Apollo: The Race to the Moon (43 page)

The Trench got its swagger from the fact that they came closer than anyone else on the ground to actually flying the spacecraft. “You know,” said Retro Chuck Deiterich, “the flight dynamics job is the neatest job in the Control Center. It’s even neater than being flight director. The systems guys, they watch the systems, and as long as the systems are working right, they don’t really have much to do. [‘BULLSHIT!’ an old EECOM exploded upon hearing of that remark.] But trajectory guys, they get to say, ‘Well, we’re gonna do this kind of maneuver today, this kind tomorrow, do this, do that.’ They’re actually doing stuff all the time to control the trajectory.” Indeed, another member of the Trench recalled, sometimes you got the spooky feeling that you were actually flying the spacecraft down there in the fluorescent gloom of the MOCR, with the plot displays in front of you and all the other controllers out of sight behind you.

The function of the men in the MOCR was to run the mission. The difference between their role and that of the astronauts lay in M.S.C.’s distinction between command and control, as originally formulated by Walt Williams: The astronauts controlled the spacecraft, the MOCR commanded the mission.

The ground had to be in charge. The volume of information required to make many of the crucial decisions was so great that only a fraction of it could even be displayed on the spacecraft’s panels, let alone be absorbed and acted upon by the three-man crew. Only one astronaut ever tried to question the ground’s primacy. The astronaut was one of the original Mercury Seven, Wally Schirra, his crewmates were Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele, and the mission was Apollo 7. For whatever reasons, possibly aggravated by a miserable cold that lasted for most of the flight, Schirra got into a running battle with the MOCR over a number of matters, topped off by one occasion when he referred to a flight director’s instructions as idiotic. Not only did Schirra never fly again, neither did Cunningham or Eisele.

But while the flight controllers in the MOCR were in charge of the flight, they saw almost nothing of it. Few contrasts are as stark as that between the way an Apollo launch looked to the outside world and the way it looked to a controller. The hummers in the back row of the MOCR, who didn’t have anything to do anyway, watched the televised image of the launch on their consoles, and it was sometimes piped onto one of the flight director’s screens as well. But not onto a controller’s screen. The controller’s whole world during a launch consisted of the white numbers on a black screen, the plots on the boards, and the low voices in his headset. At the moment of liftoff, there was for him no slowly rising Saturn V, no roar of engines, no Walter Cronkite. For the controller, there was just an uninflected voice counting down and saying, “Liftoff,” and then some of the numbers on his display began to change.

A problem seldom announced itself. For a few of the most important potential failures, the controller had a specific warning light that would flash on his console. But hundreds of things might go wrong for which no light would flash, and the controllers didn’t have the luxury of a computer smart enough to state clearly that a diode was overheating or a circuit had failed. Usually, the only sign given to the controller was that a number was not what it was supposed to be.

Discerning that the number was wrong was made difficult by the fact that the screen was filled with numbers. It was made more difficult still by the fact that many of these numbers were constantly changing. It was up to the controller to notice that one number among the dozens wasn’t right.

Even when the controller had pinpointed an errant number, it seldom told an unambiguous story. The computers were often overloaded and slow to get the data up on the screens, and the signals from the tracking stations were sometimes erratic. One set of numbers on the controller’s screen could be fifteen seconds old while all the other numbers were fresh, creating the illusion of a problem. Therefore, in the midst of everything else he was worrying about, the controller had to remember to check his data-source slots at the top right-hand corner of the screen to see whether any of them had an asterisk under them, which would indicate that the numbers associated with that source were no longer updating. And then he should glance at the clocks on his screen—if a broader problem were affecting all of his data, then the clocks would have stopped counting.

If the controller was reasonably sure he had an anomalous number on his hands, its meaning had to be deciphered in the context of several other numbers that were changing—or failing to change. It was also possible that other numbers that might explain the conundrum would not be showing on the current screen, and he would have to call up one of the other displays that were available to his console. Perhaps they would not even be on displays that normally belonged on his console, so the controller must have prepared for that portion of the flight by specifying other displays, normally on other screens, that he could call up, or by knowing which other controller to ask whether one of the numbers on that controller’s screen was changing, or failing to change, in a particular pattern.

The controller was also plugged into a set of communications loops. One loop was the flight director’s and another was the air-to-ground loop. A third was always one of those rooms on the outer perimeter of the square corridor, the controller’s own back room where specialists were watching the data affecting their particular controller’s job in much more detail than the controller in the front room could watch for himself. The number and choice of other loops that the controller would plug into depended on a variety of factors, all of which changed as the phases of the flight changed.

A controller might easily have a half-dozen or more loops buzzing in his ear at one time. He would have turned the volume up about three decibels on his primary loops, so that words spoken on them stood out, but voices from all the rest of the loops would be constantly talking as well, in bursts of a few words at a time, usually in the form of abbreviations. Seldom did a controller hear a full sentence, for sentences take time, and to speak unnecessarily was a breach of loop discipline. The function of the flight control team was to provide essential information to people who had to have it and to react to situations that required a reaction, not to chat about how things were going.

Even though no one said more than a few words at a time, the combined volume of information constantly being fed into the controller’s headset was formidable. Because the messages were so brief, the entire content of one could be buried under the sound of another. And because much of the information was not specifically intended for him, he could not expect another controller to make sure he had heard. He had to be able to pick up from the many voices on the loops that one murmured bit of information that was pertinent to what he was seeing. Naturally, the volume of information and the confusion of voices became greatest when something unusual was happening, which was at just that moment when the controller had the most urgent need to concentrate.

Once the controller thought he had identified a problem, he should not go to the flight director with it too quickly, for Flight’s attention was a precious and limited resource. Even if the controller did have a problem that Flight needed to know about, he had to be aware of the other problems that were already on the flight director’s plate, to understand (without asking) if his problem could wait longer than some of the other problems, and to remain quiet until the appropriate moment came. The flight controller also had to be aware that if, during a time-critical phase such as launch or lunar descent, he spoke too quickly and was wrong, he could set off a chain of reactions that could ultimately lead to the needless abort of a mission. Nor, of course, could he afford to be too slow in reporting a problem to Flight, for there were times when the gap between the onset of a disastrous problem and the time when it was too late to do anything about it was measured in seconds.

For the flight controller, that was about all there was to it. All he had to do was recognize a problem hidden in his displays, assess it correctly in the context of a mass of additional information, be neither too precipitous nor too hesitant in reporting it to the flight director, and be prepared to do all this instantly for hours on end.

Chapter 20. “The flight director may take any necessary action”

At the vortex of the MOCR, third row center, sat the flight director—“Flight.” It is difficult to think of another role in the modern era that is the counterpart of flight director for an Apollo lunar mission. Many other jobs carry with them some measure of the same unrivaled power—the captain of a navy ship, for example. But even that comparison is inapt, for the captain of a modern naval vessel exercises his power under the orders of others who are in constant radio communication with him. The Apollo flight director experienced no such direction during the course of a flight. By explicit statement in the mission rules, the flight director’s authority was sweeping: “The flight director may, after analysis of the flight, choose to take any necessary action required for the successful completion of the mission.” Theoretically, either Flight’s immediate boss, the director of Flight Operations, or the mission director could intervene. And when there was time, a flight director would as a matter of courtesy tell the senior executives in the back row what was happening. But none of them, not even Chris Kraft, ever changed a flight director’s decision, for all of them knew that they could not possibly read the technical situation during the course of a flight as well as he.

Along with the power of command came breathtaking exposure in the event of error. The lunar missions were, after all, landmarks not just in the history of the United States, but—without hyperbole—in the history of Homo sapiens. A flight director prepared for the manned Apollo flights in the knowledge that his decisions during the course of his shifts in the MOCR could put him at the center of the world’s attention. And yet the rewards for success and the penalties for failure were not symmetrical. With success, the flight director remained anonymous. On the other hand, if a crew were ever lost that could have been saved by the flight control team, a flight director had to be aware that he would be testifying before congressional committees and explaining his actions to boards of investigation, in addition to trying to live with himself. Formally or informally, he would be marked forever as the man who had failed to save the astronauts. “It is the finest job in the spaceflight business,” said Gene Kranz of the flight director’s post. But it was not one for just anybody.

Even before Mercury had ended, Chris Kraft had become the model of the flight director that all the others would try to copy throughout Gemini and Apollo. He underplayed his work, advertising his theory that the flight director was like the conductor of an orchestra. “The conductor can’t play all the instruments—he may not even be able to play any one of them,” he would say. “But he knows when the first violin should be playing, and he knows when the trumpets should be loud or soft, and when the drummer should be drumming. He mixes all this up and out comes music. That’s what we do here.” Around the MOCR, it was known as the piccolo theory (“The conductor doesn’t have to know how to play the piccolo …”).

All this was nonsense, according to his controllers. When Kraft was talking to one of his controllers and began the sentence by saying, “I don’t understand your discipline that well, but … ,” the controller would cringe, waiting for the zinger that was about to come. The fact was, in their opinion, that Kraft knew exactly how to play the piccolo; he could play every instrument in the orchestra if he had to. One FIDO remembered that Kraft would come down to the Trench during his off-shift and pull up a chair and sit there and chat about something that had come up on the preceding shift or about something he knew was coming up on the next—revealing in the process an intimidating technical knowledge of what the FIDO had done or was about to do. Or when he was at Flight’s console up on the third row and not much was happening, he’d sit there and bring up the displays that were showing on your console (he could do that with every position), just to keep his hand in. “Kraft is incredible,” said another controller. “Mind-boggling. Here was a man running a whole directorate. Every mission was different, had different ground rules, different flight rules. Each one had different things that were set up that way because of different constraints that went with them. And we’d be in a meeting discussing them before we deployed out to a site, and one of the crewmen would say something, and Kraft would say, ‘No, we’re not going to do that. Here’s what we’re going to do, and here’s why we’re going to do it.’ I’d sit there and say to myself, Where the hell did he ever find time to be able to do that? Where did he find time to understand all that?” The other flight directors followed suit, making self-deprecating jokes about their own ignorance of the controllers’ specialties even as they unobtrusively burrowed into the nuances of every console in the room.

Kraft also set the tone for one of the most striking features of Flight Operations, unquestioning trust—not of superiors by subordinates, but the other way around. In the flight control business, where the consequences of mistakes could be irretrievable, this level of trust was sometimes an awesome thing to receive. Kranz remembered his first shift as Flight, on Gemini IV. “I was looking for a handover, some general sense of direction, because I was picking up the shift from Kraft. And he left no handover. He didn’t brief me. He just said, ‘You’re in charge,’ and walked out.” During Apollo 5, which was an unmanned mission testing out the lunar module’s descent engine, an early engine cutoff triggered a set of convoluted contingency plans. Kranz, the flight director, was coping, but he was being stretched to the limit. Kraft walked over and stood beside Kranz’s console for a few moments. Finally he said to Kranz, “I don’t know what in the hell you’re doing. I don’t know why in the hell you’re doing it. But I hope to hell you pull it off.” And he strolled away, while Kranz did.