awake, worked the day shift. I had the swing shift with Donn Eisele on watch in the spacecraft, and Griffin got the graveyard shift, staying in touch with Wally Schirra and Walt Cunningham. Schirra had set up a “duty watch” on board the command module, so that an astronaut would be awake throughout the entire mission. This plan was counter to the experience we had in Gemini and none of the flight directors thought Wally’s “watch” was a good idea. It was tough enough to sleep the first days in space and if someone is awake, rustling around or communicating, it is impossible.
Glynn Lunney had handed my team a clean spacecraft at the beginning of the sixth revolution. The trajectory experts in the Trench worked the maneuver sequence to set up a rendezvous with the Saturn IVB booster on Lunney’s morning shift. The CSM was troublefree, so my principal concern was a report by our weatherman that a low-pressure system was developing off Cuba, 750 miles south and east of Houston. With Houston’s proximity to the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, a hurricane could make it tough on Mission Control.
A half hour before we were to hand over the controls to Griffin’s Gold Team, Schirra said, “Houston, I have developed a head cold and have taken two aspirin. I’ve gone through eight or nine Kleenexes with some pretty good blows. I’m thinking about taking a decongestant or antibiotic.”
My team surgeon recommended the decongestant only. I took him to the press conference at 2:00 A.M. and was surprised by the large turnout. The doctor turned out to be the star of the show and, with few problems on the spacecraft, Schirra’s cold—the first space illness—made the headlines of newspapers across the country and grabbed time on the network telecasts.
At liftoff, three flight tests remained before Apollo would go for the lunar landing. We had a lot to get done. The flight control team tracked each objective and added new ones to exploit each opportunity. With a single shot to qualify a spacecraft, little was left to chance. The Apollo 7 flight plan was incredibly precise, breaking objectives down and literally keeping each minute and second chock-full of activity. The mission objectives are listed in a thick manual that spells out every detail of the required test. The flight plan was designed to cover all of these objectives—and if some weren’t accomplished, they would be added to the workload of the next flight. As the flight progressed the test results we received led us to update the flight objectives, add new tests, or modify existing ones. It always has been this way in spaceflight and will continue to be as long as missions are measured in days and weeks. Schirra knew the lunar game plan and understood that we had a lot to get done before we could take the next spacecraft to the Moon.
As the mission continued, Wally’s cold was as much a test of the flight control team as was flying the mission. The flight directors were hard pressed to satisfy a cranky Schirra and push ahead to clear the deck for the next mission. There was little that pleased Schirra about what we were doing at MCC, and the discomfort and irritability caused by his cold soon made him pretty testy with Cunningham and Eisele as well. Glynn Lunney, in particular, always seemed to be at the helm when Wally was testy with the ground team. By the midpoint of the mission, I realized how lucky I was to be working the night shift.
The video reports, seven to eleven minutes long, had caught the public’s fancy. They were dubbed “The Wally, Walt, and Donn Show” and aired once each morning during the Apollo pass between Corpus Christi, Texas, and Cape Kennedy, the only two ground stations equipped to pick up the transmissions. By the third day, Schirra canceled the daily TV broadcast with a clipped, “No further discussion.” We were left with the task of convincing a skeptical press that all was well between the operations team and the crew. Deke Slayton, embarrassed by Schirra’s outburst regarding the telecasts, murmured on the voice comm: “Christ, Wally, all you gotta do is flip a switch.”
By the fifth day, the headline in the
Schirra finally relented on the broadcasts, and at one point the astronauts, trying to make amends, held up crudely lettered signs that read, “Hello from the lovely Apollo room, high atop everything.”
With Schirra and Cunningham asleep, my team would listen to Eisele talking in a hushed voice from his astronomy lab on high. He identified the stars and remarked on the vista from his platform as his partners, the “sleeping beauties,” rested.
With the lunar mission scheduled less than two months away, we started releasing our backup computers to the mission designers during the day to check out the new trajectory software coming on line. At night, with the Apollo 7 crew asleep, Charlesworth, using the same backup computers, started launch-abort training one floor above us for Apollo 8.
Meanwhile the low-pressure area had turned into a hurricane, crossed Cuba, and entered the Gulf. We were still keeping a close watch, but it appeared the full force would hit the Mississippi and Alabama coastline and not Houston. But I developed a contingency plan for the control center if the storm moved farther west.
Schirra continued to make life difficult and by the seventh day of the mission, both Kraft and Slayton were involved full-time, now arguing with Wally over an unsuited reentry. Schirra had been taking his shots freely at the controllers, but I was amazed when he started zinging Kraft and Slayton.
With a head cold, ear blockage during entry would be annoying at best, and at worst, painful and potentially disabling. If the astronauts reentered without their helmets they could pinch their nose and blow to try and clear the ear blockage. This is the technique used to clear ears when descending in an aircraft. The designers, however, pressed for a suited reentry in case of a sudden loss of cabin pressure. It was one of the classic risk trade-offs we run during a mission, but this time the argument was going public.
While the bosses argued with Schirra on the voice comm, the teams continued grinding away with the planning, chalking off the objectives, patiently explaining each and every “funny” to the crew as we were able to develop answers. Controllers use the term “anomaly” or “funny” to describe something in the CSM or LM systems operations that is not as expected. Every item of this nature is logged and pursued until it is understood, and each is discussed extensively with the crew.
Lunney set a standard for every future flight director, giving real meaning to the word “discipline” in the flight controller’s vocabulary. Refusing to rise to the bait of Schirra or the press, he kept the flight directors and teams on track. Two days before reentry, after a series of flight plan updates, the mild-mannered Eisele got into the act and complained about a flight plan maneuver update. “I want to talk to the man or whoever it was,” he said, “that thought up that little gem. That one really got us.”
When Jack Swigert, the CapCom, one of the fifth class of astronauts selected in 1966 responded, “Okay, Donn,” Schirra cut in: “I have had it up here today and, from now on, I am going to be an onboard flight director for these updates. We are not going to accept any new games like adding fifty feet to the velocity for a maneuver, or doing some crazy test we never heard of before.” (Prior to a mission the velocity for each maneuver is specified in the flight plan—but as the mission goes forward the Delta V [change in velocity] is updated to trim the orbit for reentry, as well as to set up daylight conditions at landing.)
Lunney’s log said it all: “Refer to the crew voice transcript; I can’t stand to write it.” The handover for the first time indicated his frustration. “I have finally had enough of this crew.” In the final days of the mission, the control teams, CapComs, and flight directors, covering for Wally, felt like embarrassed parents of a kid throwing a tantrum.
In retrospect, some of the exchanges seem sophomoric, except that the stakes were high and discipline and teamwork were victims of this feuding. I regretted it and still do, partly because the pettiness that crept into the mission obscured the fact that Apollo 7 was carrying on with the task that was interrupted by the Apollo 1 fire—a task that had been left unfinished for nearly two years, and one we owed to Grissom, White, and Chaffee.
My tenth and final shift passed peacefully. Griffin knew that Schirra had been counting the hours till his return to earth and was ready to come home. At crew wake-up on his final shift, Griffin as a joke threatened to keep them up another four days to equal the American space flight duration record set during Gemini. The crew, of course, vetoed the idea, and then Griffin handed them over to Lunney to bring them home, after eleven days. Despite all the interpersonal static, Apollo 7 did the job. Only twenty-six discrepancies were detected in flight. Over half were related to the instruments and communications. This was America’s second longest manned space flight, and the Command and Service Module checked out beautifully.
I never figured out why Schirra had such a burr under his saddle. Perhaps he just could not deal with the irritation of having something as piddling as a cold invade the trip of a lifetime. In any case, the careers of two younger astronauts suffered. Neither Cunningham nor Eisele flew in space again.
