Failure Is Not an Option Read online

  On the crucial day when we were sending up Enos for the pre-Glenn shot, the launch countdown was ragged, with numerous holds for missed procedures and repairs to the data system. The telemetry was noisy, the glitches were visible on the console meters and recorders. I think Williams was moments away from calling it off when the Atlas finally lifted off. Then, after liftoff, Gus Grissom, at the CapCom console in Mercury Control, used his override switches to correct erroneous liftoff and booster engine shutdown data that had been fed into the Goddard computers by noisy data lines from the launch pad.

  During the second orbit, several of the sites saw an increase in cabin temperatures and unexpected attitude control jet firings. The reports poured in by voice and Teletype as the hapless chimp sailed across Africa. The rate of fuel usage increased rapidly on the second orbit. The cabin temperature conditions were triggering an increase in Enos’s body temperature. With the capsule moving five miles closer to the deorbit point each second, decision time was rapidly approaching. Kraft knew that if he got Enos home alive, even if the mission was one orbit short, he could declare it a success and clear the way for Glenn’s launch. He didn’t dare try to imagine the headlines if Enos was left stranded and died in orbit.

  When Chris couldn’t get a clear Go or NoGo from his systems monitor, he ordered the California site to go ahead with the retrofire. California then crisply reported, “Retro one fired . . . retro two fired . . . retro three. All fired and capsule attitudes were good.” Enos was coming home. After confirming that the retros had fired, Kraft turned to me, smiled, and said, “That’s a good show!” I knew then that Kraft would build a team, his team. The real-time role of the flight director and Mission Control had been demonstrated. For the first time, the control team had intervened in a deteriorating situation, made time-critical decisions, and saved the mission.

  And now the team would have a new, permanent home: the decision had been made to relocate the controllers, the crews, and their families to what would become the permanent Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. Gilruth’s staff and the logistics and engineering people would be the first to move in the new year. Then when they were in place, Kraft’s operations organization would begin relocating. I could not believe we would relocate the operations teams at the peak point of manned missions. But the launch pressure eased slightly when the agency backed off the December 19, 1961, date for John Glenn’s first American orbital flight. A postponement of up to five weeks would allow time for refurbishing and upgrading the launch pad and give the flight teams a needed rest. We had flown seven missions in 1961, weathered a few crises, put Shepard and Grissom into space, and brought them back alive. It was one hell of a first year for America’s manned space program, but we still had a long way to go. We wanted to be the leading rather than the trailing edge in spaceflight.

  January 1962

  Trouble with hardware caused NASA to scrub Glenn’s flight, reset for January 27. We returned to Langley and landed in a blinding snow-storm. As we got off the aircraft, we were told to return to the Cape; the Atlas problem had been found. Air travel was out of the question, so we were driven to Richmond, Virginia, where we boarded a train and rode through the night to Orlando.

  During their few hours at Langley, several of the controllers had picked up their wives and children. After getting the order to return, they had the wives and children frantically pack for the trip to the Cape. Our families met us at Langley to get on the buses that would take us to the train in Richmond. The wives and kids were assigned chair cars. The rest of us had no places reserved to sit or sleep, so we sat through the night in the dining car, playing poker or rehashing how we would resume our support to the launch countdown. By the time we got to Glenn’s mission, we started bringing families down to stay during the time we were deployed at the Cape. It worked out pretty well; we would work through the night and return to our motel and go to bed in the early morning hours. The wives would take the kids to the pool for the day while we slept. Then we would get up late in the afternoon, find some food, go to work, and the wives and kids would take our places in the motel rooms. The only trouble was that the per diem we got for deployment to the Cape was so meager that after our families left and we were just down there on our own we slept two guys to a room to make ends meet.

  After all this, the countdown had to be scrubbed again, this time for repair of a leaking tank bulkhead on the Atlas. It seemed that we would never get Glenn’s rocket off the launch pad.

  Back to Langley. Next deployment to the Cape was for a Valentine’s Day launch, and, once more, we scrubbed it, this time for weather. At the Cape, we were focused and on top of the job, but the ups and downs of the launch preparation were nibbling at us. Tempers started to fray. The delays were hard to endure; we knew the stakes were enormous, both for the country and for John Glenn, but we were eager to move to launch and ready to go at a moment’s notice.

  February 20, 1962, Mercury-Atlas 6

  When I look back, I find it hard to believe that when we launched John Glenn we had had a total of three orbits’ worth of experience during the two preceding missions. Two of the Mercury-Atlas rockets had failed. As formidable as the Atlas appeared, it was essentially a pressurized metal balloon. If pressurization was lost while the rocket was on the pad, the rocket would have collapsed. We were rolling the dice in a way that would not be allowed in today’s space program.

  After ten postponements and eighty-two days of delays, this countdown had the usual glitches. The pad crew broke a bolt in the hatch while inserting Glenn and had to scurry off to get a new one. Watching from Kraft’s TV, I was amazed as always by the close quarters of the Mercury capsule. The cockpit was smaller than any fighter aircraft I had flown. Glenn entered the capsule feet first, through a hatch less than two feet square, assisted by the pad crew, then ducked under the instrument panel. In the silver space suit, gloves, and helmet, Glenn was the modern-day explorer ready to embark to a new world.

  During the hold, Kraft had his customary pint of milk to settle his stomach, and Williams made increasingly frequent trips outside to look at the weather. After the hatch was repaired, the countdown resumed.

  Williams polled the mission team, receiving a solid Go from Kraft and the Mercury capsule and Atlas booster test conductors. With each succeeding Go the energy level in the control room threatened to burst through the doors. Scott Carpenter called from the blockhouse, “God speed, John Glenn.” Then he counted down: “Three seconds . . . two . . . one . . . zero.”

  As the umbilical cables were ejected, I filled in the liftoff message and started a continuous voice briefing for the Bermuda site team. My hand was trembling as I jotted 14:14:39Z on my notepad. When I heard Glenn’s report, “Roger, the clock is running, we are underway,” I took off for the Teletype room. This time, I remembered to remove my headset.

  Returning, I continued to brief Bermuda via the Teletype order wire until they acquired data at three minutes. Other than during the high-G periods, Glenn’s reporting was just like his training runs. I consciously had to fight to keep doing my job and avoid being mesmerized by the words.

  Shortly after five minutes, Glenn calmly said, “Sustainer engine cut-off, and the posigrades have fired.” The posigrades provided the thrust to separate the capsule from the Atlas booster.

  The room hushed as Kraft and Tec Roberts engaged in the Go NoGo dialogue. The answer came swiftly and, after checking with John Hodge, the Bermuda flight director, Kraft nodded to Shepard, who gave Glenn a resounding, “Go! You are Go for at least seven orbits.” (The orbital trajectory was designed to provide more orbit lifetime than needed for the mission plan in case we had problems and could not come down at the planned end of mission time.)

  Glenn, now in the element of the test pilot, was reporting the control system status, closing out the checklist items, and continually reassuring the doctors that he felt fine. It was a jam-packed ten minutes, but everything had gotten done as Friendship 7 left Bermuda for the Cana
ry Islands site, the next in our chain of tracking stations girdling the Earth.

  For the first time I was nervous. My site controllers were going to see a manned spacecraft for the first time, and now they would have to communicate with an astronaut, run the site, and direct their team. This was it, real-time and pretty heady work for a bunch of young guys. Communications were clear and I listened intently as Glenn reported his status to Llewellyn: “Control check complete. I have the booster in sight out the window. It’s probably about one mile away, going down under my position and a bit to the left.”

  Llewellyn stammered a bit in his first communication, “Friendship 7, what is your space . . . spacecraft station . . . status report?” I had to smile that even a tough, hard-ass Marine gets clanked up at times.

  After all of the attempts to get Glenn off the ground, this one seemed unbelievably easy. When it finally happened, it was smooth as apple butter. John kept clipping through the first orbit without a glitch. Teletype messages and occasional voice contacts indicated that the controllers’ adrenaline was pumping. It was difficult at such times to maintain my focus. I felt a strong urge to yell out, “We’ve got an American in orbit!” My remote site controllers were working well and the lines were humming. I felt a burst of pride for our team and how it had progressed in the fifteen months since we had bungled our Four-Inch Flight back in November of 1960.

  I had sat next to Chris Kraft since the first mission and was amazed at his aplomb now that he finally had an American in orbit. High-risk leadership beckons many, but few accept the call.

  The Teletype post-pass reports filled the gaps when we could not listen to Glenn. The messages, when pieced together, indicated he was on the flight plan and the capsule was performing well. At the completion of each site pass, controllers prepared a systems summary message containing the values of sixteen key systems measurements, recorded during the pass. The short time intervals between tracking sites did not allow the MCC and site controllers to plot the measurements, so the Teletype messages were cut into strips and aligned with the measurements from the preceding sites, then taped together. Trend predictions from this data were rough but this was the best we could do.

  The control team at Canton Island in the South Pacific received Glenn’s report of a brilliant “bright red” sunrise, then were startled as he continued, “I am in the middle of a mass of thousands of very small particles that are brilliantly lit up like they are luminescent. They are a bright yellowish green, about the size and intensity of a firefly on a real dark night. I have never seen anything like it. They look like little stars. They swirl around the capsule and go in front of the window.”

  I showed the Teletype of Glenn’s finding to Kraft. He nodded, then said, “Keep me advised.”

  Other than modest increases in temperature, there were no concerns as we approached the end of the first orbit. The only unusual occurrence was Glenn’s report of the “fireflies” he spotted at sunrise over the Pacific.

  Before the Cape pass, Kraft walked over to me and said, “Shorty [Powers] has confirmed that President Kennedy will make a call through the Cape at the end of the first orbit. Get with the communications people and make sure everything is set up.” When caught off guard I tend to be inflexible, particularly when I am distracted from the business at hand by details that could have been worked out earlier. This was one of those times. Kraft saw the expression on my face, frowned, and then chided, “The President is the boss!”

  The presidential call did not surprise the audio technicians; they had been advised of the call by the White House switchboard the night before launch, and I was assured everything was already checked out. I had a lot to learn about the politics of space.

  As the capsule passed over the Cape, Shepard, the Cape CapCom, called, “Seven, this is the Cape. The President will be talking to you.” Caught by surprise himself, Glenn stammered, “Ah . . . the President? This is Friendship 7, standing by.”

  Shepard said, “Go ahead, Mr. President.” The communications loop was dead; the call came early and the phone line was not yet patched in.

  George Metcalf picked up the phone when it rang at his backroom console. He thought it was a gag when the voice at the other end said, “This is the White House, stand by for the President.” Attending other duties and unaware of the planned phone call, George stuttered, “Hello, hello, Mr. President!” Then Metcalf stood up, wildly gesturing for other technicians to come help him set up the patch.

  In the control room, a more crucial event now intruded on the team’s attention. A warning light had flashed on the instrument panels in Mercury Control. Moments later, Don Arabian, the systems monitor, called out, “Chris, I don’t know what to make of this, but I am showing an indication on Segment 51.”

  Kraft looked perplexed. I overheard the call and immediately pulled out the telemetry listing from my console drawer. “Chris,” Arabian went on, “Segment 51 is the impact [landing] bag deploy.”

  Quickly, I called John Hatcher, the facility team boss. “John, forget the [President’s] phone call and verify the patching of Segment 51.” Then I broadcast an all-site Teletype message: “Confirm patching instructions for spacecraft telemetry and report the readings on Segment 51, ASAP.” The chilling implication of the telemetry that Don Arabian was reporting was that the impact bag had deployed—which in turn meant that the heat shield had somehow come loose. The heat shield protects the capsule from the fire of reentry. After reentry is complete and the parachute is deployed, the heat shield is released. A rubberized bag which is attached to the capsule structure is stowed behind the heat shield. After the capsule’s parachute deploys the heat shield is automatically released and the rubber landing bag extends to cushion the landing impact. On the water the landing bag acts like a sea anchor to stabilize the capsule in the upright position and minimize drift.

  If the telemetry indication being reported was correct and the heat shield had come loose in orbit John Glenn would have no protection from the 3,000-degree F reentry temperatures. The capsule would become a meteor that flashed for but a few brief seconds during reentry before burning up.

  Kraft and the team were now faced with a grim set of choices. Controllers, distrustful of solitary measurements, immediately started digging out the details of the switch and how it was rigged. The phone system came alive as the problem was pursued. Precious time was lost trying to track down engineers at the blockhouse and Hangar S. Kraft’s controllers had no provisions for emergency access to the total design, manufacturing, and assembly team. I jotted a note to myself to set up a hot line to McDonnell Aircraft for the next mission—if there was one.

  Unaware of the crisis unfolding around him, John Glenn coasted over the Atlantic. He was oblivious to the uncertainty over Segment 51, but he was now having an unrelated problem with the attitude control. The capsule was drifting sideways to the right until it hit the attitude limit, then the big yaw thruster would kick in.

  The mood inside Mercury Control had changed with the suddenness of a thunderclap. Metcalf, still holding the line to the White House, found no easy way to disengage. “Mr. President,” he blurted, “we’ve gotten pretty busy down here now. I don’t think we’ve got time to talk.” The President responded, “Give me a call if you get a chance.” George hung up and turned to more urgent problems.

  As the spacecraft passed over Central Africa, Glenn reported that he was departing from the flight plan and was troubleshooting the attitude control problems. It appeared to him and those on the ground that the problem was a random movement from left to right, possibly caused by one of the small thrusters working intermittently.

  Glenn interrupted his troubleshooting with reports on the flight plan as he moved across the Indian Ocean, continuing his assurances to the doctors that he felt fine. The medical community’s anxieties, although reduced by Yuri Gagarin’s one-orbit mission, persisted. Kraft and the rest of the control team were elated with Glenn’s performance. It was obvious that he was
on schedule and had no problems adapting. As John passed over Australia, he embraced the attitude control problem with an energized can-do spirit.

  On the ground the story was far different. The blockhouse had reviewed their measurements and verified that they had had no Segment 51 indications during launch. But when the spacecraft passed overhead at the end of the first orbit, the blockhouse had seen the indication also. The data I was receiving from the remote sites was not much help. Half of the CapCom reports indicated they were seeing Segment 51, and the others were not.

  The limitations of the Mercury communications system now became evident. The response to each of the Teletype queries took ten to fifteen minutes. The answers often prompted another query.

  Chris was now on the phone with the blockhouse, trying to get answers, while I had gone to a small office behind the Teletype room seeking out Ed Nieman and Dana Boatman, the two McDonnell engineers who were developing the system schematics. Both of us were seeking answers to the same question: if Segment 51 is valid, what are we going to do about it?

  Chris was not having much luck and his frustration level was rising. The design engineers, in the heat of real-time crisis, weren’t quick at coming up with options. One of them suggested, “Let’s make sure Glenn keeps the landing bag switch off and we should ask him if he hears any banging noises when he maneuvers at a high rate.”