Apollo: The Race to the Moon (58 page)

In the MOCR at Houston, it was also a first-time day for Gerry Griffin. Griffin was part of the third generation of flight directors, brought in along with Milt Windler and Pete Frank in 1967. He was the first of his group to be named lead flight director and the first to be Flight on a launch phase. Still baby-faced at age thirty-four, an Aggie from Texas A&M with a high-pitched Texas twang, Griffin knew from the loops at the Cape that they were having weather problems in Florida and had doubted that they were going to launch. As the countdown continued toward T–0, he was pleasantly surprised. Like most flight directors, he had chosen not to have a television image of the launch on his console’s screens, but he assumed that the weather must be okay—otherwise, the Cape wouldn’t go ahead.

At 11:22, right on schedule, the Saturn V fired up and rose from Pad 39A. The commander of Apollo 12, Pete Conrad, was an exuberant, playful man who felt no compulsion to pretend that he wasn’t excited. His voice came over the loops full of joy. “This baby’s really goin’!” he reported. “That’s a lovely liftoff!” Only 36 seconds into the mission, Conrad’s gleeful commentary was interrupted by loud, continuous static that drowned out all communication. Twenty-six seconds later, the static finally faded and Conrad came on the air again, his voice a little breathless:

“Okay, we just lost the platform, gang. I don’t know what happened here. We had everything in the world drop out.”

In the MOCR, all Gerry Griffin knew was that the air-to-ground loop was filled with static and that neither he nor any of his controllers were getting any data from the spacecraft on their consoles. This did not necessarily constitute an emergency. Because of the vagaries of the ground stations and the many kinds of electromagnetic interference with which the communications system had to contend, it was not unusual to lose data or even voice contact with the spacecraft for a few seconds. Still, Griffin didn’t like losing communication during the launch phase, always a worrisome time anyway. Then came Conrad’s voice, reporting that the guidance platform was no longer functioning, which meant that the spacecraft now had no way of knowing where it was or what its attitude might be.

CapCom Gerry Carr acknowledged with a calm “Roger,” which, in the absence of any data from the spacecraft, was the only thing he could do. Data were still coming in from the launch vehicle—the systems in the Saturn were completely independent from those in the C.S.M.—and the Saturn V was still pumping away, gaining altitude, maintaining the correct trajectory. But Carr didn’t need to tell that to the astronauts, who were still being pushed back in their seats by the 3-g force of the S-IC stage.

Then came Conrad’s next message: “I got three fuel cell lights, an A.C. bus light, a fuel cell disconnect, A.C. bus overload, 1 and 2, main bus A and B out.” Conrad’s voice was calm but strained. He was reporting that, for all practical purposes, the spacecraft was inoperative: all electrical power was down except for the emergency batteries that ordinarily were used only for entry.

Conrad had barely finished his sentence before Griffin was on the loop to his EECOM, John Aaron. “When things start going to worms,” Aaron would point out later, the EECOM was the most likely person to know what was going on. Only something in the electrical system that EECOM monitored could be causing the multitude of difficulties that Twelve was encountering. “How’s it looking, EECOM?” Griffin asked. He fully expected Aaron to come back with a recommendation to abort.

John Aaron had intended to be a math and science teacher and raise Herefords. But upon graduation from Oklahoma’s Southwestern State College in 1964 with a degree in engineering, he had applied to NASA on a whim, and a few weeks later someone in Houston had telegraphed an offer of a huge salary—or so it had seemed to an Oklahoma farm boy. Aaron hadn’t known for sure what they were doing down in Houston, but he decided he’d go down and do whatever it was for a couple of years and then return to his Herefords. Since then, he had come to delight in the work, and he had already acquired a reputation within F.O.D. as one of the sharpest of the EECOMs. What he was about to do would make him a NASA legend.

Like other controllers, Aaron had set up his panel of buttons to light for various malfunctions and, ordinarily, he would have gone first to the lights to try to identify what had happened. But this time it was hopeless: “The whole place just lit up,” Aaron recalled. “I mean, all the lights came on. So instead of being aids to tell you what went wrong, the lights were absolutely no help at all.” He turned quickly to his screens.

The screens hadn’t gone blank, nor had the numbers turned to zeros. Rather, it was as if the screen had suddenly gone from English to an unknown language. The hundred-odd parameters on the two screens still showed values, but values that didn’t make any sense. Aaron, like everyone else in the MOCR, had no idea what had happened. Unlike everyone else in the MOCR, however, Aaron saw a pattern in the numbers, and the pattern was somehow familiar. Now all he had to do was remember why.

About a year earlier, Aaron had been sitting in the MOCR at midnight as part of a small team led by Glynn Lunney. They were “watching” a test at K.S.C.—just one more way of familiarizing themselves with their systems. The test was proceeding normally when the parameters on Aaron’s screens suddenly changed to a strange pattern—not zeros, but an incomprehensible set of values. Then the numbers returned to normal.

The morning after the test, Aaron retrieved a hard copy of the anomalous screens from the computer and took it back to his office—there was no particular reason for doing so, just Aaron’s uncommon curiosity. Aaron couldn’t make any sense of the numbers he had seen. As persistent as he was curious, Aaron got Lunney to call the Cape and find out what had happened. The Cape wasn’t pleased to have Houston call and demand to know how they had screwed up, but they disclosed nonetheless that a test conductor had accidentally dropped the power system on the C.S.M. to unusually low voltages.

Aaron went looking for one of the instrumentation specialists at M.S.C., trying to find out why the screen had reacted in such a peculiar way under low voltage. They spent hours on it. Finally, the instrumentation guy zeroed in on the signal-condition equipment, S.C.E., a box of electronics that performed an obscure role in translating the information from the sensors into the signals that went to the displays in the spacecraft and on the ground. It had a primary and an auxiliary position. In the primary position, where it was ordinarily set, it had a sensor that would turn the S.C.E. off under low voltage. In the auxiliary position, the S.C.E. would attempt to run even under low-voltage conditions. “You know,” the instrumentation guy told Aaron, “that signal-conditioning equipment had tripped off because you were in primary. Now, if you’d gone to auxiliary, you would have wiped this circuit out and you would have got your readings back.” Aaron thought that was interesting.

It is part of flight-controller etiquette to credit the back room reflexively. Whenever flight controllers are reminiscing about a memorable call, the formula is always, “Ol’ Bill had been working with the boys in the back room, and they came up with…” Steve Bales, who had done that with Jack Garman on Apollo 11, put it best when he compared the men in the back and front rooms to two mountain climbers roped together. Virtually without exception, the assumption that the back room was involved in a major call is correct. In the case of John Aaron on Apollo 12, it is not. There was no time. When Griffin asked Aaron, “How’s it looking?” Aaron was just starting to call his back room.

“Is that the S.C.E.?” he asked, already sure of the answer.

“Boy, I don’t know, John,” a worried voice came back, “It sure looks—”

Griffin, getting no answer to his first call to EECOM (he could not hear Aaron’s exchange with the back room over his loop), tried again, needing an answer quickly: “EECOM, what do you see?”

Aaron cut off his back room and punched up the Flight loop. “Flight, EECOM. Try S.C.E. to Aux.”

Griffin was surprised. In the first place, he was ready to call an abort, and was already preparing himself for that irrevocable step. In the second place, he had no idea what “S.C.E.” referred to. Never in any of the simulations or the Mission Techniques had that switch been mentioned. Griffin wasn’t sure he’d heard Aaron right, and in fact he hadn’t.

“Say again. S.C.E. to Off?”

“Aux,” corrected Aaron. The MOCR’s was truly the world’s most economical language.

Griffin played it back to Aaron, needing to be sure: “S.C.E. to Aux.”

As he confirmed, Aaron loosened up, using two whole words: “Auxiliary, Flight.”

Griffin still had no idea what Aaron was talking about, but once again trust made the system work.

“S.C.E. to Aux, CapCom,” Griffin said.

CapCom sat immediately in front and to the left of the flight director. Carr turned his head and looked back up at Griffin with a “What the hell is that?” expression on his face, but his was not to question why. In this situation, CapCom had two responsibilities: to communicate clearly and to radiate confidence. Carr did both, his voice sounding as if he were relaying a standard procedure that would make everything okay: “Apollo 12, Houston. Try S.C.E. to Auxiliary. Over.”

“What panel, EECOM?” Griffin asked. He was asking Aaron on which instrument panel in the spacecraft this hitherto unknown switch was located—if Carr, an astronaut, didn’t seem to know what S.C.E. referred to, it was entirely possible that Conrad and his crew didn’t either.

Pete Conrad, riding on top of a Saturn V in a spacecraft whose alarm panel was lit up like a pinball machine, seemed as mystified by the instruction as Carr and Griffin had been.

“N.C.E. to Auxiliary,” he said dutifully.

“S.C.E., S.C.E., to Auxiliary,” CapCom repeated. This time the crew heard right. Al Bean, the lunar module pilot, knew where the S.C.E. switch was, and clicked it to the position labeled Aux.

Griffin was still worried that the crew didn’t know how to put S.C.E. to Aux and asked again, “What panel, EECOM?” But by this time everything had changed.

“We got it back, Flight,” Aaron said laconically, meaning that the data—interpretable data—had come back up on his screen. “Looks good.” Now that he had data, Aaron could also deduce that the fuel cells that powered the C.S.M. had, for reasons unknown, been disconnected.

A minute and fifty seconds had passed since launch; thirty seconds since Conrad had first reported his status. Bill Tindall was sitting in the viewing room. The V.I.P.s around him—headquarters people, politicians, and celebrities—were laughing and talking, relaxing now that the tension of liftoff was over. Nothing they had seen in the room beyond the glass, nothing they had heard in the voices of the controllers speaking their incomprehensible language, had hinted to them that anything was wrong. One of the senior officials from F.O.D., who like Bill Tindall knew something was badly wrong, tried to quiet the others so he could hear.

“My first thought was, I can’t believe this is happening to me,” Gerry Griffin recalled. “It wasn’t panic at all, more sort of a feeling of ‘My gosh, what’s going on here?’” Every other flight director who had launched a Saturn V had had an easy time of it, comparatively speaking. Charlesworth had lost two engines on Apollo 6, but that had been on the second stage of an unmanned vehicle.

Griffin glanced at one of his console’s screens. The five F-l s on the first stage, close to the end of their two-and-a-half-minute life, were still burning unperturbed. He decided that even if they still had to abort, there was no sense in hurrying; at least this way they were gaining altitude, and with altitude Griffin also gained time and options if he had to bring the crew down. He went around the horn, polling his controllers to see whether they were go for staging. As soon as he had completed that, EECOM was on the loop again.

“Try to put the fuel cells back on the line and if not, tie bat [battery] Charlie to Main A and B,” said Aaron. He was referring to Main Bus A and Main Bus B. A bus may be thought of as a set of wall plugs. The fuel cells generate electricity and feed it into the buses; the various pieces of equipment in the spacecraft draw electricity out of the buses.

Carr passed the word to the crew. It was only seconds later when EECOM reported again to Flight that Fuel Cell 1 and Fuel Cell 2 were on line. Fuel Cell 3 would come up again within seconds. The entry batteries could be taken off line. The spacecraft was alive again.

Half a minute later, after the S-IC had staged and the S-II had taken over, Pete Conrad came back on the air.

“Okay, now we’ve straightened out our problems here,” he reported cheerily. “I don’t know what happened; I’m not sure we didn’t get hit by lightning.” The crew had seen a bright white light at the time their problems began.

A few seconds later, the irrepressible Conrad was back. “I think we need to do a little more all-weather testing,” he said confidentially.

“Amen,” replied CapCom Carr. “Amen.”

The onboard tapes reveal that Conrad, Gordon, and Bean laughed the rest of the way into orbit, making jokes about the way every alarm in the spacecraft had gone off at once.

Down below, Griffin had heard Conrad’s speculation about the lightning. Dang it, I bet that’s what happened, Griffin thought to himself.

His Texas A&M background was about to come back to haunt him. Texas Aggie jokes were to Texas what Polish jokes were to the rest of the country. Griffin had nothing at all to do with the launch decision, but, even so, and even before Apollo 12 had left earth orbit, people in Flight Operations were going around saying, “Did you hear the one about the Aggie who launched a Saturn V in a thunderstorm?”

“The one thing we missed was the Ben Franklin situation,” Petrone mused. “Somehow that had never entered into our discussion.” What they had done, they realized later, was to launch a 363-foot lightning rod, with the equivalent of a copper wire in the form of a trail of ionized gases running all the way down to the ground. Even though there was no lightning in the vicinity before launch, Apollo 12 could create its own. And that is exactly what it did, discharging the cloud into which it had entered. A few of the soaked observers at the viewing area could see it even from four miles away, a long flash of lightning down the exhaust plume to the steel of the umbilical tower.