Apollo: The Race to the Moon (44 page)

The trust that Kraft confided in his flight directors was to characterize the relationship of flight directors to controllers. Thus during the launch of Apollo 12, after lightning had struck the spacecraft, flight director Gerry Griffin, a former G.N.C., was absolutely convinced that his G.N.C. ought to call for a certain circuit breaker to be pulled. It was a crucial situation, and Griffin wanted the G.N.C. to make the call. He hinted. He nudged. He prodded. But he would not—as he could have—unilaterally order the circuit breaker to be pulled. Finally his G.N.C. decided that was the thing to do, and things worked out fine.

Give a lot, expect a lot: That was the credo Kraft left for the other flight directors. “Chris Kraft was the kind of guy who would leave you alone, and let you do your job,” FIDO Jerry Bostick said. “But without him ever saying anything, you knew you’d better not screw up. You’d better get it right. Don’t try to fake it. Because he didn’t give people a second chance.” The key was not so much being perfect—the nature of the controller’s job meant that sometimes he was going to make a mistake. The key was being smart enough to recognize the mistake, correct it, and then never repeat it. (“To err is human, but to do so more than once is contrary to Flight Operations Directorate policy,” was another of Kraft’s sayings.) And above all else, when you found out you had made a mistake you had to admit it immediately. “The flight director’s looking at a lot of data, and sometimes the information [to be inferred from the data] is not clear,” an EECOM once explained. “Your data are one thing, information is another. So if you were trying to tell Kraft something that he might use to make a critical decision, like reenter the spacecraft, you had to give him very tailored, specific information. One day I saw a guy actually give him some bad data. He just tried to bullshit his way around a problem. And Kraft knew. Kraft went down and put his hand on the back of this guy’s neck and told him to leave the Control Center. That was it, for that guy.”

Kraft was the first flight director in manned space flight and the only one until the last flight in Project Mercury, Gordon Cooper’s. Cooper was scheduled to be in orbit for thirty-four hours, which was longer than even Kraft could handle on his own, so he appointed his deputy, Englishman John Hodge (part of the AVRO group), to be the second flight director. They adopted colors to identify themselves. Kraft was Red Flight, so the men working his shifts would be the Red Team; and Hodge was Blue Flight. When Gemini began in 1965, Kraft added three more flight directors. The first two were Gene Kranz, White Flight, who had been acting as Kraft’s assistant flight director during Mercury, and Glynn Lunney, Black Flight, the youngest of the original members of the Space Task Group. After Gemini VII in December 1965, Kraft stepped down as a flight director to leave more time for his responsibilities as head of the Flight Operations Directorate. Cliff Charlesworth became the next flight director, choosing green as his color.

In early 1968, John Hodge left to work on post-Apollo programs and three more flight directors were added: Gerry Griffin (Gold), Milt Windler (Maroon), and Pete Frank (Orange). There were other additions and subtractions before Apollo ended. But just as Kraft provided the master model of the flight director, Charlesworth, Lunney, and Kranz defined the basic subtypes.

Of the three, Charlesworth seemed the closest to normal. A Mississippian, Charlesworth was a little older than the others (he had reached the advanced age of thirty-five when he was promoted), and in many ways acted older as well, with a lazy voice and a deliberate manner. Charlesworth didn’t give much away, watching and reacting rather than trying to get out front and pull people along. “Cliff is a very wise man, in a student-of-human-behavior kind of way,” one of his colleagues observed. “He could have been a pool shark or a Mississippi riverboat card player.” As a flight director, Charlesworth was what another colleague called “the laissez-faire flight director,” leaving his controllers alone until a problem arose that required him to act.

In contrast, Glynn Lunney’s problem, if it was a problem, was making himself hang back long enough to let his controllers figure things out for themselves. By common agreement among controllers and the other flight directors, Glynn Lunney had the quickest mind in a business where quickness was a supreme virtue. “Lunney was always so quick that many times the controllers would get behind Glynn,” said another flight director. “Any time we’d get into a simulation, whether it be in the systems area, or trajectory, or whatever, Glynn would start pulsing the controller with questions and leading him into paths to look at.” Since a main point of the simulation was to see whether the controller would figure it out for himself, this got in the way of the training. But it was hard for Lunney to rein himself in. “Lunney could whip everybody up into following more lines of corrective action than you really want to get into at any given time,” said one FIDO. “There are always several solutions to a given problem, and when Glynn was on, the controllers would all be furiously attacking every solution, at the same time.”

Lunney, only twenty-eight years old when he became a flight director, had a sunny personality and an open exuberance about his work that made him a favorite among the controllers. If sometimes Lunney got ahead of them, they didn’t get upset—“People who worked with him over a period of time became aware that he was just doing what’s normal for him,” a colleague said. “He couldn’t help it if it’s not normal for everybody else.”

The third member of the triumvirate, Gene Kranz, was similar to Lunney only in his open relish of the job. Lunney looked as if he belonged in a Campbell’s Soup ad, whereas Gene Kranz looked like a drill sergeant in some especially bloodthirsty branch of the armed forces—hair cropped to a regulation military brush, with a wedge of a face cut into rough planes.

Kranz was as relentless as he looked. “If nothing was going on, he would invent something,” said one of his controllers. “If there’s five minutes of spare time, then he’ll think up something else, another contingency. There was almost a constant chatter on the flight director’s loop, talking to somebody about something.” During Gemini, Kranz acquired the nickname “General Savage,” after the hard-driving hero of a contemporary television series (earlier a movie), Twelve O’Clock High.* When an anonymous controller made a stencil of the name and hung it outside his office door, Kranz left it there as long as he was in the office. He loved it.

[* In the movie Twelve O’Clock High. the unrelenting General Savage replaces a sensitive commander who was loved by his pilots even though under his leadership they couldn’t hit their targets and got shot down in large numbers. General Savage, hated at first, turns the squadron around and is finally recognized to be a terrific guy underneath his tough exterior. Kranz had in fact flown F-86s and F-100s for the Air Force during the mid-1950s.]

Yet despite the hard, unyielding aspect of his reputation, Kranz wore his heart on his sleeve more than any of the other flight directors. A devout Catholic, Kranz didn’t hesitate to pray for help before going on shift. An unabashed patriot, he played tape recordings of “The Star Spangled Banner” and Sousa marches every morning in his office. They got him pumped up, ready to give his all, which was the only throttle setting on Gene Kranz’s personality.

More than the other flight directors, Kranz had a fierce loyalty to his team, the White Team, even though its members changed from flight to flight. Early in his career as flight director, he began wearing a different white vest for each flight, sometimes new vests for important shifts within a flight. After a while, this put a strain on his wife, as she combed the Houston fabric stores trying to find a white brocade or silk or twill or something that she hadn’t already used to make one of Gene’s vests. But it was all part of Kranz’s abiding attachments—to God, country, family, his band of brothers in the Flight Operations Directorate, and the MOCR itself.

In an odd sort of way, Kranz was also a democrat. “Gene assumes that everybody knows as much as he does,” said one controller. “He doesn’t think that anybody’s dumber than he is; he doesn’t think anybody is not as involved in his job as he is. That’s the way he looks at people. So he assumed you were doing everything he was doing.” But asking of others only what he demanded of himself could in his case be scary. Kranz’s credo, what Kranz labeled “premise number one,” was stark: “Any error that a flight director or a team makes is unforgivable.”

It was an intimate business, this directing of space flights—or, as Kranz liked to say, “You’ve gotta be knowledgeable of the human.” When John Glenn was waiting to launch in 1962, Walt Williams told Al Shepard, the CapCom, to chat Glenn up a little—Williams wanted to listen to Glenn’s voice, calibrate his state of mind, as later flight directors would listen to the voices of astronauts and flight controllers alike. Each crew member or controller was a little different in personality, in the systems he knew best, in the way he put things, and the flight director had to take that into account. “In some cases, you might know you were getting a little out on the fringe of what the guy really might be able to put together and give good recommendations, so you took a little more time with it,” Lunney recalled, “to be sure that the facts were there and the guy had thought it through. There were other guys who were just like this [Lunney snapped his fingers] and I’d pass it through almost as they said it. It was a calibration process that everybody engaged in. The controllers did the same thing with flight directors.”

“I think the biggest role of the flight director was asking the right questions, which is an art more than a science,” said Gerry Griffin. “It’s anticipating what questions need to be answered.” The objective was to stay as far ahead of the spacecraft as possible, to have already thought about a problem before the problem demanded an action. And then, having asked the right questions, Flight had to listen carefully to every word and nuance of the answers. “The most likely error we can make in the business is not listening,” said Kranz. “We’ve got very smart people [in the controllers]. We breed them to be very smart, we breed them to give opinions. We breed them to work in an arena of conflict. Sometimes they may disagree with you. Sometimes they may not be too smooth in words. Sometimes they may come in on an untimely basis and disrupt your train of thought.” But none of that can interfere with your listening and understanding precisely what it is that you are hearing. If you can’t listen to each person and understand exactly what that person is saying, said Kranz, “we’re going to screw up. As you get down to having to work a problem in twenty seconds, you’ve got to have that relationship with the people.”

To coordinate the work of the entire MOCR, a flight director had to keep in his memory a prodigious amount of material. By the time of the Apollo flights, for example, the mission rules books ran to hundreds of pages. Neither Kranz nor Lunney nor Charlesworth can remember ever having to refer to those pages during the course of a flight. This does not mean that the flight directors had literally memorized them.* Actually, different flight directors had different attitudes toward the written-down rules. Tec Roberts, the first FIDO and a mentor of both Kranz and Lunney, put it this way: “Glynn is a freewheeling kind of individual. ‘Rules?’ he’ll say. ‘What rules?’ If they make sense or suit what he’s doing at that moment, they’re tolerable. If they don’t, they’re obviously meant to be ignored. For Gene, everything is by the book.” Of course, Roberts reflected, when it comes to Kranz you have to remember that he wrote the book.

[* The memories of the best flight directors were extraordinary, however. Years later, Kranz insisted to a visitor that he had a poor memory. Lunney had an amazing memory, he said, but not he. This was said a few minutes after Kranz had referred with total recall to a minor point that the visitor had raised in a conversation eight months earlier.]

But at least the books were always there if they had to be used. The more critical demand on the flight director’s memory had to do with short-term memory. All of the complexities and ambiguities of the controllers’ understanding of what was happening were being funneled into the flight director’s ear. “All sorts of different considerations apply,” said Lunney. “You have a problem with the life-support systems and you have a problem with the landing weather, so when are you going to come down? And don’t forget you had this problem with a jet earlier.” All these things had to be cranked into the decision. “The flight director’s role is to integrate all that stuff and make it come out right and then order it so that what goes up and down to the crews is also ordered.” And always, under the pressure of time. “You’ve got a limited window, you’ve got to get it all done. You’ve got to really think through doing things in a priority order. They might not even be the most important, but they’re the things you have to get done now.”

And once Flight had remembered, calculated, ordered his priorities, and made the decisions, he had to communicate them. “It’s very important to be able to communicate what you want to get done in as few words as you can,” Cliff Charlesworth observed. “I used to spend time on my own thinking about how to do that—‘How can I say what I want to say so that this guy will understand in the fewest words?’ Because you didn’t always have a lot of time to sit there and laboriously go through it.” Thinking about what to say “slows you down,” Charlesworth continued. “I used to sit [beside the flight director’s console] when, say, Glynn was on the console, and even as quick-witted as he is, I’d get ahead of him sometimes, when the problems started coming in. I’d scratch my head and say, ‘Why is that?’ It’s because I wasn’t having to talk, and he was.”

So it wasn’t just the authority and the visibility that set the flight director apart, but the job itself. It was the flight controller’s job writ large: Know in technical detail one of the most complex machines ever made. Master a complex flight plan and a huge body of mission rules. Piece together tiny and often unconnected bits of information from multiple sources coming to you at the same time. Do all this under the gaze of the world in situations that might give you only seconds to make life-and-death decisions.