Failure Is Not an Option

landing site.

A rescue aircraft was overhead as Gemini 8 splashed down, and fifteen minutes later, a para-jumper landed with rafts and flotation gear within swimming distance of the spacecraft. The USS Mason arrived after the crew had spent three hours bobbing in the heavy seas in their spacecraft.

Gemini 8’s flight lasted ten hours and forty-one minutes, but the flight of the Agena, thanks to Dave Scott, continued under a carefully crafted plan for the next two days. Brooks performed ten maneuvers with the Agena, expending all maneuver fuel and electrical power and vindicating the record of the Agena in the process. Over 5,000 commands later, the Agena died, a valiant first effort for Brooks’s team. They were ready.

My debriefing was short and pointed: “We got our crew home safely and the control teams did a damn fine job under real-time pressure. I know this is going to sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, but the lessons from this mission are how we screwed up in planning and training.

“The crew reacted as they were trained, and they reacted wrong because we trained them wrong. We failed to realize that when two spacecraft are docked they must be considered as one spacecraft, one integrated power system, one integrated control system, and a single structure.”

I continued: “The next thing is that many of us did not trust the Agena. Only Brooks’s team thought it was a great piece of hardware. If we don’t trust a spacecraft, we have to fix it. We were lucky, too damned lucky, and we must never forget this mission’s lessons.”

Treating docked spacecraft as a single system was one of the most important lessons to come from Gemini. It had a profound effect on our future success as flight controllers. The lesson learned on Gemini 8 would be invaluable on Apollo 13.

9. THE ANGRY ALLIGATOR

Spring 1966

John Hodge departed the ranks of Gemini flight directors to prepare for the unmanned Apollo Saturn rocket flight testing. Glynn Lunney and Cliff Charlesworth joined me as flight directors for Gemini 9. Both men had grown up in the trajectory world, but there the similarity ended.

Glynn was an early entrant to the Space Task Group. He was smart as a whip, boyish and trim, the youngest of the flight directors, freewheelng, with a tendency to get ahead of his team in moving to a solution. Cliff was the oldest, a civilian who had previously worked in the Navy and in Army ordnance labs. He had a laid-back personal style that earned him the nickname “The Mississippi Gambler.” I regarded Glynn Lunney as my friendly but intense competitor; he ran the Trench, and I ran the Flight Control Branch. Our branches were two of the seven in Hodge’s Flight Control Division that staffed the Mission Control Center. Glynn and I both wore two hats, as flight directors in the MCC and as branch chiefs in Hodge’s organization.

I had the good fortune to have grown up under several outstanding leaders who had given me a lot of hands-on experience with people and technically complex missions. I didn’t have Glynn’s innate talent, so I surrounded myself with smart people and relied on them to work with me as a team to get the job done. My credo: always hire people who are smarter and better than you are and learn with them.

My team respected me because I did the dirty work and never pulled rank. I assigned the work responsibilities and once I set up the plan I stuck to it. I took the risks to let people stretch and grow and I took the heat, and deserved it, especially when I decided there would be no holidays, no vacations. Which meant that I got to answer the calls from agitated wives. I was blessed that Marta was not among them. She understood the pressures at NASA and, in turn, I tried not to bring them home. In truth, there was no room for them. Our sixth child, and fifth daughter, Jean Marie, was born on April 16, 1966, between Gemini 8 and 9. The house we had moved into just a year before was crowded again.

With the increasing frequency and complexity of the flights, we now had to prepare for several missions simultaneously. To integrate the Gemini mission design, training, and planning, Hodge, in his role as division chief, assigned a lead flight director to coordinate the mission strategy of the flight directors, astronauts, and program office. During the mission, the lead provided a strategy overview, resolving any conflicts among the flight directors.

Risk is normally highest during the launch phase. Decisions must be made rapidly and the teamwork must be precise, for the results are irreversible. With Kraft closely monitoring us, Hodge and I worked up to the position of launch flight director by demonstrating our skills at risk judgment and rapid and correct decision making under pressure. Working with Kraft in Mercury and early on in Gemini I had been an understudy for the flight director’s part. On occasion during training or testing for these early missions Kraft gave me the helm at Mission Control. Hodge had launched Gemini 8 and now he assigned me to launch Gemini 9. He made me the lead flight director. Kraft, the teacher, was now handing over the baton to the new generation of flight directors.

A Gemini launch took about six minutes. The launch simulation begins with the final five minutes of the countdown, the Mission Control Go NoGo, and then liftoff. Some launch simulations might end only seconds after launch with a call for a crew ejection. Other exercises might be hours in duration if we screwed up and got into orbit when we should have aborted. In those situations we were required to solve the problem we had created.

The launch phase of the mission was the toughest to prepare for. The flight director, the Mission Control team, and the astronauts had to be tuned to perfection for this phase to make the most fundamental decisions— continue the mission or abort. The real-time decisions were made with the entire world listening and watching. So our simulation dress rehearsals had to come as close to reality—and the unpredictable—as possible. We took a quantum leap forward when we got digital computers and systems that worked faster and faster with each new upgrade. They brought us into that virtual reality that made simulation training almost indistinguishable from the real thing, particularly as the missions became more complex. This technology also replicated the atmosphere—the tension and intensity—that prevailed in actual missions.

Technology and training were pushing us to the ultimate standard: failure was not an option. In simulation and in real time controllers knew that if the team made the right decisions, we would accomplish the mission and bring our men home safely. If we were wrong in real time, we would ruin the mission and the crew might be killed.

In the course of an abort training session, for example, eight to ten simulated launches were run in a six-to eight-hour day. Some sessions might be only seconds in duration, demanding instant decisions for an on-or near- the-pad abort. These were perhaps the most intense. I remember one when Kraft, in the middle of a training run, his nerves and reflexes set at a hair-trigger level, unexpectedly threw the abort switch and shouted “Abort! Abort!” After the crew in the capsule simulator got the abort information from Control and responded right on the money, Chris got on the intercom and asked, “Who said ‘abort’?” In a somewhat embarrassing postmortem debriefing, it turned out that no controller had called and there was no reason to perform an abort. The only voice Chris had heard was his own. We kidded him about this for years afterward—but we all knew that any one of us, when we were primed and on edge, could have done the same thing. Not doing it was an important part of what a simulation was all about. As a Catholic, I found debriefings were almost like confessing my sins to a priest—except that this was done over a microphone, so the whole “congregation” heard my mea culpas, particularly when I had to say what all of us learned to say: “I don’t know.” Knowing what we didn’t know was how we kept people from getting killed.

May 1966

The Gemini 9 mission was a brute, and the two-month turnaround went far too swiftly. Gene Cernan and