11

The End of an Era

The roses came into the control room like clockwork, targeted to arrive on the day of landing for each of the 110 Space Shuttle flights that came after the Challenger accident.

They were a gift from Mark and Terry Shelton, and their daughter MacKenzie. A tradition that lasted nearly a quarter of a century was born on the spur of the moment, on 3 October 1988, the day STS-26 came back to Earth following a four-day mission. Words could not describe what a relief it was to be flying again after the staggering loss of the STS-51L crew a little more than thirty-two months earlier, and that first bouquet was a small token of appreciation from Mark and his family.

But could they even get to the right place? Shelton had no connection to mission control, other than having been a space buff since a 1960s visit to MSC during his childhood. “I didn’t actually decide to do it until the day the STS-26 mission was to land, and I didn’t know that I even could get it done in time,” said Shelton, a Dallas resident. “I called information to find a florist near the space center, and then I asked the florist if they could deliver roses to mission control. At first, they said they couldn’t do it, but then they said they would try. But I had no idea if they actually made it or not.”

They did, and they were noticed. They caught the eye of Milt Heflin, who was by then a flight director, almost as soon as he walked into the room. They were so different, not necessarily out of the place, but just unexpected. He walked over, read the card, and wondered who the Sheltons might be. Almost as soon as Discovery landed, Heflin called the Sheltons and confirmed that, yes, the flowers had in fact arrived and how much the control team appreciated them.

From that point on, all the way through STS-135 in July 2011, the flowers became almost as much a part of the décor as the rows of consoles and large displays at the front of the room. The arrangements included one flower for each shuttle crew member, and once the Russian Mir and International Space Station were operational, more for each spacefarer already on orbit. A single white rose stood in memory of those who had lost their lives.

If for some reason they were delayed in getting there, the control teams—they were not a superstitious lot, were not supposed to be at any rate—sometimes got a little antsy. “The Sheltons have sort of become a part of our team in mission control,” Heflin said. “I almost look at them as kind of a distant back room, just like the technical support rooms located around the control center. It gives me a very warm feeling.”

Heflin was not the only one who was impressed by the gesture. When Gene Kranz retired from NASA in February 1994, Shelton called to see if he could purchase a ticket to the celebration that was being held in his honor. When he went to pick them up in Kranz’s office, however, he was not allowed to pay for them. That was not the half of it. Kranz apparently heard his voice, and bellowed to his secretary.

Is that Shelton?!?

For the next few minutes, Shelton visited with Kranz. It was a nice moment between a man who had been a driving force in mission control for so long, and Shelton, who appreciated him for that very fact.

Kranz’s retirement was just the latest in a long line of changes during the evolution of NASA in general, and mission control in particular. No longer were the rooms on the second and third floors of Building 30 known as MOCRs. During the Space Shuttle era, each became a Flight Control Room, FCR for short and pronounced “FICK-er.” A decade earlier, there had been an even more significant name change. The sprawling complex upon which the Mission Control Center was situated was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center on 19 February 1973, in honor of the former president who had helped pull the strings to land the center in his home state and who had passed away less than a month before.

The MOCR was now the FCR, and it was JSC and not MSC. Apollo was over, and it was the Space Shuttle’s turn at bat. In a sense, the bouquets sent by the Sheltons flight after flight, year after year, represented a sort of comforting constant in a world that had changed drastically since Challenger went down.

Jay Greene was old school, of that there could be no doubt.

The New Yorker was part of the invasion of new flight controllers into Houston, arriving on campus in 1965 having absolutely no idea where he was going, who he was going to work for or even what he was going to be doing. He settled in as a FIDO, and was on console when Eagle landed on the moon.

Like so many others, he never planned to become a flight director. That changed one day in 1983 when George Abbey walked into his office. “Throughout my career, George has come in on many occasions and said, ‘Guess what you’re going to do,’” Greene said. “I don’t know if I was fired during some of those or not. I don’t think so. But he came in one day, and he said, ‘We need some more flight directors, and I want you to do that.’ That wasn’t a request, and so I moved down.”

As Emerald Flight—he wanted green, the reason being obvious—Greene considered himself somewhere between Cliff Charlesworth and Glynn Lunney, his best friend among the flight directors. Charlesworth, he said, would not try to do somebody’s job for them. If he could not trust somebody to do their own work, they would not be on his team for long. And Lunney—Lunney could sometimes drive people crazy, his mind working so fast that he could almost churn out action items faster than they could absorb, much less answer. Greene could sometimes be abrupt, but that did not stop him from sitting his first shift as flight director during the launch of STS-6 on 4 April 1983.

It was Challenger’s first flight, and Greene would be in the exact same spot for its last.

STS-51L was the thirty-fourth crewed flight to be flown out of the control room on the third floor, and it had seen its share of near-misses—Gemini 8 and Apollo 13, in particular. It had also been through the glorious triumphs of Apollo 8, Apollo 11, and so many others. A crew had never been lost in flight, and there was no reason to believe it might happen any time soon. Such a thing was recognized as a possibility, of course, and that was just one of the things that made what happened here seem so incredible. Against all odds, astronauts always came home. Always.

Then came the morning of 28 January 1986.

Richard O. “Dick” Covey was Jay Greene’s capcom that day, and while Greene was working his seventh launch, Covey was on his first. An astronaut since 1978, he had flown in space once before, as the pilot of STS-51I in the late summer of 1985, just a few months before. He was concentrating on learning the ropes as a capcom, but he could not help but look around the room, see the plaques of missions that had been controlled out of this very room, and marvel if only for a fleeting moment.

Wow. There’s some serious shit that happened in this room.

Serving as capcom was, for Covey, a plumb role. If he could not be flying himself, being as close to operations as possible was the next best thing. Working the console was not a guaranteed springboard into another flight assignment, but it certainly did not hurt. He found Greene to be “very direct. He was very demanding of his team, but he was a consummate operator. He never lost sight of, ‘Okay, this is what we’ve got to do to get things done right and safely.’”

As closely as he worked with Greene and the rest of the FCR, Covey was even closer to the crew of Francis R. “Dick” Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. “Judy” Resnik, Gregory B. Jarvis, and S. Christa McAuliffe. His was the voice the crew would hear during its ascent, and each needed to know exactly how the other was going to react on the way to orbit.

That was on a professional level, and he knew all but Jarvis and McAuliffe very well personally, too. Covey and his family were closest to Onizuka, and had been ever since the two of them started in the air force’s test pilot school together in 1974. Onizuka and Covey were members of the same 1978 astronaut candidate class and were joined by Scobee, McNair, and Resnik. When Covey flew a chase plane for STS-3 in March 1982, McNair was in the backseat. He knew Smith’s family well, too.

Even Greene had gotten to know each of his shuttle crews reasonably well. It was such a departure from the days of Apollo that Glynn Lunney once advised him that maybe he was getting a little too close. Greene wanted to see his friends fly, and he was as frustrated as anybody over two launch postponements caused by a delay in the landing of STS-61C due to bad weather at KSC. That flight eventually landed at Edwards Air Force Base in California in the early-morning darkness on 18 January. Those delays were followed by two more scrubs, the first of which took place early in the countdown on 25 January because of an unacceptable weather forecast throughout the launch window.

One domino, and then another and another, seemed to fall two days later. The countdown was stopped at T-minus nine minutes because a handle refused to budge from the hatch, and that was followed by a problem with a portable drill. An hour and twenty minutes later, winds at the nearby landing strip were deemed too brisk. The liftoff would take place the next day. “We scrubbed because we had a government-supplied handle that went on the hatch of the vehicle, and they couldn’t get it off,” Greene said. “Had they gotten the handle off, 51L might not have happened. Somebody else might have had it happen to them, but not those guys. We also scrubbed on a beautifully clear day, based on a bad weather forecast.”

What happened the next day was forever seared into the consciousness of the ’80s generation. Their grandparents had Pearl Harbor, their parents the JFK assassination and Vietnam, and their children 9/11. If Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 were mankind’s first grand triumphs to be broadcast live around the world, the Challenger accident was the first overwhelming global tragedy to be captured in such fashion.

Temperatures dropped into the low twenties overnight at the Cape, and there had been one hourlong delay in tanking and another to allow for melting of ice that had accumulated on the launch pad. Nevertheless, launch day started out as so many others had in Houston. Covey went through comm checks with the crew, which seemed very positive, ready to go. Ground crews and the Launch Control Center were worried about monitoring the ice. “There was discussion—not a lot of discussion—about the icing on the pad and the cold temps,” Greene noted. “The shift prior to mine had worked the problem, and they concluded that as far as the orbiter was concerned, we had no concerns about the weather.”

There were catastrophic problems lurking in the cold O-ring seal of the Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) on the right side of the huge, orange External Tank. A split second after ignition of the SRBs, black puffs of smoke appeared near a lower field joint. Just after 10:38 a.m. in Houston, data processing system (DPS) engineer Andrew F. Algate—responsible for the shuttle’s onboard computers—noted Challenger’s departure from the launch pad.

Liftoff confirmed.

Greene offered a crisp reply.

Liftoff.

Moments later, FIDO Brian D. Perry was on the loop to Greene. Challenger had automatically rolled upside down to get onto its correct heading to orbit.

Good roll, Flight.

Rog, good roll.

Booster Jerry L. Borrer was next, reporting another programmed procedure to bring the thrust percentage of the shuttle’s three main engines down as it passed through maximum aerodynamic pressure. Again, Greene shot back a quick acknowledgment.

Throttle down to ninety-four.

Ninety-four.

Another exchange between Borrer, Greene, and Perry took place as the main engines throttled down still more.

Three at sixty-five.

Sixty-five, FIDO.

T-del confirms throttles.

“T-del” was FCR-speak for “throttle delta time,” and what Perry was saying was that the continued decrease was right on the money. So far, so good.

Thank you.

Ten seconds later, a small flame became visible on the right SRB. A growing blowtorch was eating into the side of the External Tank. Still unaware of the crisis that was beginning to unfold, Borrer gave another update.

Throttle up, three at 104.

This time, Greene was on the horn to Covey.

Capcom, go at throttle up.

Less than a second later, Covey relayed the information to Scobee.

Challenger, go at throttle up.

The veteran astronaut came right back.

Roger, go at throttle up.

The exchange became a part of history, as sadly iconic as few other lines had ever been, because of what happened next. Challenger was engulfed in the eruption of the External Tank, and did not explode so much as it was broken apart by the cruel aerodynamic forces to which it was suddenly exposed. Covey’s attention was fixed on the limited amount of data he had available on his console monitor, and it was only after he caught the reaction of fellow astronaut Frederick D. “Fred” Gregory sitting just to his right that he looked up. A video camera caught Covey’s reaction as he spotted the bulbous cloud, and it was one of complete shock. “Fred was watching the video when the explosion happened, and he said something like, ‘Oh, look!’” Covey remembered. “My response wasn’t to the initial explosion. It was to what clearly was something I didn’t understand, but wasn’t good.”

Covey attempted no more calls to Challenger. “My logic was I don’t need to make a call unless I’ve got something to tell them,” Covey said. “If they called me, we could respond. If they were doing something up there that they could do, and we weren’t going to be able to tell them to do something different, I didn’t want to sit there and say, ‘Challenger, what’s going on? What are you doing?’ while they’re sitting there trying to fight a fire. If they were able to do anything, I wanted to provide help.”

Greene did not glance at a monitor located on the other side of fellow flight director Alan L. “Lee” Briscoe, who was seated to his left, until he spotted Gregory and Covey. Briscoe was watching a couple of displays himself, and he saw the failure IDs start to flash up on the one monitoring Challenger’s three main engines. He had never seen such a thing before, and he remembered making a quick remark to Greene.

Something’s wrong.

“I kept hoping and thinking that maybe the shuttle was going to come on out of that cloud,” Briscoe said years later. Thirteen seconds passed before Greene made his first call, and it was to Perry.

FIDO, trajectories.

Go ahead.

Trajectory, FIDO.

Flight, FIDO. Filters got discreting sources. We’re go.

Discreting sources meant that radar was tracking multiple objects, and the information was not faulty. It was actually picking up pieces of debris as they began their long descent into the Atlantic Ocean, just off the Florida coast. The terrible news kept coming. Ground controller (GC) Norman R. Talbott got on the loop to Greene.

Flight, GC. We’ve had negative contact, loss of downlink.

Okay, all operators. Watch your data carefully.

Perry seemed to be holding out hope that all this would work itself out, that Scobee and Smith would somehow bring Challenger back.

Flight, FIDO. Till we get stuff back, he’s on his cue card for abort modes.

The FIDO was not alone in his brief moment of optimism. “We got the report that they were tracking multiple pieces, and kept on hoping that some part of the vehicle would come out and everything would have a happy ending, because it was supposed to and it didn’t,” Greene said. The feeling was not misguided, either. Nothing like this had ever happened before within these hallowed walls. Many a crew had been lost in training, but this was not just another sim. This was real time, the harshest reality imaginable. Public affairs officer Stephen A. Nesbitt continued his commentary throughout, his voice never once betraying the heart that was almost surely about to beat out of his chest. If the final “throttle up” exchange between Covey and Scobee were the tragedy’s most-often repeated lines, Nesbitt’s narrative was a close second.

Flight controllers here are looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.

Twenty-nine seconds later, Perry relayed a report from the range safety officer that confirmed what was already painfully clear.

Flight, FIDO.

Go ahead.

RSO reports vehicle exploded.

There was a brief pause.

Copy.

A few seconds later, rather than asking for and receiving information, Greene gave his first order.

GC, all operators. Contingency procedures in effect.

After nearly four more minutes of working with Perry to hustle recovery forces to the area, Greene gave another command.

Okay, everybody. Stay off the telephones, make sure you maintain all your data. Start pulling it together.

Several more seconds passed, and Greene began polling his team to see if anybody had seen anything unusual on their screens. First was Borrer.

Did you see anything?

Nothing, sir. I looked, and all the turbine temps were perfect, right on the prediction. All the redlines are in good shape.

Keith A. Reiley, who was responsible for Challenger’s Remote Manipulator Unit, Mechanical and Upper Stage Systems, was next.

We looked good, Flight.

EECOM? EECOM, Flight.

R. John Rector was on duty.

Flight, EECOM. We looked normal.

DPS?

All our data’s normal, Flight.

Prop?

Propulsion officer Anthony J. Ceccacci answered.

Everything looked good, Flight.

GNC?

That was Jeffrey W. Bantle’s role that day.

Flight, the roll maneuver looked fine, what we saw of it. We were on our way decreasing roll rate as we lost data.

Copy.

The worst day any of them had ever experienced at NASA was just beginning. “We secured the room, nobody in or out,” Greene recalled. “We secured the communications. We got everybody getting their data together and writing incident reports. We worked for a long time trying to get the search and rescue guys to enter the area.” For an hour after the accident, rescue forces were concerned that debris was still falling and were hesitant to send choppers into the area. Greene was able to admit that it was understandable, but at the time, he added, “It was disconcerting, that we could have had guys out in the water and they didn’t want to get close to them.”

Jay Greene never worked another flight in the FCR, and Gene Kranz’s string of consecutive shuttle missions being on duty there would last only one more—the Return to Flight mission of STS-26. The two of them had shared an incredible moment in time sixteen and a half years earlier, when Apollo 11 landed. Now, right here in the very same spot, it was almost as if the developing tragedy was sucking the air out of the room.

Kranz, in the room as the director of the Mission Operations Directorate, caught an eerily familiar flicker out of the corner of his eye. It was the explosion on a monitor that was close by, and he had seen enough failed launches during the early days of the space program to know exactly what had just happened. The only difference was the most major one of them all—this time, there was a crew on board. Almost as if by reflex, Kranz reached for a handbook that contained a series of checklists for what to do in the event of an accident. He told Briscoe to make sure he had those pages handy, to make sure of everything that had to be secured.

24. Flight director Jay Greene dejectedly holds his head in his hand following the breakup of the Space Shuttle Challenger on 28 January 1986. The third-floor control room had seen NASA’s greatest moments and, now, its darkest. Courtesy NASA.

Video shot that day in the FCR captured the reactions of both Greene and Kranz, and it is very nearly as heartbreaking to watch as the accident itself. “I looked at Jay, and the look on his face, it was something that you see only a few times in your life,” Kranz said in the History Channel documentary Beyond the Moon: Failure Is Not an Option 2. If that was the case for Greene, the same could have been said of Kranz. There is no way to fully describe their expressions—the mixtures of shock, sadness, disbelief, and yes, maybe even anger. It would be hard to say how long Greene remained on duty that day. “That’s pretty much what we did,” he concluded. “Released the operators, was very calm, cool, and collected. Went home and completely broke down. It was a rough day.”

Arnie Aldrich had wanted to become a flight director himself, and felt pretty good about his chances right up to the point when Kranz told him that it was not going to happen. Instead, Kranz said, Aldrich should expect a call from Chris Kraft. One thing led to another, and all of a sudden, Aldrich found himself in management. By 1975 he was already working on the Space Shuttle, and in the aftermath of the Challenger accident, he was director of the Space Transportation System at NASA headquarters in Washington. Playing such a key role in getting the agency back on its feet was the highlight of his career. “We made over 500 changes to the Space Shuttle, between Challenger and the next flight,” Aldrich said. “I led all of that work, and I was pretty proud of it.”

The Space Shuttle’s fifth flight, STS-5 in mid-November 1982, was the first to be flown out of the third-floor control room, and there were a lot of familiar names on the manning lists. Don Puddy, Neil Hutchinson, and Chuck Lewis were now flight directors. Jim I’Anson was on console in the FCR, as were men like Bill Moon, Larry Strimple, Al Pennington, Will Presley, Gary Coen, Ken Russell, Gary Renick, Joe DeAtkine, Charlie Dumis, and Bill Boone. Ed Fendell was back, too.

Gerry Griffin was still around, and in a big way. He had always been the sort in search of some new challenge to attack, and when Apollo ended, he was not interested in continuing to work in the MOCR during Skylab. He headed to NASA headquarters, where he helped keep the Space Shuttle efforts on track from 1973 to 1976. After that, it was on to deputy center director roles at both Dryden Flight Research Center in California, where he worked under Apollo 15 commander Dave Scott, and KSC. Another stint in Washington led to the ultimate job—director of JSC, his home for so long as a GNC and flight director. Griffin was only the third person ever in that prestigious position, after Bob Gilruth and his mentor, Chris Kraft.

He did not know it at the time, but Griffin got broken out of the pack in Washington, where he saw a side of the agency he had never seen before. He also came to view JSC in a slightly different light. “It was just another center,” said Griffin, the JSC director from August 1982 to January 1986, just before the Challenger accident. “It was very important and a big center, but there were other centers around the country that mattered. Some of them didn’t like JSC, because JSC was kind of like the New York Yankees—they always won, they got the ink, they had the astronauts, they had mission control. All of the guys out there in the hinterland that are building the hardware and developing technology so that those guys can do that don’t get all that coverage.”

The smart money might have been on Glynn Lunney to replace Kraft, and that is what Griffin thought as well. “A lot of people were assuming, and so did I, that it would go to Glynn,” Griffin continued. “He was kind of a Kraft protégé, much like I was, except maybe even closer. I think the agency knew we were coming into a tough time, and I think they were looking for somebody that had a little broader experience. I’m just guessing, but I think that’s why it came to me.” Make no mistake about it, there were times during his tenure as center director that Griffin looked around and wondered to himself.

Good God, now I’m the director of the Johnson Space Center? How did I get here?

Tommy Holloway was another of the old guard who made the jump from Apollo to the Space Shuttle, and he was now a flight director as well, just like Puddy, Hutchinson, and Lewis. It was not a job he went after with guns ablaze, and in fact, he at first had serious reservations about it. Holloway was not a man who liked change—at all. He had worked in the Flight Crew Operations Directorate for the first fifteen or so years of his career, and that was absorbed by the Flight Operations Directorate shortly after the end of the Apollo lunar flights. Holloway kept right on doing what he was doing, and he was fine with that.

Another flight director was needed as the shuttle program was getting ramped up. Holloway got the nod, not that he wanted it. He was a branch chief where he was, and most other flight directors had come out of the Flight Control Division. “I haven’t talked about this with a lot of people, except my wife,” Holloway said. “Most people would never understand it, but I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a flight director or not. I really struggled with whether I should accept the position or not, primarily because it’s change. I am a person that is slow to change.” He took on the role of flight director, but started out slowly.

So began a career pathway that led to some lofty positions—chief of the Flight Director Office; director of the Shuttle-Mir effort with the Russians; and manager of both the Space Shuttle and International Space Station programs. “In retrospect, any rational person wouldn’t have thought about that over ten microseconds,” Holloway admitted. “I was at the right place at the right time. I would’ve missed all that if I hadn’t come to my senses.”

Along with the Apollo veterans who were still around, younger controllers were taking their places in the FCR as well. None were more eager than the women who were working in the control room. Anne L. Accola worked in MPAD during the Apollo era and trained at one point to become a flight controller, while Frances M. “Poppy” Northcutt and Parrish N. Hirasaki had worked in the SSRs. Northcutt was featured in an ad for her employer, and the headline read rather suggestively, “TRW’s Poppy Northcutt keeps bringing astronauts home.” A 28 April 1970 article in Fredericksburg, Virginia’s Free Lance-Star about her contributions to the flight of Apollo 13 ran a similar headline, except this one called her a “girl.”

The first couple of paragraphs were a far cry from the politically correct climate of the next century. “A former beauty contestant whose name has been linked romantically with Astronaut John Swigert Jr., played a key role in bringing the Apollo 13 crew home safely,” wrote reporter Will McNutt. “Bachelor girl Poppy Northcutt, 26, a tall, winsome blonde mathematician, was the only female working inside the Mission Control Center during the Apollo 13 emergency.” The story went on to detail the fact that Northcutt had no plans for marriage, dished more on her supposed romance with Swigert—there was none, according to the writer—and how she was a “popular, fun-loving girl” who liked to “swim, dance, ski or sail. She used to wear glasses, but switched to contact lenses. She also bleaches her hair.”

Whether on the second floor of the MCC or the third, women began appearing in NASA control rooms, front and center. There was Carolyn L. Huntoon, a medical experiments officer for Skylab 4 who later became JSC’s director; Sharon R. Tilton and Ellen L. Schulman, surgeons; Lizabeth H. “Betsy” Cheshire, computer command; Anngienetta R. “Angie” Johnson, payloads, the first female African American flight controller; Linda G. Horowitz, aerodynamics officer; and Jenny Howard, booster, to name but a few. The gender barrier had been broken down, and it had been broken down for good.

FAO Marianne J. Dyson eventually became an award-winning children’s author and speaker, and also wrote the manuscript for a memoir titled Fire in Mission Control: The Story of a Woman Flight Controller. She had been keen on the space program since the first grade, when she and virtually every other person in the country watched in amazement as John Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth. The Canton, Ohio, native loved all things space even more than her other great passion—horses. She wrote a massive sixty-page paper titled “The Apollo Program” for an eighth-grade English class, and when her father brought home posters of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, they shared space on her bedroom wall with one featuring Peter Tork of the Monkees. There were no female astronauts at the time, but when Apollo 13 proved to the world that flight controllers could be heroes as well, that became her goal. “I loved how the men in mission control had used their knowledge of space and spacecraft to find a way to rescue the astronauts,” Dyson wrote. “If women couldn’t be astronauts, maybe I could be part of the team that solved problems for them?”

Hired as a programmer and analyst in the Flight Activities Branch, she started work at JSC in January 1979. John Wegener had worked the control console during Apollo, and when he took her on a tour of the room, it seemed much smaller than it had appeared on television. As they made their way up the rows, they eventually came to the FAO console. She had a question, even if she did not actually ask it of Wegener.

Would I really get the chance to sit here someday?

For her, there were no horror stories of sexual harassment as she started her journey with the agency. Only one man asked her out, but when she explained that she was already engaged and planning to get married in just a couple of months, he quickly gave up. She was eventually recruited to serve on the NASA speaker’s bureau as “the substitute woman astronaut speaker”—if some group somewhere wanted a woman astronaut at its event and one was not available, Dyson got the nod.

That is not to say that it was always smooth sailing for Dyson or her fellow female FAOs, because it was not. When the lead positions for STS-5 through STS-8 showed up in her inbox, she did not like what she was seeing.

This can’t be right.

Every female lead FAO had been removed from the schedule and replaced with a male counterpart. She and two other women issued an informal complaint of discrimination, because, as she wrote, “we owed it to the women coming after us to speak up, even though we were all nervous about what it might cost us personally.” They met with their directorate chief, who promised to review the matter. After some frank discussions, Dyson concluded, “Finally came a sort of apology for the ‘insensitive’ way the reassignments had been handled. The three of us had obviously been caught by surprise, and without the benefit of discussions with our managers ahead of time, we’d drawn conclusions based on incomplete information. In the future, care would be taken to inform employees privately if changes could impact the perceived standing of women in the organization. In summary, better communications would solve all our problems.”

25. Marianne Dyson was one of the first female flight controllers to work a console in the hallowed halls of mission control. Courtesy NASA.

Michele Brekke became the first woman to be named as a flight director in 1985, but in the downtime after Challenger, she moved on to another position before STS-26 took NASA back to orbit. It would be another seven years before Linda Ham became the first of her gender to actually serve as a flight director, during STS-45 in the early spring of 1992.

Tommy Holloway had taken his turn at the FAO console on the third floor during a total of nine Apollo flights—including Apollo 8, Apollo 9, Apollo 13, and each of the six lunar landings. He spent many an hour in the room during simulations and flights, but while Holloway initially considered it just another control room, STS-5 was not just another flight. After just four tests, the Space Shuttle was for the first time officially considered fully operational and for the first time carried a crew of more than two people. On board were CDR Vance Brand, PLT Robert F. Overmyer, and mission specialists Joe Allen and William B. “Bill” Lenoir, and they deployed two commercial communications satellites during their five-day journey.

Those went according to plan, but the first EVA based from the Space Shuttle by Allen and Lenoir scheduled for the third day of the flight did not. First, Lenoir was dealing with space sickness, and what Holloway remembered most about the flight—more than any other issue faced by the FCR during the mission—were the briefings with the press about it. If they wanted to maintain a good relationship with the astronaut corps, the surgeons had learned a long time before not to show all their cards when it came to crew health. If that meant being a little cagey with the media about Lenoir’s condition, that was the way it was going to be. “That’s the most vivid thing I remember about the whole flight, the dialogue with the press,” Holloway said. “One of those press guys accused us of lying to them, which irritated me.” As lead flight director, the buck stopped with Holloway and he eventually put the issue to rest in what he called “plain Arkansas-ese.”

Yes, Lenoir was not feeling well, but no, it would not impact the mission other than to delay the EVA by a day. That was before the suit issues cropped up. Allen’s suit fan refused to work despite all kinds of attempted workarounds, and then Lenoir’s suit would not fully regulate. The call was Holloway’s, and he made it. “I canceled the EVA,” he said. “Back in those days at least, the flight director had almost unilateral authority in making those kinds of decisions, although the program and mission operations management participated. But I canceled the EVA, and it was solely due to the problems with the suits.”

At 8:50 p.m. in Houston on 13 November, a near disaster struck during the crew’s sleep shift when a failure in an electrical cable on the first floor caused it to heat up and short out. Monitors turned to snow, and Dyson remembered lights in the room flickering off and the emergency lights coming on and casting an eerie glow. Flight director Gary Coen, she continued, put the room on lockdown.

An onboard computer alarm would have awakened the crew midway through its sleep period if the FCR team could not refresh Columbia’s state vector—the vehicle’s true position and velocity at the time. Coen did not want to disturb the resting astronauts, but with no way to send commands to the spacecraft due to the power outage, it was impossible to clear the command. Robert E. “Bob” Castle, the sleep shift INCO, helped work on a code to pass along to a tracking station so that it could send up the workaround. What might happen if there was even a small typo in the code?

Within an hour and fifteen minutes, however, primary control was restored and Castle was able to in effect hit the snooze button. “I don’t know if Gary would have actually done this, but we worked to give him the option,” Castle said. “Folks worked feverishly and got the system back up in time for me to clear the SPC alarm without having to have the ground site do it.”

Two of the best-known of the fourteen missions controlled out of the third-floor FCR before the Challenger accident were STS-7 in June 1983 and STS-41B in February 1984. Sally K. Ride was a member of STS-7’s five-person crew, but while she was the first American woman in space, that was an issue for public affairs to sort out. The fact that a woman was on board the spacecraft was of little consequence to how the flight was actually monitored in the FCR. “Sally was a very capable individual,” said Tommy Holloway, again serving as lead flight director on STS-7. “I think Bob Crippen (the flight’s commander) treated her as she should’ve been, as just one of the crew members.”

Although Bruce McCandless talked Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down Eagle’s ladder and across the lunar surface during the historic Apollo 11 EVA, it was nearly fifteen more years before his own first spaceflight on STS-41B in February 1984. He made the most of his rookie trip to orbit and became the first astronaut to test the Manned Maneuvering Unit untethered backpack, followed soon by crewmate Robert L. “Bob” Stewart.

Hoot Gibson’s series of photographs of McCandless’s trek are among the most iconic of the Space Shuttle era, and the team behind the development of the MMU—NASA’s Charles E. “Ed” Whitsett Jr. and Walter W. “Bill” Bollendonk of Martin Marietta—was awarded the National Aeronautics Association’s prestigious Collier Trophy for 1984. Back in the third-floor FCR, EVA capcom Jerry L. Ross was watching it all very closely. As he began to power his way out of Challenger’s cargo bay, McCandless asked Ross to relay a message for him.

Jerry, pass to Ed Whitsett that we sure have a nice flying machine here.

Ross, who was still nearly two years away from the first of his record-setting seven Space Shuttle flights, was a junior member of the EVA team and had helped McCandless with the development of the MMU. They had flown to Denver together a few times to test the backpack in Martin Marietta’s six degrees of freedom simulator, both in shirtsleeves and fully outfitted in spacesuits.

Yes, sir, Bruce. It looks like a real friendly machine, real solid, real stable, and it looks like you did a good job with all that engineering work over those years, as well as Ed and the rest of the crew.

Ross had been mesmerized by the MOCR as a young adult, when he was taking the very first steps that would eventually take him to orbit. He watched as much television coverage of the Apollo missions as he possibly could, up to and including static shots of the control room. He hoped to work anywhere within the space program and contribute in some small way. After being assigned to the Payloads Operation Division as a payload officer and flight controller in February 1979, he was named to the astronaut office in May of the following year.

Ross was on his way.

During one of his first flights as capcom, Ross pushed back from the console as the shuttle passed between tracking stations. That created a minutes-long loss of signal to and from the spacecraft, giving controllers a short break. A thought crossed Ross’s mind as he looked around the room.

I always thought this would be a neat thing to do, and I was right.

McCandless was the acknowledged leader in the astronaut office during development of the MMU, that much was certain. “That was a big plum,” Ross said. “I think it was one that was well deserved. Bruce was by far the most senior of the people that flew any of those missions. He’d been there since the Apollo era, and he had by far invested more time and effort in getting the hardware developed to where it was ready to go fly. I don’t think there was a whole lot of doubt as to who was going to get the chance to go do that.” Still, it was hard for Ross to remain on the ground and watch as both McCandless and Stewart took the MMU out for a spin during STS-41B. That was nothing against either of his fellow astronauts. “I would’ve traded places with everybody that flew,” Ross quipped. “Any time the shuttle left the ground without me, I wasn’t too happy about it.”

The MMU flew just three times before Challenger fell so tragically back to Earth, and afterward, there were essentially no jobs left for it to do.

Robert M. “Rob” Kelso was as hooked on the space program as any kid ever had been and from about 1966 or so during the Gemini era, the native of the Houston-Galveston area in southeast Texas knew that it was what he wanted to do with his life.

He did reports on every space-related book he could get his hands on, and every chance he got, bugged his parents to bring him the quick fifteen minutes from their home over to MSC for tours. When a flight was over and it was time to debut its highlight film, Kelso was there. He bought mission slides from the gift shop. As a Boy Scout, he earned his Space Exploration merit badge. A senior manager at NASA sent Kelso and a couple of others who signed up for the program “jillions” of books and pictures and met with the small group every couple of weeks. On one behind-the-scenes tour, Kelso met none other than Jim Lovell and Jerry Carr and toured the vacuum chambers where the Apollo Command and Lunar Modules were tested.

With every step, he was falling more and more in love with the idea of working there. His senior year in high school, the center announced its junior co-op work study program, in which those who took part would go to school a semester and then work at MSC a semester. The only problem was that it was for minority candidates. He and his high school counselor came up with a solution. “It would never fly today, but I wanted this so bad, my counselor put on there, ‘Rob has red hair, and that classifies him as a minority in some sense,’” Kelso remembered. That got Kelso’s foot in the door, and he went to work in the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory.

Austin College in Sherman, Texas, did not have a co-op program, so one was invented for him. When he graduated, Kelso already had three and a half years of government service to his credit and a job offer to boot. He went to work for Maxime A. “Max” Faget, the legendary NASA spacecraft designer. In 1978 he got put on a recruiting list for the control room. He had dreamed of just such a job ever since watching from the viewing room and seeing controllers go about their business in the second-floor control room during Skylab. “I was just so fascinated,” Kelso said. “I would spend hours in there, just watching. I thought it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. It really did have this aura about it.”

Faget let him off the hook, but with a caveat. He could go, but only after giving Faget a year’s time on the job. After that, if Kelso still wanted to be a flight controller, he could go be a flight controller with no questions asked. “Max remembered that,” Kelso said. “There was no contract. There was no memo or anything. It was a handshake, but that guy had such integrity. He said, ‘I hate to see you go, but I know that’s what you want to do.’”

Kelso worked his way into the SSR for the flight of STS-1, and he never looked back. The very next flight, he was training as the payloads officer in the front room, and on STS-3, the console was his during the entry shift under flight director Don Puddy. The more his career progressed, the happier and more satisfied he became. Reality was every bit as good as he had imagined working at JSC would be. The controllers who were mentoring the next generation of flight controllers early in the Space Shuttle era were the controllers who had worked the glory years of Apollo.

Kelso got one of his first big lessons when he first encountered Gene Kranz in the hallway on a Friday leading into a three-day weekend. The up-and-coming flight controller was both in awe and terrified.

This was, after all, Gene Kranz—tough guy of Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 fame, complete with his signature crew cut. Somehow, Kelso worked up the courage to speak.

Mr. Kranz, you got a big weekend planned?

Kranz shot a glance at Kelso.

Son, I’ll start thinking about that at five o’clock this afternoon.

Listen close, and it is almost possible to still hear the air rushing out of the deflated Kelso. “I just stood there with my mouth open, just shrinking,” Kelso remembered. “He got in the elevator, the door shut, and I just stood there. That was my first exposure to Gene.”

Round One might have gone to Kranz, but Kelso got up off the canvas and dusted himself off. Working on Saturdays was not a problem, because that was when there was time to go through mail, write a few memos, and do some study. That was the way Chris Kraft and Kranz had done it, so that was the approach Rob Kelso was going to take as well.

He got to know Kranz better, too. Wednesday nights were the best, because that was when Kranz would sometimes take new controllers along with his family over to the local Knights of Columbus hall for a strip steak, baked potato, salad, tea, and a dessert, all for just a few bucks. “I think he figured that this way, us young engineers would get at least one good meal a week,” Kelso said with a hearty laugh.

Better yet, Kranz would bring the party to his house, where he might share a story or two from his long and illustrious career. Kelso soaked in every word. “This went on for several years,” he said. “Looking back on it, I realized what he was doing was not telling us just a bunch of good war stories, which is what they were. But it wasn’t just to pass on stories. He was passing on values and heritage. He was passing on to us lessons learned. He was passing on culture to us that would serve us as we went into the shuttle program.”

One day from out of the blue, Kelso was called to his boss’s office. He wanted Kelso to work on a Department of Defense (DoD) payload, and there was no other way to put it. Kelso did not want to do it. The people who worked on those kinds of things always seemed to be behind closed doors, never to be seen again, out of sight and out of mind, it seemed, to management. They just disappeared. “To this day,” Kelso concluded, “there’s probably heel marks still on that floor where they drug me down the hallway to the DoD office.”

Although Kelso took the job against his will, he was put in charge of reworking the operational issues of the Inertial Upper Stage (IUS) rocket used to deploy satellites. The planetary probes deployed by the shuttle used the IUS, and so did the Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) and some of the DoD’s payloads. He wound up behind those closed doors, responsible for the classified payload deployed during the January 1985 flight of STS-51C.

Virtually everything changed in the room due to what took place on orbit during STS-51C and the seven other DoD flights that were controlled from the third-floor FCR. After the Challenger accident, each of the room’s six remaining flights was either wholly or partially classified. They were simulated and flown in what was known as “control mode”—basically anything that could be secured, was. The eyes of the world had once been on this very room, but that was no longer the case.

Holloway was lead flight director for the mission, and afterward was presented with a medal for his role. He got in line with a few others who were being honored, and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency hung the award around his neck. Holloway took a few more steps, at which point a military official promptly reclaimed the medal, put it back in its box, and then placed it in a safe. The recognition could not be recognized, because it too was classified.

Several years passed before he received a package at home. “I came home from work one day, and my wife said, ‘What in the world is this?’” Holloway said. “This little box showed up. They didn’t declassify what the flight was about, but they had declassified the fact that I got the medal. They had mailed it to me.”

The journey of STS-27, another DoD operation, began at 8:30 a.m. in Houston on 2 December 1988. A little less than three full years had passed since the loss of Challenger, and while no one could possibly have known it at the time, an eerie link to NASA’s second fatal crewed spaceflight was about to take place. As early as twenty-seven seconds into the flight, commander Hoot Gibson was noticing that he could see some sort of white material hitting the windows. At least one strike left a streak on the first window to the left of the commander’s seat that was visible throughout the rest of the flight. Approximately eight-five seconds after leaving the pad, ablative material from the nose cap of the right SRB broke off and struck Atlantis. What Gibson and the rest of the crew, which also included pilot Guy S. Gardner and mission specialists Richard M. “Mike” Mullane, Jerry Ross, and William M. “Bill” Shepherd, could not yet see was the extensive damage done to the shuttle by the debris.

After checking launch footage and confirming that something had indeed struck the spacecraft after breaking free from the SRB, the FCR asked Mullane to use a video camera on the tip of Atlantis’s robotic arm to check the orbiter’s belly. There were at least two dozen impact areas, and those were just the spots that Mullane and the rest of the crew could see on their on-board monitor. They could also look out the rear windows on the flight deck and clearly spot damage on the right Orbital Maneuvering System pod.

Houston, we’re seeing a lot of damage. It looks as if one tile is completely missing.

Frank L. Culbertson, the capcom on duty, eventually told the crew not to worry about the strikes.

We’ve looked at the images and mechanical says it’s not a problem. The damage isn’t severe.

Gibson chimed in.

Houston, Mike is right. We’re seeing a lot of damage.

Again, the capcom’s response was basically the same.

Hoot, they’ve looked at it and they’ve determined that it’s not any worse than what we’ve seen on other flights.

There would be plenty of speculation about what the ground knew, and when it knew what. There were no pictures or television being downlinked during the secretive mission, and encrypted video frames were transmitted at the rate of maybe one every three seconds or so. “I can remember at one time using the arm to look at whatever tile damage we could see on the vehicle,” said Lee Briscoe, STS-27’s Orbit 1 and reentry flight director. “It was so bad, you couldn’t really see much of anything. I don’t actually remember a whole great big lot of discussion during the flight that there was a lot of damage, how bad it was. If that had been something brought up as a terrible, terrible concern for entry, I would’ve known about it. I just don’t know if everybody knew how bad the damage was during the flight or not.”

The severity of the situation became all too clear as soon as Atlantis came to a stop at Edwards Air Force Base in California on 6 December. A total of 707 damage sites were found, of which 644 were on the lower surface and mostly on the right side. Nearly 300 of the strikes were more than an inch in size, and one complete tile on the forward right fuselage over an antenna cover was missing altogether. It was by far the most damage ever sustained by a vehicle that somehow managed to land safely.

A report released just two months later detailed the incident, and its eighth finding began innocently enough. “It is apparent that all shuttle elements have made great progress in eliminating debris sources as evidenced by comparing early and recent ascent photography,” it read. Knowing what was to come on that January day in 2003, the very next sentence seemed nothing short of chilling. “There remains other areas for product improvements that could further reduce debris potential, particularly in the External Tank,” the report continued, before adding in Finding 10, as if to spell it out, “It is the team’s view that there is a general lack of awareness on the orbiter tile susceptibility to damage by debris.” That particular finding concluded, “It is essential that all involved employees, both government and contractor, understand that loose objects or materials coming off the elements will cause tile damage at the speed encountered during ascent.”

Still, the report recommended no delay whatsoever in flying STS-29, the next mission on the manifest. Fourteen years, one month, and eleven days after STS-27 landed, the flight of STS-107 left Earth. While Atlantis had avoided disaster following a debris strike all those years in the past, Columbia did not.

NASA kept right on flying and so did the DoD missions for the time being. Rob Kelso worked on interfacing the DoD payloads with the shuttle, flight rules, malfunction procedures, and so forth, all behind a closed door with a cipher lock to boot. There was a safe in the room, and if Kelso was going to work on any sort of classified material, he had to log in what time he opened the safe and what time he put it back. Making a quick trip out of the room meant putting it right back in the safe. If somebody came into the room, he either asked them to leave or covered up his work. Folders for carrying the documents featured a huge red “Classified” sticker. A Secured Telephone Unit (STU) was a classified phone with an encryption key that was used for hush-hush conversations.

It took some effort to even get into the third-floor FCR. Pre-approved clearance, special badging, pass codes—name it, and it was necessary to enter. Doors were locked well before simulations, and voice communications between the control room and the crew in the simulator were encrypted. Despite his initial reluctance, Kelso came to love every moment of his work on the DoD missions. “That was probably the best time in my whole career,” said Kelso, who worked his first shift as a flight director during STS-33 in November 1989. “I loved those things. It just gave me a great pride in being an American, red, white, and blue, and knowing we were doing something very significant for the country.”

There were times early in Kelso’s career as a flight director when he got so nervous coming up on some big event—say launch or a satellite deployment—that he would excuse himself, head to the restroom, and maybe even throw up. Yet once he was back behind his console with his headset plugged in, it was if he was a part of the building. The jitters went away, and they went away instantly. “I was a nervous wreck, going to the potty, and all that before,” Kelso admitted. “But once I walked in that door and I plugged into that console to take charge of the room and the mission, all that went away. You were now focused, locked in, and a part of this whole operation. You were part of that building, like you plugged in a toaster.”

It is likely no one outside a very limited circle would ever know for sure just how significant the DoD flights were, and that was despite the fact that STS-33 astronaut John E. Blaha once told a crowd in Australia that the mission had ended the Cold War. Not only that, but Kelso has also hinted that STS-36 might have been the most important Space Shuttle mission ever flown. Only the first servicing mission to the flawed Hubble Space Telescope could possibly touch it, Kelso added.

Those kinds of statements were tantalizing and dramatic, but that was all, because both flights were DoD flights. On STS-36, for instance, Kelso estimated that there were fewer than ten people in all of NASA outside the crew who had full access to the mission. “You knew you did some incredibly important things, but you can’t go tell anybody,” Kelso said. “You can’t go tell your family. You can’t tell other managers.”

A plaque he received during an anniversary get-together for STS-36 put it best, and gave him a sense of peace about his role in it all.

May you find silent satisfaction in that which is known only to an unheralded few.

The December 1992 flight of STS-53 was the final mission to be controlled out of the third-floor control room. After deploying its classified payload on the first day of the weeklong flight, the rest of the flight was unclassified. Intelligence satellites would be forevermore deployed by unmanned rockets, and the reason was economics—it was cheaper to risk blowing one up on the launch pad than to fly on the Space Shuttle.

Construction on a five-story extension to the Mission Control Center known as 30 South began earlier in 1992, and eventually it housed control rooms designated Red, White, and Blue. Kelso had the distinction of being the lead for the last flight out of the third-floor FCR, and he was also lead for STS-70 in July 1995, the first to be controlled from the new White FCR. Gone were the lighted console push buttons that Kelso could use to warm his fingers, replaced by newfangled touchscreen technology. Gone, too, was the old room’s traditional tiered configuration. Each row of consoles was located on the same level, sometimes giving the room the appearance of a high-tech cubicle farm.

Kelso prided himself on being the first one in the control room for a shift, and he had a routine to get there. He would have himself a hearty breakfast, get mentally ready, and then walk over as if heading onto the playing field for some big game. He had an American flag present, always. He would have his flight data files in order, his displays and comm loops set up just so. He still came into the White FCR early, but it did not seem the same to be booting up a computer and placing his telemetry display windows where he wanted them.

Kelso missed his former haunt. “I loved the old FCRs—the old MOCRs—better,” he said. “To me, I had a better sense of what was going on in that room. I just loved that room. There was better technology over in the new building, but it wasn’t the same for me. There was that sense of history, almost like it was a cathedral or a religious feeling from being in that room.”

Amen.