Buffering the outside world from the technical decisions these guys had to make. Part, peoplein like kraft had the same experiences you had, wouldnt you say as a formal as a former flight director he knew . Washristopher columbus entirely appropriate for this guy. Pioneer in Mission Control. He launched each one of the mercury missions. But he was the mentor, teacher and tutor for this young generation who became known as Mission Controllers. He set the mold for everything that would be done thereafter and in particular, he set the and for the flight director the flight director being able to take any action necessary for crew safety and mission success. He had done that in the beauty of the thing was even though he physically had left the console, wase he knew his job now to give them the confidence to make the technical decisions and he was going to broker whatever political fallout might occur. A spectacular man. He was the interface between the top level and politics. I found that out later because when kraft moved to director, i became the Flight Operations director, the broker, external inner pace interface for skylab in the shuttle program, so i had the opportunity to feel the political heat that comes down when some but he might want to land the shuttle at the cape and we dont think it should be landed at the cape with a fuelcell down or we made a call to launch when maybe all the Mission Roles were not satisfied or we used more propellant than we should have pursuing our mission objective. Inanaged to spend some time headquarters explaining the control team decisions. He actually walked in his shoes. Getting back to the fundamentals of the earlier flights because we are coming up on the one that made you famous, even more than apollo 13 wasing, the story of jean kranz as much as it was jim level, fred hayes mission where the basic maturity of this team continued just to spread forth in almost a magnificent fashion. We had made the Decision Missions earlier that we would always have for Mission Control teams during the course of the us several this gave advantages because certainly the Mission Events dont fit neatly into eight hour shifts. So we would have to show up a shift early or a shift late and ining the fourth Team Position made that transition much easier. But it was also designated as crisis team, if we had any problems during the course of in position made that transition muchthe mission, major problems, this team would try to find some way to work itself off line the remaining three teams would continue to work eight hour shifts, whatever it turned out to be. My team was designated as lead our principal responsibilities during the mission, we were going to be doing a lunar orbit insertion thate were going to do from the moon and that is what we were trained to do. During the course of the mission, it changed dramatically. And ourch was normal crewmembers were ken mattingly, fred hayes, and mattingly and hayes were the experts in the lunar module and they were scheduled to descend in the search of the moon. Very late in the sequence, he had been exposed to measles and he was replaced by a member of the backup crew. We had trained with jack. We had chained with the backup crew, so we had all the confidence we needed in jack. It was the question of getting a missiona training runs, controllers getting tuned up again and getting them into the mission assignment. The mission had gone very well. We had a minor problem, we lost an engine on the second stage power flight, but Mission Control provided the crew the shutdown times. The remaining engines kept working like a champ and they got to orbit, made the decision to inject to the moon. It went by the numbers. First sequence of Mission Events had been accomplished, my team picked up the console and we were following in the shift rotation. Take a lookld now at the command Service Modules and we did not see anything of significance in our first shift operation and basically used this time in the mission to sort of look ahead at the mission and close out any open items that might have been left over. Etc. He crew tuned up, the First Mission went well. Then my team went into one of we wouldh for dolls now be in the proper shift for the lunar orbit insertion. My second shift was in this new timing sequence. Andme in eight hours later during the course of the shift, we had the lunar module, the initial lunar module, the crew had opened up the hatch and they go into the lunar module and they also had a Television Broadcaster on the tv tour on the lunar module. The Television Broadcast was concluded and we were in the process of closing out the items. After the Television Broadcast was concluded, the wives and families had been behind me in ,he viewing room and we waved they went off and they turned the lights off in the room behind me and the final thing we had to do was get the crew to sleep. Detailed presleep checklist, about five pages in length. We had gone through each one of these checklist items very meticulously because in Mission Control, the greatest error that lends to a lot of levity at the somemission party is for Flight Controller is to miss something in the presleep checklist that causes us to wake up the crew. A series of awards that we give out at the parties if this happens. You gete jollies ridden pretty hard. So we were meticulous following through this checklist. We were down to the final item on the checklist, getting ready to close it out. Hadier in the shift, we had an anomaly, a problem with problem with a communications that did not seem to work properly. Hand over problems to the next shift in line. The next problem was the antenna would not track the earth signal properly. All of the sudden after troubleshooting for 20 minutes, it started tracking. We could never figure out what caused this. My ecomilar fashion, had a series of anomalies associated with tank pressures where they had gone through some rapid cycling and the tank pressure had been reading, which was reading about 87 at that time, all of a sudden failed and started reading 100 . We had a series of what you call funnies you have to close out during the course of the shift. We were down to the final entry and the cryogenics come of the fuels that we use on board the spacecraft are oxygen and hydrogen. It is a super dense, supercold liquid at the lunch with temperatures at minus three hundred degrees packed in vacuum tanks. But by the time you are in to the mission, these consumables soupyurned into a thick, fog or vapor in the tank. Like fog on earth, it tends to develop and layers. Inside the tanks, we have fans that we turn on to stir up this mixture and make it uniform so we can measure it and then we use heaters to raise the pressure. We asked the crew to do this. In the meantime, the next control team was reporting for shift handover so the noise level in the room was building wasnd the flight director the leader of the black team and we used colors to identify those teams. He is reading my flight we advised thend crew we want today cryostir. Jack swaggart acknowledged our request and looked behind him. Coming through the tunnel from the lunar module is fred hayes. Sy lieber got it this time. He had the responsibilities for the cryosystem and had switched his attention to the current measurements, the electric current measurements he had. Swaggart started the cryostir. The current increased, indicating the stir had started and hes taking a look at computing the time, etc. All of the sudden, i get a series of calls from my controller. The first one says we have had a computer restart. The second controller says antenna switch. Third controller says main bus interval. From the spacecraft, i hear houston, we have a problem. Swaggart called it. There was a pause for about five seconds and level comes on and says houston, weve got a problem. Within Mission Control, literally nothing made sense in those first few seconds because the controllers data had gone static briefly and when it was restored, many of the parameters just did not indicate anything we had ever seen before. Down in the propulsion area, my controllers all of the sudden saw a lot of jet activity. Jets were firing. Ins is all happening seconds. We see level take control of the spacecraft and fly into an attitude so he can keep communicating with us. For about 60 seconds, literally calls just kept coming in but they made no sense. They made no pattern right on down the line until the training giving given the controllers kicks in. Very meticulously, they started making the calls, the calls relayed by jack cosman. The calls started restoring some of the functions that appeared to be lost on the spacecraft. I had written the time of this 55 hours, 55 minutes and four seconds. Look atan you take a your data and see if anything else happened at the time of that event. He says that is when we saw this in 10 abeam switch. I went down and started thinking we had an intent a problem, a glitch in the antenna, some kind of electrical short circuit. Shortly we would resolve the problem and be back on track to the moon. Moste meantime, however, of the problems had been resolved. Those that remain focus on the same controller and he has a system you need to stay alive in space. He has power, pressure, electrical, heat, water, basically everything you need to stay alive. None of the data he is seeing from his standpoint is believable. Very quickly, it looks like we have lost one of our fuel cells, possibly a second one. Cryotank number two, oxygen tank number two is reading zero quantity where previously it had been reading 100 quantity. Temperatures, instead of being 300 degrees earn height are now at plus 17 degrees. That data doesnt make sense. Another tank is starting to decrease in pressure. Hes trying to put all of these pieces together in the back room. In the meantime, another problem is occurring because we are approaching what we called gimbel locke. Whatever is happening is pushing the spacecraft around and the crew has Manual Control fighting it but some of the valves had apparently been shut close so we the to reopen the valves so crew has the ability to control the spacecraft attitude. It is tough for me to work with the controllers because, interspersed with the problems, we are approaching gimbel locke again. Up to theo voice that crew and for probably 60 to 90 seconds, it is chaos. Then it is amazing how this whole thing starts to take focus. We still dont have the slightest crew what is slightest clue what is going on. Jack comesues until to me and says is there anything we can do . Is there anything that makes sense . Is there anything we can trust . Mys sort of acting as conscience right now because we have been scatter shooting. Andll the control team up this occurs just about the time the crew is calling down and we realize the crew says they have had some kind of jolt or some kind of shock. Everyd of listening to crew call in every controller, i start being much more selective because im starting to get the feeling this isnt a communications glitch. It is something else. We dont understand it all stop so i proceed very meticulously. Startour guessing, lets working on this problem. Then i used some words that surprised me after the fact. Good main bus a, dont do anything to screw it up. The lunar module is a patch and we can use that as a lifeboat if we need to. Get me more computing and commute occasions research. Words but thene immediately went back to tracking this thing and it took about 20 minutes and it was thely frustrating because situation is becoming more and more desperate. This oxygens like tank is shot. Oxygen tank number one is continuing to decrease. Two of our fuel cells are off line and these are the principal Power Generation systems we have. Lieber comes to me and says i want to shut down fuel cells one and three. I say lets think about this. He says thats the only way im going to stop the leaks. I go back to him the third time time for our final option. Very reluctantly, i agree to advise the crew we are going to shut down fuel cells one and three. Kraft has come, in. The crew feels very uncomfortable about shutting down these fuel cells. We go through a dialogue that last several seconds until reluctantly, they agree to shut these fuel cells down. Is probably the point in the mission where everybody has realized we have now moved into survival mode because with two or three fuel cells shut down, we are not going to the moon anymore. We are just going to be dam lucky to get home. In, its themes only vernacular i used that i would never use before i said hit. S, we are in deep s his experience in the Flight Control business and his flight record, he did not bother me. He was letting me try to extricate myself from whatever problems were occurring in here. Time, they called down and indicated we are venting something and we had come to the conclusion we had time we had some type of explosion on the spacecraft. Our job now is to start an orderly evacuation from the command module into the lunar module. Time, im faced with a series of decisions that are all irreversible. Explosione the occurred, we are about 200,000 miles from earth, 50,000 miles from the moon. We used a term entering the lunar sphere of influence. This is where the moons gravity is becoming much stronger than the earths gravity. During this trip, for a short time, you have two options. One will take you around the front side and one will take you all the way around the moon. Flight dynamics he has brought me up a list of the options weve got. If i would execute what we call a direct abort, in the next two hours, we could be home in 32 hours but we would have to do two things we would have to jettison the lunar module, which im thinking of using as a lifeboat, and wed have to use the main engine and we still have no clue what happened on board the spacecraft. The other option, we have to go around the moon, but its going to take five days and i only have two days of electrical power. So we are making the decision which path are going to take . My gut feeling, and thats all ive got, says dont use the main engine and dont jettison the lunar module. Thats all ive got as a gut feeling and the Flight Control business, the flight director business, you develop some street smarts. I think every controller has felt this at one time or another. I talked briefly to lonnie and hes got the same feeling. They trajectory people are scared out of their wits that we are going to execute this direct abort because it is very late in the trajectory to make this kind of computation and swinging this mission around the front side of the moon is going to be a risky job. In the meantime, my systems guys want to get back home as soon as they can because they know they are in deep trouble. Is now decision time and with nothing more than a gut feeling, make the decision to swing the mission around the moon rather than come around the front. This puts us on the trajectory path that we have to start rapidly coming up with answers. We talk regally to the crew. I dont have much time to say why we are doing it, but they are willing to follow whatever direction we are going to give them at this time. In the meantime, we have now got the crew moving over to the lunar module, starting the power up process and glenn lonnies team has come up with come up to speed where we can hand over to them. My job now is to get off shift and come up with a game plan for here on out. As soon glenn hits the console, he is immediately challenged because our final fuel cell is dying and hes got 15 minutes to get it powered up. But he has to trout has to transfer the navigation data to the mood loot to the lunar module computer. This is pencil, paper and slide rule. In those days, we would have killed for a pocket get pocket calculator. As glenn is doing that, im trying to figure out which direction to go and it is obvious, whatever we come up with has got we are going to have to come up with an answer in hours and days and what usually takes months and years. Its outside all the test boundaries of the spacecraft and we have to come up with the answers. I walk into this room and my team is down there and its loaded with my controllers and their backroom people. This is a data room, a room only used when there is trouble. You can sense trouble in this room. Its got to overhead tv monitors, one small calm panel, but it is filled with gray government desks where people can spread out their records and start going over them. Room and in the data the records were used were scattered all over. One of the difficult problems we faced was there was no instantaneous data retrieval. It was literally hours from the time we would request a printout of telemetry data until we would see them. The only records we had to work with were the ones in the recorders themselves and the hardcopies we could take and make a copy of the television display. We had these pieces of paper in these controllers have been watching the blood drain out of the spacecraft and we knew there had been some type of explosion but that was all there was. Our job was basically to figure out what on board the spacecraft was usable and come up with a game plan to get them home. I now, we had made the decision we are going to go around the moon and i made a brief opening speech because i had a lot of players who are starting to show up from the engineering community. Obvious that this team was much larger than we needed at this stage in the game. I needed to get focused on the most immediate problems. Problem was emerging. We kept hearing one voice as we were going through the evacuation in the lunar module and that was tom stafford. They had started telling us about the problems we would have in accomplishing an alignment of our Navigation System using the lunar module optics while the spacecrafts were still docked together. They kept being insistent in this to the point where this became a principal concern of myself and lonnie. With this background piece of information, we are starting to look at can we afford to powerdown the spacecraft. The point where it could stretch these batteries. Intoame plan broke down three distinct phases. Set ofcome up with a master checklists we would use to get the spacecraft from where we were around the moon and then back to earth. I assigned one of my more trusted controllers, arnie aldrich, he had been with us since very early in the mercury program. Hes a remote Site Engineering and became the model for the systems engineers we used at Mission Control. Job to be thehe individual who would maintain the master set of checklists for the remainder of the entire mission. John erin, a new controller joined us in the gemini program. He was given the responsibility to sit on top of all consumables, all Resources Available on both spacecrafts. Veto authorityte over any checklist entry. So they were almost welded at the hips with erin being the guy who had the veto authority. The third one obviously needed was someone to figure out how to turn the lifeboat into a survival vehicle. That. My controllers got so these were the three key individuals and i told these three people to look around the room and anybody they didnt think they needed for the next few hours, send them back to their consoles and get them out of there so we could focus the smaller team. We then did a blackboard exercise that very quickly listed the majority of the issues that had to be worked and who would work them. Guy, who was the power one of the things we have to do is get powerdown immediately. Butid i will work on this, we have to figure out new ways to navigate because we can expect the Navigation System to continue drifting and we have to find some way to realign it. So we gave phil shaffer the responsibility to come up with ways im sort of getting ahead of myself. One of the things giving us problems was this explosion that occurred sent a cloud of debris around the spacecraft of frozen particles of oxygen. We normally navigate with stars and we couldnt see stars anymore. All we could see was the son, the earth, and the moon. Phil was given the responsibility to come up with techniques to check our spacecraft attitudes for maneuvers and those kinds of things using only the sun, earth, and moon. And continue to fight to refine the techniques of aligning the navigation on the lunar module once we did have to shut it down. I took my team offline and tried to figure out ways to cut down the return trip time because john said theres no way were going to make five days. We have to cut it down to four days, maybe three and a half upp so i had the team split and moving in several different directions. I had one team working power profiles and other team working navigation techniques and a third integrating all the pieces we need. Up the picked responsibility to figure out a way to cut off a day from the return trip time. Areas in theking control room proper and it was amazing how literally president s of corporations would respond to i had in 27yearolds charge of these teams. At that was one of the real miracles of Mission Control. Not only the Team Structure but the relationship between program manager, designer, Flight Controller, crew, was one of absolute, pure trust. Once the person was given the responsibly to do the job, everyone would snap to and support. Once decisions were made, you never secondguess those decisions. This process continued for the. Irst one he four hours my team came back to execute a maneuver that goes back to apollo nine. During apollo nine, we did a lot of testing of the lunar module engine while the two spacecrafts were docked together. As soon as we recognized we had to perform a maneuver to speed up our return journey, that is the set of procedures we fell back to. We updated those procedures based on the situation at hand. My team came back on console and executed these procedures and increased our velocity by almost 1000 feet per second, changed the landing point from the indian ocean to the south pacific, set the aircraft iwo jima to the landing location and now, with this maneuver behind us, we had powered down for the first time. , you can explain it simply. 200as the equivalent of watt light bulbs or about a quarter of what todays microwave uses. Thats what we had to sustain us, the survival level to get us all the way back to earth. Once we got into this powerdown only one mainer one Major Management flop. To get his crew to sleep. I said we are going to keep them up and awake until we get this spacecraft in a passive, thermal control mode. Kraft wanted to powerdown even more. I had to tell craft we are not going to powerdown completely until we get this thermal control. We had to invent a rotisserie type maneuver to spin the spaceship on its access on its axis because the only power we had was the son. The first attempt to do this was on except was unsuccessful. They thought they had the right take on things and i was the guy in charge and had to say no, thats not the way were going to do business. Contingencies all the way through this process of returning to earth. There is no such thing as a free ride in this mission. We had to form a couple of emergency maneuvers because our trajectory was letting out. The crew was suffocating. We had to invent techniques of using the chemical scrubbers we used for the air. Throw a sample in the command those to theapt lunar module. As we were approaching the final stage of entry, they were not coming together quite as nicely as we would like to. The crew wanted to see how we were going to accomplish this final sequence. The problem we had was we had a command module that was the reentry vessel. It only had about two and half hours of electrical power lifetime. We had the Service Module where the explosion occurred was virtually useless. The lunar module attached to the other end of this stack through a small tunnel, and that was our lifeboat. We had to come up with a game plan to move this entire stack to an attitude where we could separate all three pieces so they would not collide with each other on reentry. Ton the crew had to evacuate the lunar module at the last moment, power up the command module, get the computer initialized, get into attitude for entry. This is the game plan we were coming up with. Theid not really get all pieces put together and get them verified in simulators until 10 hours before the time we had to execute this plan. The crew was quite concerned they could see the earth continuing to grow in the windscreen of the spacecraft and still did not have the game plan in hand. We kept reassuring them that this is another time deke slaton came in, they said we have it, cooldown. Deke had the magic of being able to work with his crew like kraft had the ability to work with us. Those were the two pioneers of spaceFlight Operations. They set the mold for everyone else that would come from that day on. We got the procedures up to the crew, Jack Swaggart had the command module part, and about the time we were voicing out these procedures, we realized how desperate it was on board the spacecraft. It was in the high 30s, low 40s. The crew had the cotton coveralls they had, very moist, fred hayes by this time had developed a high body temperature, about 104 degrees, severely dehydrated, bad urinary infection, he had the shakes and we had to voice the instructions up to him so he could do the lunar module part of the procedures. We kept working back and forth throughout this process. Joes come to mind mattingly and ken kerr one. They had been looking at troubleshooting. The game plans, etc. Joe would be the voice of concern in the final hours. His he is a medical doctor and his bedside manner was superb. He was a mentor, tutor the whole nine yards. At times, i almost felt he was on board the spacecraft placing the cruise hands on the switches , just keeping them going. We continued to have a lot of surprises, we had to do an emergency maneuver, one of the three command module batteries failed, just about the time the parachutes were due to come out. Landed, thise issue was still in. The final thing i remember about this mission was the reentry because the mood in this room was becoming what i would say mellow. When we got ready to jettison lunar module, we started speaking sentimentally to the lunar module as we were getting ready. We said farewell, aquarius, you were a hell of a good spaceship. In front of the whole world to start talking, you didnt even know the world was out there, we were so focused on getting these guys back. Finally comes time to express our feelings, and the entire world was listening and Mission Control is not going to admit we are emotional and the rookie on board the spacecraft finally says all of us up here want to thank you down there for the fine job you did. That broke the ice and we got a few that a boys from level and hayes and then we go into blackout. Blackout is the time in the of the where the fire reentry prevents communication to the spacecraft. A could nail this to within second. Each controller during blackout, this is an intensely lonely time because you are left, the crew is on their own, left with the data you gave them, maneuver data, attitude information, all of these kinds of things. Each controller is going through everything they did during the missing during the mission and was i right is the only question in their mind. There isnt any noise in here. You hear the electronics, you hear the hum of the air days, weing, in those would smoke a lot. You would hear the rasp of a zippo lighter as somebody lights up a cigarette. You would drink the final cold coffee and stale soda sitting there and every eye is on the clock in the wall coming. Andld joe, give them a call we did not hear from the crew after the first call. We called again, we called again and we are at a minute we should have heard from the crew and for the first time in this mission, there is the first little bit of doubt coming into this room that something happened in the crew did not make it. In our business, hope is eternal and trust in the spacecraft is eternal. Every time we called the crew, will you please answer we were one minute and 27 seconds since we should have heard from the crew for we finally get the call and a downrange aircraft has heard from the crew as they arrived for the acquisition signal. Almost instantaneously from the aircraft carrier, we get the sonic boom, iwo jima. Then we have the television in the room and you see the spacecraft, three red and white parachutes and the intensity of is everyional release controller is silently crying. You hear a whoop and you are back to business again. In Mission Control i guess its necessary you can never express any emotion until well after this mission is over. You get this whoop and you are back in there and you can hear the voice of the people, you voice of the crew and you really have to work to get them. Then, these guys are in the warm air of the south pacific. They are alive and you see them come out of the spacecraft. The iwo jima is deploying helicopters and at Mission Control, our job is not done until we hand over the responsibility to the Carrier Task Force commander. It is only when that is we can startthat this internal celebration. Our celebration always started with cigars. I dont know what the young controllers are going to do today because you cant smoke in Mission Control. Somebody ought to write a federal regulation and maybe we will change it that they and the shuttle teams recover their crewmembers against long odds. Anyway, you start with a cigar and they have to be good cigars because nobody in Mission Control is going to smoke a bummer. We had some darn fine cigars. There are about 700 we acquired. It went to the factories, the laboratories, everybody had their mission cigar to light up at the same time we did. Provided by the Cigar Institute of america. Spectacular. Lly but once you get the cigars lit up, there is all of the celebration and then you unlock the doors because they have been locked and the real heroes start pouring in because these are the folks in the back rooms who came up with the answers we needed when we needed them. The final phase of every mission, the final celebration is to pass out an American Flag. We had these flags we started this tradition when we sent our , the secondan record, a record when we rounded the two spacecrafts for the first time. Has been an American Flag for every controller at the time of touchdown. Just a spectacular time to live. I dont think anything or anyone will forget those days. Final comment on this is crew parties are always, always something. While we are waiting for the crew to recover, the backup crews and the cap comms always develop some kind of parity on what happened during the course of a mission. This was a parity that was taken of after after a short set s i made during the mission when i said i dont understand that, sigh. And size as i think it is an instrumentation flight. Then deke says we are going to have to do something about that. They took these three segments of words and interspersed them with today, people wont understand spike jones and his music. We had some gospel music and they interspersed all of these on the tape and we had to listen to this thing over and over and over as we drank the beer and smoked more cigars. Way ofthat kind of business. This was an honest to god rather hood that existed in those days. I dont think anything, any group of people in peace time has ever come together in a similar fashion. Does that old gang ever get together today for reunions of any sort . Every fiveally, years, we get together for some type of reunion. I think they are all together in two frequent. R are too infrequent. I think the apollo 13 movie has brought some recognition to some really great people, people who stood tall when the times were short and the odds were long. I think john glenns flight helped bring together some of the real joy of living in the work that we did and i think that has helped. The coming celebrations for this 30th anniversary, we are going to have a lot of 30th anniversarys for lunar landings for the various missions we have flown here. I think that is bringing it back together. It is good to get the folks back together. American history tv is on social media. No plate cspan cspanhistory. 1970,rs ago, on april 17, james level, john sicard and fred hayes splashed down in this in the Pacific Ocean after an onboard exposure and caused the goal caused critical situation failures. Next, their press conference at the Johnson Space center in houston. At this time, i want to introduce the apollo 13 crew, captain james level, mr. N
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