The relationships that developed between the controllers and their families on Flight Controller Alley were both personal and professional, and it was not long before they turned to the social and the athletic. One evening while standing on the corner talking, Dutch casually stated, “How about coming out to Ellington with me tonight? I’m thinking about starting to play judo again. They have a pretty good coach who is forming a team.” This invitation started me on a decade-long love for the sport of judo, the “gentle art.” When I was issued the invitation, I did not know that Dutch and John Llewellyn had been playing the sport for years and were brown and black belts, respectively. I was the new guy on the block. Our primary instructor was the Houston Marine recruiting sergeant, and his team was topnotch in the Armed Forces Judo Association, in which we competed for promotion.
We looked forward to moving into our new permanent offices at NASA near Clear Lake, outside Houston. Inside the old Stahl-Myers plant where we had been, the constant hassle to make more room for the incoming rookie controllers had us all but sitting in each other’s laps.
I compounded the floor space problem there when I brought in a cockpit trainer for the controllers. Electrical cords stretched across the floor and under the drafting boards and desks. People treaded lightly near the mockup, walking around it like a swamp. But I wanted the control team to know the cockpit as well as the crew did. I spent hours in the plywood and cardboard replica until it became as familiar to me as my console in the Mission Control Center. The controllers practiced blindfold drills, sitting in the cockpit, reaching out and touching each switch or running through each of the checklists until they had the intuitive feel for the crew’s every procedure. That was comparable to what we did when preparing to fly jets. We would have a blindfolded cockpit drill, with an instructor leaning over your shoulder. This enabled you to find any switch, at any time, under any flight environment. That was exactly the kind of proficiency and self-confidence I wanted my controllers to develop.
Shortly after noon, on November 22, 1963, Maureen Bowen, Mel Brooks’s secretary, burst into my office, her face drained and white. She said, “Kennedy has been shot in Dallas. Connie just heard it on the radio!” The shock spread through the building. We hung on to each radio report. Someone found a television set and we congregated around the drafting tables. Tears were coursing down the faces of Kennedy’s moonstruck recruits. John Kennedy had inspired us with his vision. One by one, we left work to grieve in private. The flag was at half-staff in our hearts.
The vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who as the Senate majority leader had been instrumental in passing the Space Act, was sworn in as the thirty-sixth President on the plane that carried Kennedy’s body back to Washington. We now looked to him for leadership. We were confident that he would carry out JFK’s commitment. But none of us will ever forget what it was like to live through that incredibly sad weekend when America came to a stop, stunned by this tragedy. At Mission Control and throughout NASA, in our hearts we resolved to honor John Kennedy’s memory by meeting the challenge he had set for us.
Midway through the interval between Mercury and Gemini, Hodge, Lunney, and I were named as flight directors for the Gemini and Apollo missions. The short intervals between the planned missions (less than two months), high flight rate (up to six missions per year), and long flight duration (up to fourteen days) demanded around-the-clock operations in Mission Control. The announcement in August of 1964 was a hell of a nice present for my thirty-first birthday. I was no longer flying Kraft’s wing; I now had my own team to lead. To differentiate the teams for training and mission support, the flight directors chose identifying colors. Kraft chose red for his team, Hodge blue, and I selected white for mine. At a later date, Lunney chose black as his team color.
In Mercury, the decision process seemed to be a shared responsibility between Kraft and Walt Williams. At the conclusion of Mercury, Kraft knew that the flight director must have the authority to make the final decision and more autonomy within his team. The operations director’s role had to be advisory rather than supervisory. Kraft’s job description, when he was Mercury flight director, had included words such as “directs, controls, monitors, and approves.” But Chris had gotten tired of having someone sitting above him. For Gemini, he began rewriting the definition. The mission rules are the flight director’s bible, and in that document he inserted this new description:
The flight director may, after analysis of a flight, take any action necessary for mission success.
This was about as clear as a job description will ever get. So the flight director no longer shared authority. He was now the guy in charge.
We had plenty of other job descriptions to lay out. For example, the Titan II booster for Gemini was equipped with a primary and secondary guidance system, plus the ability to switch between the systems in flight. Since the switchover cues were determined by the flight trajectory, a guidance position was established in the trajectory team.
Responsibility for the Gemini spacecraft’s systems was split between two engineers. One was accountable for the guidance, navigation, control, and propulsion systems; he was assigned the communications call sign GNC. Guidance systems provide the computations or corrective actions to achieve a set of orbital conditions, or to reach a target. Navigation systems determine the position, velocity, and orientation of the spacecraft. Control systems use guidance information to compute and provide pointing, steering, and engine start and stop commands. The second engineer was given the electrical, environmental, and communications systems, call sign EECOM. With longer and more complicated missions, we established support staff rooms to assist the front-room controllers. Midway in the Gemini program, we further expanded the team to accommodate the Lockheed Agena rocket that would be used as the rendezvous target.
Gemini 2 was the first mission requiring controller support. (Gemini 1 was an unmanned Gemini launch on a Titan II rocket on April 8, 1964. The Cape MCC flight support was limited to an informal evaluation of the Titan rocket systems and launch trajectory support by the booster and trajectory controllers. The dummy spacecraft was not recovered.) The game plan for Gemini 2 took Kraft and me to the Cape for what we hoped would be penultimate Cape deployment. The construction and much of the testing of the Houston Mission Control Center (MCC-H) was completed. John Hodge headed the checkout team in Houston that would monitor Gemini 2 from the new Mission Control Center. After two successful missions in a monitoring mode the mission control functions would be transferred from the Cape to Houston.
Kraft and I were sharing a two-bedroom efficiency apartment to stretch the per diem. The arrangement was convenient, since the living area provided enough room for us to spread out all the material we had to work on to study the endless details involved in a launch. This mission was to be a simple lob shot, much like Alan Shepard’s, but without a pilot. The goal in Gemini 2 was to check out the Titan’s propulsion and guidance system, and its ability to steer along the planned launch trajectory. This would place the Gemini on a path to test the heat shield on reentry. An automatic sequencer controlled the entire mission. The only role of the control team was to issue backup commands if the sequencer failed. Two ships were deployed downrange to monitor the eighteen-minute flight.
Ed Fendell was a rookie flight controller assigned to lead one of the ship’s teams. In Gander, Newfoundland, he was the voice on the radio guiding pilots to safe landings in blizzards and later, at the Cape, he worked in range control. A hard-driving perfectionist, Ed was perfect for Gemini, and he inherited responsibility for a computer-driven remote site system that was marginally ready to do its assigned job.
To prepare for my role as a flight director, I essentially became Kraft’s understudy. The pre-mission responsibilities were vast. The flight director developed the mission game plan; ascertained that each test objective was scheduled; verified the network readiness; made sure that his control team was fully trained—and came up with a contingency plan in case things went wrong.
Throughout the pre-mission period, the flight director oversaw the mission control, network, and team readiness, and provided the flight operations Go NoGo at the reviews preceding the start of the launch countdown.
Each evening, Chris and I would meet in the apartment, and I would listen to him run through the long list of open items for the first unmanned launch. As troubles mushroomed in the thruster and seat tests, he became
