The control team cheered when Lunney later received a medal for the mission from President Johnson at the LBJ Ranch. His performance went well above and beyond the call of duty.
Three years later, when we designed the emblem of the flight control team, we remembered our best days with Schirra. As the central theme of the controller’s patch, we used the Sigma from his Mercury spacecraft, representing the unbreakable link between the crew and ground. We made our peace with the grumpy commander.
13. THE CHRISTMAS STORY
The successful Apollo 7 flight cleared the way for us to land on the Moon in the coming year. A lot of flight and ground testing remained, and I was sure that there would be surprises, but we had developed the momentum required to pull off a miracle. Our greatest worry was that we had to complete three virtually flawless missions and achieve every major test objective before we could shoot for the lunar landing. I didn’t think much about the odds, but since every mission would be a first, the odds had to be stacked against our success.
In the late 1960s our simulation technology had progressed to the point where it became virtually impossible to separate the training from the actual missions. The simulations became full dress rehearsals for the missions down to the smallest detail. The simulation tested the crew’s and controllers’ responses to normal and emergency conditions. It checked out the exact flight plan, mission rules, and procedures that the crew and controllers would use for the flight. The problems thrown at the controllers and crew by the SimSup (simulation supervisor) prepared them for the real crises that might come in any phase of the mission from launch to splashdown. Simulation attempted to make events that could happen in real time—malfunctions in any one of the many spacecraft systems, trajectory problems, or failure in the ground systems—as realistic as possible. With hundreds of possible malfunctions and many time-critical mission events, the training opportunities were limited only by the hours and weeks available to train. We simulated every mission phase under a variety of normal and emergency conditions. By the time the training period for a mission ends, the astronauts and the MCC teams must be thoroughly familiar with the pre-mission plan. They must know what should happen and be capable of making a correct decision to continue the planned mission or execute a mission abort under any set of circumstances.
A lunar mission consists of a series of time-critical maneuvers strung end to end. Two and one half hours after the Saturn liftoff from the Cape the lunar phase of the mission normally begins with the translunar injection (TLI) maneuver. Midway through the second revolution in Earth orbit the Saturn IVB stage is reignited, increasing its velocity from 25,500 to 35,500 feet per second. After S-IVB engine cutoff, the CSM separates from the booster rocket. The velocity from the TLI maneuver places the spacecraft into an orbit 250,000 miles high with the Moon at the highest point of the orbit.
The next phase of the mission is called translunar coast (TLC) and lasts about three days. Small maneuvers are performed during this period to trim the trajectory to pass sixty miles in front of the Moon three days after the TLI maneuver. Fifty-two hours into this period, the CSM leaves Earth’s gravitational field and enters the lunar gravitational field. During the TLC phase the Mission Control Center is in continuous communication with the crew.
Three days after liftoff the astronauts perform the lunar orbit injection (LOI) maneuvers with the CSM service (main) propulsion system engine. LOI consists of two maneuvers that place the CSM into a sixty-mile circular orbit around the Moon.
After the lunar phase of the mission is completed, the CSM service propulsion system is again used for trans-Earth injection (TEI). The return period is called the trans-Earth coast (TEC) and takes about sixty hours prior to reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere and splashdown.
Eight days after Apollo 7 returned to Earth, Charlesworth and his Green Team began the first lunar mission simulations. The post-mission assessment gave the command module a solid Go. The next spaceship, in a schedule based almost entirely on gut instinct, would go to the moon in less than sixty days.
As we approached the lunar prize, NASA’s future was far from certain. Starting in 1967, Congress had made significant budget cuts in the manned programs and shortly after the Apollo 7 landing they announced there would be no space program beyond the Apollo Application Program, a planned mini-space station that would use Apollo hardware. Responding to the uncertainty about our future direction, MSC director Dr. Gilruth established an advanced programs organization element within the MSC, which reported directly to him. Since John Hodge had been outspoken about NASA’s lack of planning for the future, Gilruth selected him to lead the effort. Hodge’s new job was to seek out new NASA opportunities in space, develop a rigorous and logical program plan for the future, and establish a more businesslike structure for NASA.
With Hodge moving into his new job I officially became the chief of the Flight Control Division (FCD), the administrative home for the majority of the MCC flight controllers. I reported to Kraft as one of his four division chiefs.
The FCD included the MCC flight directors, assistant flight directors, trajectory controllers (the Trench), booster and spacecraft systems engineers, science and procedures officers, and the simulation instructors (SimSup and his team). Sixteen of the twenty-one controllers normally present in the main control room, as well as SimSup and his team, were provided by the division. The FCD comprised seven branches and two small groups corresponding to the major MCC operations functions and had about 300 personnel. The operations branches were Flight Dynamics (trajectory), CSM and LM systems, Experiments, Mission Simulation, Flight Control, and a Requirements branch that assured the MCC configured correctly for simulations and missions. The flight directors and booster engineers from Marshall were two small groups at my staff level.
The FCD controllers developed the mission strategy, performed pre-mission planning, developed CSM, LM, and experiment schematics and troubleshooting procedures. They wrote the mission rules, supported the design and check-out of the spacecraft and MCC, and performed the integrated crew-controller training. With the exception of the headquarters mission director and mission scientist the remaining MCC controllers were provided by other organizations at the MSC.
While Charlesworth and Lunney pulled together the teams for the lunar mission, I started preparing with my team for Apollo 9. Mission planning and preparation takes about one year, with the final training starting about three months before launch. The objectives for each mission were vastly different from the preceding mission and now, with the launches spaced at two-month intervals, every flight director and controller was working several missions simultaneously, constantly juggling schedules and priorities. The workload was punishing. Sixty-to seventy-hour workweeks became commonplace.
From the early days of space virtually all of the trajectory data coded in the MCC originated from the Mission Planning and Analysis Division (MPAD). MPAD consisted of several hundred mathematicians and scientists, supported by a large array of high-tech contractors. John Mayer was the boss and Bill Tindall was the deputy. In late 1968, Tindall was reassigned as a staff engineer for George Low. In the restructuring after the fire, Low gave Tindall the task of uniting the entire Apollo team, civil servants and contractors, into a working group to determine how to use the hardware and software most effectively to achieve each mission’s objectives. Tindall’s genius was his ability to focus on issues and coax diverse people to work together. He combined the friendliness of a puppy with a comic wit. His operational intelligence was brilliant. We formed a particularly strong bond, and our families spent a lot of time together at his beach house. Although our technical backgrounds were very different, we were both emotional about our work, perpetually optimistic, and gave our people unconditional support.
Bill Tindall swung into the Apollo 8 mission with zest, resolving issues from the simplest to the difficult. While we were slugging it out with Schirra on Apollo 7, Tindall was holding daily meetings to work out how we would navigate to the Moon, and how to get into and out of lunar orbit. Allegiance to Tindall did not come easy for the Trench. For a while, Bostick’s team believed that Tindall was really doing their job. Bostick’s deputy, Phil Shaffer, and Llewellyn complained about these turf issues, while Tindall tried patiently and persistently to gain their support. By the time of Apollo 8, however, the Trench had become Tindall’s most zealous group of converts, actively
