, and then to clean up afterward so that the landing could continue unaffected.” The landing was on for the time being.

The next time, it was not the abort switch that went haywire, but the landing radar. Still a little more than six miles up, Mitchell knew that the radar should be about to lock onto the surface. It did not, and he radioed down to Haise.

Can’t get the radar in.

Rules were rules, and the rules said that if the radar was not working at ten thousand feet, the landing would be a no go. Griffin was not worried about the problem. He knew that Shepard and Mitchell had to have a radar to land, but with so many other things going on at once, Griffin had compartmentalized the radar as a “to do” item. He knew the Trench and systems guys were working the issue, and for Griffin, that was good enough. It took just a couple of minutes before Haise transmitted a potential fix up to the crew.

Antares, Houston. We’d like you to cycle the landing radar circuit breaker.

It was a reboot before there was such a word, and it had worked. “If you were going to call an abort based on no landing radar, you wouldn’t want to call it until you had to,” Griffin said. “We still had time, we got the problem fixed, so I didn’t dwell on it. We had to get on with the landing.”

Seven minutes later, Antares was on the surface, and legend would later hold that Shepard would have played the gung-ho, bulletproof, indestructible hero card and landed even without the radar. No way, said Griffin. “Others may disagree with me, but in spite of everything said or supposedly said after the mission was over, there is no doubt in my mind that if we had called an abort, Al would have aborted the landing. He was too good not to.”

Touchdown in Fra Mauro was the most bittersweet of moments for Haise, who had been hit with a double whammy by fate. The world saw what happened to Apollo 13, but he had seen another chance at a moon landing drift sadly by after serving as backup commander for Apollo 16. That put Haise, LMP Jerry Carr, and CMP William R. “Bill” Pogue in line to fly Apollo 19, but both that mission and Apollo 18 were canceled on 2 September 1970.

When Haise sat down at the capcom console during the flight of Apollo 14, he knew that unless something happened to John Young, he would never walk on the moon. Shepard and Mitchell had taken Apollo 13’s landing target in the Frau Mauro highlands as their own, and so Haise volunteered for the capcom gig because he had trained for so long to explore there himself. “I’d been disappointed long before Apollo 14,” he admitted. “That was over. It was past history. My disappointment was obviously during 13 itself, when we knew we couldn’t make the landing, and the second time was when they canceled 18 and 19.”

The moonwalkers encountered a few minor hiccups during their first EVA, during deployment of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (ALSEP) and with a gradual degradation of the resolution of the television picture. On the second, their primary objective was Cone Crater, but getting there proved difficult almost from the outset of their journey. Landmarks were not where they expected, and lugging the Modular Equipment Transporter (MET) proved to be such a bear that their backup crew of Gene Cernan and Joseph H. “Joe” Engle bet them a case of Scotch that they would not make it to Cone’s rim because of it. Haise could not resist reminding them of the wager.

There’s two guys here that figured you’d carry it up.

Mitchell did not understand at first, and asked Haise to repeat himself.

Said there’s two guys sitting next to me here that kind of figured you’d end up carrying it up.

Cernan and Engle won the bet. The fact of the matter was that the two astronauts were not quite sure where they happened to be. Shepard picked a turnaround point, and at first Mitchell put up a mild protest.

Oh, let’s give it a whirl. Gee whiz. We can’t stop without looking into Cone Crater. We’ve lost everything if we don’t get there.

Moments later, Haise added the grounds’ two cents.

Okay, Al and Ed. In view of . . . where your location is and how long it’s going to take to get to Cone, the word from the backrooms is they’d like you to consider where you are the edge of Cone Crater.

The response was not the one for which Mitchell was hoping.

Think you’re finks.

Haise tried to explain the rationale.

Okay. That decision, I guess, was based on Al’s estimate of another at least thirty minutes and, of course, we cannot see that from here. It’s kind of your judgment on that.

Mitchell was not going down easily.

Well, we’re three-quarters there. Why don’t we lose our bet, Al, and leave the MET and get on up there? We could make it a lot faster without it.

Shepard told him that the rocks around them had been ejected from Cone during that eons-ago meteorite strike, but that was not good enough for the LMP.

But not the lowest part, which is what we’re interested in.

Shepard relented, and they pressed on. Haise relayed a message from their boss.

And, Al and Ed, Deke says he’ll cover the bet if you’ll drop the MET.

Nope. Mitchell would not hear of it. He was a gamer.

It’s not that hard with the MET. We need those tools. No, the MET’s not slowing us down, Houston. It’s just a question of time. We’ll get there.

As optimistic as Mitchell was trying to be, their thirty-minute extension evaporated in the blink of an eye. They had to stop, start sampling, and then start the return trek to Antares.

Al and Ed, do you have the rim in sight at this time?

Shepard misunderstood the question, and Haise repeated it.

Oh, the rim, the veteran astronaut replied. That is negative. We . . . haven’t found that yet.

It was at that point when Haise had to give them the bad news.

Ed and Al, we’ve already eaten into our thirty-minute extension and we’re past that now. I think we’d better proceed with the sampling and continue with the EVA.

The search for Cone was over, and they had come up short. Although he trained for Fra Mauro, Haise did not feel that he had been much of a help when it came to finding their way around. “Unfortunately, the main role I played was encouraging them to come back and stop trying to climb the side of Cone Crater,” Haise remarked. “They didn’t quite get to the edge. They were very, very close, but to get up there, they were going away from the LM. There was a lot of pressure to get them to call off the quest because of the time, and come back to the LM.”

Shepard had one more surprise in store when he and Mitchell got back to the LM. An avid golfer, he dropped two balls into the dust of the landing site.

Houston, while you’re looking that up, you might recognize what I have in my hand as the handle for the contingency sample return. It just so happens to have a genuine six iron on the bottom of it. In my left hand, I have a little white pellet that’s familiar to millions of Americans. I drop it down. Unfortunately, the suit is so stiff, I can’t do this with two hands, but I’m going to try an old sand trap shot here.

He swung and brought up the most valuable divot in the history of the game. Mitchell, then Haise commented, just the way they would have had this been an ordinary round back on Earth.

Hey, you got more dirt than ball that time.

That looked like a slice to me, Al.

The first lunar golfer was not about to be undone by a couple of good-natured smart remarks about his game. He dropped another ball onto the ground.

Got more dirt than ball. Here we go again. Here we go, straight as a die, one more.

He swung, and the ball disappeared out of frame of the television camera.

Miles and miles and miles!

Haise had not known of Shepard’s stunt, and supposed that he had cleared it with Slayton beforehand. “He got a good whack at the second one,” Haise said with a chuckle. “The mission at this point had been, obviously, declared successful for most of the primary objectives. They were just getting things cleaned up there at the LM. It was a nice little lighthearted amusement there at the end. To me, it was nothing that was super risky. It was not off color. It wasn’t eating into the work timeline. So I don’t see any rational reason why anybody would be against it.”

A day before landing back on Earth, Liebergot and McCandless had another brief encounter. The EECOM had just called for a quantity balancing procedure on the three oxygen tanks, and when he did, the capcom brought up one of Liebergot’s screens on his console in order to follow along as he read the instructions up to the crew.

Apollo 14, this is Houston. We’d like to get Oxygen Tank 3 heaters to Off now. 1 and 2, Auto. Over.

Shepard confirmed.

3, Off. 1 and 2, Auto. Okay.

Roger. That’s 1 and 2, Auto. Over.

Nearly a minute passed, and McCandless apparently noticed the tank temperature rising a few degrees past the 325-degree limit that Liebergot had imposed for the procedure. He got back on the loop to Shepard.

14, Houston. Confirm Oxygen Tank 3 heaters Off. Over.

Shepard’s reply was pure “Icy Commander,” his well-earned nickname from a long way back. In his book, Liebergot remembered it as “dripping with acid.”

Okay, we’ve got Oxygen Tank heater number 3, off. O-F-F. We have Oxygen Tank heaters number 1 and number 2, Auto. A-U-T-O.

“Shepard came back, and he played that military game,” Liebergot said. “The less familiar you were with him, the more you feared him. He played that to the hilt. He radioed back down, dripping with sarcasm. He was pissed. I’m screaming at McCandless, ‘No, don’t! Everything’s cool!’ I finally had to bury my head on the console, because I was going to get blamed by Shepard for that, not McCandless.”

Laughing, McCandless did not have much to offer other than a simple acknowledgment.

Roger, 14.

Apollo 15 was Glynn Lunney’s last mission at the flight director’s console, and that was not the only place in the MOCR where a changing of the guard was taking place.

Rod Loe had not been on the manning lists for several flights, and Bob Carlton had not worked the front room since Apollo 11. John Hodge, Dave Reed, and several others moved en masse to the Department of Transportation. In their place came new controllers like Bill Moon, young and eager to get in on the exploits of Apollo. Lunney had already been to the Soviet Union in late November/early December of 1971 to help begin laying the groundwork for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and he had been made manager for both it and the Apollo Experiments branch of the Apollo Spacecraft Program.

Ever so slowly, management was beckoning Lunney. Operations had been a part of his life since 1959, and he had worked in every American manned program since. He had for years been helping to build a highway to the moon, and while Lunney was not necessarily looking for an off-ramp, it eventually found him. It was time to move on and give the younger guys a chance. “I never thought of it as bittersweet, but in a way it was,” said Lunney, who worked his first and only descent to the lunar surface on Apollo 15. “It wasn’t like I was just leaving. It was time to move on from the work I was doing in operations, and it was time to move to a brand-new world that I really had never operated in before, which was program management. Things were changing all around me, and I was being asked to do some things that went beyond what I’d done before. All that just sort of tumbled out and was on top of me before I even realized that it was.”

Lunney was not the only flight director in the process of moving onward and upward. That was the way Gene Kranz and Cliff Charlesworth were headed, and Gerry Griffin gladly took the handoff and ran with it. Apollo 15 was to be the first of NASA’s “J” missions, which were extended explorations of the moon complete with an upgraded LM and PLSS backpack, which were good for EVAs of up to seven hours, and a high-tech dune buggy called the Lunar Roving Vehicle, or Rover for short. The entire crew—CDR Dave Scott and rookies LMP Jim Irwin and CMP Alfred M. “Al” Worden—had taken to geology with great gusto. Once Griffin joined them on a number of field trips, he understood why.

Before, focus had been on transportation—getting a crew to the moon and then getting it back safe and sound. Science was a part of each flight, but that did not take priority. Just pick up a few rocks here and there, make it to the rim of Cone Crater or not, then be done with it and get the heck out of Dodge for a safe trip back to Mother Earth. It was not necessarily us against them when it came to NASA and the science community, but they were not exactly one big happy family, either.

There seemed to be a breakthrough on Apollo 15, and not just because it was to be the first three-day stay on the moon. A big reason for that was Scott, who invited Griffin to tag along out to New Mexico for a geology field trip. The site was similar to what Scott and Irwin would find at their landing site near Hadley Rille, and it was there that the mission’s lead flight director began to take an interest in geology as well. “The bug kind of bit me, too,” Griffin said. “It was really fascinating. We all got kind of a turn-on to the science, the real purpose for why we were going, rather than just the transportation.” Griffin, in fact, wound up spending time in the field before each of the last three lunar landings.

Planning for the J missions was intense. The LM had to be upgraded to last three days on the surface. The Rover had to be developed, and a way figured out to fit it on the side of the LM. Astronauts had to learn how to become geologists, and later, a geologist would have to learn how to become an astronaut. Ed Fendell, though, was not concerned about any of that. A young NASA engineer by the name of William E. “Bill” Perry had come up with the idea for a camera that could pan, tilt, zoom in, and zoom out. Chris Kraft, who by then had been made deputy director at MSC, was in favor of the camera and putting into place a way to control it from the MOCR. That way, there would be a way to follow the crew without them actually having to continually move it here and there.

Responsibility for the camera fell to Fendell’s INCO group. Yet as he went through the chain of command, he met a certain amount of resistance. It meant selling it to the program office, building the system, spending the money, hiring a contractor, the whole spiel. A meeting was scheduled, and Fendell had one slide to present, and it read simply, “FOD [Flight Operations Directorate] has no requirement for a controllable television.” As he entered the room, Fendell handed over the slide and then sat down to wait. First, Anthony J. “Tony” Calio, the head of the Science and Applications Directorate (S&AD), made his case and his slide was basically the same as Fendell’s.

S&AD has no requirement for controllable television.

“Kraft starts to eat his ass out,” Fendell began. “I mean, he is cutting him a new ass. He is chewing him out for being stupid, near-sighted, et cetera, da-da, da-da. The whole room is just sitting there cringing, and I’m saying, ‘Oh, God. I’m gonna get it bad. I’ve got this requirement and my ex-boss is going to chew me a new asshole.’”

Mel Brooks knew what was coming, and told Fendell to have his slide pulled as soon as humanly possible. There was no time.

I can’t pull my slide. The slide’s in there.

Brooks did not help Fendell’s morale.

Oh, shit. You’re going to get killed.

When Fendell’s turn finally came, he meekly—as if Ed Fendell ever did anything meekly—went to the front of the room to face the music or the firing squad, whichever the case might have been.

Can I have the first slide please?

When it came up, the room broke into laughter. Kraft looked at him, shook his head, and gave him an order.

Sit down.

Chris Kraft got his camera.

Launch went smoothly enough on 26 July 1971, but on at least a couple of different occasions on the coast out to the moon, a definite sense of disconnect developed between flight director Milt Windler and EECOM Sy Liebergot.

The first of those took place nearly a day and a half into the mission, when telmu Merlin Merritt reminded Liebergot that an hour had passed since the crew was to have performed an “LM enrichment” procedure in which its cabin pressure was equalized with that of the CSM. Scott and Irwin would lower the pressure in their suits for their descent to the lunar surface, but before doing so, the concentrated oxygen in both vehicles allowed them to do a pre-breathing exercise in order to purge their bodies of nitrogen and avoid a malady known as the bends. The MOCR didn’t have the telemetry for the pressure gauge located in the docking tunnel between the two spacecraft, so there was no way to tell other than asking the crew. Over the comm loop, Windler pressed for details.

21. After a rather interesting meeting, Chris Kraft got the controllable camera he wanted for the later Apollo moon landings. Ed Fendell had just a two-year associate’s degree in merchandising but was placed in control of the camera and all things having to do with Apollo communications. Courtesy NASA.

Why is it important to do that?

Liebergot came back to Windler with a quick response.

Because, Flight, it’s going to be an hour from that point before we can equalize pressure with the LM, okay? And you’re nailed to that hour if what we suspect is true, that you’re going to have to drop the LM 2 psi. So why don’t we just go ahead and ask them? It’s no big deal either way. It’ll tell us a lot more than we know right now, relative to the flight plan.

Not only was Liebergot pitching in his two cents’ worth, so did Merritt and astronaut Dick Gordon, who was working alongside Karl G. Henize at the capcom console. Some time passed before Windler had Henize ask the crew about the procedure, and with Scott’s reply, Liebergot had just about reached his boiling point.

Not yet, Karl. We will, though.

Liebergot was “so pissed” at Windler, he would later recall how he turned around to confront the flight director.

Windler, someday you’re going to hurt somebody.

Rarely, if ever, had a flight director been spoken to so bluntly and brusquely in the MOCR. There had been many a heated debate between flight directors and their controllers, but that was the kind of thing that took place somewhere else, not in the control room and not with a crew on its way to the moon.

According to Liebergot, Windler responded by lunging at him over the console. “If I needed to know something, I needed to know it and don’t give me this crap about, ‘Let’s not bother the crew right now,’” the former EECOM said. “They’re probably sitting there, picking their nose. After about an hour of Windler picking and picking and gaining the necessary knowledge and tying up the flight director loop for an hour so he could thoroughly understand what LM enrichment was, he said, ‘You should’ve had it on telemetry if you really needed to know it.’”

Neither Windler, nor Merritt, nor Gordon had any memory of any kind of physical confrontation between the two men. Cynics might suggest Windler had good reason not to remember it, but with Merritt and Gordon also in separate agreement, it would seem to confirm that whatever might have happened between the two was very brief and that cooler heads prevailed.

Helping matters not in the least was yet another issue the very next day, when a leak developed around a water chlorination port. The port had leaked during preflight checks on the pad, and as Liebergot and George W. Conway in the SSR worked to find the fix, Windler got on the loop to ask about the excess water that was building up.

Why don’t we just pump all that overboard, then?

Conway answered the question almost before Windler was finished asking it.

Negative.

Liebergot demurred, saying that he didn’t want to chance busting the CSM’s passive thermal control barbeque roll that the overboard vent might cause. That did not satisfy the flight director.

I guess I’m not too concerned about the PTC. We can reestablish PTC, EECOM, a lot quicker than we can dry out the cabin.

The frustration in Liebergot’s voice was clearly evident.

Flight, it’s not an emergency right now. Just let me read this procedure. Leakage was noted pre-launch, and I think we may be able to cure it with this little procedure I’ve been trying to read.

And so it went.

Okay, look, Liebergot began a few minutes later. Let’s read the procedure up to them and get it done with. We’re wasting time here.

Interrupting Liebergot, Windler had a thought.

We got anything to lose by taking the water gun and squirting that . . .

It was the EECOM’s turn to break in.

Yeah, we could have this procedure accomplished already.

Recordings of the episodes from Liebergot’s comm loop were included on a CD that came with his book years later. He kept them, just in case. “I thought he was going to come after me after the mission, but he didn’t,” Liebergot admitted. “I don’t think he’s ever read my book, because I’ve seen him since and he hasn’t said anything.”

After a smooth landing on 30 July 1971, Scott did the first and only stand-up EVA through the upper hatch of the LM to survey the site. He and Irwin then rested, and nearly fifteen hours after touchdown, they at last headed outside.

When they tried to deploy the Rover, they met with resistance. The saddle that connected the Rover to the LM Falcon during the descent had very close tolerances, so much so that it had to be almost completely free of stress to easily separate. Falcon was tilted slightly to the rear and sideways, and that made for an even tougher separation. Bill Peters was prime telmu for the flight, and he had one suggestion from Harry Smith in the SSR on how to remedy the situation, another from Marshall Space Flight Center officials in SPAN.

Peters had to make a decision and could almost feel the eyes of Scott, Irwin, flight director Pete Frank, and the rest of the world watching in on live television. Smith had worked on deployment tests of the Rover at the Boeing plant in Kent, Washington, in which it had hung up in the same way. When it was relieved of as much stress as possible, it was freed. Peters opted to go with that instead of SPAN. “I had faith and confidence in my guy that had been there and he said, ‘We saw exactly that before and this is exactly what you do to release it,’” Peters said.

Capcom Joseph P. “Joe” Allen called to Scott and Irwin.

Dave and Jim, pull the Rover as far out as you can away from the LM, and then pull on the front end, if you could. And by that we mean lift up on the front end.

It worked, but that might not have been the end of the story. Marshall was responsible for the Rover, and Peters later heard that Huntsville had filed an official complaint that Peters had not gone with their suggestion. “In retrospect, I know I made the right decision,” Peters said. “I certainly didn’t pacify the managers. They got a little aggravated at me. It wasn’t what they wanted, simple as that. They wanted to go through some other procedure. It was one of the spur-of-the-moment things, like when you’re driving an automobile and you jerk the wheel one way instead of the other. You have to make a decision, and you have to make it now.” That kind of confidence in his abilities and those of his support team was a strength of Flight Operations, he continued. Make a decision and then fly through whatever flak might come. “I think it was Chris Kraft who called that ‘intellectual arrogance,’” Peters said. “I guess we all had it. I think I still have it, but it doesn’t fly well with politicians.”

A packed flight plan combined with their own enthusiasm for lunar geology caused Scott and Irwin to go after their duties like no other crew ever had. Scott developed hemorrhages under fingernails of both hands because the sleeves of his suit were too short, forcing his fingers too far into the tips of his gloves. Irwin was unable to work the drink valve in his helmet during the first and second moonwalks; Scott’s drink mouthpiece became dislodged during the second; and neither of them even attempted to use their in-suit drinking devices during the third and final EVA. Scott pulled a shoulder muscle while trying to pull a balky drill stem loose from the surface during the last of their three EVAs, and the pain kept him from getting a good night’s sleep afterward. A total of nineteen hours, seven minutes, and fifty-three seconds spent outside left both men standing on the brink of exhaustion.

There was little time for rest once they rejoined Worden in the CSM Endeavour in lunar orbit. They had to transfer rock samples from the LM to the CSM, again put on their spacesuits for a pressure check, and then close out the tunnel between the two spacecraft before cutting Falcon loose. The pressure checks and tunnel closeout did not go well and Glynn Lunney ended up having each step read up to the crew, one by one, in an attempt to get the process back on track. Gene Kranz, who had sat with Lunney for the last couple of hours, wrote in his autobiography that he “was spooked just listening. Even in the most bloodcurdling simulation I had never seen the crew and ground so out of phase.”

“I think several things were going on,” Lunney added. “The crew had been through a straining day, long day, demanding day, et cetera, et cetera. Then they had this other physical problem that we didn’t really know about very easily. We didn’t have any reason to try to find a way to make the day easier for them. We were trying to find a way to make the day right for them.”

The physical problem to which Lunney referred was a series of heart irregularities that Irwin and, to a much lesser extent, Scott both had exhibited during the flight. Forty-one minutes before launch, Irwin had experienced “an isolated premature ventricular contraction”—in essence, what would commonly be called a heart flutter. They remained at the rate of about one or two an hour on the way to the moon, during each of the three EVAs, Falcon’s ascent from the moon, and docking with Endeavour. They were not considered significant, because the doctors had seen similar issues with Irwin during training and he had come away none the worse for wear.

Shortly after the two spacecraft rejoined, however, Irwin also experienced a bigeminal rhythm in which his heart alternated between normal and premature beats for ten to twenty beats. That was followed by a series of premature ventricular and atrial beats, interspersed with normal ones. Scott had also experienced some arrhythmias, but nothing quite like this.

Irwin did not experience any kind of pressure or pain in his chest, and he was reportedly unaware that anything usual had happened. Still, the book Biomedical Results of Apollo added rather ominously, “Astronaut Irwin reported later that he had experienced a feeling of a brief loss of contact as though he had momentarily gone to sleep. In retrospect, this episode could have been a momentary loss of consciousness at the precise time the arrhythmia was noted.” The report did not confirm that Irwin actually lost consciousness, just that he could have.

Later tests confirmed that Irwin had an undetected coronary artery disease that existed before the mission. Had doctors known anything about it, Irwin would likely not have been on the crew—it was, after all, a heart murmur that had led to Deke Slayton’s grounding.

Irwin had an acute heart attack about two years after returning from the moon, and he became the first moonwalker to pass away on 8 August 1991 after suffering yet another.

Flight surgeon Chuck Berry was in the room and beginning to tell Chris Kraft what was taking place with Irwin. He was sure it was the result of a potassium deficiency made worse by their exhaustive work on the moon, and he also laid out the issues both he and Scott had experienced earlier. The three flight directors—Griffin, Lunney, and Kranz—all intently listened in. “I must admit that I felt like privacy was dominating safety,” Lunney said. “When you have to be so careful about what you talk about that you’re not communicating to people the real circumstances that are at hand, the balance is wrong.”

Griffin saw it as a concern, but also as a transitory event that came and went with no impact on the flight. He remained friends with both Scott and Irwin long after the flight, and in all those years, they never discussed the heart irregularities of the Apollo 15 astronauts. “Must not have been a topic too high on Dave’s or Jim’s agenda,” Griffin concluded. “Remember how long ago this happened. It was 1971 and [Irwin’s preexisting heart disease] went undetected. He made it to the moon, and did a superb job. I say, ‘Good for Jim!’ He lived another active twenty years, and even went on several expeditions to Mount Ararat looking for Noah’s Ark. Not bad!”

This was a new one, a “deputy” flight director.

The 23 November 1971 press release announced the hiring of four such positions—Don Puddy and Phil Shaffer, who would work the upcoming flight of Apollo 16, and Chuck Lewis and Neil Hutchinson, who took over for Apollo 17. Each would get a trial run on console, in preparation for Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and the Space Shuttle program that was still a decade in the future.

Shaffer started out in the MOCR as a FIDO in the Trench. His career progressed to the point where he was working as chief of data priority for both Apollo and Skylab, and now that he was Purple Flight as well, Chuck Deiterich and Bill Stoval would come to him with a question but first ask what hat he was wearing at the moment. Was he Jolly Red, the giant of a man who was a kindred spirit in the Trench, assistant chief of the branch? Was he a data priority guy, or maybe Purple Flight? When they asked, they were probably only half joking. “Those guys in the Trench were a real pain,” Shaffer once said. “They really were. They were the worst of the worst when it came to the prima donnas. They thought they were something special.” If they thought they were hot stuff, however, he probably did, too, because at the end of the day, he was still one of them.

The new deputy flight directors were thrown to the wolves, but only in training. That was the way it worked for everybody who worked in the MOCR, not just them. When it came time for shifts on their first flights, they got the relatively easy ones—coasts to and from the moon and so forth. Shaffer got his baptism on the way out to the moon on Apollo 16, a little more than thirty-eight hours into the flight that launched on 16 April 1972. Gene Kranz came into the MOCR to sit with Shaffer for an hour or two, but after that, Jolly Red was on his own.

Almost as soon as Kranz left, the Inertial Measurement Unit went on the blink, leaving the crew of John Young, Ken Mattingly, and Charlie Duke without an attitude reference. “I wasn’t particularly concerned about that, because it happens, except that the guidance officer was also new,” Shaffer said. Jerry Mill was working his first solo shift as well, and when the problem took place, “he stood straight up and said, ‘Oh!’” Shaffer remembered. “I knew I was in trouble.” Before an erasable software program was uplinked to the crew to remedy the malady and because there were still tiny pieces of debris from the LM bay panels on the S-IVB trailing the vehicles, Mattingly used the sun and moon as references to realign his platform.

Those were the kinds of shifts that Mill sometimes pulled in the MOCR, the ones where he might have lunch at 3 a.m. The cafeteria was located just on the other side of the simulation room to the right front of the room, just down the hallway. It was low rent, not fancy, typical government chairs, trays, plates, everything. For some reason, Mill would always remember that the worst thing he could possibly order was the scrambled eggs.

“If you’re working the night shift, the graveyard, the crew’s asleep and all the important people are long gone,” Mill said. “It’s just the people who have to maintain the vehicle being the observers, ready to call the prime team in if a disaster happens. You try to stay awake by drinking lots of coffee, by BSing.” He and Bill Stoval would sometimes pass the hours by running numbers through the RTCC, to see, for instance, what the velocity of a spacecraft might be if it simply stopped on its way to the moon and started suddenly falling back to Earth.

The first time he met Chris Kraft, the godfather placed his hand on Mill’s shoulder. Mill vowed to never wash the spot again. “I was honored and glad to be in the front room,” he began. “I think management chose the best people based on their skill level and knowledge base, and I wish I had worked harder to be in the top. There was no discrimination or anything else. They chose the people that they thought were the best, and I certainly have no disagreement with any of the people they selected.”

Except for maybe one or two, but that’s another story.

After the IMU issue, problems got progressively worse. While Young and Duke were activating the LM Orion, a helium leak developed in the regulator of one of its two RCS systems and wound up being vented overboard. “We were scrambling to work that problem, because the mission rules said we had to have both systems of RCS to land,” said John Wegener, who was on the control console at the time. An ullage volume was created by transferring propellant into the ascent tanks, and that provided a “blowdown capability” in which the trapped pressure forced enough gas into the faulty RCS system for it to be used as a backup. As it had happened on so many other occasions, the ground actually came up with the solution before the flight and had simulated it with a crew other than Young and Duke. “The procedure worked fine, so that was our excitement during that period of time,” Wegener continued. “That’s what we were fooling with.”

Mattingly had his hands full, too, wondering what was wrong with the backup servo on the CSM Casper’s SPS engine. It developed a wicked shimmy every time he tried to operate it, and no matter what he tried, the wobble would not go away. Gerry Griffin had no choice. He waved off the landing for at least one revolution of the moon and possibly for good if the MOCR and its vast network of resources could not work things out.

Terry Watson was on the GNC console, the same Terry Watson who had taken up Milt Heflin’s offer of powering down the Apollo 10 Command Module on its recovery ship just three years earlier. Watson had grown up near his father’s Baltimore machine shop, turning his model rockets on lathes there. His dad worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s earliest predecessor. Watson was a prodigy and skipped his freshman year at Georgia Tech, where he majored in mechanical engineering. After making the move from Landing and Recovery, he got his feet wet in the SSR before settling into his slot as GNC. “I thought I belonged there,” Watson said. “You’re obviously a little nervous, but it didn’t take very long to get over that.”

Casper was on the far side of the moon when Mattingly first attempted to test the backup system, so Watson and fellow GNC Gary Coen had no way of knowing what was about to happen when Mattingly came hurtling back around with Young and Duke trailing not far behind in Orion. As soon as capcom Henry W. “Hank” Hartsfield reestablished contact, Mattingly told him about the backup servo failing to cooperate.

Watson remembered Coen taking a look at his data and figuring out, on the spot, that the Rate Feedback Sensor had failed. When Watson asked how Coen could be so sure, he just shrugged his shoulders. Watson, a mechanical engineer, trusted the electrical engineer’s diagnosis. “I understood plumbing, and he understood electrical stuff,” Watson said. “Turns out, he hit the nail right on the head. That was the problem.”

That was causing the oscillation, but what could be done about it? Gerry Griffin had decisions to make at the flight director’s console, and whether to continue with the landing was only one of them. If the SPS was not operable for a return to Earth, an Apollo 13–like lifeboat rescue with the LM might be necessary. Griffin and his team had five laps of the moon to come up with something, and as they did, Orion and Casper flew in close formation, ready to dock again. “We were close to aborting the landing, but finally got it done after waving off a couple of lunar revs,” Griffin admitted. “As I went back over the transcripts I was reminded how much effort it took by the entire nationwide Apollo team to reach the decision to go ahead and land.”

That nationwide team included the Rockwell plant in Downey, California, where sims were conducted with a high-fidelity mockup of the SPS engine. They determined that the backup servo would not, in fact, shake the engine to pieces if it was needed. “They came back with the statement that if you had to use that system, if the engine was thrusting, it would put enough load on the engine that the bell would not wiggle,” Watson said. “It was no problem to do a burn with that failed rate transducer. Rockwell felt that in the event we had to use it, it would be okay. So we pressed ahead with the mission.” After a delay of three and a half hours, Griffin made his call.

The landing was on.

Two and a half hours later, Young and Duke settled into the Descartes Highlands. For twenty hours, fourteen minutes, and fourteen seconds spread over three EVAs and three days, the two astronauts worked, but not nearly as close to a frazzle as the crew that proceeded it. Their diet was filled with potassium-rich foods such as orange juice, and that led to a rather entertaining exchange concerning . . . well . . . farting. They were tired by the end of the third and final EVA, but not to the point Young could not put on one last show for the camera and capcom Tony England. He began to hop, flat-footed, from the surface.

We were going to do a bunch of exercises that we had made up as the lunar Olympics to show you what a guy could do on the moon with a backpack on.

A smile was almost evident in England’s voice.

For a 380-pound guy, that’s pretty good.

As Young moved to the back of the Rover and continued with one more jump, Duke was suddenly inspired to join him. He shot straight up, and for a split second, looked like he would keep right on going. His backpack throwing his balance off, Duke flailed his arms and legs in a desperate attempt to regain control.

Wow! That ain’t any fun, is it?

Duke had already stumbled to the ground at least once during his time on the surface, nearly impaling himself on a core sample tube in the process. This time, he took an even harder backward fall.

Young scolded Duke, every bit the stern parent.

Charlie . . .

If telmu Jack Knight could have joined Young, he would have. “You remember Al Shepard’s golf ball, right?” Knight said. “For some reason, the guys wanted to do something memorable.”

Knight’s fear was that the oxygen supply on Duke’s backpack took the brunt of his fall, and it was pressured to 6,000 psi. In other words, Duke might have used a bomb as his cushion. Knight got on the loop to flight director Pete Frank.

Flight, I’d just as soon he didn’t do that again.

Frank was in complete agreement.

Yeah. Me too.

When the Apollo 17 crew of Gene Cernan, Jack Schmitt, and Ron Evans splashed down only a mile from its target point in the Pacific Ocean on 19 December 1972, exactly eleven years, six months, and twenty-five days had passed since the day President Kennedy told Congress that he believed the nation should chart a course to the moon.

The Apollo lunar missions were over, and those who had worked them in the MOCR were moving on to other things. Many went into management, others focused their attentions on Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, or even the Space Shuttle. Some were caught up in the dreaded “reductions in force,” otherwise known as layoffs. The last three missions to the moon were the most productive three missions to the moon, but the team was breaking up.

Bill Stoval had been angry when he did not get assigned to the launch of Apollo 13, but he more than made up for it later by working each of the final three launches and lunar ascents and rendezvous of the series. It was a decent tradeoff, because to him, leaving the surface in the LM and coming back together with the CSM in lunar orbit was more “FIDO-ey” anyway. And then there was this. “The whole world thought just getting to the moon was a big deal. Well, I didn’t,” Stoval began. “I thought going to the moon and doing stuff was a big deal. There wasn’t any doubt, to me, that we could go to the moon, land, and bounce around. To me, Apollo 17 was ten times harder than Apollo 11. Apollo 11 was just syrup and candy. It was balls to the wall in terms of history, but in terms of doing stuff while you’re there and really pushing the envelope, they took very good care to make it very, very safe.”

The applied science of the final lunar missions intrigued Stoval, and he had hoped to see the cast-off LM ascent stage crash into the moon’s surface in view of the Rover’s still-active television camera. “It went faster than a bullet. What the hell was I thinking?” Stoval asked, not expecting an answer. “We filled up the day. We did all those spacewalks with the light backpack. We had all this seismic stuff, the mass spectrometer stuff, jettison booms. Those were busy times. Apollo didn’t end with 11. To me, it started with 11.”

If there was a tragedy to be found in the end of Apollo’s lunar landings, that was it. Just as the missions were beginning to hit their stride and fulfill the enormous potential of scientific return, they were stopped dead in their tracks. It is no stretch to imagine that if Apollo had continued on its course unabated, Mars might very well have been the next step. At the very worst, even with the moon landings at an end for the time being, it might take twenty years.

The country was in the last terrible stages of Vietnam, and with the OPEC oil embargo and Watergate just over the horizon, America’s focus was elsewhere. “I can tell you that all of us thought that we’d probably be on Mars in twenty years from that time,” said Gerry Griffin, the lead flight director on Apollo 17. “It just never happened. Frustrated? I think disappointment might be an ever better word. There was just something that was empty about it. I could see it coming. I was off doing other things, but I knew we were going to be stuck in low-Earth orbit for a long, long time.”

Those who worked in the MOCR during Apollo continued to leave their marks on the human spaceflight community for years. Don Puddy, Phil Shaffer, Neil Hutchinson, and Chuck Lewis would eventually become full-fledged flight directors, while others like Tommy Holloway, Harold Draughon, Gary Coen, Jay Greene, Randy Stone, and Al Pennington would join them at the console during the Space Shuttle era. They were back in the third-floor control room, home again.

Hutchinson was the one man who could lay claim to having worked on each of the first three rows of the MOCR—serving as guidance in the Trench, GNC on the second row, and flight director on the third—and on each of the first three floors of the Mission Control Center, having started out as a supervisor in the RTCC. He never charted a course for the flight director’s console, never so much as even thought about it. When Arnie Aldrich became deputy manager of the Skylab program, Hutchinson had his sights set on moving up from deputy to chief of the CSM Systems Branch.

Hutchinson, a native of Portland, Oregon, was named deputy of the CSM branch before he ever actually sat a second-row console, and that ruffled a few feathers here and there. He immediately dove into getting up to speed as a GNC. “Here’s how you get to be a manager at NASA,” he explained. “You can technically beat up everybody else around you. Sometimes, that makes the worst managers in the world, because guys that are really, really good engineers and really, really good technically sometimes can’t do the people thing worth a damn.”

22. While Gene Kranz (center) still sported his familiar crew cut, Gerry Griffin (right) had let his grow out a bit more by the time Apollo 17 rolled around. Neither had anything on Neil Hutchinson (left), whose longer hair and mustache did not stop him from becoming a flight director. Courtesy NASA.

But flight director? Never. “There was no goal, trust me,” he continued. “For one thing, setting the goal to be that man is bullshit, because you’ll never get there. Really only two people—Kraft and Kranz—decided you’re fit for that duty. I’m probably not going to mention names, but there were several people who aspired mightily to carry that title and never made it.”

For Hutchinson, the deciding factor was Kraft. From the time he arrived at NASA in 1962 until he left the agency in 1986, he rarely made a single move without first seeking Kraft’s counsel. “I was privileged to be one of ‘Chris’s Boys,’ and there were only about a dozen of us,” Hutchinson said. With Aldrich on the move onward and upward, his underling desperately wanted the gig and, yes, went to Kraft about it.

I’m going to go be the CSM branch chief.

No, you’re not. I want you to be a flight director.

Oh . . . but I can’t do both of them.

Of course not, so you need to go be a flight director.

Only eight other men had ever been named to that most important of titles in the MOCR, but if that was what Kraft wanted him to do, that is what Neil Hutchinson was going to do. He wanted the chief’s job, but Kraft insisted that it was not the right fit for him. Hutchinson, Shaffer (who was best man at Hutchinson’s wedding), Lewis, and Puddy were going to be flight directors.

Hutchinson was also one of the first in the room whose hair was a little bit longer. His mane was nowhere near a regulation Gene Kranz crew cut. “I was always kind of my own guy,” Hutchinson said with a laugh. “I probably had a broad Jerry Garcia tie while everybody else was wearing black stringer ties, and yeah, my hair was pretty long. I went to kind of a different drummer sometimes. I felt like I didn’t really need to explain anything to anybody. I think some guys may not have thought that was very cool. It didn’t bother me.” It was good enough for his wife, and at the end of the day, that was all that mattered, right?

Damn straight, Hutchinson concluded. He would go on to lead the very first flight of the Space Shuttle, STS-1, in April 1981.

Chuck Lewis was also new to the flight director ranks. He worked his first mission as an assistant flight director under Pete Frank on Apollo 9 back in 1969, and while he had not necessarily disagreed with the assignments of Frank and Milt Windler, he would admit that he was maybe a little surprised.

When his turn finally came on Apollo 17, he was ready, if not just a tiny bit frightened. Or maybe a lot frightened. “Initially, I was scared to death,” Lewis admitted. “I mean, really. You think of the responsibility you’ve got, and thoughts went through my mind like, ‘I hate to make a fool of myself, because the whole world’s listening to the flight director loop. You wonder, ‘Why did they pick me?’ You’ve got a lot of expectations to live up to.” He got over it quickly, knowing that he just had to be himself and that he had to try to do the best job he possibly could. That was how he had gotten to that point, so why bother changing?

After Apollo 17, Lewis led the American flight control team in the Soviet control center for the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. He later worked in the training branch before returning as a Space Shuttle flight director, including a handful that were controlled from the room on the third floor. The last year or two at NASA, he was enduring severe bouts with cluster headaches. “I had health issues, frankly, and they were getting worse,” Lewis said. “I had several series of headaches, and they were really bad. I lost a lot of time. I didn’t think I had any choice. I had to get out of it.” Lewis retired in 1994, and it was five years before he had another episode.

23. The Apollo 17 Lunar Module Challenger lifts off of the lunar surface. It took three tries, but Ed Fendell finally got the perfect shot on the final departure from the moon. Courtesy NASA.

Apollo 17 set marks for the longest stay on the lunar surface; the longest single EVA and the most total time outside; most distance driven by the Rover, not to mention the farthest away from the LM one had ever traveled; heaviest load of rock samples collected; first night launch; and Schmitt was the first professional geologist to land on the moon. The list of superlatives was a long one, and it all boiled down to the fact that the best really had come last. It was just about as trouble-free as a mission could get, and if the worst that could be said was that Cernan and Schmitt ripped the fender off the Rover during their first moonwalk, so be it.

At the INCO console on the left end of the third row, INCO Ed Fendell had perfected the art of following moonwalking astronauts with his television as they moved this way and that on the surface. He found that there was a trick—as soon as one began to move, he would zoom out to capture a wider view as well as the direction the astronaut was headed. The one shot that had always eluded him was to follow the LM ascent stage upward on its journey from the surface, as far as the camera’s eye could see. On Apollo 15, there was a problem with the motor that panned the camera upward and the LM almost immediately shot out of the frame, and on 16, the Rover was awkwardly parked and Fendell was able to capture only a few seconds of the lunar blastoff.

For Apollo 17, however, he nailed it. As strange as it might seem, Fendell did not follow the action through a viewfinder like an ordinary cameraman would on Earth. He had fellow INCO Harley Weyer work out the timing of his moves beforehand, came up with a script, and hoped for the best. “The command for that camera to start the move up was sent two seconds before liftoff,” Fendell said. “The other commands were all sent from the script. I did not look at the TV picture, because if I had, I would’ve screwed up.” Fendell was already known as Captain Video, but Apollo 17 sealed his legacy once and for all. “I became well known all over the world, this, that,” he said. “I won a German Emmy award, all kinds of shit.”

The Command Module America splashed down in the Pacific Ocean at 1:24:59 p.m. in Houston. The Apollo moon missions were over. The great space race between the United States and Soviet Union was over, and America had scored a decisive victory. Glynn Lunney saw the Cold War as a forty-four-year contest, divided into quarters and beginning with the end of World War II in 1945 and ending with the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall.

The Soviets got out to an early lead with the launch of Sputnik and then stretched it out with the first human in space, Yuri Gagarin. By halftime, however, the game was over. “In our theater of competition, the space theater, we were surprised and engaged at the beginning of the second quarter,” Lunney said. “We had won the day and the enemy left the field of competition at halftime. It went on for a long time after that in other fields, but not in ours.”

Third-floor comm loops fell silent, its console monitors darkened. It would be nearly a full decade before another crewed spaceflight was flown out of that room, as control for all three Skylab missions, the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and the first four Space Shuttle missions shifted to the one a floor down.

The third-floor MOCR had played a major role in the grandest adventure mankind had ever known, but in January 1986, it was to be part of NASA’s greatest tragedy to that point.