Apollo: The Race to the Moon (40 page)

“Walt Williams became like the father,” said Lunney. “We were all his boys and he loved that. He came knowing that an operations organization had to be set up and having a lot of the instincts about what characteristics it should have. Walt encouraged it to happen.” But Williams was too busy negotiating with the Air Force and taking care of the preparation of the Atlas launch vehicle to make it happen from day to day in the flight control part of the business, Lunney said. “And then this young Kraft guy came along with a lot of clever technical skills and the charisma to pull it off. Chris made it happen.”

His unlikely name was Christopher Columbus Kraft, Jr. He was named for his father, who had been born in New York City the week that Columbus Circle was dedicated. Chris Junior was born in 1924 in Phoebus, Virginia, just up the road from Langley—his uncle August had been one of the surveyors who had laid out the original runways at Langley Field back in 1915. A standout baseball player in school, Kraft toyed with the dream of playing pro ball. But he wasn’t quite good enough for that, and he was rejected for military service during World War II because of a hand that had been badly burned when he was a child. So after returning home with his engineering degree from Virginia Polytechnic, Kraft drove down the road from Phoebus to Langley and applied for a job. He reported for work in January 1945 and was assigned to William Hewitt Phillips’s Stability and Control Branch, where he worked for another young engineer named Chuck Mathews.

In later years, Kraft would reminisce about his years under Phillips with a craftsman’s pride in his work, but eventually he began to scrape against the edges of the Langley mold. By 1958, Kraft was a quietly frustrated young man with an ulcer. Then that fall, Mathews recruited him into the Space Task Group as his assistant in the new Operations Division. One day, as Mathews remembered it later, Kraft came to him and said, “There needs to be someone in charge of the flights while they’re actually going on, and I’d like to be that person.” Mathews agreed, and that was how the position of flight director in manned space flight was born. After Williams came aboard and Mathews gradually moved into the background, the original Operations Division was split into three new divisions, for Preflight Operations, for Flight Crew Operations, and for Flight Operations. Kraft was made director of Flight Operations. Ultimately, he would become the embodiment of Mission Control.

Walt Williams would throw out an idea and Kraft would pick up on it. One of the earliest and most important of these was Williams’s notion of mission rules. “He said we had to have them,” Lunney said. “We didn’t know what ‘mission rules’ meant, but we went out and made them up.” It was really just about that simple, according to Kranz. “Honest to God, I hadn’t been on board more than a couple of weeks when they said, ‘Hey, go down to the Cape and write some mission rules.’ I said, ‘What are mission rules?’ ‘Well, if something goes wrong, we want to have some thinking as to what we’re going to do about it.’ I said, ‘Jesus Christ, I don’t even know where the Cape is, much less how to go down there and write mission rules.’ But it was unquestioned. We’d all muster out and go do it.” Kranz and Tec Roberts and Paul Havenstein, a Navy officer seconded to the Space Task Group, flew down to the Cape on one of East Coast Airlines’ creaky old planes. They sat out on the porch of a house borrowed from an Air Force officer stationed at Patrick Air Force Base, just south of the Cape, and there they made up mission rules.

Walt Williams had brought the notion of mission rules from Edwards, where they were used as a way of preparing the pilot to react correctly in situations where there was no time to think through a problem or in which he might intuitively do the wrong thing. Mission rules for space flight were developed to help the controllers decide ahead of time, calmly and deliberately, with plenty of information and time to think, what was to be done in a critical situation.

Williams remembered meeting considerable resistance to the notion of mission rules at first: “It took table pounding.” People argued that they would never know exactly what to expect and that the rules were unlikely to work for a specific situation. That’s not the point, replied Williams. “If you’d worked your way through problems, then when you saw a problem, whether you knew exactly what it was or not, you started recognizing the characteristics of it—and understanding the system, you could work your way out of it.”

Throughout Mercury and Gemini, mission rules continued to develop, and by the time of Apollo they filled a number of thick books. But over time, the mission rules also took on the elements of a philosophy—or, as Lunney liked to think of it, a set of values. “It’s like being raised by parents in some faith. You get a set of values, and then when you’re an adult, you probably live by them most of the time. And it became like that with us.”

The most generic of all principles was that the crew must be protected from dying. But the principle had to be more sophisticated than “protect the crew at all costs.” Just as Owen Maynard and Caldwell Johnson constantly had to make trade-offs between different kinds of risks, so the controllers found that it wasn’t possible to make decisions simply on the basis of whether a procedure was safe or not. “When we first started,” Lunney recalled, “people would say things like, well, the spacecraft’s got to be ‘good’ [before deciding to continue a mission]. But what the hell does ‘good’ mean?” Slowly, the Flight Operations Division wended its way toward a subtle and complex style of thinking about this crucial thing called safety. In this process, Kraft became what Kranz and some of the others called “The Teacher,” developing precepts that became the catechism for later generations of flight controllers.

The first of Kraft’s precepts was simplicity itself: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.” But it was simple as a koan is simple, for flight controllers were trained and conditioned to solve problems; the temptation was for a controller to think that he knew what to do when he really didn’t. True wisdom in flight control lay in being able to recognize one’s own ignorance. Much of the training of the flight controllers consisted of showing them how they could be fooled.

Another of Kraft’s precepts was not at all simple. According to Kranz, “Kraft always believed that once you accepted the risk of launch, once those engines ignited, you had bought a good portion of the risk associated with that mission. Once you got into orbit, what you wanted to do was exploit the environment you were in. It was really a philosophy of risk versus risk and risk versus gain which we debated many, many times.” For example, during the Gemini V mission, there was a risk of losing the fuel cells if the spacecraft remained in orbit. If Kraft brought the crew home, another crew would have to repeat the mission and accept the comparatively higher risks of the launch phase. The conclusion, according to the Kraft philosophy, was that although it was risky to use the fuel cells, it was safer in the larger scheme of things to continue the mission than to bring it home with its work uncompleted.

If “safety before everything” was impossible, what then was the guiding principle for deciding to abort a mission? The canon was voluminous, but the unifying tenet was based on the ability to tolerate one more major failure. As Lunney explained it: “You will continue [flying] only if the next thing that happens to you—and it’s the worst thing you can think of to couple with the problems you already have—is still survivable.” If you thought in those terms, the flight controllers pointed out, a great many of the more specific rules fell into place. “Sounds obvious as hell,” Lunney added, “but it took a little while to figure that out.”

While these principles of flight control were evolving, two other developments profoundly affected the way that flight operations would be conducted during Apollo. One was a process lasting for years; the other was a single, terrifying event.

The process was the shaping of Flight Operations into a brotherhood. For an extended period from 1959 until the mid-1960s, the new Flight Operations Division was continually hiring new people. But whereas other divisions within the Space Task Group hired a mixture of new college graduates and people out of industry, the Flight Operations Division hired almost nothing but new college graduates. Furthermore, Kraft looked for a particular kind of person. He wasn’t worried about grades—a B or sometimes even a C average could be good enough. In fact, the straight-A student wasn’t likely to be right for Flight Operations. Kraft wanted people who weren’t locked into a standard engineering career path. He wanted people who enjoyed nosing around in many different areas, and who knew that they were going to have to work hard to succeed. Most of all, he looked for applicants who were fascinated by space flight and who couldn’t believe their good fortune when they were given the opportunity to work sixty-hour weeks at a Civil Service salary—as long as they were working for the space program.

When these youngsters, twenty-one and twenty-two years old, came to work, they found themselves in one of the most glamorous jobs in the program. They didn’t sit at drafting tables drawing electrical circuits or designs for valves; they were the guardians of the astronauts. They went to exotic places—Hawaii and Bermuda; Carnarvon on the northwest coast of Australia; Kano in the interior of Nigeria; Tananarive in the Indian Ocean; ships and islands throughout the world—to man the remote sites. They had as their leaders the redoubtable Williams, possessing everything to inspire awe in twenty-two-year-old males but a silk scarf around his neck, and Kraft, who, as Williams left more and more of the daily operation to him, became the revered leader.

Kraft was the model for flight-controller cool, taking in bad news without changing expression or tone of voice, making decisions quickly, controlling people and events as the situation demanded. He had the indefinable quality called presence as well. “I’ve seen people argue and argue and argue with him, trying to get their way,” one controller recalled. “He’d look at them very casually, and he’d say, ‘I have your input.’ And it would just terminate the conversation—just terminate the guy into a dummy load, is what we used to say.”

“People idolized Kraft, and wanted to be like him,” another controller said, speaking of the youngsters coming into Flight Operations fresh out of college. For a while back in the early 1960s, the young Glynn Lunney wore the same kind of loafers, smoked the same kind of cigars, held his cigar in the same way as Kraft. Gene Kranz, with his fighter-pilot experience, saw himself in his early days with Flight Operations as Kraft’s wing man. He would arrive at Mercury Control long before Kraft and test everything on Kraft’s console, check out every communications loop, then make sure his own console was prepared so that in the event of a failure on Kraft’s console, Kraft could step over to exactly the same setup on Kranz’s. “I was probably overkilling it a bit,” Kranz said, “but I wasn’t going to let my lead guy get shot down.”

So there they were—young, male, in a high-pressure job, often the only one they’d ever known, many of them single, spending most of their waking hours together, often in remote overseas outposts, led by men they idolized. The result was more or less what one would expect of such a mix of circumstances: male bonding (a phrase no flight controller would be caught dead using) on a grand scale, and a kind of closeness that many of them would never know again. Along with the excitement went the hell-raising in which groups of young men are prone to indulge. In Houston, where some had families and they were working all the time anyway, it was pretty tame—volleyball and beer—or reasonably discreet. At the remote sites and the Cape, the hell-raising got a little more exciting, much of it involving cars (driven into the surf off Cocoa Beach, for example), women (Australia was an especially popular duty station), and more beer. The controllers had their own legends of outrageous flight-controller behavior arising from the adventures of free spirits such as Ed Fendell, John Hatcher, and above all John Llewellyn. They had their own language. While they were working a mission in the Control Center, they communicated in short bursts of acronyms and abbreviations and code words that made it impossible for an outsider to have any idea what they were talking about. After work, drinking beer at the Flintlock or the Singing Wheel, they would add to the acronyms and the jargon their own figures of speech. A Saturn didn’t ascend to orbit; it “went up the hill.” One didn’t make inquiries of someone; one “pulsed” him. To fall asleep was to “go to poo,” referring to program P00 which reset the onboard computers to zero. Then, for reasons that remain unexplained, the controllers mixed their technological slang with medievalisms—“yea verily,” for example, and “it came to pass,” and “thou shalt.” Sometimes it seemed that the controllers lacked only decoder rings and a tree house.

Kraft consciously reinforced the band-of-brothers atmosphere in Flight Operations. As long as you were part of the brotherhood, he would defend you against any charge to anyone outside. In one of the classic John Llewellyn stories, Llewellyn, who had been assigned to coordinate the recovery team for one of the early missions, decided unilaterally that the Navy ought to add an extra ship to the recovery task force. The Navy did, and sent a bill for something like a million dollars to Gilruth. As the story is told by the controllers, Gilruth called Kraft to his office and asked what this was all about. Kraft got Llewellyn on the phone, listened for a while, hung up, turned to Gilruth, and said simply, “Pay the million.” That’s the way Kraft was with his people.

“He’s got to be the best motivator of people I ever had anything to do with,” said Rod Loe of Kraft. For example, said Loe: During Gemini, Loe, a flight controller for the environmental control system, was worried about one of his subsystems. He couldn’t get the contractor in charge of it to pay any attention to him—Loe was just a little guy. Kraft somehow heard about this, and when a few days later the contractor people were discussing another problem with Kraft, Kraft casually walked over to Loe and put his arm on his shoulder and asked, “What do you think, Rod?” That’s all it took. “‘Rod? Who’s Rod?’ Those guys didn’t know who ‘Rod’ was,” Loe said. “But from then on, those guys started looking me up to get my opinion, because they thought, ‘God, Kraft listens to this guy.’” It didn’t take many such episodes to build a lot of loyalty among Kraft’s people.