FTV: Mission Control

 

     The 1995 movie adaptation of Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon spawned a catch phrase that took on a life of its own.  In Apollo 13, Tom Hanks (who portrayed Lovell) repeated the famous, “Houston, we have a problem” after the explosion on board their Moon bound spacecraft was first called in by his fellow astronaut Fred Haise (Bill Paxton).  It seems everyone decided that Lovell’s declaration was the perfect fit for any and all problems.  Personally, my favorite line in the movie comes from Flight Director Gene Kranz (Ed Harris) who informs the Mission Control team that it is their job to get the crew back home safely and that, “Failure is not an option.”  Growing up in the heyday of NASA’s push to get us into space and then to the Moon, I was very familiar with the Mission Control set up that guided the space flights.  I did not realize at the time that just about all the events I watched unfold in that room during those missions were being guided by the people who invented the art of ‘Mission Control’.  One of the prime movers and shakers in this period was one Christopher Columbus Kraft (2/28/1924 – 7/22/2019).

     In his excellent book (Flight – My Life in Mission Control – 2001 – Dutton Press), Kraft recounted the monumental effort that the Space Task Group (STG) put forth to give birth to America’s Space Program.  The United States’ first efforts to reach space were being handled by the Air Force and the Navy.  Their lack of success and inter-service rivalries were part of the reason that the USSR managed to launch the first artificial Earth satellite, Sputnik.  Even the Russians were rather surprised at the world’s reaction to their success.  Moscow’s Pravda newspaper made a brief mention of the launch buried at the bottom of page one.  Even the Soviet Union’s leader, Nikita Khruschev, had gone to bed after their rocket scientists had reported the successful launch and orbit to him (and were satisfied but not overly excited about the whole event).  

     The entire concept of a Space Race didn’t actually start until the Western press plastered front page headline banners (accompanied by long stories and analysis of the Soviet launch).  The London and New York papers broke the news to the world and immediately began asking questions like, “Do the Russians realize they had a technical marvel on their hands?” and “Is the United States that far behind the Communists’ technical abilities?”  Congress was enraged and demanded hearings so they could at least pin the blame for this ‘missile gap’ on someone.  The alarmists in the press ignited feelings of fear and rage in the general public.  The secrecy under which the USSR developed its space program kept the rest of the world in the dark.  The key details of their space efforts and even the name of their main rocket program designer were kept secret for many years.  Without the full truth being reported, the western world did indeed undergo moments of panic.  A general feeling of dread was voiced openly;  “If the Reds can launch a satellite, can they also put nuclear weapons in space?”

      In the scientific world, nobody was overly surprised that someone had launched a satellite.  Both the United States and the Russians had announced plans to launch an instrumental package as far back as 1955 when the International Geophysical Year (IGY) was announced.  This 18 month scientific program to study the Earth and upper atmosphere was going to be carried out in the U.S. by the Army.  The team they were relying on to get the job done was headed by Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket scientists.  They had been the prime developers of the German rockets that terrorized England and came close to changing the final outcome of WWII.  Von Braun and much of his team had been secreted to America near the end of World War II in a clandestine project code named ‘Operation Paperclip’.  President Eisenhower wanted the American satellite launch to portray a more peaceful image so he had the project initially  transferred to the Naval Research Laboratory and not to von Braun’s team.

     NRL’s Vanguard rocket fizzled on the launch pad.  For some reason, the Pentagon had deliberately restricted von Braun’s Jupiter rocket in 1956 fearing he would ‘accidentally’ put a nose cone in orbit (these facts only resurfaced years later via declassified documents so the reasoning for this action is lost in time).  A month after the October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik, the Russians launched a larger payload (Sputnik II) with a dog named Laika on board.  The public now added their voices to the furor over America lagging behind the Soviets.   Animal lovers joined the fray when it was learned Laika was sacrificed for propaganda purposes (the dog died in oxygen deprived sleep before the capsule burned up on re-entry).  The country demanded answers and action.

     The President finally realized the Vanguard rocket was not going to get the U.S. in orbit.  Ike  authorized the launch of a small satellite (a 31 pound object named Explorer) built by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California aboard one of the Army’s Jupiter rockets on January 31, 1958.  A few weeks later, Vanguard finally put another small payload in orbit.  The director of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, Hugh Dryden, recognized that NACA needed to begin preparations to transition from aeronautics to space flight as well.  NACA formed the Space Task Group (STG) which was a forward looking step on Dryden’s part.  On October 1, 1958, NACA was rechristened NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) by order of President Eisenhower.  NASA was to be a civilian agency in charge of the American space program.  As a NACA employee, Chris Kraft was already appointed to the STG and this group began to formulate NASA’s plan to put men in space.

      Chris Craft was born in Phoebus, Virginia in 1924 but his hometown was long ago swallowed up by the urban sprawl of Hampton and Newport News.  He was an active child who overcame serious burns he received after falling into a trash fire at age three.  The burns to his knees and left hand were less severe than the damage done to his right hand.  It remained weaker for the rest of his life (but not enough to make him become a lefty).  He first studied mechanical engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and felt somewhat overwhelmed by the subject until he enrolled in a class called Introduction to Engineering.  This class introduced Chris to the phrase, “It is not fatal to change your mind,” and it not only helped him find direction in his studies, it would become a guiding thought throughout his career in aerospace.

     Craft would be part of the Class of 1945, but World War II began to siphon both instructors and students into the war effort (the entire Class of ‘42 entered Officer Candidate School).  A good number of ‘45 decided to apply for Naval Flight School but Chris’s injured right hand sent him back to VPI.  As one of the first to receive a degree in aeronautical engineering from VPI, he was given an opportunity to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) at Langley Field, but he felt it was too close to home.  Instead, he accepted a job offer at Chance Vought, a major aircraft manufacturing company in Connecticut.  He never worked a day for them and in the end, it was a move that opened a much better and exciting world for Kraft.

     When Chris arrived at Chance Vought, a gatekeeper receptionist stonewalled him because he did not have a birth certificate with him (which no one had mentioned he would need).  “Security reasons – you can’t enter without a birth certificate,” she told him.  She cited the same regulations when she refused to let him talk to the men who had interviewed him at VPI.  Thus stymied, he went back to his hotel and called NACA to see if their offer was still on the table.  He recalled, “I asked if  their job offer was still valid.  They said, ‘It sure is!  How soon can you be here?’  ‘Next week,’ I said.  ‘Make it Thursday, see you then.’”  He packed his bag, wrote Chance Vought a short note why he wasn’t joining them, and then set off on the first leg of his journey into aerospace.  NACA was a good job even though he had no way of knowing then that when President Eisenhower created NASA from NACA, he would become a vital cog in the United States space program.

     After twelve years with NACA, Kraft was becoming increasingly unhappy with is position.  He lived for the action involved in gathering true flight data testing aircraft and saw his job becoming more and more administrative.  He wasn’t taking good care of himself and suffered from several health issues.  Little did he know his wife, Betty Anne, was praying he would find a different position.  When the Russians flew Sputnik, the wheels turned,  NACA became NASA, and Kraft’s career changed very quickly.  When he joined the 35 member Space Task Group, his area became ‘flight operations’ – it was a new frontier and nobody knew exactly what they were doing.  “The job ahead had never been done before.  We would learn by doing.  So we got started,” he recalled.

     The engineering at Langley Field was pretty straightforward stuff:  if they needed a new instrument, for example, they simply made one.  With NASA, they were introduced to a whole new level of organization via a device called an RFP.  Request for Proposal was a governmental tool that compelled them to outline with exacting detail what they needed, how it would do the job, and how much it would cost.  These RFPs were then sent out to private contractors who would compete for the job by returning their plan.  The old joke around the astronaut corps went something like this:  “How do you feel about flying in a spacecraft built by the lowest bidder?”  Naturally, the details and timeline to put out an RFP and get the completed proposals back from the contractors meant there were no ‘instant fixes’ – government jobs took a long time to complete.

     The United States would not even launch its first successful satellite until January 31, 1961 when Explorer 1 went into orbit.  Never-the-less, the STG were already laying the groundwork to put a human in space.  Before there was a rocket or a capsule to accomplish this mission, Chris Kraft and his Flight Division began working on what the flight plan would look like.  They simultaneously began working on how these missions would be guided and the design of ‘Mission Control’ also began to take shape.  They built Mission Control before there was a mission to control.  

     People often asked Kraft what Werhner von Braun’s work for NASA was at that time and the answer was ‘nothing’.  Von Braun was still working for the Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama and wanted nothing to do with NASA.  This changed when he finally got wind of what they were planning.  The Huntsville group would eventually be charged with developing the rockets NASA needed, but von Braun never got to fulfill his greatest ambition.  He wanted to run the whole show but as Kraft pointed out, he was a ‘rocket guy’ and his talents would have been wasted anywhere else but designing and testing NASA’s rocket fleet.  

     Kraft never took credit for being ‘the guy who did it all’.  In his book, he singles out key people like Bob Gilruth, Max Fagat, Caldwell Jones, and Chuck Matthews for doing the multitude of needed tasks.  “Our part is simple,” Matthews said, “Chris, you come up with the basic mission plan.  You know, the bottom-line stuff on how we fly a man from the launch pad into space and back again.  It would be good if you got him back alive.”  That was the mission in a nutshell and as the rocket power to do that was tested launching satellites, the planning to put a man in space was already well underway – it was called Project Mercury..  

     Watching the workings of both NASA and SpaceX control centers today makes it look, not exactly simple, but routine.  In the late 1950s, there was no routine and most of the procedures employed today have their origins with the STG.  Kraft points our that vital questions had to be addressed:  “How do we measure the trajectory during launch so that we know when to abort if the rocket goes haywire?  How do we know the capsule reached orbit?  What kind of radar beacons do we need?  What do we need on the ground to track them?  What instruments, dials, and gauges does the guy in the capsule need?  How much does he need to know and how much do we need to tell him?  How do we track the health and performance of the capsule and the guy inside?  What kind of electronic aids do we need to find the capsule after it splashes down in the ocean?”

     The questions asked spawned more questions and everyone of them needed to be answered for a mission to succeed.  The answers would influence the design of the space capsule and the design of the recovery efforts.  For a company to bid on this project, the RFP would have to contain information about all of the nagging questions that kept Kraft and his team awake at night.  The STG gave the contractors four weeks to submit their proposals and on December 11, 1958, Charlie Donlan divided the group into teams to review them.  On January 12, 1959, the contract for Project Mercury were awarded to McDonnell with a (hoped for) deadline to get it done – three years.

     In the interim, the group wanted to learn everything they could about the Air Force’s Atlantic Missile Range at Cape Canaveral.  To their surprise, they were stiff armed by the Air Force – the boys in blue resented NASA for ‘shoving them aside in the manned space business’.  The officers there saw the NASA guys as rookies and the recovery people at Patrick Air Force base were especially hostile.  Just to use the Air Force facilities required reams and reams of paper work (“mounds of gobbledygook,” Kraft called it).   The STG had to hire extra clerks to wade through it all.  A trip to Los Angeles to figure out the logistics of ordering the Atlas rocket they needed from the Ballistic Missile Division of the Air Force was also an eye-opener.  At least the Space Technology Laboratory folks and Air Force personnel who worked there felt some responsibility to be helpful – they had to ensure the rocker’s success.  As Kraft summed it up, “There is no such thing as a money-back guarantee in the missile business.  [The BMD] knew if the rocket blew up, it was their fault.  If it didn’t, everybody’s attention would be on that Mercury capsule up there in space.”  Kraft knew that once launched, the survival questions became Mission Control’s perview.

     Such was the state of affairs of the newly christened ‘Manned Space Program’.  The idea of getting an astronaut in space by the end of the 1950s wouldn’t pan out.  In Part 2, we will pick up the story as Kraft and his colleagues began putting the pieces of the MSP together in the early 1960s.

 

Top Piece Video:  It had to be Rocket Man – right?  From 1972 at Royal Festival Hall.