the MCC, I heard the Atlas Agena test conductor call out on the loop, “Who the hell is transmitting engine start commands?” He continued, “Houston, have you been sending commands?” Just as I was about to respond, “Negative,” I heard the voice of my command technician state calmly, “Flight, the command system has failed, we have been in continuous command transmission. We have belched out every command in our inventory!” We were lucky that day. If we had been in orbit and our command system failed, the commands would have been transmitted to the Agena, possibly starting the rocket engine, changing control system modes, and turning the telemetry system off. The unplanned commands would have wreaked havoc on the mission. We amended our procedures, but we were still uneasy about the next step. Loading new software into new computers and using it for the first time was like playing Russian roulette. It demanded and got a lot of respect.
Brooks’s team was sharp as a scalpel as the test conductor pressed the button and the Atlas/Agena rose majestically from launch pad 14. To the north, at nearby launch complex 19, astronauts Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford sat atop the Titan II rocket in their couches and listened as the Gemini test conductor updated them on the Atlas/Agena launch progress. To set up the conditions for a rendezvous, we first launched the Atlas/Agena. When the Agena passed over the Cape at the end of its first orbit, we would launch the Gemini spacecraft from another pad into a slightly lower orbit to begin the catch-up phase of the rendezvous. Launch of the target spacecraft was normal. The Agena separated from the Atlas booster and the Agena engine ignited. Brooks’s data flickered briefly, then stopped updating. FIDO reported tracking was lost. Then came a report that Range Safety was tracking multiple pieces of debris falling into the ocean.
Meanwhile, the Gemini countdown had continued on Pad 19, but the reports going to the crew became progressively worse. The reports from Canary Islands and Carnarvon were negative. At launch minus fifty minutes, we scrubbed the Gemini countdown and gave the crew the bad news. The Agena was destroyed, pieces scattered in the Atlantic. They had no target for their planned rendezvous.
I stayed with Brooks and his Agena team until there was no hope. Brooks was defeated, utterly spent. Many thought that the Agena had lived up to its less than sterling reputation. I was sad for my team. It was time for a few beers at the Singing Wheel before we started to regroup.
This watering hole was a two-story, barnlike building, the place we went when we needed some R&R. It was located a mile west of the center on state Highway 3 and hosted the Gemini-Apollo generation of flight controllers. The floor in the barroom tilted toward the wall to a degree that made it impossible to lean back in a chair without falling over. The Singing Wheel sold Lone Star beer by the pitcher. Nelson Bland, the owner, knew all the controllers and ran remarkably accurate tabs for all of them. A wall-to-wall mirror stretched behind the ponderous and scarred bartop. The tables in the back room were covered with checkered oilcloth. John Llewellyn’s wife, Olga, occasionally tended bar. After judo sessions, Llewellyn, Dutch, and I, wearing our sweaty gi outfits (white cotton trousers and a heavy, kimonolike jacket), would drive over for a beer or two after calling it a night.
It was, for all of us, a place of refuge where we could celebrate on the good days—and lick our wounds on the bad ones. Today was one of the bad ones.
8. THE SPIRIT OF 76
The rendezvous in space continued to elude us. The Russians had tried twice and failed—but we were impressed by their dual launch capability. We couldn’t even get our target rocket into orbit. Accomplishing this became the highest priority for Gemini and the American space program. Until now, a rendezvous in space was something only mathematicians really believed was possible. They worked out elegant equations and said, “If you launch it at this time, and go this fast, in this direction, you eventually are going to catch up to a target. If you perform the maneuvers properly, the two spacecraft will end up side by side.”
Proving that this theory would work became not only a goal, but an obsession. If we accomplished a rendezvous, we would validate the software that controlled the Gemini spacecraft as well as the crew’s fallback manual backups. There was no time to waste; we needed to dramatically improve our learning curve in order to be ready for the far more complex and sophisticated rendezvous and docking procedures necessary for a lunar landing. Within hours of the launch failure of our Agena target and the consequent scrubbing of Schirra and Stafford’s Gemini flight, we were discussing an alternative mission. A proposal from McDonnell’s senior management seemed to offer the most promising option. Walter Burke, the McDonnell vice-president and general manager for space and missiles, and his deputy, John Yardley, suggested we take a page from the Russians’ script by launching
Frank Borman, the commander of the next Gemini mission, overheard the discussion and became an immediate convert. The proposal got a cold reception from the Air Force and NASA Cape management, so Yardley, a close friend of Kraft’s, took the proposal to the MSC director, Robert Gilruth. (The respect for Gilruth was so great that virtually everyone in the program addressed him as “Dr. Gilruth.” Only those very close to him, like Kraft, ever called him “Bob.”) Within twenty hours of the Agena failure, Yardley and Burke convinced Gilruth to give the dual launch concept to his staff. In short order, the NASA Gemini program manager, Chuck Mathews, and Kraft agreed to check it out with their people. In the early afternoon, Hodge called a division staff meeting, apprised us of the dual launch plan, and gave us an hour and a half to see if we could pull it off. I was short on staff since most of my controllers were returning from the remote sites. After a brief meeting with the remnants of my branch, we concluded that it could be done and that the concept was not fatally flawed. I passed the word to Hodge, who passed it to Gilruth: “Flight Control didn’t see anything we couldn’t do, or anything we couldn’t work around.”
Later in the afternoon Gilruth had talked with Dr. George Mueller, the agency’s associate administrator, in Washington. After a day of intense discussions and, only forty-eight hours after the Agena failure, a press conference was held at the Texas White House. Bill Moyers, President Johnson’s press secretary, announced the planned rendezvous of two manned spacecraft. The mission was assigned the designator Gemini 76, combining two Gemini missions into a single mission by using the long-duration Gemini 7 spacecraft as the target for Gemini 6. Within hours of their return from the remote sites, our guys were at their desks writing the data plans, procedures, and site confidence tests.
The mission concept was simple. Borman and Lovell would be launched first (before Gemini 6) on their fourteen-day Gemini 7 mission. Immediately after launch of the Gemini 7 spacecraft two things were scheduled to take place. First, everybody at the launch site would carefully comb the entire area looking for any debris that might have fallen off the booster as well as checking for any damage to the pad. Then the Titan carrying the Gemini 6 spacecraft crewed by Wally Schirra and Tom Stafford ( the previous launch of Gemini 6 had been scrubbed after the Agena failure) would be erected on the same pad used to launch Gemini 7 and the pre-launch checkout could begin. If all went well, we would be ready to launch Gemini 6 seven days after Gemini 7.
The day after the press conference Flight Control was in high gear. My branch went about its work with the kind of cheerful exuberance one experiences all too rarely in life. It was like watching Patton’s Third Army break off their offensive, perform a pivotal maneuver, turn, and march 100 miles in the dead of winter to relieve Bastogne. In forty-eight hours, we had redeployed and were back on the attack. The launch was scheduled for early December of 1965.
In order to move ahead to more complex missions while Hodge and I were building up the Flight Control Division, the Mission Planning and Analysis Division was expanding to develop mission concepts, design the
