Failure Is Not an Option

every move and anticipating his command and data needs. So he took me by the shoulder, walked up to Kraft, and said, “Kranz is in the hospital. He was injured in an automobile accident coming to the MCC today.” My response was quick. “Dammit, Brooks, what the hell do you think you are doing! This is our last training run.” Kraft, amused by the byplay, said, “It looks like you’ve been benched.” Brooks believed that Kraft should conduct Schirra’s final training simulation without his regular wingman. Von Ehrenfried filled in and did well.

Schirra’s was a textbook flight. But within days of its conclusion the world was again on the brink of war, this time over the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba. I was glad we were not in Florida. My Air Force Reserve unit, among many others, was put on standby status as a showdown between the Soviets and the United States developed.

For almost two weeks, we in the space program were understandably preoccupied by the blockade and possible invasion of Cuba, which could presage an all-out nuclear conflict with Russia. With the two countries “eyeball-to-eyeball,” in the apt phrase of the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, the Russians backed own, turned their ships around, and removed the missiles.

The textbook flight of Schirra cleared the way for Gordo Cooper’s one-day mission to conclude the Mercury program. Cooper’s flight required two MCC control teams and a relocation of the ships to plug the gaps in the network coverage. The length of the flight represented a different test for all of us. The capsule would be out of communication on several orbits for over an hour as Cooper slept. We had no option but to trust the capsule systems. Still, I was less concerned about this mission than any of the preceding ones. The Mercury spacecraft, if used well, was getting the job done. The knowledge level of the controllers was at an all-time high and the remote site teams had proven that they could respond rapidly. The technology was advancing so rapidly that we could now reliably bring the tracking and telemetry data from the Bermuda, California, and Texas tracking stations to the MCC. Now we had almost twenty minutes of continuous data every time the capsule passed over these stations. Since we no longer had to staff these stations with controllers, we had the resources to make decisions in a much more focused and efficient fashion at Mercury Control.

Early 1963

With the New Year, more changes came. Bob Gilruth, director of the Space Task Group, became the director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. He was shifting resources to Gemini and Apollo, so the Mercury office was down to less than fifty people.

Marta was in the hospital in labor with our fourth child and for a change I was holding her hand. I had been in Korea for Carmen’s birth, out to lunch during Lucy’s, and just made it back to Virginia for Joan’s. Now the women in Flight Controller Alley decided it was time for me to do my duty. They selected Jim Strickland, a neighbor and systems controller, to carry the message. “Gene, we can carry on here at work. The Alley has decided you should be with Marta, so get home and take care of your wife!” The handholding was an experience in total helplessness. All I could think was to thank God for the courage women have to go through childbirth. Mark, our son and fourth child, was born in Houston in January 1963. We were staying with the Von Ehrenfrieds at the time we think he was conceived, so we have since concluded that drinking a lot of good German beer and living with a family that had two boys in it had a decisive effect. (Twenty-seven years later I again learned how powerless one can be. Mark was hit by a drunk driver. For an entire night Marta and I held his hand while doctors tested for neurological damage. Mark had to endure without medication. He spent the best part of two years in multiple surgeries and therapy before he recovered.)

With the organization in high gear, I prepared for the final Mercury mission. The Air Force Atlas program had suffered two unexplained flight failures. We could not move ahead until we figured out what had gone wrong. Then the Atlas booster to be used for Cooper’s liftoff failed its rollout inspection in San Diego in January. These setbacks had emphasized the need for support from inside the plant to track design changes.

The second Atlas rollout in March was successful and finally we had the flight elements for the final mission. Gordo Cooper’s Faith 7 mission was the first where we would literally fly beyond the coverage of the ground network. The ships Coastal Sentry and Rose Knot were moved to the Pacific Ocean to provide the mid-orbit communications coverage and to support the capsule retrofire sequence preparation. The two ships provided the majority of the controller support during the middle section of the mission while Gordo Cooper was sleeping.

Chuck Lewis led the Australian team and Ted White had California. At least one team would spot the capsule during each orbit. Cooper’s mission would involve a global effort of twenty-eight ships, 171 aircraft, and 18,000 military personnel, in addition to the support of the ground control crews.

Mel Brooks, in his capacity as SimSup, had achieved a degree of notoriety among the flight control teams as a result of the training exercises for Schirra’s flight. He was forming a new organization for Gemini, and for his farewell training run he unleashed an exercise that tied the control teams and especially the doctors in knots.

Most of the doctors assigned to the remote site teams were military personnel with broad experience; some were Army Airborne and others were Air Force and Navy flight surgeons. Those in Mission Control came from research backgrounds. Brooks was determined to build on their uncommon skills and motivation to create a real- time ready team. While medicine often has occasion for differential diagnoses (i.e., doctors who disagree), Brooks felt that the control teams didn’t need any doctors telling them, “on the one hand… but on the other hand.” So he did things like obtain electrocardiograms of people having actual heart attacks and patch those into training tapes. In the final simulation session Brooks had trouble keeping a straight face as tapes peppered with this type of material and instructors simulating astronauts in medical distress ratcheted up the anxiety level in their voices, giving our doctors plenty to think about—and react to. Fast. They quickly learned there was no time to wait until the next pass, and they learned to resolve differing diagnoses very quickly.

Brooks had a field day debriefing the medics and was in a merry mood. His final training run had been a success and now it was time to put on his other hat and become a capsule systems engineer on Hodge’s team for the final Mercury launch.

Shortly before launch, Cooper’s mission was expanded upward from one day to twenty-two orbits, placing the planned landing point near Midway Island in the Pacific. Since Gordo Cooper had been the first astronaut I had met, I was happy to be working his mission and even a tad sentimental about it. I was sure that my remote site controllers were in peak form. With the longer mission duration Kraft and Hodge formed two teams to provide twenty-four-hour coverage at MSC. Only Kraft, Hodge, Huss, Lunney, Aldrich, Llewellyn, and I remained from Kraft’s original Mercury Control team. The new teams were young, but we all were young together in the early years of space.

May 15, 1963, Mercury-Atlas 9

Thirteen seconds after 8:04 in the morning EST, Faith 7 lumbered skyward, and the final mission of the Mercury program was bound for orbit. The early orbits went rapidly. Cooper precisely checked off the procedures for the eleven experiments his capsule carried. On the fourth orbit, he launched a six- inch satellite with a flashing light to test an astronaut’s visual acuity in space. The orbits clicked off, the systems performing perfectly and the early Go NoGo decisions easily made. Mercury Control operated on a two-shift basis for the first time. After the Go NoGo on orbit six, Kraft’s team handed over to John Hodge’s team. In my newly assigned role as assistant flight director Kraft had assigned me to support Hodge’s team. My vision of the flight director’s role in Mercury Control was based on associating with Chris during the pre-mission planning periods and watching him in action during missions. Kraft was called the “Teacher” because of his hands-on mentoring of his young charges. The longer mission duration and infrequent contacts during the mid-orbits of Cooper’s mission allowed me to study another flight director at work, John Hodge. Hodge was different from Kraft, less on edge and more dependent on his team members. I quickly sized up John as a flight director who sought to obtain consensus in selecting a direction and one totally at ease with his people—but not with his role as their leader. John was a damn nice guy.