Apollo: The Race to the Moon (54 page)

On Wednesday, July 16, 1969—2,974 days after John F. Kennedy asked the United States to commit itself to a lunar landing, 169 days before the deadline he had set—Apollo 11 was launched.

The Saturn V carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins lifted off from Pad 39A at 9:32 A.M., Eastern Daylight Time, the precise moment selected months earlier. It had been just ten years earlier, in the summer of 1959, that Scott Simpkinson and his team of forty-five had arrived at the Cape and set up shop in one corner of Hangar S, that Joe Bobik had sprayed ammonia to kill the mosquitoes so his men could work through the night on Big Joe, and that Jack Kinzler had carted out the Mercury capsule cushioned by mattresses on the back of a flatbed truck.

As it had for Apollos 8, 9, and 10, the Saturn V performed flawlessly. Then, in a maneuver that had become almost routine, the S-IVB sent the command module Columbia carrying the lunar module Eagle into its translunar trajectory.

At eight o’clock on Sunday morning, Houston time, July 20, 1969, the LEM Eagle disappeared behind the moon and Gene Kranz’s White Team took over the MOCR to handle the lunar descent.

Kranz had already been to mass early that morning at the Shrine of the True Cross near his home in Dickinson. He had listened to his Sousa marches. He had brought a brand-new vest of white brocade with silver thread that his wife, Marta, had made for the day’s shift. Now, as Glynn Lunney finished the handover process, Kranz carefully removed the vest from the plastic bag he had hung over the back of his console and put it on as fastidiously as a matador adjusting the jacket of his traje de luces.

Kranz looked behind him at the viewing room. There, gathered behind the glass, were Paine, Seamans, von Braun, Silverstein, Elms, Petrone, Rees, Debus, Draper, the astronauts for the next missions, and some astronauts from years gone by. In front of the glass, in the fourth row of the MOCR, were Bob Gilruth, Sam Phillips, George Low, George Mueller, Chris Kraft, and Deke Slayton. The rest of the MOCR was packed with off-duty controllers.

Kranz caught sight of Bill Tindall squeezed into the group in the viewing room. Tindall was Kranz’s kind of guy—a man who knew what he believed and wasn’t afraid to get emotional about it, who told you where he stood. Plus which, as Kranz saw it, Tindall had been sort of a spiritual leader of the MOCR, their mentor in getting ready for this moment. Kranz beckoned to Tindall to come into the MOCR and plug in beside him, an honor that Tindall would never forget.

While the LEM was still behind the moon, Kranz directed that the doors to the MOCR be locked. The level of tension was such that Steve Bales, sitting at the Guido console next to Jay Greene, smiled to himself—was Kranz trying to keep other people out, or the controllers from escaping? In fact, locking the door was only the visible part of putting the MOCR on “battle short” status, in which the circuit breakers in the Control Center were physically prevented from opening under an electrical load. Kranz was prepared to let a circuit burn up rather than risk a power transient that would cause a major Control Center system to drop off line.

Then Kranz switched from Flight’s loop to an auxiliary loop that the people in the viewing room couldn’t hear. The tape of what he said is lost. As best he can recall, what he told his controllers went something like this:

“Hey gang, we’re really going to go and land on the moon today. This is no bullshit, we’re going to land on the moon. We’re about to do something that no one has ever done. Be aware that there’s a lot of stuff that we don’t know about the environment that we’re ready to walk into, but be aware that I trust you implicitly. But also I’m aware that we’re all human. So somewhere along the line, if we have a problem, be aware that I’m here to take the heat for you. I know that we’re working in an area of the unknown that has high risk. But we don’t even think of tying this game, we think only to win, and I know you guys, if you’ve even got a few seconds to work your problem, we’re going to win. So let’s go have at it, gang, and I’ll be tagging up to you just like we did in the training runs. Forget all the people out there. What we’re about to do now, it’s just like we do it in training. And after we finish this sonofagun,we’ll go out and have a beer and we’ll say, ‘Dammit, we really did something.’”

Kranz had been standing behind his console as he said all this. He sat down, and, feeling a little abashed, switched back to the Flight loop. He’d really gotten into it. But if not now, when?

As Kranz sat and waited to begin the descent, the NASA photographer in the MOCR caught a shot of him. In it, Kranz is leaning forward expectantly, calm and cool. Behind the console, hidden from the camera, Kranz lifted his hand from a sheet of the flight plan and left behind a perfect, soaking-wet image of his palm.

It took time to check out the LEM and to put it into the initial phase of the descent, so the White Team had been on shift six hours when they approached the moment for powered descent initiation. The MOCR had settled into its rhythm by that time, and Kranz sounded relaxed as he went into a final check before P.D.I. Steve Bales was Guido—to be called Guidance now that they were talking on the loops. FIDO was Jay Greene. Retro was Chuck Deiterich. CapCom was Charlie Duke. TelCom was Don Puddy. Control was Bob Carlton. Surgeon was John Ziegleschmid. Kranz polled the controllers, a procedure called going around the horn.

“Got us locked up there, TelCom?”

“Okay, it’s just real weak, Flight,” Puddy answered. Getting good radio communication from the moon was still a matter of constantly juggling signals and sources.

“Okay,” said Kranz, who wanted a more straightforward answer, “how ya lookin’? All your systems go?”

“That’s affirm, Flight.”

“How about you, Control?”

“We look good.”

“Guidance, you happy?”

“Go with systems,” said Bales.

“FIDO, how about you?”

“We’re go,” said Greene. “We’re a little low, Flight, no problem.”

“Rog.”

For the next twenty-two seconds, Flight’s loop was silent. Then Kranz’s voice came on again.

“Okay, all flight controllers, thirty seconds to ignition.” His voice was low and mellow, falling off lazily on the word “ignition” as if to say that it was just a stroll in the park, no sweat. And the descent to the moon began.

They had been having problems communicating with the LEM. FIDO intermittently lost data from MSFN (“misfin,” the Manned Space Flight Network), but they had tracking data from PGNS, AGS, and Doppler radar as well. Also it looked as if the spacecraft was going to land downrange from the planned spot—irregularities in the gravitational field of the moon, called mascons, had played tricks with the navigation again. That one was a little worrisome. The velocity was 20 feet per second (f.p.s.) too high the first time Bales saw data after P.D.I. began. “That really scared the hell out of me,” Bales recalled—they were already more than halfway to an abort boundary of 35 f.p.s. He could think of innocuous reasons why the velocity might be too high, but he wanted to be sure this wasn’t a sign of some deeper failure in the guidance computer. Bales watched the downtrack error closely, but it seemed to remain at 20 f.p.s.

In a way, Kranz welcomed these problems, because they gave him a look at the way the team was responding to them. “I listened to what they said, but I listened more to how they said it by that time.” They were saying it just the way he wanted to hear it. The spacecraft yawed on schedule, and the landing radar began acquiring data for the landing. The clock came up on five minutes and thirty seconds into the burn.

The landing radar had found the surface of the moon and begun to calculate where the Eagle was. The radar recognized that the altitude was too high and began automatically to adjust velocity to converge with the planned trajectory. Bales began to relax.

“Is he accepting it, Guidance?” Kranz asked Bales, inquiring whether the crew had begun using the landing radar data.

Buzz Aldrin’s uninflected voice came onto the loop over Kranz’s question. “1202,” Aldrin said. He was announcing that a light on his panel was lit, an alarm buzzer was sounding, and the program alarm code 1202 was showing on his computer display.

“Stand by,” said Bales, putting off an answer to Kranz.

“1202.” It was Aldrin again.

“What’s a 1202?” an unidentified voice inquired.

“1202, what’s that?” asked another.

“12 … 1202 alarm,” said Gran Paules, sitting beside Bales. During critical portions of a mission, Guidance had a second controller, “Yaw,” so named because his function was to monitor the yawing movements of the spacecraft. Paules had won that assignment for the descent. He was talking to Flight now, because Steve Bales had suddenly become exceedingly busy. Paules’s voice was worried.

“Affirmative on that 12,” CapCom said, confirming that Houston was picking up the same alarm and also implicitly promising advice to come.

These were the moments when flight directors were forced by circumstance to exhibit a capacity for divided attention. Bill Tindall had always found Kranz in particular to possess this ability to an extreme. “It’s like he’s got two entirely separate minds. Like two people. He’s sitting there running these missions, calling these people, punching the buttons to bring up the loops, thinking about what’s happening, and at the same time he’s writing down in this precise printing of his, like a telegraph operator, exactly what’s going on all the time, keeping a total record of the whole goddamned thing. It’s just beyond my comprehension how anyone can do anything like that.” But a capacity for such divided attention was essential precisely because of what now happened: Just as Kranz heard that a potentially mission-threatening alarm had just sounded, somebody else also had urgent business for him. Chuck Deiterich’s voice came over the loop.

“Flight, Retro.”

“Go, Retro.”

“Throttle down 6 plus 25.” Retro was giving Kranz the time, six minutes and twenty-five seconds into the burn, when the crew should be expecting the descent engine to throttle down to 55 percent power.

“6 plus 25,” said Kranz. In the shorthand of the MOCR, Kranz had just acknowledged Retro’s message and at the same time given a tacit direction to the CapCom (which the CapCom recognized as being a direction because he knew this was one of the items of information that the crew must have) to pass Deiterich’s message along to Armstrong and Aldrin. Even as Kranz confirmed the 6-plus-25, a voice from the LEM was coming in over his words:

“Give us the reading on the 1202 program alarm.”

Some abort decisions were to be made by the astronauts. Other abort decisions were to be made on the ground. In the case of a program alarm, the instrumentation in the LEM could tell the astronauts only that an alarm had occurred, and its number. Armstrong and Aldrin could know nothing else about whether it was recurring or how serious it was, and they knew that the ground would have to make the call. When Eagle said, “Give us the reading,” they were asking whether they should abort. It was now up to Steve Bales.

When the report of the alarm had come in, Bales had half risen from his seat, pulled up by a surge of adrenaline, his left index finger furiously twirling a lock of hair. He began talking to his back room, where Jack Garman also had heard the message. They still didn’t have any data—it would be another four or five seconds before the computer brought that up on the screen—but Garman was sure right away what the alarm was, and his voice came over the Guido loop quickly in an almost schoolmasterish voice, each word carefully articulated: “It’s executive overflow; if it does not occur again, we’re fine.”

“Yeah,” said Gran Paules in his Texas drawl, “it’s the same thing we had”—referring to the sim of a few weeks earlier.

Actually, it wasn’t the same thing they’d had. The simulated program alarm had been one that was “possible” during a flight, whereas a 1202 alarm was, they thought, “impossible”—purely a debugging alarm, still in the software only by oversight. But because of the simulation they had studied up on even the impossible ones, so the team was ready.

Examined clinically, it was a textbook case of how the flight control system was supposed to function. A type of failure had been foreseen and simulated. Based on that experience, rules had been developed. At the moment of crisis, the man in the back room, Jack Garman, had instantly retrieved from his memory the salient information and given it to his man in the front room. It was cut and dried.

Examined less clinically, the decision was not that clear. “I thought I was right,” Bales said years later of the call he was about to make. “Well, I knew I was right based on the work we’d done previously.” And he trusted Garman, who Bales thought was the smartest computer guy he’d ever met. And yet it still wasn’t so simple. “I knew I was executing what we’d decided to do previously,” Bales continued. “But then you could ask, well, what was the softness or firmness of that decision made previously? And there was some softness in it. No one knew really what was causing the problem. When you don’t know what’s causing the problem, you are never absolutely one hundred percent sure that the decision you’re making is right. It’s like trying to diagnose yourself and taking a pill just on symptoms. So I knew I was doing the right thing from what we’d previously discussed, and I knew darned well there was some softness in that decision.” He also knew that two lives could depend on his being right. And so when Steve Bales made his call, he stammered slightly, and his voice was high.

“We … we’re go on that, Flight.”

It was nineteen seconds since he had first told Kranz to stand by. Steve Bales, twenty-six years old, with some advice from a twenty-four-year-old, given nineteen seconds to think it over, told Gene Kranz, Chris Kraft, General Phillips, Administrator Paine, President Nixon, and the world—and, not incidentally, Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong—“Ignore the computer and trust me.”

“We’re go on that alarm?” Kranz wanted to make absolutely sure. Again Bales stammered. “If … if it doesn’t recur, we’ll be go.”

Jack Garman’s voice was in Bales’s ear again, straightening out a slight misunderstanding: “It’s continuous that makes it no-go. If it recurs, we’re fine”—meaning, if it recurred with intervals of several seconds in between, they were fine. He continued to articulate each word carefully, slowly, confidently.