From the Vaults – Mission Control – Part 2

 

     In Part 1 of Mission Control, we introduced Christopher Columbus Kraft, the man who guided the birth of ‘Mission Control’ for the United States space program.  Kraft and his group invented the position that became commonly known as ‘Flight’.  This call sign has been used for the director who rules over NASA’s ground control team during all of the manned space missions.  Gene Kranz, the Flight Director on duty at the time the Apollo 13 flight experienced an explosion en route to the Moon, may have become more famous than some FDs, but he was hired and trained by Chris Kraft.  In Ron Howard’s excellent movie (an adaptation of astronaut Jim Lovell’s book, Lost Moon), actor Ed Harris (as Kranz) tells his team that, “Failure is not an option” – a quote that became almost as famous as Lovell’s, “Houston, we have a problem.”  In his book Flight, Kraft explains how even Lovell’s account missed a couple of key points in his book.  This tells us how much of an insider the man who helped invent Mission Control really was (we will get back to Apollo 13 in a bit).

     As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, NASA’s idea about having a man in space before the end of the 50s decade had succumbed to reality:  they just weren’t ready.  The Atlas rocket NASA was counting on was having problems that made putting a manned capsule on top of one a dicey proposition.  The decision was made to give Werhner von Braun’s rocket development team in Huntsville, Alabama a shot:  why not use their Redstone rocket to do the job?  While the rocket and Mercury capsule were being developed, NASA was screening hundreds of applicants looking for  astronauts to train for the ride of a lifetime.  On a third front, Kraft and members of the Space Task Group (STG) were writing the mission rulebook and designing the ground control stations that would guide the flights.  The application pool was eventually whittled down to the finalists, dubbed the Mercury 7.  The development phase of the program really didn’t excite the American public until the astronauts were introduced.  Suddenly, they had the ‘All American Hero’ tag attached to them and America went ga-ga over those daring young men destined to fly in space.

     Even congress had a hard time knowing what to do with the program.  They really didn’t understand it even though they were the ones allocating the money to develop it.  That all changed on May 16, 1963 when Alan Shepard made the first sub-orbital flight.  Shepard was angry because he should have been the first man in space, but an overly cautious rocket development team decided they needed one more test flight.  In the last test flight before Shepard was scheduled to go, Chimp-anaut Ham went higher and farther than he should have due to a minor malfunction.  By insisting on one more Chimp flight, von Braun opened the door for the Russians to get Yuri Gagarin in space first.  Just as the launch of the first satellite (Sputnik) gave the American public the mistaken idea the Soviet program was far more advanced than it really was, putting the first man in space doubled down on this idea.

     One person in a position of power can do wonders for a program under fire.  President John F. Kennedy was enthralled by the Manned Space Program.  He invited the Mercury 7 team to the White House right after Shepard’s flight and listened intently to their description of a circumlunar flight planned for the future.  Kennedy asked, “Why aren’t you considering landing men on the Moon?  If we’re going to beat the USSR, don’t we need to do something more than just flying around the Moon?  What do you need?”  Program director Robert Gilruth told him, “Sufficient time, presidential support, and a congressional mandate.”  Kennedy followed up by taking a trip to Cape Canaveral to see what all the excitement was about.  Kennedy quickly became a space cadet.

      Literally weeks after the United States stuck a toe in the ocean of space, Kennedy gave his famous,  “We don’t do these things because they are easy, we do them because they are hard,” speech.  He told the nation, “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.”  Kraft says, “For the minute, I was paralysed with shock.  My mind was going off in a hundred directions and I was sorting through the most amazing thoughts.  ‘The Moon . . . we have only put Shepard on a suborbital flight . . . an Atlas can’t reach the Moon . . . we have mountains of work just to do the three-orbit flight . . . the Moon . . . men on the Moon, has he lost his mind? . . . Have I?’  I wasn’t alone.  No one on the Mercury team was immune [to these panicky thoughts].”  

     Maybe it was a political move on Kennedy’s part (as some have asserted) or perhaps it was the much needed kick in the pants the country needed at the time.  Either way, JFK being a space fanboy gave NASA the support it needed to mount such an ambitious program.  Even though Kennedy would be gunned down not long after committing the United States to a future in space, his legacy drove more than just the space program.  As an elementary student, my classmates and I were the beneficiaries of Kennedy’s space ambitions.  Congress went on to allocate funding so schools could educate the engineers and scientists of the future.  Watching the mission’s lift off on a black and white TV in the school gym wasn’t nearly the same as watching today’s missions unfold on large screen color TVs, but it was exciting just the same.

     The astronauts were given roles in the development of the capsules and mission systems.  Each was assigned an area to follow and they weren’t shy about putting their two cents in.  Original plans called for them to simply be passengers (like the Chimp-anauts) until they made a case for the astronaut being able to take control of the spacecraft in certain situations.  The first craft designs didn’t even include a window and no self respecting pilot would want to pilot a craft blind.

     When Gus Grissom performed the second sub-orbital flight, a malfunction after splashdown caused the hatch on his capsule to blow open too soon.  Gus had to abandon ship and watch the recovery helicopter try to recover the craft as it filled with sea water.  When the helicopter’s engine began to overheat, they had to cut it loose and watch it sink.  Meanwhile, Grissom’s suit was also  taking on water through an open oxygen tube port.  He feared he would follow his capsule to the bottom before they finally pulled him on board another helicopter.  These were all things that were corrected in future flights but some singled out Grissom for ‘losing his spacecraft’, something that was an engineering problem and not the astronaut’s fault.

     Every flight was a learning experience and Kraft felt the only time they came close to losing an astronaut was during Scott Carpenter’s flight.  Carpenter was the only Mercury 7 astronaut without extensive experience flying jet aircraft.  He didn’t display the discipline needed to follow Mission Control’s instructions.  During his flight, he became distracted and burned too much of his maneuvering fuel even after being instructed to curtail the use of the thrusters.  He nearly missed the necessary step of pointing the heat shield end of the capsule toward reentry and his craft wobbled dangerously during the hottest part of the trip through the atmosphere.  Carpenter landed a long way from the primary recovery zone and still did not seem to grasp the serious nature of the problems he himself had caused.  Kraft and Gilruth saw that he never flew in space again.

     The other Mercury 7 astronauts performed their duties and their recommendations were included in the next generation spaceship, Gemini.  The two man crews flying Gemini missions would test all of the steps necessary to get to the Moon.  These included rendezvous with another craft, working outside of the capsule, and long duration flights.  Two men sharing a space no larger than the front seat of a minivan was a challenge.  Working outside the capsule turned out to be the most daunting task they had to overcome.

     Working in space is unlike anything one experiences on the planet below where Earth’s gravity rules.  In space, a space capsule travels at the right speed to constantly ‘fall’ around the Earth, thus negating the pull of gravity.  This means Newton’s Laws of Motion reign supreme, especially the third one:  “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.”  An astronaut trying to tighten a nut, for example, finds the nut exerting an equal force that causes the astronaut to turn the opposite way.  Without being properly secured to something, working in space puts the astronaut in an exhausting wrestling match with themselves.  It would take a while to master this part of working in space.

     When the Mercury program wound down, it was up to the Gemini flights to test out the rest of the techniques needed to travel to the Moon.  The Russians never did rendezvous in space -but they  did have two capsules in orbit at the same time.  Their predetermined orbits brought them close together, but only briefly.  Gemini showed that NASA had the calculations right so two spacecraft could meet and orbit together in space.  They also perfected the art of docking two vehicles in space.  Both of these skills would be needed for men to land on the lunar surface and then reconnect with the orbiting Command Module.  Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott were practicing the docking maneuver on the Gemini VIII mission when one of their thrusters decided to fire on its own.  The capsule was in a deadly spin which required the astronauts to shut down the primary thruster ring and activate the secondary system needed for re-entry. 

      Mission rules stated they had to come down immediately when the secondary ring was activated so NASA got another lesson – this one involving locating a craft that had to land somewhere other than the prime recovery area.  The thruster problem showed the engineers that the crew needed to be able to selectively turn off each thruster if needed.  When planned mission objectives went south, Mission Control had to adapt to the current conditions and rearrange the agenda.  Keeping the astronauts alive was always number one on the checklist.

     Concurrent with the Gemini missions, Kraft found himself deep into planning the next level of manned space exploration, Apollo.  The new Manned Space Control Center was under construction in Houston and Chris had to move his family from their familiar Tidewater home to Texas.  The need for Kraft to turn over more of his Gemini duties to someone else became clear as he assumed more responsibility for the Apollo program.  Unfortunately, North American Aviation, the company that was building the Command Module, did not seem interested in using the knowledge Kraft’s team had learned from the Mercury and Gemini programs.  

     Shoddy workmanship and lack of oversight would lead to astronauts Gus Grisson, Ed White and Roger Chaffee perishing in a flash fire that swept through their Apollo 1 craft during a ‘plugs out’ test run at the Cape.  The Board of Inquiry charged with finding out what went wrong did just that.  The findings declared there had to be a complete change in how NASA and its contractors did business.  Had these issues been addressed earlier, perhaps the Apollo 1 crew would not have died.  

     The only ‘good’ Kraft could find in the aftermath of the tragedy was the fact that flying such a flawed vehicle would have uncovered more problems.  More problems would have slowed things to a crawl as they were fixed and the end result would have been, at best, slipping Kennedy’s timeline well into the next decade.  The worst case scenario would have been to lose a crew in space which may have killed the whole program.  When the new Apollo craft was designed and assembled, Kraft said, “It was so good that I remain convinced that the tragic fire in fact gave us the tools to get to the Moon.  Instead of delay after delay, we dove deep into the spacecraft problems and we fixed them.”  Gus Grissom had long said, “If an astronaut dies, the others will line up to take their place and the program will go on.”  He was right.

     The boldest move NASA made was to send Apollo 8 to orbit the Moon before the Lunar Landing Module was complete.  They thought, “Why do another around the Earth test flight?  The craft was designed to fly to the Moon, so why not orbit the Moon and test the critical stages up to and after a Moon landing?”  It would be a critical test that would buy time until the lander was ready for a shake down flight in Earth orbit.  The move proved all the theoretical parts of the Moon landing were possible.   Confidence in both the machine and men who would carry out the mission peaked at just the right time to keep Kennedy’s timeline intact.

     With all the pieces in place and the first Moon landing in the books, NASA should have been flying high (pun intended) through Apollo 20.  Of course, mistakes made with the handling of an oxygen tank destined for the Apollo 13 spacecraft led to the explosion that crippled the ship.  The Apollo 13 movie does an excellent job of explaining the whole affair even though it took a little license with how NASA dealt with the families.  The job Mission Control did to get the crew home took the spotlight but Kraft felt they over dramatized some of the personal parts (which is what Hollywood does when cramming months of storytelling into a couple of hours).  

     The major problem after Apollo 11 was public apathy – a ‘been there, seen that’ attitude that filtered down to the people funding the project – Congress.  The Apollo 13 accident brought people’s interest back temporarily, but funds were cut cancelling Apollo flights 18, 19 and 20.  The amount of science that was planned for the later Moon flights was either crammed into the last few flights or dropped all together.  Kraft knew a return to the Moon would take a while but even he was amazed that fifty years would pass without any manned Lunar Missions.  As George Low told Stu Roosa when the program ended, “There will never be another Apollo,” and sadly, he was correct.   Fifty years on, we are just getting back to assembling the next Moon missions.

     The zenith of the human experience in Chris Kraft’s lifetime was the entire journey of man into space.  He felt that hundreds of years from now, history will look back and say, “Why didn’t they continue?  What were they thinking?”  Indeed, it cost a lot of money to put twelve sets of human footprints on the Moon, but for every billion dollars spent, it generated tens of billions of dollars in technological advances on Earth.  The space program’s value went far beyond mere  dollars and cents.  Humans are explorers by nature and to quote our friends in the Star Trek universe, “Space is the final frontier,” and there are still many, many aspects of the universe we need to explore.  How long would it have taken for us to take those first steps into the cosmos if it weren’t for people like Chris Kraft, the Father of Mission Control?

Top Piece Video:  Commander Chris Hadfield performing David Bowie’s first hit, Space Oddity from the ISS orbiting the Earth.