Failure Is Not an Option Read online

  By the time Kraft and the rest arrived at the Cape, I was no longer feeling like a rookie. I had spent every available moment in Mercury Control, prowling through the room and listening to the check-out, observing how the technicians handled communications with “Goddard voice,” the tracking stations, and the blockhouse.

  Project Mercury was literally having trouble getting off the ground. In August of 1960, after the first Mercury-Atlas exploded in flight, the major journal in the aerospace business, Missiles and Rockets, stated: “NASA’s Mercury manned satellite program appears to be plummeting the United States toward a new humiliating disaster in the East-West space race. The program is more than one year behind the original schedule and is expected to slip to two. It no longer offers any realistic hope of beating Russia in launching the first man into orbit, much less to serve as an early stepping-stone for reaching the Moon.”

  The testing of the Mercury capsule escape system was carried out at the Wallops Island Station just below the Maryland-Virginia border. This was a Langley test facility for all sorts of “sounding,” or high-altitude research rockets. The tests of the escape system were about 50 percent successful. While we were getting ready at the Cape, one of the Mercury tests at Wallops failed spectacularly on November 8. Sixteen seconds after launch the escape and jettison rockets fired prematurely, thus leaving the capsule attached to the booster rocket, which reached a ten-mile apex and then came screaming back to Earth, destroying the capsule at impact.

  The Mercury program used two booster rockets—the Redstone and the Atlas. Both were derivatives of military systems but with vastly different capabilities. The Redstone was an Army battlefield rocket. It would be used to start the capsule systems qualification test flight and, if that was successful, for two ballistic manned missions. The ballistic missions were to be about twenty minutes in duration, reaching a maximum altitude of about 130 miles and providing a short weightless period before reentry. The Atlas was an Air Force intercontinental missile and was to be used for both ballistic and orbital Mercury missions. The first three missions were ballistic, to continue the booster and capsule qualification, test the tracking network, and provide experience for the MCC team. The orbital testing would continue the qualification testing using the mechanical man and a chimpanzee before the manned orbital flights.

  When Mercury-Atlas 1 exploded in flight, we fell about one year behind in the schedule, so a lot was riding on the first Mercury-Redstone flight, MR-1. Kraft’s team arrived on November 13 for the MR-1 launch, now only eight days away. Once again my guardian angel, Johnson, arrived to save my bacon. He took a place to the right of the console and punched up the buttons of the intercom during our simulation dress rehearsal.

  Immediately, a half dozen different conversations flooded through my headset. It reminded me of the cool, almost casual but terse and clear voice chatter that came up on the tactical frequency when things heated up during the time I was in Korea directing air strikes on ground targets. As I listened, I picked up the voices of the test conductors. Johnson broke out some thick documents and advised Kraft of the page and sequence of the countdown. It was fortunate that this was just a test. It gave Johnson a chance to brief me on the countdown process, get to know the people talking on the loops and Mercury Control’s role in the test.

  At intervals, Johnson encouraged me as the MCC procedures controller to make suggestions to Kraft or one of the other controllers. Throughout the test, he glanced around the room and made mental notes about what people at the various console positions should be doing or doing in a different way. Periodically, I would print out a message and call the ground communications controller. Eshelman would rush into the room to pick up the message, put it on the Teletype line, and then rush back with a confirming copy of the transmitted text. After several hours, I picked up the routine of the count and felt comfortable, as long as all was going well.

  This first mission in which I would play a role was a ballistic test of a Redstone booster rocket and a Mercury capsule. The Redstone’s engine was scheduled to burn for two and one half minutes. After the booster engine cut off, the escape tower separated from the capsule by firing the tower ring attachment bolts and igniting the tower escape rocket. Then after the booster thrust had decayed, explosive bolts would fire, followed by the firing of three small posigrade solid rockets, to separate the capsule from the booster. (“Posigrade” is the term used for adding velocity in the direction of flight, in this instance the small rockets used to separate the Mercury capsule from the booster. Retrograde rockets fire opposite to the direction of flight.) The Redstone boosted the spacecraft to an altitude of 130 miles before it started to arc downward.

  At 20,000 feet, the capsule’s drogue parachutes would deploy, stabilize its motion, and slow it down sufficiently to allow the main parachutes to deploy safely. Then the landing sequence would begin. The entire mission was planned to last only sixteen minutes. After the countdown simulation test we began training for the brief actual flight of the Redstone. For three days we rehearsed, calling out events and issuing backup commands to the automatic sequences.

  During the simulation run-through our instructors sat watching us from their vantage point at the top row of the consoles and played magnetic tapes into the telemetry and radar systems, which in turn drove the controller’s meters and plot board displays. If all else failed, we would be handed a written question, like a pop quiz in school. You had to stand up in front of the entire Mission Control Center team and say, “Flight! A new problem has shown up and this is what I am going to do about it.” You took it seriously. God help you if you couldn’t come up with an answer—instantly.

  The launch complex from which we would fire the Redstone consisted of the launch pad, service tower, and a blockhouse for launch site command and control. Servicing the pad was a network of power and communications cables, and pipes carrying fuel and other fluids. The blockhouses were igloolike structures that sat about 230 meters from the pad and looked somewhat like squat World War II pillboxes. Atlas blockhouses were a bit different—twelve-sided concrete bunkers with walls three meters thick and domed tops, embedded in thirteen meters of sand. Earlier blockhouses used a viewing slit with a thick quartz/glass window. Later on periscopes were added; they afforded a view of such things as the fuel tanks and cable trenches. The blockhouses had to be close enough for direct viewing and far enough from the booster to survive an explosion. (Five percent of the early boosters exploded shortly after liftoff.)

  The blockhouse team was a mixture of German rocket scientists, former Army technicians, and booster contractors. The Germans were most often found talking in their native language, huddled over their displays and praying for things to go right. In addition to von Braun’s colleagues, the blockhouse capsule engineers were drawn from a broad talent pool, mostly from aircraft (soon to be called aerospace) contractors. Kraft’s team was made up of engineers who came from all sorts of backgrounds, put together like a pickup softball team. The capsule engineers came from the NASA Space Task Group, network controllers from the Air Force, facility technicians from Bendix, and the Mercury Control Center CapComs from the initial group of seven astronauts. Three-man operations teams were deployed to the thirteen Project Mercury manned tracking stations to provide global tracking, data, and voice communications data coverage. The leader of the three-man team was the CapCom, and he was responsible for site mission readiness, real-time mission support, and status reporting to the Mercury Control flight director. During the manned missions he provided the communications with the astronaut in the capsule, hence the term “CapCom.”

  The teams at the thirteen manned tracking stations were provided by Kraft’s operations organization. With high-risk time-critical decisions, the astronaut corps believed that only astronauts should talk to the astronaut in the capsule. In the Mercury Control Center and at the blockhouse, CapComs were selected from the Mercury astronauts and they were often sent to tracking stations designated as mission
critical.

  During this period, the American space program drew on some military resources as well as those of NASA. By contrast, the Russian program was part of their military. Soviet hardware, software, and personnel were military, albeit with some modification—spacecraft instead of warheads sitting on top of boosters that, like our Atlas, originated in military programs developed for strategic warfare. Over time the Russian effort would become somewhat more civilian in nature, but from inception, NASA’s operations would be separated by a kind of firewall from military operations and personnel.

  In the first decades of the race into space the Russians enjoyed the advantages of running a program powered by the virtually unrestricted resources and funding of a military that, in a command economy, came first in economic priority. We were on a somewhat more modest footing in the early days. That would change dramatically thanks to President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Johnson pushing for the funding and resources that would enable an explicitly civilian space program to succeed.

  In Mercury Control the only controllers reporting administratively to Chris Kraft were the trajectory operators, Tecwyn (Tec) Roberts, and Carl Huss, whom I had yet to meet; Howard Kyle, who doubled for Kraft at the flight director console; Paul Johnson; and myself. The capsule engineers assigned to work with the MCC team understandably focused on hardware rather than flight operations and had their hands full checking out the spacecraft in Hangar S, and they looked at training in the Mercury Control Center as a waste of their time. The core of the engineering staff was based at Space Task Group headquarters at Langley Research Center. When McDonnell Aircraft sent a capsule to the Cape the engineers would come down and check it out in Hangar S.

  Despite a certain amount of confusion about who should be doing what, since we were inventing it all as we went along, we were moving quickly to the crunch point. To my dismay, two days before launch at the readiness review, Johnson took me aside and said he would not be there. He had to go to the Canary Islands to work out a tracking site problem. He wished me good luck.

  November 21, 1960, Mercury-Redstone 1

  Only one month and four days after I was hired, I was at the procedures console. Thanks to Johnson’s unflagging coaching and the training we had done, I had no problems and felt comfortable with the mechanics. But I had a long way to go before I would have that sense of “being ahead of the airplane” or “ahead of the power curve” as pilots put it—having the experience to anticipate what could happen rather than just reacting to what was happening at the moment.

  As the countdown proceeded, I noticed a change in the intensity of the atmosphere in the control room. I had felt that before when I signed off my aircraft—accepted it as ready for flight—at Holloman. Although the job was different, the emotional content was the same. Controllers were going through the same gut churning as we had had prior to a B-52 test flight. During a hold in the countdown to fix a leak in the Redstone’s hydrogen peroxide system that fueled the control thrusters, Kraft turned to me and said, “How about getting me a couple of cartons of milk from the roach coach?” (Mercury Control, like all the other Cape facilities, was out in a vast palmetto swamp, about half a mile off the main road. A lunch wagon, known as the roach coach, pulled by a pickup truck, made its rounds to the test stands, camera trackers, and other stations. The loudspeakers would announce its arrival when it stopped at Mercury Control three times each day. The menu was pretty limited—but it did offer milk.) For the first time I realized that behind Kraft’s calm exterior he had the same sensations I felt—of squirrels running around in my stomach—as we approached launch.

  The launch countdown progressed without any major incident. As liftoff approached, I leaned back and peered at the video image on Kraft’s console coming from a camera focused on the Redstone standing on the launch pad. Precisely at zero on the clock, there was a great cloud of smoke. Kraft looked startled, and then he leaned forward intently. The TV cameraman momentarily lost track as he panned the camera upward, and, for a few seconds, there was nothing on the screen but a smoky sky. From my position, it looked much like the rockets I had launched from aircraft. I was surprised at how quickly the Redstone had accelerated and moved out of sight.

  Then after a few seconds the camera panned down. Although smoke still obscured the launch pad, the vague outline of the Redstone was still there. Kraft’s face was incredulous. He stammered for a few seconds, then called out, “Booster, what the hell happened?”

  Our booster engineer in the control room came from the Marshall Redstone team. After liftoff he was responsible for reporting booster status—engine and guidance—to Kraft’s team. If something was wrong he was supposed to give us a heads-up so the trajectory people in Mercury Control could better assess what they were seeing on their radar plot boards. Now he reverted to his native German as he tried to figure out what happened and, more importantly, what the blockhouse team should do about it. All hell broke loose. The Redstone had lifted a few inches off the launch pad and then the engine shut down. By some miracle, the rocket had landed back on the launcher cradle.

  When the escape tower cut loose, unguided and spewing flame, it corkscrewed to an altitude of about 4,000 feet. As it plummeted back to Earth, loudspeakers around the facility blared out warnings to the astronauts, engineers, and VIPs in the viewing area to take cover. The escape tower ultimately landed some 1,200 feet from the launch pad.

  The launch team in the blockhouse was as stunned as Mercury Control. Booster continued talking in German to his counterparts in the blockhouse, oblivious to Kraft’s repeated calls. Television cameras showed the events on the pad as the main and reserve landing parachutes popped out of their stowage compartment at the nose of the capsule, ejected upward and partially opened up. Initially, they hung limply, then they slowly inflated and caught the sea breeze. At the same time strips of tinfoil were ejected from the capsule and spilled over the sides of the booster and capsule. (The strips, or chaff, were used to help radar track the capsule as it was slowed down by the parachute and headed for splashdown, or water landing, in the Atlantic Ocean.) Every controller held his breath, afraid the parachute would topple the rocket and cause an explosion.

  The intercom that had been quiet was now busily filled with directions, observations, and opinions. Everything that happened, although it had taken only seconds, passed before me in slow motion. Then it finally clicked. We had launched the escape tower.

  The Redstone rocket, surrounded by smoke, was armed and fueled but still sitting on the launch pad. Kraft told everyone to calm down, but Booster was still on the hot line, interrogating the blockhouse in German. We all could see the anger glowing in Kraft’s eyes as he walked over and yanked Booster’s headset cord loose from the console, saying, “Speak to me, dammit!”

  Chaos continued for several minutes until Booster, in halting English, told us that the Redstone engines had fired and the rocket had lifted off the pad enough to drop the umbilical, the bundle of cables that connected launch control with the booster and that normally fell away right after liftoff. Then the engine inexplicably shut down. The Mercury capsule, sensing the booster’s engine shutdown, acted as if it were in orbit and sent the command to jettison the escape tower. The capsule, not sensing any further acceleration, acted as if it were in the recovery phase and so deployed the parachutes. We now had a live rocket on the pad, a fully pressurized Redstone; and, since the umbilicals had disconnected, we had no control of it. The booster’s destruct system was armed and there was no way to secure the system. No one had any idea what to do next.

  Kraft walked over to me, eyes blazing. Pointing at Booster he snapped, “The damn Germans still haven’t learned who they work for. Everyone in this control room must work for me.” We sat stunned, helpless in Mercury Control. We had no technical data on the spacecraft or the launch system beyond a simple manual, the equivalent of an owner’s manual for a new car. All of us were still thinking in aircraft, not rocket, terms—and we were definitel
y behind the power curve. We had no data to work with because we weren’t smart enough to know what we really needed. We were dealing with a new control room, a new network, new procedures, and entirely new jobs, doing something that we had never done before, something almost alien to our nature.

  A tentative proposal came from the blockhouse to reconnect the umbilical. The chances of people getting killed doing this were discussed and we decided that it could not be done safely. The next, and equally desperate, suggestion was to get a cherry picker (a kind of crane or boom with a man-holding bucket on the end of it, like those used by telephone and utility line repair crews) and cut the nylon parachute risers. This would at least eliminate the threat of wind filling the parachute and toppling the Redstone, but this idea was also discarded because of the risk to personnel. All the while we were apprehensively watching a partially inflated parachute and praying that the sea breeze did not pick up, fill the parachute, and topple the whole damn rocket over.

  After impatiently listening to a pretty far-out proposal to depressurize the rocket by using a rifle to shoot holes in the fuel and oxidizer tanks, Kraft sputtered and growled, “Dammit, that’s no way to do it! They sound like a bunch that just started spring training!” Even to a rookie like me, shooting a hole in the tanks did not seem to be a sound plan.

  Kraft listened intently as each of the crazy schemes came across the loops, everybody desperately searching for a way out. Then one of the test conductors came up with a plan that made sense. “The winds are forecast to remain calm, so if we wait until tomorrow morning, the batteries will deplete, the relays and valves will go to the normally open condition. As the oxidizer warms up, the tank vents will open, removing the flight pressure. With the booster depressurized and batteries depleted, it will then be safe to approach the rocket.”