Oral History: Glynn Lunney

okay well if we're rolling i'm going to take you back in time with me if i can glenn let's go all the way back when first you heard of some new organization called space task group and i wondered what prompted you to get into their scheme of things how did you first migrate into the very beginnings of manned space flight in the in the very early days i remember when i got out of college i got out of college in june of 1958 and across my desk came a drawing of the mercury spacecraft what became the mercury spacecraft with one person in it and was drawn by cadwell johnson he was at langley there was a group at langley that was doing uh high high energy re-entry studies and they launched rockets from wallops and then they would drive them down into the atmosphere and then measure the heat transfer and the heat effects on different kind of shapes of bodies and reentry bodies and at lewis i joined the group when i got out of college june of 58 that was doing the same work except we used air launch rockets we dropped them off the wing of a b-57 and they flew up and again drove the the re-entry test specimens down into the atmosphere at high speeds and we would measure the heat transfer and so on and so on so when the folks at langley began to start thinking about how this spacecraft this merc became the mercury spacecraft would be designed they called back to at the time george lowe was the branch chief second level of supervision in nasa and george was our branch chief john disher was my section head john went to headquarters in well and uh goddard eventually but did not come here but we started to communicate with the folks at langley and begin to begin to start doing some studies for them up there to help them as we went along it was sort of natural in those days in the naca world for different specialists who are working on different things to get together compare notes coordinate the research in effect and so on i noticed you said naca this is even before there was an nasa an aca before there was an nasa and uh and uh we began to interact with them and then we started to fly down there we had a little uh dc3 that joel granny used to fly and we would fly down on monday morning come back on friday night that didn't happen immediately but probably by oh second half of 58 we were going down there fairly regularly uh and then we'd we'd understand what they were trying to do and bring the work back and work on it at lewis in cleveland ohio sometimes uh but after a while it got to the point where we were spending uh just about full time going down there somewhere along the i'd way the idea that this was the space task group came into vogue i don't think i had that name connected with it when we first started but they had a special place a kind of a away from the main langley research center in another set of buildings and we would go down and start working with them on how we would might transpose these ideas or take these ideas that people had for the reentry shape and turned it into a mercury spacecraft and turned it into what became the mercury program which was the beginnings of human space flight i remember somewhere along the line somebody said they counted heads at some point and there were 35 of us most of them probably oh two dozen from langley and then about 10 or 12 of us from the cleveland center the the lewis research center and so i always felt i was part of the mayflower team in terms of human space flight and i was fortunate enough to be right there at the time when this began i remember uh when i went to college i'd been a little model airplane builder and all the all the things that kids do when they're fascinated with airplanes and when i went to college i took aeronautics there was no aerospace or anything like that in college i took aeronautics because i wanted to be working in the field of flight some kind of flight aircraft flight at the time and out of the blue my first month out of college this thing came along to take a spacecraft not an aircraft but a spacecraft to absolutely a new envelope in terms of altitude speed and and place to go and so on so it was just a it was an exciting time for us especially at the beginning although i expect at the beginning i as a kind of a 21 year old kid probably i didn't have a very clear idea of what this was or where it might go i just knew that it was going to be fun did anybody really have a good idea at that time of where it was going to go well i think that was before of course the announcement uh for the apollo program landing a man on the moon and bringing him back in the decade it was before that and it was no i don't think it was clear now it may have been clear to some of our visionary leaders that it was to me but for me this was just an exciting thing i mean the idea of putting people there and of course the space age had opened uh sputnik flew in 1957 in october and i remember i was at a wedding with a with a group of people in at the lewis research center one of the fellows was getting married and when the sputnik thing occurred and that began that the major change in our country that all occurred against the backdrop of the cold war and the fear and concern that people had for where that was going to lead it was sort of almost built into everybody at the time i mean when i was in high school and college i mean people were talking about building bomb shelters and some actually did there was that kind of a fear and concern for the competition with the at that time the soviet union uh so the uh the background that we had for it uh was very real and then sputnik occurred which was another indication that the soviet union was ahead we were not and the mercury project and the beginnings of it were all i always were conducted and had the flavor of the american shot the american beginnings initiatives to respond to what had been the russian successes and victories early on at that time too some of your thinking was oriented in military rocketry too wasn't it oh yes i mean what we had in the way of rocketry was basically a set of vehicles that came out of the ballistic missile programs we eventually built some that were not ballistic missiles but for example the first flight that we flew unmanned and then with a monkey and then with people the redstones were initially conceived as small tactical missiles by today's standards small but not at the time tactical missiles for the army so all of the rocketry that we had in the country was being driven by the the ballistic missile idea both short range and long range eventually intercontinental range and we were walking into a world where we had to convert these these weapon systems into something that we could use for flying people and at the time i don't know how well people remember this launching rockets was a very risky proposition we had the vanguard collapse on the pad and we had so many other films if not actual witnesses at times i got to see them of launches that just came apart right right either on the pad practically or right off the coast in florida so uh our our mental image was we were in this race we were dealing with these kind of machines these launch vehicles that were that were really our means to getting to orbit and boy they were dangerous those things just blew up regularly i don't know what our reliability numbers were but if you told me it was 50 at the time half of them failed it would be easy for me to believe that that was true a couple of weeks before alan shepard flew the first time we had an atlas failure in full view of our pooled cameras a couple of weeks before the fact yes yes so no there was so there was serious concern about whether the boosters would boost the spacecraft yes but we felt confident that we could build a spacecraft that would work okay uh but the launch vehicles the boosters were really scary i mean they just uh they just watched that stuff and it was frightening to to watch it what you took your chances took the chances and in so doing one of the first chores i understand for you was getting a machine that would handle a man getting a man that could handle the machine i'm looking of course at simulation and how do you build this stuff that will work and how did you set up control systems and simulators to work them yes one of the things that we began the focus on because of the riskiness of these boosters was we call them abort modes but really they were escape routes what would we do to get out get away from the launch vehicle if something happened at various stages of it we built a an abort sensing system and put it into the into both the redstone and the atlas vehicle so that certain parameters could be measured on board the vehicle and if things were going outside of limits and hitting red lines then the vehicle could be shut down assuming you could do that but more importantly the escape tower could be ignited and pulled the astronauts astronauts singular off the vehicle and then of course land them somewhere a lot of that was kind of hard to determine where the landing would be but when we got going fast enough we had a little bit of control so we had a couple of specific areas that we would target but we were in a search for a number of things one how do we make these rockets more reliable and that was a problem that was addressed by people who were intimately involved with the launch vehicles at the time and of course the aerospace corporation in the air force was providing the atlas launch vehicle so there was a fairly huge effort to so-called man rate the the atlas vehicle we put the abort sensing system on which would add a degree of detection of impending failures and triggering of an abort sequence we had the design of the spacecraft to worry about we had the put this thing in place so that all of this could be integrated in very short periods of time i can't remember exactly but the atlas probably went from the pad to orbit within i don't know six or seven minutes or something like that so a lot of things happened very quickly so we had to begin to plan on where to put our recovery forces how to control the any kind of accident impending failure in the launch vehicle so that we had some degree of control over where we would land in the atlantic for a while we had ships spaced almost all the way across the atlantic over to uh to the coast of africa and we began to also think in terms of how would we train ourselves and we had by that time begun the idea of a control center and how would we train the astronauts to do this so we began rudimentary simulators for uh understanding this kind of stuff and for figuring out what kind of displays to use both in the control center and on board so that we would know what was going on so that we had some degree of visibility in it and that we knew that the had the kind of information that we could make some choices about how to control the the uh sequence of events in an operational way so we built uh relatively crude simulators we eventually i think we called it a procedures trainer for the mercury spacecraft that we had at langley and we today you can build a simulator where you can have something happen and then everything becomes it's so nice and digital and programmable that you can make a response and then the vehicle responds that way and the telemetry responds that way and the people on the ground and the crew can see it in those days it wasn't anywhere near as uh as as clever and as capable as it is today we would plan something and often what happened was different than what we had planned and then we would make tapes of everything so that when we had an abort we would play a tape of the abort because the system just wasn't as a closed loop or as flexible as the systems the training systems that we had today so our simulations especially then when we got to simulating both the control center in florida and at cape canaveral at the air force station down there and for the stations around the world we did all that with tapes that we would build ahead of time ship around the world and then try to keep what we had planned to happen in sync with what was really happening that often did not work out that way and we would have tapes that would go down path a when the when the team was deciding to go path b and they would be even when it came to making tapes you were in an era when videotape was just coming oh yeah that was a crude science too yes we hardly i don't we didn't tape that we're using right now is a far cry from the tapes think of video i mean we didn't even get around the video and until what gemini and apollo programs well you had video as a matter of fact we even used videotape uh at the time of the original shepard flight but it was crude it wasn't like two inch yes quad simple stuff but as you look back across when you say tapes you're really meaning data tapes data tapes yes telemetry type telemetry data tapes and then the telemetry would come down and then someone would send a command and of course if we predicted what they were going to do well then the tape would be right but as often it's not what we predicted would happen and when it would happen was different than when it actually happened so that the tape was the tape system in terms of trying to pre-plan and pre-can the simulations and the training exercises was very difficult think back with me for a moment on the old mission control mercury control at the cape ah yes remember just a little about that and what it meant to you because you've gone from there into a progression of what's here in houston yes uh the mercury control center in florida was a place that i loved i mean i have come to think of the control center at the in florida and now especially the control center here in houston as a kind of a church it was a cathedral of sorts where we went and did what we thought was important work for our country and for humanity and we did it in this place where we all came together and struggled mightily sometimes with the problems that that we faced and the reaction response that we had to bring to the table uh and when i go in when i go in the control center now i still have this sense of coming back to the church or the cathedral of my youth where we did important i don't want to put a religious word on it but we felt we felt that we were doing something very very important and very important for mankind it was a big step for us because until that time flight had been airplanes and here we were taking this really major step to go somewhere else so the control center at the cape where i was a flight dynamics officer and we had a little corner over on the right hand side where we had our plot boards that would track the vehicles and tell us where they were and we had our computers were actually up in washington dc on pennsylvania avenue the computers we used to run the the system that we had in florida the control center in florida basically were in on pennsylvania avenue in a big ibm building small ibm building in washington dc and we would of course send all the tracking data to the computers and then they would compute the trajectory send it back to the cape and display it on our plot boards and when we got in orbit we would also use the same system to calculate the deorbit times for the various landing points that we had scattered around the world in the various oceans that we had recovery forces in so it was a again by today's standards a relatively crude system the telemetry was all analog so it came down in florida and then got processed and displayed on meters we didn't have any cathode ray tubes any video screens as people are commonly looking you looking at data today everybody has their pc but we had little meters for all the telemetry and then we had some we had these built-in displays into the console with little uh uh little numbers almost like a clock where we could calculate and display the retrofire times for the various opportunities we had to bring the spacecraft back the big plotting maps were they manually controlled or were they no they weren't manual but they were what had what had grown up at in florida was the range safety officer used this kind of a platform where they tracked the vehicles range safety officers had an interesting job at that time because their job was to to monitor all launches and be sure that the vehicle stayed within certain boundaries and if it went outside of those boundaries representing a threat to uh to landing on something in florida then they would destruct the vehicle and that so the couple of platforms we used in the control center were the follow-on to that technology that had been developed and used probably for a decade or maybe not quite that long haven't been flying quite that long but something of that order probably five years in florida and then we we use those in the control center and of course in the front of the control center just like today we had this great big world map that kind of moved a little symbol of the mercury spacecraft across the map so that we could at a glance see where we were what stations we were coming up on whether our calm was our communications would be with the with the crew on board the spacecraft and how much time we were going to have i mean we had we have today with the tracking and data relay satellite almost full-time coverage uh full-time communications both telemetry command and voice video etc from the shuttle as it flies in those days the only telemetry we got was when it was over one of these little circles on the world map which were about five minutes big in terms of spacecraft travel so and that was if you went from the from the maximum points on the circle sometimes it just skimmed the edge of the circle where you'd have one or two minutes of communication so our brains began to be driven by what do we need to communicate what's our next opportunity what do we need to get done in this past in the way of convert conversations with the crew and then what do we need to do in terms of problem solving what do we need to do in terms of recommendations or direction to what we're going to do with the flight so we we all got tied to this little five-minute circles that were spotted around the world where we had teams of people we didn't even have high-speed communications that could take the telemetry and big impact to a control center the telemetry was all processed locally at each one of those stations where we had a small flight control team that was like an extension of the control center but while the crew was overhead for that station that little team handled the whole thing so you had to prep the team ahead of time with what you wanted to know and what you wanted to do often the crews would report something that was different than had been happening before so you had to modify your plan in real time and and one of the things that caused to happen in all of us certainly in may was you have this tremendous sense of time sequencing and time criticality and i must get this done by i've only got two minutes and so on and so on and either it's innate in me or i developed this you could almost in your head keep track at the time in the sense of when was the next pass how much time were you going to have what did you need to get done by and that there was going to be an los or a loss of signals in a little while and that clock was also ticking in here and you knew you had to get things done in a just a matter of a few minutes in many cases to uh to keep the mission on track and keep it communicated keep it well tagged up between the crew on board and the people both in the control center and that team of people that were scattered all around the world you even had astronauts at some of those tracking stations just to keep them yes and we had what we now call the capcom position and we had that at each of the tracking stations so that the communications with the crew even in those days both from the control center and at all the remote sites around the world was conducted by a fellow astronaut who would be sympathetic and understanding of the of the physical and technical situations that the crews would face and would help translate that to the folks on the ground who were looking kind of at like what a system was doing and how a subsystem and how it was behaving and the capcom provided the bridge between what the system subsystem was doing how it's behaving what do we want to do with it and the way that would be communicated with uh with an astronaut on board in terms of what switches to use and so on and so on so it was uh it was quite a learning time and i and i think all of us develop these this sense of having internal clocks that are running all the time i find even today that i am impatient with time-wasting talks that seem to you know branch off into what i consider to be irrelevancies and they don't quite get to the point i mean we dealt in the world was where what are the options what is your recommendation what do you want to do let's get on with it and it was all measured in minutes some cases even seconds so it was time became very very precious to us and drove many of the uh processes that we put in place for dealing with controlling the flights uh and and i think it has carried that carried with me the rest of my life time is very precious especially when you're trying to deal with something uh in a business sense or today in a technical sense or a programmed sense and i have i get impatient when things get off track and wander around a little bit and i go back to the mode that we had which is look what's the situation what are your options what's your recommendation let's be crisp and clear about it and get on with it you know go no go kind of became the go no go i guess terminology entered the vocabulary as we built our methods for handling space flight and go no go means is it yes or is it no you know make up your mind don't give me anything in between yeah i don't have a lot of time to listen to a lot of this stuff is it yes or is it no what do you have to do did it surprise you that those military boosters that were used in the beginning performed as well as they did you never had a major failure no not after uh not after the the first uh failure that we had that was what ma1 big joe i guess we launched and we had a problem with it uh at the regime of maximum dynamic pressure where the biggest loads were on the vehicle and it got and then we learned from that and put a belly band around the place where the launch vehicle and the spacecraft came together and and strengthened it so that the rest of the mercury vehicles flew well the mercury atlas vehicles but yes i was surprised because by the record that we had and not being able to quote reliability numbers today but the record we had was we had a lot of problems and a lot of very violent catastrophic losses of vehicles that surely gave us great cause for concern but the work that people did on understanding those failures and fixing them the design and engineering work the abort system that we put on in place and then all of the thought processes that we put in place to deal with the control center the interaction with the crew and the selection of escape routes mission rules all that stuff began to come into place so that we began to have at least a sense of well if something happens we have a system that can detect it and get the spacecraft off or we can shut it down and get on and do something in terms of choosing one of our escape routes i even had a shut down the booster switch on my console so that if it were going badly i could shut the shut the atlas down and and then we would move into one of our escape modes board modes not to say too that everything went all that smoothly there were times when you physically had to make a save or make a decision i'm thinking for instance john glenn on the pack yes yes yes would you like to tell us about a little of that yes uh uh let me first say that in the job i was in which was flight dynamics was basically a trajectory monitoring job i didn't have too much to do at that time with the subsystems although i knew about of course the subsystems that affected our planning of the trajectory such as the retro rockets and so on but in the course of that flight which by the way three revolutions of the earth is four and a half hours it's not a very long period of time and somewhere in the course of that flight i can't even remember how early it occurred there was an indication in the telemetry that the heat shield itself may have come loose that is the heat shield that we were counting on to to protect the vehicle because it had a big bag and it was a natural separation of it at some point when it gets on the water but the indication came through that we had that possibly the heat shield release so the concern was was it really valid and what can we do about it well the truth is when we instrumented the vehicle early on we did not have in our minds the concept of having multiple ways to measure and detect things so that so that as we fly now well you can see you can get this measurement and then you can confirm it usually with several other measurements downstream of this event so that if it says the pressure's wrong for example here you can look at what's happened down here in the system and you can correlate it and say yes it's really true or no there's something kind of funny about this measurement in those days we did hadn't really evolved to that level of sophistication so we had this little measurement staring people in the face saying the heat shield might have come loose which which would portend probably loss of the vehicle during entry or at least that had to be the concern so despite all our efforts to try to understand whether that was a false or correct reading it was inconclusive the only action available was well the retro rockets were on the front of the heat shield and they were strapped to the back end around the corner of the heat shield so the only action that anybody could think of is well maybe we can leave the retro rocket package on and that will tend to keep the heat shield on to for as long as this package was going to last on the front of the vehicle now of course that introduces a whole set of different aerodynamics than we had planned for and studied for and and fortunately as a matter of fact i could make a speech about how fortunate we have been in the space program in terms of events and in terms of people but fortunately of course max vijay was around who was the father of the design the blunt body shape for this vehicle who had almost an intuitive instinctive feeling for how things fly and how they work and what would happen and i think max was satisfied that we could leave the leave the heat shield leave the retro pack secured and it would not change the aerodynamics enough to be of concern that the vehicle would still fly okay based on his judgment based on his judgment his intuition and however many years of experience 15 or so probably at that time that he had had in thinking of and experiencing studying these kind of effects so the decision was made to leave the retro pack on came as a surprise to john i'm sure and and that's the way we entered and it did indeed work okay work well and and john of course was recovered fine and the end turned out in retrospect that the indication was false and that we really didn't have the heat shield coming loose which which drove us to thinking about gee how do we really it's like the human body how do we instrument this human body so that we don't decide just on the basis of one flimsy measurement that we got to go in and operate on you but rather that we can measure a couple of different things and before we take any action like operation on you we will know what your problem is and that we are indeed attacking it appropriately and not chasing a false measurement and you know doing something to you that you don't need to have done in the first place so the whole idea of how do you instrument this vehicles and how do you begin to use that instrumentation then how do you build it into let me call it a code of ethics we began early on to conceive of the idea of mission rules that is what would we do in these circumstances our whole a whole bunch of our world was driven by what if what if this what if that what if this and this was this chess game we played with mother nature i guess and hardware as to what are we going to do if this happens what are we going to do if that happens and gradually we evolved both a way to instrument the spacecraft so that when we were trying to detect something or that we had various ways of knowing that we indeed were really defining the problem and then we had to develop this code of ethics about how far were we willing to go in continuing the mission in the face of various kind of failures and when we started on that people had a fairly it was sort of intuitive well if this happens i should do this but we gradually began to build first off a kind of a philosophy of risk versus gain the risk we're taking appropriate to the gain that we are getting out of any any decision that we made and then we began to build a a framework below that for uh how much redundancy we wanted to have remaining in order to continue so that if we lost or if we believe that we had lost certain kind of systems or capabilities we developed an attitude about how much redundancy we wanted to have to remain in order to continue the whole mission and if we and if we passed over the threshold of having enough redundancy that we wanted to have to continue then we were into one of these no-go conditions where okay we're going to start looking for the closest place to come home fortunately in in the mercury spacecraft and a lot of the others although occasionally that's not true uh we found ourselves in a position where we basically had enough capability to continue usually to the end of the nominal or normal planned mission there was another player in that era whose name comes to mind walter williams yes indeed you know there there were so many names of people and uh so much of it can get lost i realize now at this stage in my life that the contributions and the work and the problem solving that went on is understood by peers it appears at the time peers are those involved but is lost really to the outside world i mean outside of this small collection of people may be measured in the 1 200 people when you get outside of that size of a group there isn't a full understanding of what all the what all the internal considerations were but we you know again the space program we were fortunate uh it's almost reminiscent of the people who show up in american history when they're really needed the the kind of people who show up uh at this time we were embarking on this great challenge dr gilruth was leading the team at uh in a space task group and eventually in the move here to houston dr gilruth was a genius never got the publicity or the attention or the credit that he should have gotten for what he put together to put this human space program on track we called it manned space program at the time now we call it human space where and he brought in dr garith was kind of a analytical designer kind of a person with a lot of research experience from langley when we began to realize that we were going to be dealing with these vehicles in what you and i came to know as an operational way which is they're flying what are we going to do with them what decisions are we going to make how do we put this instrumentation how do we feed this intelligence into a control center system with remote sites how do we put all these people together and build a set of rules for them how do we do all that somewhere somehow that i don't know walt williams showed up walt had been at edwards in the x programs in the exit x programs airplanes and was a major player out there at edwards came to the space task group and and he began to focus on the operational end of life as differentiated from the design of the vehicle end of life although he played he played in that sphere also walt was also a absolute powerhouse in the nasa management of the launch vehicles he almost single-handedly almost single-handedly with maybe one or two helpers interfaced with the air force and the aerospace corporation in the in their building of the of the atlas vehicle and of course they were the experts on it but walt managed that activity from a nasa point of view and from the uh manned flight point of view and built into their system and eventually into their factories this whole idea of snoopy awards and so on began to take take shape in those early days where nasa at the time in the space task group and the astronauts realized we need to really get out and touch people who are making these things in factories so that they really know what they're being used for and the criticality of them and out of that came some of those early awareness recognition activities they for example in factories where they were building launch vehicles for both manned use and and other use there was they had a way of tagging uh parts that were going to be used for the manned vehicle i don't remember how exactly they tagged them but there was a sense of trying to build a an awareness and a and a sensitivity in everybody that handled the flight hardware and then walt came and uh dr girth was overseeing the whole event including max that represented the design max fighter the representative design half walt came in and started to think about integrating a set of flight crews with the control center and with the ground crews and with this new launch vehicle that was the new launch vehicle use that we were going to make of the atlas and he began to work on that problem and again america's inventory of talent out of that also came chris craft who became walt's right-hand man i suppose you could say and chris sought to the operation the building of the operation of the control center the operation of all the remote teams he built the mission rule idea uh with help of course from his staff but he's the his for us chris and walt and bob guriouth i mean they were just leaders so much attention paid in modern times to management and leadership and and what that is and how it works best we were in it absolutely completely in it because we had the best of leaders i mean we always felt that way we had the absolute best of leaders and and they they were all of us were aligned with accomplishing the the purposes of the program and they were on the front lines with everybody else they made tough decisions they were tough-minded in what had to be done and they made sure that it happened the simulations we used to run woe be to him who screwed up because we did debriefed each simulation uh and it was confession time it was absolute confession time whatever happened you had to recount what happened what you saw what you did and why and occasionally people would do something that was a little bit not correct or incorrect as seen in retrospect and they would suffer the humiliation of exposing themselves and maybe even getting some chewing on for whatever they did that wasn't quite right but it built a sense of real teamwork and our leaders were in front of us i mean they were not behind saying go do this they were in front of us they were making all those kind of tough decisions at their level in their spheres of activity also just as we were for example at the planning level and at the console level in the control center in florida the mercury control center and then eventually back here in this control center i watched this control center operate today i still see i really see chris crafts is still there i mean the attitudes the techniques the balancing of risk versus gain the sense of how much you can do how far you can take things when to back off all those things got instilled in us really by chris and with help from walt who was one level up doing a variety of other things including this launch vehicle management that i talked about but today the control center is operating the way uh chris craft designed it to operate i'm talking in terms not of the technology but in terms of the the stuff that people deal with in it the decisions that they're trying to make the balances that they're trying to make on decisions as to how much risk to take versus how much gain all of that is still very very operative the attitudes of performing well the simulations and the debriefings and the confessions and the and the compulsion or obsession almost that people have with doing it well and not not screwing anything up but doing it very well knowing what they're doing being prepared all those things are are still alive over here in the center and they started with chris he was the hands-on manager leader of that activity and he instilled a sense of what was right what was wrong what you had to do how good you had to be and those standards that he kind of bred into everybody by his own example and by what he did with us continue today the control center today the operation today is a reflection of chris craft did it help that early on you had a goal you knew where this program had to go shortly after in other words mercury started flying suddenly here was the target thrown right in your face and with all these icons at work that you've described you now had a sense of direction all you had to do was figure out how to get there yes although i have to say that when i first heard president kennedy's speech at rice university i was overwhelmed at the magnitude of it i mean we were we were launching things and struggling with spacecraft that weighed 2500 pounds 2000 pounds you know they were about a ton the mercury spacecraft was about a ton we were talking about doing something with launch vehicles and with spacecraft that were 10 20 times that big or more i mean spacecraft it would be 10 or 20 times and for me it was all i mean it was just an overwhelming thought that we could actually go and land on the moon and bring somebody back it really was and yet you know capturing capturing history is good because uh it's only somewhat recently in the last 10 years or so where i've begun to reflect on what we did and how it was and so on at the time we were consumed with getting on with the next step of whatever it is we were doing that month in other words we had so many of the for example the early redstone launches uh where the first one i was down for the bloody thing lifted off shut down landed back on the pad the escape tower blew off and all the parachutes came out i mean i was over with the range safety officer for that for that flight and i was nervous as a cat going into it i was probably 22 or 3 at the time and since i had worked on all this trajectory stuff they said well go watch to see what the rain safety officer does well i was nervous as the devil being in there when this captain i can't remember his name just calmly doing his job like he did done all other flights he's going out for breakfast i mean the idea of having something to eat was was beyond anything that i could believe at the time i just couldn't eat anything i was so my stomach was rolling and nervous and then this vehicle shuts down on the pad the motor goes the shoots pop out and then we went on with that series and flew one and we flew the monkey on one of the uh mercury redstone flights we flew another extra flight in there because something didn't quite look right to the folks in alabama uh to the uh werner von braun team they wanted to fly an extra flight before al's and then while we're getting ready for all that in the middle of all that yuri gagarin flew a month or so before and then we've we've i guess we flew out didn't we before the or was the announcement before al flew the president kennedy's announcement kennedy after after after helen we flew this one thing two or three hundred miles down range and this little bitty thing that only weighed a ton and this little rod by comparison this little rock at this redstone and here we were i mean the the boldness the boldness of the decision-making and the challenge that it presented to the country uh instead of technological technical community was just just staggering to me but we were so busy that it was well okay i guess we're going to do that so let's get on and we get on with the next flight next flight the next flight and by that time we we had of course another mercury redstone with gus and then we had a number of unmanned atlases that we flew and then we finally flew john glenn in february 62 and then we ticked off the others reasonably well uh six seven eight nine mercury six seven eight nine they went pretty well and i can't remember how close they were to schedule but as well as we held schedules in those days they went reasonably well but the enormity of what we were asked to do i mean i think we were all aware of it and sunk in uh i think it had sunk into us what we were being asked to do the scale was just was just immense and at the time we were dealing people people have a hard time remembering today they're relatively simple almost crude spacecraft the only thing we could do with the mercury spacecraft to change its direction was to fire the retrorockets and come home i mean we could control the attitude but the only thing we could do to change where it was and where it was going to be and change its direction would be the the retro pack that brought it home so along came gemini and of course the need for a whole new control center oh yeah you had to you had to mature yes the program had to mature at that level before it could go ahead yes i have another perspective on on the events there too let me let me say it this way in mercury we had a relatively simple one-man spacecraft no eva no maneuvering no guidance no rendezvous no kind of experience like that at all couldn't even get outside the spacecraft right until after it landed we flew six seven eight nine of a couple of three orbit flights a little longer than that and then a little about a day and go to cooper's flight so we had a relatively small amount of experience now let me jump you to apollo we had a couple unmanned flights that i worked on different saturn rockets uh but in the man sequence we had apollo 7 that flew 10 days on orbit manned three people we had the incredibly courageous decision to do apollo 8. an absolute breakthrough gutsy call we did apollo 8 on the second apollo flight and then we did nine the lemon low earth orbit 10 the whole thing out around the moon and 11 we landed which for us by the way felt like downhill from apollo 8. apollo 8 got us to the moon we were in orbit around the moon and and all of the getting theirs and the getting back from theirs had been figured out and worked out so apollo 8 was a real gate opener to the landing mission but think about that we had four orbital flights with mercury that were relatively simp crude and simple and on apollo we went to a 10-day flight we went around the moon we had a lunar flight both in earth orbit and around the moon and we landed in five flights we would not possibly have been able to jump from mercury to apollo without this training vetting ground that we had called gemini we flew what 10 man missions two seats different control of the launch vehicle we put a lot of these things in that we had learned in atlas and we had a redundant uh guidance system could and i think even hydraulic system on the vehicle at the gemini it was then a titan launch vehicle we were using under the gemini spacecraft but we had two people we had digital computers we had maneuvering capability we did evas we rendezvoused we docked we actually tethered as you remember and swung one of the agenas around we did guided re-entries to real landing uh targets not just the not just the see what happens thing that we were doing in apollo in mercury and uh but we made that jump from four mercury's and then we you think about the sequence of manned flights for apollo the reason we were able to do that is we had this team of people planners uh the flight crews and and the control center and its team of both planners and then actual monitors flight controllers during the flight and that team of people came out of gemini with a tremendous amount of experience we had we had fuel cells that flooded we had thrusters that clogged up all the time we brought a mission down early uh jim and i ate down in the pacific we rendezvoused and docked with both rendezvoused with two gemini spacecraft when the ajina went in the drink and we rendezvoused and docked with the genus we we docked them and burnt the engine on the ignited the engine on the gina went to high altitude we did evas looking back on our eva history we again were kind of simple-minded about it we didn't realize how difficult it was going to be for people to hold themselves in position we were probably deluded by the gemini 4 experience where ed white went on just kind of floated around but when you have to go out and stay somewhere and work we found the crews were expending so much energy to work that they were overloading their air condition systems their helmets were fogging up and the spacecraft were limping fuel cells thrusters god knows what else would go wrong but by the time we got through that program we had experimented with all kinds of rendezvous we'd built that into our code of ethics all the learning that we had experienced we had a very very strong team of people who who had the sense of how to conduct missions the flight crews the planners the ground guys uh and and the control center here in houston just became more and more capable as we went along and we were able to do the five flights in apollo because of what we did on gemiini and what we learned together the operations team all those people several hundred maybe is the total number of people i'm talking about came out of the gemiini program gangbusters to take on apollo we were ready to take on apollo we stumbled with the fire took a while to recover from that but the sense of this this elite team of high high performance people that came out of a pile of gemini coupled with the people who had been planning for the the lunar missions came together and by the time we got the hardware for for the apollo missions we were more than ready more than anxious to grab a hold of it and get on with it the the gemini story is a is a terrific story of a bridge that allowed the apollo sequence to go so well had we not done gemini apollo probably would have taken us 10 or 12 flights to land on the moon and something probably would have happened in one of those flights witness apollo 13 that might have changed the whole history of events matter of fact we want to come more deeply and in much more depth to some of those apollo missions but right now since we're at germany but i really feel strongly about that because uh i i think even amongst us we don't stop to reflect on it in white it says how quick how quickly would we have been able to do apollo if we had not done gemini the answer is we would never have had the courage to fly for example the first flight 10 days we'd have never had the courage to fly apollo 8 around the moon on the second manned flight etc etc it would have taken us a dozen flights or more during that era you helped write the mission rules yes you broke in mission control right let's go over some of the things that were done during that time the mission rules for example what did you build into there how how casual were those mission rules how bendable were they yes uh i i think i would first again put a little context on it um chris was our natural leader and he had a number of uh key players who were in the same age group as chris mid-30s or thereabouts then he had a bunch of guys like us who were all in their 20s so we came to all this as energetic [Laughter] perhaps a little brash but but probably quick learners for the most part i'm always amazed at the talent that again the country needed something and this talent got called out we were not you know selected by any process that says we were the best and the brightest we just managed to be here and to grow with the job and even uh and and of course within that some were quicker than others but even even the ones who were not as quick as the other ones knew what they had to do and worked at it and did it very well uh even even if uh even if it was a big stretch for them to do what they had to do so but we began to build what our technical term is mission rules i think of it as a code of ethics we began to build something so that when we flew we and the flight crews would know uh what we were going to do under certain sort of preset circumstances which allowed us to develop this ethics base for okay well if we got into something we didn't hadn't planned how far would we be willing to take it we found that most of us in responding to circumstances would end up with about the same solution given given the right amount of time to work on it so that we did have this sort of common base and we developed it by just starting to sit down and write what am i going to do if this happens what if this system fails what if the trajectory deviates over to this line uh what if we lose communications with the crude urine ascent during the powered flight phase of the vehicle etc and then we would write these down and then we would bring them in and we would argue about them emotionally argue about them and it wasn't like we had the code all figured out before we started writing we started writing sort of it met in the middle we started writing and we gradually tested everything and argued about it and decided whether that was really right or not for that what if condition and as we did that from the bottom up we began to realize that we had a more that we could we could capture our more umbrella approach or our higher order approach to this in terms of how much redundancy do i want to have left to continue and that became aware of risk versus gain we had a way then of packaging up at that level and then we began to reflect all these individual rules against this higher order of thought so that so that the more of that and we would do that hour after hour day after day where we would bring in and argue amongst ourselves and then argue with the next level of people in the flight director of the full team then we would argue and discuss with the crews and then we would do it all over again when we ran some simulations and tested it but we gradually built this very strong common understanding of how far were we willing to go and and when would we pull back you know stop doing something we developed this so that and it served us well roy because we and we encountered a lot of different things especially in gemini and then on apollo where the communications amongst people and the decision processes that were going on in people's head was almost like it was almost like a star trek calls it a mind meld or something like that but we knew what we knew what we were thinking without even having perhaps to express the full thought and everybody everybody the crews and the and the folks in the control center got comfortable that we kind of knew how far we were willing to go both for the cases we had defined the what-ifs the mission rules and that provided then a basis for us to respond to whatever else might happen in flight and we generally would arrive at about the same answer given the same death he wrote them so well the definition they're still in effect today are they not still in effect and they continue to be tweaked and tuned but fundamentally they haven't changed very much uh and and the other thing that happens is as a result of this documenting testing melding arguing and then fitting it into some higher order way of thinking about him became a system of thought for us as a matter of fact i suspect that in in almost any uh business that you could mention the people go through something of the same thing they may not have been ex as explicit about it in terms of risk versus gain and being sure that you know what you had to do before you do something and not just taking action for the sake of action i mean it's a lesson that all professions apply in their various ways they may not say it the same way we did but we kind of tried to get to the generic or the general underlying principle that we're dealing with and i suspect that everybody does it the same more or less they may articulate it differently but decisions are risk versus gain in personal life too in professional life do i want to do this what's going to cost me what's the downside what's the upside is it a good choice for me or my family or whatever and it works it works and we had enough time to pound on those things and then to test them in simulations and then to test them in flight where by the time we got to apollo we had a couple hundred people in this operations team that had a very very common understanding of of how far we would be willing to go and what would we do under certain circumstances and when would we pull back and and sort of retreat to a a less risky mission or or back away from an activity and so on it's it served us very very well it was made apollo easy and then suddenly on the eve of apollo tragedy struck right squarely in your midst and from a corner that was least expected yes let's take the apollo 1 situation and what it did to put the program essentially back on track in time yes uh january 67 bill anders bill and val anders were at our house for dinner they were running the test at the cape to get a phone call at the house bill left immediately i had to clean up and went over to the control center the fire was absolutely unexpected to us in retrospect it was a it was a risk we should have defensed in a design sense uh we should have defensed it but we didn't we had been also perhaps we had dealt with 14 psi oxygen in the gemini spacecraft perhaps we'd gotten used to it and didn't recognize it for the risk that it really was and then when we got to apollo it was probably compounded with we had didn't have a we did not have a tremendously rigorous materials program that is the materials that were allowed to be in the spacecraft were not really screened for flammability or or anything of that type there were more the materials were more dealt with from a convenience basis i need a blanket for this or i needed something for that or whatever and so on or and you put this stuff in on the displays but we didn't have a flammability criteria in our mind as people began to design and to add things to the spacecraft loose equipment in the spacecraft and lo and behold here we were with a 14 15 psi pure oxygen cabin we had a short somewhere started the fire and bingo the whole thing went the oxygen environment this loose material that was flammable and the spark the ignition source uh caught us and it was uh it was like you know a tremendous punch in the stomach to all of us uh three people uh some some and certainly uh we had worked with all three of those roger was first flight out but i'd worked with gus and ed and all of us had and uh gus was beloved i think of the people who worked on the program as they all are but gus had been in it from the beginning ed and roger came along in some of the later selections and i mean it just was a just a real blow to the psyche i guess of those of us who are working on the program we'd gotten to the sense of feeling that we had our we knew what we were doing and we were on top of it and you know think we kind of could figure out how to defense these threats but we missed that one and for whatever all the reasons and it certainly it certainly rose up and bit us very badly lost to those three guys on the pad and i think it also afterwards caused some major changes in the program that in the end were very healthy for the apollo program because prior to that time and i i don't say this critically and i don't have anything specific in mind but there was a sense of of trying to meet the schedule to land by the end of the decade and maybe maybe we were not being as thoughtful as we could be about some of the design some of the risk we were taking and so on in a design sense and and maybe we had gotten a little overconfident or something it's hard for me to say that's really true because i think people were really doing their very best and so on but this is a tough business and we missed something and it caught it and bit us very badly in the response to that a couple of things would come to my mind one i know it's been chronicled in a number of places in a number of ways but the role that george lowe played in bringing the program back together was was i mean just a remarkable accomplishment he he after the fire was named the program manager uh and uh he had his hands full but he brought together george smart very border non-genius i guess kind of a man that i had known and worked with in a lot of ways usually a couple levels away from me in terms of my job but everybody had the greatest of admiration for george he brought people together he brought the all the designers and the ops people in the astronaut corps he brought them all together and made them part of his team and he had these rotations around the country where he would go to california and check on the apollo the command module then he would go to bethpage and check on the lunar module then he would check on the other parts of the suits and the various other things that were being made then we go to washington and do his coordination with the launch vehicles that were being managed out of the marshall center he would do his work with the headquarters sam phillips became the apollo program director somewhere in that time frame uh it was i think before george but george came in and he had this pulling together okay you know we have a we have a problem we didn't we didn't account for it now we have to recover from it so we got to get together as a team and get this program back on track and i think by dint of his intellect and his energy and his way with people george was able to affect a great deal of that recombining that needed to occur after the fire bring people back together where they had perhaps been fractured a little bit by arguing about how did it happen why did it happen and how could we you know so yes you can go through that guilt trip for a while but sooner or later you had to get back with okay now let's go do it also so uh and any and in in that process he clearly brought the people at this center that that i work for in the person of chris and of course the astronaut corps max regiae he brought those people into and welded them if that's the right word into a real force prior to that time a lot of the operations people chris's organization had been involved in the gemini flights when they came to apollo there was an existing structure where everything was kind of had its way of being done so there's a little problem with the people who are the operations people who are coming out of gemini to fit into that and so on and so on but after the fire and under george's leadership that became a kind of a single integrated team i would call it and george was very adept intellectually of course but he's also very adept at bringing people together and threading through masses of confusing confusing stuff and arriving at the right decision i'd also comment on uh one of the other things that happened then there is somewhere along the line and i don't know who made this assignment it might have been george it might have been george and deak together or deke by himself they sent frank out to uh to california to the downy plane frank borman and frank's job there although it probably had a lot of technical things to it was to rally a team of people who had who saw themselves as having been defeated perhaps by the fire or certainly beaten not they considered themselves the heavies they were the heavies in this thing and so they had a big emotional uh wound of sorts to heal and to get himself back on track and i think frank god bless him brought a lot of that to the downing group i don't know how the downey group received it but and and they would have their own opinion that but i think frank helped with this healing process uh and and uh you know the search for the guilty and why did this happen and how could you let this be moved from that stage on to now let's get on with it we got to we got to move it forward so in that respect he was a very good representative of george who was in george lowe who's in effect trying to cause the same transformation to occur okay we've had the problem okay we've had all our recriminations now we've got to get the hell on with it and we got a big job to do so let's get together we're all going to pull on this thing together in the same way and uh we're going to make it facts of life in a remarkably short time you had a workable spacecraft and you were getting ready for apollo 7. yes remarkably short yeah yes i wonder if perhaps that could be done today well uh we you know with respect to being able to repeat that today we it was a unique time i mean there was a lot of things that the program had going for it that have fractured uh since that time today for example you just go to washington and uh when when in those days when you went to washington i mean of course you talked to the white house and there might have been four or five six at most committee chairmen probably not even that many that needed that needed to be involved discussing the problem resolving whatever with those folks that was the end of it then it got done that way today it's much more there's much more opinion uh in washington as you know the congress has got a lot of members who who who are asserting themselves and so the the strong committee chairman simple clear easier decision-making um it's not as obvious today there's just and i'm not criticizing that i think there are a lot more points of view that are prevalent today that we didn't have in those days and so on there's there's less single-mindedness about what we're doing today than there was in those days maybe that's a better way to say it uh so that the uh so that but that's just one example of the stuff we had going for us in those days and it allowed people who had the talent to cause it to be successful in coming in healing the wounds getting over the problem getting over the recriminations and moving on to uh to life whether we could repeat that today i don't know it's it's tougher today because there's just sort of you get a sense of things being somewhat more fractured uh than than they were in those days and maybe that's a little also nostalgic and looking back a long time it may seem that way looking back maybe at the time it was not that way or at least people might feel it was not that way but i always had the sense it was somewhat more single-minded in those days than than it is today there's just more opinion there's more things to balance there's not the threat this was conducted against the threat that existed represented by the cold war and so on there was a probably a serious sense in the american people that maybe we were falling behind maybe our opponents in the soviet union were really going to win not only the space race but just win in general the threat of of the weapons that started to come into play in those times all the other things that were going on made it easier perhaps for people to be single-minded about it today americans are not threatened about activities in space they're not threatened about anything that the russians or the japanese or anybody else is doing they don't feel threatened by any of that and frankly that's good i mean their security is not threatened by any of that it's an absolutely positive thing on the other hand that that then there doesn't induce them to want to go do a lot of stuff as was the environment we had in the 60s and the support that we had during the apollo program by the way i also would like to say a few things about that while it popped into my head uh different people this is true of anything you know if different people have different takes on this stuff uh i had a sense that especially in response from just people in america perhaps as personified by my parents my parents and i think they were typical of a lot of people in america were very very proud of america's program they were extremely proud that one of their children had an opportunity to be such a player in it and it engendered in me a sense of a realization that i was in this position and doing this thing but i was doing it for other people i was doing it for for for the folks in our country and uh so i had this i developed a sense of stewardship about the program like yes i was in this position of doing wonderful things and having great fun at it but i was doing it for large numbers of other people and therefore i felt like i was always answering to them like this is why we're doing this i mean both in my head and sometimes in public but my inside me i had the sense of uh we were stewards for this program it was important to the country we had to do it well because of what it meant to to the country at the time uh and therefore i i began to think of it that way even at a fairly early age i mean i was 20s and barely into my 30s when i was doing a lot of this but i had this sense of stewardship about the program in the sense that that i just happened to be involved in it and therefore had the obligation to do it real well for the sake of a lot of other people for whom it was also very very important uh and i would say in connection with that that i was raised also dealing with the media and for me that was quite an eye-opening thing i mean press conferences and so on i i remember chris and chris graft and walt williams they at the mercury control center and they would say glenn all those reporters out there they're all hassleless about this go out and explain his stuff to him wait please i mean people didn't know about orbits or anything remember it was all so brand new at that time so get out there and explain that to those things and then they laughed and it was like sort of a sense of throwing this young kid to the wolves you know and the press and i don't want to say just the press but the way the country operated including the role that the media played at the time made us and made the country run a completely open space program and in the end i think although it was difficult to see at the front end that became one of our major strengths i mean people knew what we were doing they knew why we were doing it we were not bsing them about it uh we we had when i was on duty as a flight director every shift almost i mean it didn't always stay that way but almost every shift we would come over and visit with people either in florida back here in houston and explain what we were doing and why and then a lot of other interviews around the fight and a lot of times the press would be very tough on us you know insisting on demands and demanding answers to certain kind of questions and and that was fair i mean i gradually began to understand that that was fair and that it was another check or balance or whatever you want to call it in our system where uh where it forced us to be conscious i could go back to my stewardship idea which is why i relate the two we were answering to a lot of people about what we're doing and how we're doing it and i can personalize it through my parents to american people but but one way to do that was through the media the media was the intermediary by which that happened and and although i think there was a strong testing all the time by the media i always had the sense much as i did in terms of a sense of support from the emotional support from american people my parents personified that we had the same sort of support from the from the media the media indeed seemed to love the program the people who covered it seemed to love the program as much as we did a different point of view and they had different responsibilities than we did but nevertheless they seem to love it and care about it the same way we we do and and i could detect that in various ways but especially for example when we would have a difficult problem in flight i mean the apollo 13 thing clearly comes to mind my sense when i talked to the media the next morning after that night's work was that you know they they were there to help us they were there to help us and and uh they were as concerned as we were and uh they they had as much of their themselves invested in the program and its success in a way as we did and i i felt you know media relations can be sometimes difficult than adversary but i felt i always felt somewhat nurtured by it i i felt that they tested us which was fair and i felt that when the chips were really down and we faced great danger they were with us they certainly would not tolerate bad mistakes and would and would publicize whatever need to be publicized in terms of the things that might have caused things to happen but when the chips were down and and the stuff was flying they were on our side and they were trying to be helpful in that and i said i always had the feeling that we were getting this emotional support from him and it was good and while i'm on that i might say one other thing i talked earlier about the leadership that people like gilruth and walt williams and chris craft provided to us and how you know as a young man i thought gee everybody must be this way if i thought about it at all i mean i lived in a world where people were just almost perfectly matched for the jobs that they had to do and america somehow pulled them out of its inventory and these people showed up who were just perfect for what needed to be done and you know i guess i if i thought about it at all i would have thought that everybody lived in that kind of environment you know it's taken me some degree of experience later on i realized it's really not the way it is all the time but we were extremely fortunate and the point i want to make is apollo 13. i came on duty shortly after the tank blew worked all night to stabilize it and we've gotten things kind of somewhat settled down more or less to the point where we were entertaining the various options we had for coming back you know swing around the moon which engines to use how much to burn what oceans shoot for how quickly to try to get back et cetera it's all risk gain balancing uh and sort of towards the end of my shift after we'd gotten 10 hours of stabilization to occur we began to entertain the strategy for getting it back and i worked that for a while then i think i came over here and did the press conference after uh after the after my shift which by again another experience of sensing this emotional support from from the people who are covering the flight who had by the way thinned out by that time in history after the apollo flights but then i went back to the control center and continued to work him a little bit with jerry griffin i believe and then we went downstairs and briefed the nasa management tom payne and was the administrator george lowe was his deputy at that time and all the people here at the center and jerry and i went in there and i laid out the options for the return here back to here's the options here's our recommendation here's what we think we ought to do and why a little discussion about it about whether we could get back faster or not was basically the questions and we discussed whether that was a good idea and what we'd have to do to do that and traded it off etc and got where we got and after a brief discussion of of that the only question that was asked of us that i can remember of any significance was by tom payne whose question was what can we do to help you guys what can we do to help you guys so you know here we are 30 years old you know dealing with this problem of national significance and the only question the management really had for us is what can they do to help us more and uh again at the time that didn't profoundly register on me but but the more i thought about it later i said my goodness doesn't that say something about you know a chain of command the roles that people play in it the delegations that they make and the confidence that they have and and the courage to live with those delegations i mean weird 30 year old kids uh i don't want to say kids but you're 30 year old young people doing this stuff and all they gave us was their complete support i noticed that you singled out apollo 13 would you say that was the culmination perhaps the highlights of the various flights well let's see i spent 10 or 12 years working on how to conduct flights safely and how much risk to take and how far you could go and how to invent ways to get out of problems and so on i spent i spent a decade or better doing that from 1959 almost when i started on it and we had a lot of experience with it apollo 13 was perhaps if you were designing a test case it was perhaps the maximum test case you could provide in terms of damage to the status quo or the condition that we had on the way out and the amount of margin that existed to solve your way through it and get back alive it was it was i think the maximum case that that we ever faced and it was close to the maximum case that you could have designed to test the system of people to respond to it you could have designed cases that we could not have gotten back from right i mean if we were in lunar orbit the lamb was gone and then we also lost the engine blue and then we were stuck but in terms of a case that would allow a threading of the needle to get home with no margins anywhere along the line and yet pose a very serious long-term couple days problem to deal with i think that's what apollo 13 was it was probably in retrospect it was probably what we i don't want to say we train for it but we were trained to we trained and thought and prepared ourselves to be able to handle eventualities as bad as that uh with the confidence that if there was a way to thread through it that we would find it and be able to make it i said that for myself and i say that for the people who were involved at the time i i think for all of them they would tell you that it was it was a maximum if a simulation team went off to design a case this would be one of the maximum tests that they could have generated that had a way to get home but with very little margin in the threading of the needle all the way back to get there in all kind of dimensions and parameters so it is sort of a maximum challenge maximum test opposed to this team that it's been off and on various people coming in and out of it but the core team spent you know a decade putting itself together and preparing itself to deal with it it's another one of these american inventory things uh the country needed a a solution and some people to do it and lo and behold by the end of what we had been doing for the country we were able to do that and that's true in probably other a lot of other professions too certainly certainly the country calls out the best in people when it really needs it and somehow people show up outsiders point of view i'd like your comment on it it seemed to me that it was absolutely amazing the way in which the various flight directors concerned with that flight each having their own team were able to peel off do separate sections and put it all together under common guidance yes yes for example uh gene was on the team before me gene kranz and uh he had had a long day it was a long day in terms of hours it wasn't it was kind of easy floating out to the moon there wasn't much going on tv shows etc uh but uh but you know shortly before his shift was scheduled to end is when the houston we've got a problem report came in and at first it was not terribly clear how bad this problem was and one of the lessons that we had learned was don't go solving something that you don't know exist you got to be sure that what you really have and because of the scale of the problem and the explosion and all that it induced there was a lot of measurements and there's a general presumption that gee we couldn't had one thing so bad that all these measurements are doing this so it was generally a a go slow let's not jump to a conclusion and and get get you know get going down the wrong path and gene struggled with that for probably i don't know 45 minutes or an hour or so at the end of which time it was becoming clear that we had to get people over into the lunar module that it was indeed that bad and by the and when it got to that stage it was clear that gina gene's team had been at the end of a long day it was time for my team to pick up which we did and we stayed on for the next eight or ten hours doing all the things that that it entailed to stabilize this thing and then at the end of that shift begin they entertain how we would get back to the earth the gene went off and looked at the gene's team went off and looked at what tried to reconstruct what happened although it was something of a that was a lost cause at that point worrying about that and a gene's team eventually got redeployed to work on the entry offline completely to us and then jerry griffin came on behind me in the morning and picked up the continuing of the return strategy and and actually at that point we we kind of had a game plan it was don't let anything else screw up and don't get anything else anything else worse than it is we kind of got a little thread here we can we can move through these needles if eyes of these needles if we're lucky so let's keep it that way and milt windler of course was on the flight and then he picked up after he picked up after jerry i can't remember if gene actually ran another shift until entry or not my memory is that he didn't but he may have come in another shift or so before that but we all sort of had to do this and and we had this sense of handover difficult to let something go i wanted your time to leave especially if you just reel real deep into it on the other hand after eight or ten hours there's a need for a fresh set of players on the console and it's it's actually relaxing in that kind of an operation if when the new guy comes on and you get them all briefed and he starts to just sit there and watch for a little while because one of the features of working on a console in that kind of environment is that it's very helpful to have someone else who's completely attuned to the job sitting alongside of you we call it ride and shotgun because sometimes they can see and think about things that because this person the on-duty guy is actively dealing with he may not have had time to think about something else and the shotgun rider can say hey you know this looks like it's going a little awry or maybe you need to pay some attention to this or why don't you get some people offline working on that the other thing i would say about it is we talked about flight directors and teams equally important was the fact that during those flights we had these this operations team that you have seen in the control center in the back rooms around it and we sort of had our own way of doing things in our own uh team and we were fully prepared to decide whatever had to be decided but in addition to that we had the engineering design teams that would follow the flight along and look at various problems that occurred and put their own disposition on them sometimes that would affect the flight in our decisions but mostly it would get them ready for what they had to do to fix this thing when it when they when they're getting ready for the subsequent flights uh but they do follow it along and so there's a there's a the ops team doing its thing and the and the engineering design team is kind of following along in parallel in somewhat of a shadow mode and they're not responsible for real-time decision-making in any way but they're there for support and on a number of problems by the time the flight team got around to saying oh boy we need to get a problem we need to get a solution for the carbon dioxide because the thing we got ain't going to last you know their response is hey glenn we're already working on that we've been working on that for the last you know since it happened so when do you need a solution buy we need a solution in like you know 24 hours okay we'll have one for you and uh and the support of of the engineering team and and all the not only here in houston but connected with all the factories and plants around the country they had mit involved and of course the downy plan involved and everybody else i suppose in the world figuring out how how to respond to all these things but again that was part of this this network of support of people had their certain jobs to do they knew what it was they knew how they fit in and they were anticipating and off doing it it similar to the way the role that the media played and the coverage of the flights and they're keeping it honest but being supportive of it kind of a role it's the support we got from the american people the support we got from our own management it's very heartwarming tiger teague put it directly to the point he for whom this auditorium was named tiger said you know apollo 13 was the time when for the first time the media was actually a working part of the mission control team they were here and they were telling the world yes what you people were doing that's a good way to put it you were part of the team the beauty was part of the team yes tiger teague bless his soul got it we love that man well let's continue then because right at that point in apollo when we deviated to talk about 13 and what it really meant we had just derived apollo 1 and the spacecraft was now ready to fly again and you were the lead flight director for apollo 7. yes and although the flight went very well it wasn't all piece cake there was a yeah there was some testiness involved and you know you can attribute whatever you want to uh that but uh it was the first time we actually had a serious falling out between the ground crews and the flight crews and it was a fracture in what had otherwise been a relatively seamless uh cooperative kind of an effort and i guess i guess since i was a participant in it i've shied away from making judgments about it but i would say that the events of apollo 7 were responded to publicly and they were responded to by the crews of apollo 8 9 10 11 and so on so what had been uh a fracture in a very strong team was healed immediately and by the people who would be in the best position to cause that healing and that would be the subsequent flight cruise and apollo 7 was difficult for me because i was as i was kind of upset with with what went on uh felt it was uncalled for but uh but it we got through it and uh and uh it it the flight worked okay worked fine and uh and we were ready to get on with apollo 8. i mean and i knew before we went into the flight that we're going to be doing apollo 8. so uh we're ready to get on with it that's really the essence of apollo 7 is that it was a successful flight yes it set the ground and set the ground rules and set the scenes for spacecraft yes and set the stage set the stage for apollo 8 it certainly would have been difficult to do apollo 8 if we had a lot of spacecraft problems i would say also that compared to gemini and this is not to criticize any of the people involved in either program but i think the maturity of things that we knew how to do in the country was just less there in gemini than it was in apollo we had a difficult problem with fuel cells thrusters and a variety of other things by the time we got to apollo a lot of the lessons learned from gemiini had been applied to the design the hardware and so on and people the spacecraft were really behaved pretty well there were some notable exceptions but by and large the spacecraft worked pretty well we got them in flight and didn't give us a lot of the same uh subsystem failure or subsystem impending failure problems that we had on gemini and i attribute that to just the learning process that was going on in the country and all the gemini lessons also got applied on the design side where people were figuring out well look what they learned here we'll do this little different and hopefully avoid some of those difficulties in the future we were quite surprised when we got to it how well the spacecraft the command service module in apollo how well it worked compared to what we were used to dealing with in terms of uh of uh space flight programs were surprised well i mean i guess it was i because i didn't have much time to think about it here i was all off doing all this gemini stuff and we flew a couple on manned apollos i was involved in those and uh and but when we got around to the manned vehicle uh it it worked pretty well then the lunar module came along and it worked pretty well too for the frail aluminum foil thing that it was it seemed to work pretty well people had given a lot of thought to it it seemed to be designed to do its job and just about that time the people here put on their thinking cap and said let's go to the moon with apollo 8. did you share in that decision uh no not really that was a fairly i mean the decision itself was a fairly uh closely held activity while it was in the process of being made and i don't know all the details of it because i wasn't involved in it but my sense of it is that the idea either originally came from george lowe or chris kraft or both together or something i'm not quite sure how because in no time at all those two guys had bonded that they were on the right path and had begun to test the idea with the number of other people and you know it was at first when you when i first heard it my reaction was holy mackerel i mean we're just getting started and then the more you think about it it said that's really the right thing to do what i mean by that is the lunar module was not ready it was a couple months down the road the saturn five had had two unmanned flights one went very well and then the next one had a variety of propulsion problems to it so we had to fly the saturn v again now once you decide you're going to put people or even a spacecraft on board a saturn v you i mean and run the engines and burn all the fuel in the tanks you might as well take it have it take you to wherever you really want to go rather than just in some halfway half direction or half distance so so the idea of gee why don't we're going to use it anyway so why don't we point it in the right direction and go to the moon and then we'll jump over all of these apollo all of these lunar issues how do we get there what's the trajectory what are all the abort modes what's the navigation like how accurately can we do it how's the crew what's the barbecue modes keep the spacecraft nice and warm and toasty like it should be etc etc all those things got resolved you know forced to be resolved in a planning sense before we flew and an experienced sense by flying so that after we had done that what remained we got we had the saturn v under our belt we had the lunar experience under our belt lunar orbit experience anyway with all that that entailed what we had to do was get the lunar module to enable the final landing and then we did that in three steps earth orbit lunar orbit and then down it's great great courageous decision making wonderful leadership as you were watching apollo 8 take place were you working the mission oh yeah i worked it yeah i worked apollo 8 what were the sensations what were your thoughts as you saw those guys really making the long haul achieving escape velocity alone oh yes well um you know it was something that we had thought about and planned for we were going to go to the moon at some point i think what was energizing about it is that we were going to get to go there that early in the sequence a lot of the apollo planning up until that time had these elaborate uh you know sort of uh prerequisites that we had to do this and that the other thing to get there so it would have entailed a lot of flights but this was kind of like it was kind of like a just an absolutely bold genius stroke to to to leapfrog a whole bunch of problems and get them solved at one time without without an unreasonable risk in terms of the gain that we were trying to achieve as measured by are we going to get this apollo thing to the moon and land before the decade is out so in those terms after the first shock of the thought and i would say this occurred within seconds to minutes after the first shock of the thought not days uh yes you start thinking boys that sounds that sounds like the right thing to do yeah can we do that we can do that yeah what do we have to do to do that you know it's quickly turned in how do we make this happen not should we make it happen how did you feel when suddenly those words started coming back and in the beginning god i loved that i loved it i mean i had no idea what the guys were going to say and you know in general the the crews off and on had had various reactions that they had or responses or whatever in flight and my sense of it always was that it was generally pretty appropriate but here we were and you know i guess this captures forever i guess seared in my memory that that night of being out in the control center and then having them come over the hill around the moon and into into calm and then go through that sequence it was very moving and i sometimes describe i sometimes describe my feeling about what we had done in the space graham in terms that border a little bit on kind of a religious flavor to it i mean everybody has their own version of that and that's fine with me but for me it was a sense of i mean we we had people go to another planet you know live on another planet we had taken this very bold step we were lucky in a lot of respects looking back we say boy if this had happened this way instead of that way we'd have been in trouble so we were lucky so since it maybe we're being a little looked after and i talked about at my control center as a church i mean so it was where we did what we considered to be pretty profound things and uh not to compare it to religion but profoundly so i felt very i feel very emotional and personal about it all and the choice of that passage and even a passage in itself but that particular passage just seemed to me to be it could not have been more perfectly i mean however long it's been some 30 years later i'm not sure i would have suggested anything any better than that in retrospect and what uh what the crew did that night and uh again i think it's a tribute to you know america has this inventory of people and here comes here comes the people when you need him out they come and and then to cap it off with that kind of appropriateness and dignity maybe it's not quite the right word as again america asked for him and they got him and they were the right people and then they did the right thing and they conducted themselves in exactly the right way where again the sense of stewardship i'm sure everybody in america just loved it you know it was it was it was what they wanted to hear even if they didn't know it at the time talking earlier about the fact that one of the tenets of nasa's license is to be in the public domain yes and here was well if you will barman was a deacon in the church yeah i think he was yes theory was relying on his religion yes to give america a christmas a message a christmas message christmas from the space program yes from the space program yes

Channel: Space Oral History

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Id: NKuJX86GH0A

Length: 99min 13sec (5953 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021