Failure Is Not an Option Read online

  Only moments later, Carl Huss broke into the communications loops, beginning the countdown to retro sequence. His words hung briefly, then were echoed by the MCC CapCom, “5 . . .4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . . Retro sequence!” Shepard confirmed he had maneuvered the capsule to attitude for rocket firing.

  The weeks of frustration and training were finally paying off in a perfect mission. Now all we needed were the parachutes.

  I listened, amazed at the professionalism that had developed in the Mercury team in the six months since I had joined. The pad team, Mercury Control, and the recovery forces were working in perfect synchronization, with an almost casual tone in their voices as if they had done this many times before. In less than fifteen minutes our first manned mission was over.

  Shepard was safely aboard the aircraft carrier Lake Champlain eleven minutes after landing. While dictating his pilot’s report on the carrier Shepard was called to the carrier’s flag bridge to answer an unexpected telephone call. President Kennedy had watched the launch and landing closely via television and was now one of the first to congratulate America’s new space hero. Kraft rapidly wrote out his mission summary report. It was less than two pages in length. It was now time to celebrate.

  3

  “GOD SPEED, JOHN GLENN”

  We consumed large quantities of beer and barbecue at Fat Boy’s in honor of Al, and reveled in the day’s headlines: “U.S. SCORES SUCCESS IN FIRST TRY TO PUT MAN IN SPACE.” “ALL AMERICANS ARE REJOICING, SAYS KENNEDY.” Alan Shepard had become America’s hero, but more so he was uniquely our hero.

  The Space Task Group had little time to savor the wine and smell the roses before we had to do it all over again. In two months the second astronaut would go up. This gave Kraft’s team an opportunity to apply the lessons we had learned during the turnaround to our next mission. The combination of our technical successes and President Kennedy’s vow to land a man on the Moon in this decade spurred us on. When I read Kennedy’s speech, delivered to a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961, “A Special Message from the President on Urgent National Needs,” I found it almost impossible to grasp that our nation had established the lunar target as the prize in the space race. I had always yearned to be involved in an undertaking that would challenge the imagination of man. Any doubt I ever had about moving into space vanished.

  To those of us who had watched our rockets keel over, spin out of control, or blow up, the idea of putting a man on the Moon seemed almost too breathtakingly ambitious. Word about the speech spread like wildfire through our offices at Langley; all work virtually came to a halt and people began to offer various opinions. Most wondered if this was for real. It seemed, at that moment, like a pipe dream. I thought, “Well, let them get on with their great plans; I’m gonna get a man into orbit first.” But it became real for us in the months that followed, particularly when Kennedy gave a speech sixteen months later at Rice University affirming his commitment to a lunar landing. I saw Kennedy when he came to visit Mercury Control at the Cape with Shepard and Glenn. His energy and charisma were electrifying; he made believers out of all of us, even the most skeptical. Our hopes had been renewed; maybe Kennedy really understood the towering odds we faced—and were willing to overcome.

  When Kennedy first announced this ambitious goal we were back at Langley, preparing for the second manned Mercury mission, which would be flown by Gus Grissom, who had been Shepard’s backup. For a change we had a breathing space of almost two months before we deployed to the Cape. Now that we had flown Shepard successfully, the pressure eased for a while. Then, on July 21, 1961, at 7:20 Eastern Standard Time, Grissom made the second suborbital flight on another Redstone, his capsule bearing the name Liberty Bell 7. His flight was virtually a carbon copy of Alan’s. This launch doubled our manned time in space; we reached one half hour.

  Grissom was a likable guy, seasoned, decisive, and taciturn. An Air Force cadet at eighteen, he had flown a hundred combat missions in Korea. When he first arrived in Korea, he found that until they had been shot at by a MiG, pilots were not allowed a seat on the bus to the flight line. Gus stood only once. On his first mission, he went looking for a MiG, found one, shot it out, and qualified for a seat on the bus.

  Everything went well during the flight but shortly after Grissom’s splashdown, the hatch inadvertently released. With the hatch open, the capsule started to take on water. In his silver space suit, Gus fought his way to the surface and swam a short distance away. In Mission Control, we sat helpless as a nearby helicopter grappled the loop at the top of the capsule to prevent it from sinking. By the time the helicopter took up the slack in the lift cable, the capsule had partially submerged. With the capsule under water and sinking fast, a tug-of-war began between the helicopter and the sinking spacecraft.

  Almost unnoticed, Grissom was struggling as the downwash from the chopper’s rotor blades whipped the sea to a froth. I was sweating bullets, as I recalled the times I stood near the runway, or sat in my aircraft watching and listening as a squadron pilot called “Mayday . . . Mayday” and attempted to nurse a damaged or flamed-out (no engine power) aircraft back to the runway. The feeling of utter helplessness gets you in the gut. I had seen a student pilot in jet training try to make the runway, finally ejecting too late when he realized he was short. I had that same sick feeling now watching Gus struggling in the water. Water was leaking through the suit inlet hose fitting, and as the seconds passed the space suit buoyancy was no longer supporting him. I kept murmuring aloud at the console, “Dammit, get Gus, forget the damn spacecraft.” As a second helicopter went to Grissom’s rescue, the drama of the capsule recovery seemed to play out forever on our television sets in the control room. The helicopter strained against the load, briefly lifting the capsule almost clear of the water, only to lose the battle as the engine began to overheat. (Through a remarkable feat in deep sea exploration technology, the capsule was located and recovered in extraordinarily good shape in July of 1999.)

  The Liberty Bell 7 mission was perfect until the very end and then it turned to worms. Rookies and veterans alike were once again reminded: there are no free rides in a flight test.

  A rumor soon circulated that Gus had panicked when a small amount of seawater entered the capsule. I thought that was baloney. Everything I had seen of Gus and the astronauts indicated that they had the “right stuff.” Grissom’s hatch was the first flown with an explosive primer. Shepard’s had had a mechanical design. Something must have screwed up in the new hatch.

  I returned to Virginia from the Cape the next day, and Marta greeted me with a sigh of relief, and a holiday of hugs and kisses. “Thank God, you’re here,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d ever get that thing off the pad. How did you make it so fast? Did you write your report on the plane?”

  As a rule, we spent most of a day writing the post-mission report and did not leave until it was finished. I made quick work of this one. I had to because I was racing the stork. The next day I drove Marta to the hospital and, after a brief countdown, we were blessed with our third daughter, Joan Frances. Marta’s timing was impeccable. But she didn’t leave much to chance. With the births of each of our children, she had labor induced to assure that I would be on hand.

  That happy event was in stark contrast to my on-the-job progress. Anger has always served me well, and I had been smoldering with anger and frustration for months at the Cape. I was largely angry with myself. I knew what to do but did not have the hands-on knowledge to do it. I felt I was not carrying my share of the load. My first step was to learn every detail of every system in the Mercury spacecraft and boosters. Then I intended to help Kraft train members of the mission teams to make sure we had the competence and knowledge that I knew we needed to carry out our mission.

  I believed Kraft had several problems looming on the horizon. His systems controllers were good engineers, but as I had learned at Holloman, engineers needed to become operators. There was a hell of a difference. An engineer can explain
how a system should work (in theory) but an operator has to know what the engineer knows and then has to know how the systems tie together to get the mission accomplished. If the systems break down the operator must make rapid decisions on fixing or working around the problem to keep the mission moving.

  We also had to change the way we were thinking. We had not crossed the bridge from an aircraft test mentality to one suited to space flight. Aircraft pilots have an option to get to a runway or else to eject. In space, we were always hours away from a landing site. If there was some kind of glitch, Mission Control had to be prepared to develop options to keep the spacecraft going until it could be returned from orbit.

  The third problem that I identified would take time to solve. Mission Control was a new idea to the astronauts. They responded directly to Kraft because of his authority, but were generally cool to the controllers. They would double-and triple-check what the controllers said and did. We had to earn their respect and trust. To do that we had to be smarter than they were in each of our technical specialties, and we had to be utterly precise and timely in every action. This was a hell of a chore when we were writing the book as we went along.

  After returning to Langley from the Cape following the Grissom mission I was assigned the responsibility for the remote site teams, with eight NASA civil servants and sixteen technical reps from the pioneer electronics company Philco. The technical challenge was to develop the remote site team skills sufficiently so that any one of the site teams could take the actions required to keep the mission going when things went wrong. The Philco personnel were from across America, virtually self-taught with an incredible mastery of communications, electronics, and data systems. They had staffed the tracking stations in Alaska, California, and at Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific for the early Air Force satellite missions. The civil service recruits were mostly fresh college graduates. The shotgun wedding between the young scholars and the Philco controllers was just what we needed to bring instant maturity and poise to the fledgling remote site teams.

  The bible on the Mercury capsule was the pocket checklist, a five-by-seven-inch set of schematics sized to fit in the pocket of the astronaut’s flight suit. I knew from my own flight test experience that this wasn’t adequate. Based on everything I had learned at Holloman, you lived or died by the data at your fingertips. This slim volume was the sum total of our knowledge, and it reflected the naÏveté of the engineers who produced it. I wanted to build a data set like the one I had had at Holloman. I got two engineers from McDonnell assigned to work directly with me at the Cape and at Langley. They would get the engineering data and test reports for me from McDonnell Aircraft’s St. Louis plant and help me boil it all down to information that was useful and instantly accessible.

  Kraft was skeptical but gave me the benefit of the doubt. Two fine engineers, Ed Nieman and Dana Boatman, joined my remote site group. I would have my people train themselves in the same way I came up to speed as a flight test engineer. Each controller would research a capsule system to get a deep understanding of it, with the contractor’s help. When you are sitting at the console, you want a set of handbooks with certified correct data, formatted so the information can be accessed and used in seconds. We needed to separate the “nice to know” from the “must know.” We had to get the data that would enable us to work problems that were workable, and discard all the data that applied to problems that could not be solved by the crew or controller.

  To manage this large mass of information, I assigned a single capsule system to each controller. He had to grind through it and digest it, put it in a readily usable format, and cross-check it with test reports and specifications. We built a comprehensive handbook out of this data. Once we had the words on paper, each controller taught the entire team about the system he had studied. This gave us a common frame of reference among the crew, the remote site controllers, and those in the control center. Once we got the data right then, in similar fashion, we wrote the troubleshooting procedures the crew would use, and from there we moved on to codify all the operational rules.

  The potential for a superb real-time team was realized as the controllers fanned out to the remote tracking sites. Each mission was a final exam for the controllers; some passed the test and some didn’t. Those who survived the early missions became leaders in the rapidly developing art of space flight operations.

  September 1961, Mercury-Atlas 4

  The next mission would use the capsule recovered from the flight that had been snuffed by the RSO on the third Mercury-Atlas mission. We had lost the booster but saved the capsule. When the destruct signal was sent, the escape tower fired and pulled the capsule away from the explosion. Then the tower separated from the capsule, the parachutes deployed, and the capsule landed safe and sound in the ocean.

  Mercury-Atlas 4 was a simple orbital test of the Mercury spacecraft and control teams prior to a three-orbit mission with a chimpanzee. But there was a greater significance. This would be the first worldwide mission deployment since the global network had been completed five months earlier. For us, it was like planning the Normandy invasion. Thirteen teams of three controllers were sent, in those days mostly by slow prop-driven aircraft, to the distant corners of the Earth to function as self-contained mini-control centers. The teams had to be self-sufficient, so they carried everything needed for mission support, often including maintenance manuals and spare parts. The teams were mostly made up of men in their twenties; only one of the CapCom’s team leaders had been overseas before.

  The controllers assigned to the converted, aging merchant ships deployed first and had the toughest and loneliest assignments, wallowing haplessly in the ocean swells and occasionally hanging on for dear life during severe storms, fighting forty-five-foot waves and losing deck gear and communications antennas in the process.

  The African sites were extremely risky. The young controllers found themselves in the middle of internal conflicts and were not warmly welcomed by many of the local citizenry. But the mission could not be done without them manning these remote and isolated sites. Throughout much of the mission, the remote tracking stations were the only sites in radio and telemetry communications with our crews. If communications were good with Mercury Control, the sites would report capsule and crew status to the MCC flight director and then receive instructions. If the communications were poor, as often was the case, they were out there on their own, improvising as they went along, dealing with often marginal technology and keeping their cool when things were falling apart.

  A prime example was John Llewellyn, a stocky, square-jawed former Marine and an early member of the Space Task Group. He was chosen to lead the control team at the Zanzibar site, on the large island off the east coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. John had fought through the First Marine Division’s bitter retreat from the Chosin Reservoir in Korea in December of 1950. After discharge he went to the College of William and Mary. A couple of years older than the rest of my controllers, John thrived in the crisis atmosphere of Zanzibar and drank many a toast with the Gordon Highlanders, the British unit stationed there during the period when, as British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan put it, “winds of change” were blowing through Africa.

  This first deployment of a fully global network was a time of trial, the first test during a mission. Hundreds of people were learning to work together as a team for the first time and had had only a few weeks to put it all together. Things were particularly tense in Zanzibar, which was in turmoil. After a particularly bad day of rioting there the day before launch, I received a cryptic Teletype from the site: “MY TEAM WILL REMAIN AT SITE UNTIL TOMORROW’S TEST. WE HAVE THEM WHERE WE WANT THEM. SIGNED, LLEWELLYN.” It took me a while to realize that John’s team was surrounded. John was not going to take a chance that he could not get to the site the next day to support the mission. (Many of those who survived the hazards of remote site conditions would become the leaders in the Apollo program.)

  After
we accomplished a successful one-orbit mission, the remote site control teams returned to Langley to prepare for John Glenn’s orbital flight, scheduled for December 19. The final tune-up with the network and control teams was a planned three-orbit mission with a chimpanzee named Enos.

  November 29, 1961, Mercury-Atlas 5

  Walt Williams was the toughest leader I have ever known. A bit of a brawler, with the build of a barroom bouncer, he manned the console behind Kraft’s, surrounded by a blue haze from his chain-smoking. Walt had to be a tough customer—over the years he would have Presidents, members of Congress, the media, and prima donna astronauts to contend with. Because he had to be on top of everything, briefing him was a scary experience. God help you if you were unprepared. Here was a man who must have never slept. In the middle of a briefing he would start snoring, then grab a handful of his favorite Necco mints, chomp a few, and go back to sleep. Then, after the briefing, he would crisply summarize every key point in your presentation, isolate the important issues, and say, “Okay, let’s do it.”