Failure Is Not an Option Read online

  We could only hope now that our training would prove sufficient. It was time to launch.

  April 25, 1961, Mercury-Atlas 3

  The Atlas rocket, shedding ice formed by condensation on the sides of the liquid oxygen tanks, lurched skyward on three shafts of liquid fire, steam billowing from the flame bucket that channeled the fiery exhaust away from the blockhouse, support tower, cables, and pad. Inside the control room, I could not hear the engines roar, but the sense of my first Atlas launch seeped from my fingertips as I scribbled the liftoff time in the Teletype message and handed it to a waiting runner.

  Without pausing, I picked up the running Teletype dialogue over the order wire, advising Bermuda of the launch time and status. Seconds after the launch, a note of anxiety crept into the Welsh accent of Tec Roberts, the flight dynamics officer (FIDO) responsible for launch and orbital trajectory control, as he reported, “Flight, negative roll-and-pitch program.”

  A collective shudder went through everyone in the control room as the controllers absorbed the chilling significance of Roberts’s terse report. The roll-and-pitch program normally changed the initial vertical trajectory of the launch into a more horizontal one that would take the Atlas out over the Atlantic. This Atlas was still inexplicably flying straight up, threatening the Cape and the surrounding communities. The worst-case scenario would be for it to pitch back toward land or explode. The higher it flew before it exploded, the wider the “footprint” of debris scattered all over the Cape and surrounding area would be.

  The RSO (range safety officer) monitoring the launch confirmed the lack of a roll-and-pitch program, then continued to give the Atlas an opportunity to recover and start its track across the Atlantic. The RSO lifted the cover on the command button and watched as the Atlas raced to a fatal convergence with the limits on his plot board.

  At forty-three seconds after liftoff, Roberts reported, “The range safety officer has transmitted the destruct command.” Seconds later, Kraft’s TV glowed a vivid black and white with the explosion. (We did not have color monitors.) We waited, not speaking, counting the seconds, listening for the telltale, muffled krump that would signal the mission was over. Carl Huss, the retro controller (RETRO), responsible for reentry trajectory planning and operations, reported, “Radar tracking multiple targets.” Roberts’s response echoed all our feelings: “Chris, I’m sorry.”

  We sat by the consoles, not talking for several seconds. Then, one by one, the controllers closed their countdown books and started to pack their documents.

  My message to the remote site teams was succinct: “MA-3 WAS TERMINATED BY RANGE SAFETY AT 43 SECONDS INTO FLIGHT. STAND BY FOR DEBRIEFING.”

  The destruction of the Mercury-Atlas 3 left us dazed and disheartened. We had gone to launch feeling that with three successful unmanned suborbital missions the jinx seemed broken, the odds were turning in our favor. Then the Atlas had to be blown up.

  There was no cheer as the Mercury team retired to the bar at the Holiday Inn in Cocoa Beach and waited for Walt Williams, the operations director, and the launch team to finish the press conference. We knew they would take a beating. We had no time to lick our wounds or feel sorry for ourselves and no one had much to say. Numb with shock, frustration, and anger, we were uncertain about the impact of this spectacular failure on the entire program. We did know that it would mean more time at the Cape, more time away from our families. But did we really know what the hell we were doing? The Atlas was the key to orbital flight and we had racked up two Atlas failures in three Atlas missions.

  When we debriefed and vented our frustration over drinks at the bar, it was all in the family. During the missions, Kraft set the tone when we lost our composure. He knew that he could not show any uncertainty to his team. In Mercury Control there was no room for displays of emotion. Kraft allowed himself an occasional broad smile and lit up a cigar when his gang did well. When we failed, maybe he would mutter a curse word or two. His message from the earliest Mercury days: we were the visible point men for the program and we had to maintain a calm, professional, and confident image. But, as long as no outsiders, especially press, were around, we could let it hang out when we left the Cape and hit the bar.

  We didn’t even have the luxury of a day off. We debriefed, wrote our reports, and, on April 26, 1961, returned to Mercury Control. With only seven days to prepare for our first manned flight, our self-confidence was badly shaken and we all shared the same unspoken fear: in only a few days, would we be crowning our first space hero—or picking up pieces of him all along the Eastern seaboard? We attacked the final days of the training schedule with a renewed urgency. Everyone connected with the program was now consumed with one goal: the successful flight of America’s first man in space. We simply could not accept, or even contemplate, another failure.

  It was the top layer of NASA management which was directly in the line of fire coming from Congress and the executive branch. Our new administrator, James Webb, who was everybody’s boss, didn’t exactly deflect criticism when he said, “This present program is not designed to match what the Russians may do.” Reporting to him for manned space flight were Wernher von Braun at Marshall Space Flight Center, Harry Goett at Goddard Space Flight Center, and Robert Gilruth at the Langley Research Center. (Mercury preflight operations at the Cape were run by a division headed by G. Merritt Preston and reported to Gilruth.)

  Gilruth, director of Project Mercury and boss of the Space Task Group, was the pioneer who focused the Mercury effort. He was regarded with great affection by those who worked under him. Starting at Langley in 1937, he had a sterling record of achievement in flight-testing. By the late 1950s his people were the most knowledgeable on high-speed flight research and he was the obvious choice to form and lead the Space Task Group.

  Gilruth’s Washington counterpart was George Low, an Austrian whose family fled to America when Germany invaded and occupied his native land. After serving in the Army in World War II, he worked for Convair and then was chief of special projects at the National Advisory Committe for Aeronautics—NACA—the predecessor of NASA. In the summer of 1958 Low was tasked to organize a new space agency and became the chief of manned space flight during the agency’s early years. He was absolutely determined to put a man on the Moon, believing only such a bold goal would sustain the manned space effort. Personally, I would settle for rockets that worked.

  In the first two years, we spent almost half our time on temporary duty at the Cape. When we left our homes and families behind, we never knew whether to pack for a few hours or a month. We lived out of our suitcases, in nondescript motels, coping with loneliness, too little perdiem, and too many failed countdowns. Invariably we would go home to find our wives feeling neglected and frustrated. You have no doubt heard the saying “Behind every great man is a woman”—and behind her is the plumber, the electrician, the Maytag repairman, and one or more sick kids. And the car needs to go into the shop.

  To make matters worse, most of the wives had a postcard image of sun-washed beaches and a kind of intergalactic glamour. We felt this pressure and knew we could not resolve it. The beach was only a rumor to most of us, and glamour was a tub of beer on ice. The Cape Canaveral area was hardly the glossy Florida of Miami or Fort Lauderdale, but it was a community full of solid, decent working people, who encouraged us by their support for our fledgling space program.

  We didn’t have nine-to-five jobs. Pad tests, simulations, and practice countdowns are driven by launch pad activity. Launch preparation is more an art than a science, with the high priests (test conductors) of the blockhouse, in charge of the countdown, dictating the overall schedule. Our job at the Mission Control Center was to be ready whenever the launch team needed us. The MCC support for the capsule and booster launch pad tests usually started with the test conductors’ call to console stations about 2 A.M., so the controllers usually hit the sack about sundown and arrived at Mercury Control about 1 A.M. to prepare for the test.

  The flight r
ules that were a mystery in the beginning now anchored me at the center of the mission policy and decision process. They were an upscale equivalent of the Go NoGo criteria we used in aircraft flight tests. I had inherited the rule-recording job when Kraft sent me to the Cape for the first Mercury-Redstone test. This task opened the door for me to every technical aspect of Mercury operations. In the early months, I was the scribe sitting in on Kraft’s meetings with crews, controllers, and management. I wrote out the record of the decisions of the meetings, putting them in the flight rule format, defining each decision as a series of conditions followed by the action procedure.

  The Mercury rules summary was thirty pages long. Many of the rules were procedural in nature and placed a heavy weight on the judgment of the controllers. Go or NoGo conditions were underlined in vivid green or red. The value of compiling and defining rules was not in the document itself as much as it was in hashing out Go NoGo stipulations in team meetings. The rules were set up on each page in this fashion:

  Frequently, Kraft would leave a team meeting disagreeing with the results. The controllers and doctors were too conservative for his way of thinking. After reflecting for a while, Kraft would say, “I didn’t like their input. When you write the rules, let’s do it this way.” Many of the critical flight policies were determined over dinner at Ramon’s restaurant, late at night in one of the bull sessions, or during a lull after a tough training run.

  No matter what the rules said, the ultimate authority was the operations director, Walt Williams. Born in New Orleans and an LSU graduate, Williams worked for Martin Aircraft and then at Langley, where he concentrated on control and stability systems during World War II. In 1956 he was head of engineering for the X-1 project (our first aircraft to break the sound barrier). He went on to be the director of virtually every supersonic test program for jet-and rocket-propelled aircraft and by 1958 was head of the X-15 test committee. He had been assigned as Gilruth’s deputy for Project Mercury, and was the feared but highly respected boss of every aspect of Mercury operations.

  The days remaining before the manned launch passed rapidly. Walt Williams gave the operation’s Go at the mission review on launch minus one day, May 1, 1961, and the capsule servicing began as we conducted our final simulations. We did our data checks and returned to the motel. Normally, I sleep like a dead man, but I tossed and turned most of the night.

  Since I had spent most of my time with the team at the Cape in unmanned rocket testing, most of what I knew about the astronauts came from the newspapers. When I did see them, they seemed to live in a world apart from the rest of us, communicating only with the top managers and spending most of their time in hands-on training, learning all they could about their spacecraft and rockets. I didn’t blame them. The early space hardware had much in common with the imaginary technology in a Jules Verne science fiction novel. The capsule used steam-powered thrusters for control (the steam being generated by the reaction between hydrogen peroxide and a catalyst in a nickel chamber attached to the thrusters), a periscope for visual tracking, and an electric Earth globe for determining position. Half of the systems were primitive by today’s standards for aircraft avionics and control systems, while the other half were untested first-of-its-kind technology.

  Their test pilot backgrounds made the Mercury Seven highly independent—and fiercely competitive. Each one of them was determined to be the first man in space; each believed his performance during the months of training and testing would win him the coveted prize. As launch time neared, Gilruth took the extraordinary step of asking each astronaut to rank all the others in the order of who was best qualified for the mission. Some thought he did this just to confirm his personal selection. Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, and John Glenn were chosen from the seven; one of that trio would be the first among equals. Shortly thereafter Life magazine got into the act, dubbing the first three the Gold Team, the remainder the Red Team.

  The brass felt a need to reassure the public there was no split in the ranks. Wally Schirra, Deke Slayton, Gordon Cooper, and Scott Carpenter stepped forward at a press conference a few days later to confirm that there was plenty to do and they all were still on one team, not divided into “red” or “gold” factions. Their reassuring words and smiles could not cover up the fact that someone else had indeed been chosen to be first. NASA did its best to soothe the egos of those who did not make the first cut. The lyrics to the music went like this: Each astronaut had an important role to play. There were plenty of flights for all. And, sure as hell, there was enough work to go around.

  We in MCC were not surprised by the choice of Glenn, Grissom, and Shepard to make the initial flights. The controllers had worked briefly with all three, but only our bosses and the astronauts knew who would fly this very first mission. Since we had seen more of Shepard, we were betting on Al. The media seemed to favor Glenn. In part it was his image as a God-fearing, clean-cut American patriot and good family man. But journalists may have reported this in hopes of provoking someone into saying who it would be.

  Shorty Powers, a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force, was the man in charge of public relations and the “voice of Mercury Control.” To Shorty, dealing with the press was just like a game of poker: never let on what is in your hand—and try to bluff them into showing you theirs.

  Like Williams, Shorty never seemed to sleep and his exhausting work schedule only compounded his irritability; it took very little provocation to make him lose his temper. When he did, it was like a launch, a great deal of energy and noise expended amid the fire and smoke. He was a bantam cock of a guy, about five-foot-four or-five, always dapper and a bit of a strutter. For the most part, Powers had an unenviable job, setting up a public relations barrier behind which the engineers and the astronauts could work in peace, while at the same time trying to feed reporters’ insatiable demands for information. He really needed two sets of astronauts, one to do the mission, the other to perform for the media.

  The astronauts and controllers stayed at the Holiday Inn at Cocoa Beach. It was not unusual to see Walt Williams charging into the bar late at night to get an answer to a problem from one of the controllers or engineers. He was likely to find the man he wanted there, because all of us sat around and chewed over rules and procedures endlessly and tuned in on Williams’s questioning to get the latest word.

  We knew that three days prior to the launch the selected astronaut would check out of the Holiday Inn and quietly try to move out to the crew quarters at the Cape. Reporters hung around the Holiday Inn fishing for information, striking up a conversation, occasionally trying to pass as a member of the launch team. The press, which had become somewhat negative and adversarial after the Gagarin flight and the Atlas 3 failure, was now caught up in the excitement of this new chapter. Realizing that a man’s life and the future of the program were at stake, their coverage finally began to capture the excitement and suspense surrounding the imminent mission. The control team, taking our lead from Powers, neither confirmed nor denied any of the press speculation and ignored all the rumors that buzzed around the program like a swarm of busy bees.

  “It’s a Go”

  The weather was stormy at midnight on May 2, 1961, when the control team arrived to support the initial check-out. The countdown progressed through the fueling of the Redstone while the launch team held the transfer van (used to move the suited astronaut from the hangar to the launch pad) at the hangar until the weather improved, or the launch was scrubbed

  We had adopted the call sign “Freedom 7” during our final training runs, but I never knew who had named the capsule. Just one week after the Mercury-Atlas 3 failure we were once again in Mercury Control counting down to launch for our first manned mission. The headlines read: “AS HOP NEARS ASTRONAUT X IN SECLUSION.” Soon the world would find out—and so would we. I think only Kraft, Willams, and the flight surgeon knew it was Shepard. It had been decided in Washington that the identity of the first man would remain a secret until he stepped forward to
climb atop the rocket.

  The Russians did not announce any launch in advance; in fact they didn’t release any news about their manned spacecraft effort until they were good and ready, and even then they gave only carefully selected details about a flight. They could do this quite easily in a closed society in which news was strictly controlled by the government. We did not have this luxury. From its earliest days, NASA had followed a policy of maximum, though prudent, disclosure. We had to do everything openly—and soon under intensive, live TV coverage. In their own good time, the Soviets had announced that Gagarin spent 108 minutes in orbit before returning safely to Earth in a parachute-cushioned landing.

  We wanted to catch up and we believed that, at last, we were ready to do it—at least for the first step, a suborbital mission of limited duration. Dressed in his silvery space suit, Alan Shepard stood behind the door of Hangar S. Outside, the van that would deliver him to the launch site waited, along with a large group of reporters and photographers who were eager to tell the world which astronaut would step through the door.

  Lightning and rain had been playing about the Cape all morning, and when the clouds had not cleared by 7:25 A.M. local time, the flight was canceled. No one could be responsible for the weather, but it struck us as another in an unending series of tough breaks. Who would stop the rain?