Failure Is Not an Option

supporting, debating, and testing his plans, carrying into the training his decisions and mission rules.

We were, in a sense, in a race against ourselves, every event and decision converging on the launch date. Tindall was unsinkable. Only a month away from the Apollo 8 launch, he was still arguing with Frank Borman on the best way to navigate the return journey from the Moon.

To the men of the Trench, Apollo 8 was the mission; it would be their greatest achievement. Living in the world of pure mathematics, they were the first generation fully at home with computers—incredibly young, dreamers and visionaries who were venturing in their imaginations and theories with the crew into the unknown, working at the very edge of our knowledge and primed to overcome any difficulties that came their way. Their work, coded into computers and plotted in piles of charts and graphs littering their consoles, was the foundation for every computer instruction in the Saturn rocket and aboard the spacecraft. The Trench and the trajectory designers were totally dependent on the millions of lines of code that they wrote in a variety of computer languages such as COBOL and HAL. These computations would hurl the Saturn toward the Moon, and then would swing the CSM into lunar orbit.

Apollo 11 would be the flight for the ages, but Apollo 8 was a very big leap that drew on one’s spiritual and moral resolve. For us it would become the second greatest Christmas story every told. Think about the imagery of a rocket soaring through limitless space, so close to heaven the passengers could reach out and touch the face of God.

After the methodical intensity of the testing, the frequent crisis meetings, the incessant intrusion of the media, and the briefings of “just one more” VIP, the last couple of days before launch always seemed strange. All of a sudden time and motion stopped, as it seems to on a ship caught in the doldrums. I initially welcomed this brief and strange interlude preceding each mission as the final time to catch a breath. Then as the clock kicked over into the last twenty-four hours, the minutes seemed to hang.

This was my first mission as FCD chief. Success belonged to the team; failure was ultimately my responsibility. Even though I was not flying this mission, I went through the same emotional and physical process as my controllers. It was tough to stay away from the control center—and stay out of the way of the guys doing the job—especially during the final hours before Apollo 8. The team understood my anxiety and called me to report, “The count is on schedule and they are in fueling. Why don’t you have a beer and get some sleep. We’ll call if anything comes up.”

The evening before the launch of Apollo 8, a visitor arrived whose presence told you something powerful, something historic, was taking place. He was Charles Lindbergh. He belonged to a more romantic time, when flight was still more an art than a science. His career and his life created a kind of vapor trail that stretched across the years. Lindbergh was with us, as he should have been, when Americans reached for the Moon, so long the object of man’s curiosity and dreams. Perhaps more than anyone in the history of flight, he had inspired human beings to explore the skies above them. Commandingly tall, his hair gray and his manner both reserved and modest, he was an honored guest at the invitation of Wally Schirra at a very private party given for the astronauts and a few of their friends.

The plane Lindbergh flew from New York to Paris in 1927 was powered by a single engine. Lindbergh had sailed through uncharted skies, “hacking it out,” as Wally put it, “with the most primitive of technical equipment.” No radio, no radar, a windshield a bird could break. Lindbergh’s presence was a kind of laying on of hands. I felt that he had handed the stick and rudder over to the astronauts.

December 21, 1968, Apollo 8

The Green Team started arriving at Mission Control two hours after midnight. Cliff Charlesworth was at the flight director’s console, backed up by a group of Trench controllers barely out of college. To a great extent, this was their show. For the first time, man would leave the Earth’s gravity and be captured by the gravity of another heavenly body. The Trench would provide the guidance and navigation. Working closely throughout the early morning hours with John Mayer’s mission planners, they fine-tuned their equipment, their techniques, and themselves. Mission Control is a big, big space, but there is no room in it for ego, only for flawless teamwork.

Sitting in the control center and surrounding buildings were a bunch of very nervous designers, engineers, and computer programmers. All of their work since Kennedy’s speech in 1961 was about to be tested. Every assumption, trade-off, and decision they made in creating the system was about to be put on the line. They were threading the needle, shooting a spacecraft from a rotating Earth at the leading edge of the Moon, a moving target a quarter of a million miles away, passing sixty miles in front of it three days after launch.

Buried in the dungeons of the auxiliary computing room was Hal Beck, an early entrant to the Space Task Group. Now he was the chief of the lunar mission design. His work of almost a decade was about to come to fruition. This was payback for the years of freezing at his desk, thermostats turned down to cool the computers in their office complex. Wrapped in sweaters with a heater at his feet in the midst of a broiling Houston summer, Hal represented the labor, the frustration, and the exuberance of almost eight years of work by the mission planners.

Chances are you have never heard of Hal Beck, who grew up, as many of us did, believing in Buck Rogers. He was one of the unsung heroes of Apollo, of whom there were many. It may not stretch the truth to say that without the likes of him we would not have made it to the Moon.

The next morning, shortly after dawn, I found myself in Mission Control, wearing a green vest hand-tailored by Marta (on occasion I wore a vest the color of the other leads for their flights). In the Trench, FIDO Jay Greene, RETRO Chuck Deiterich, and Gran Paules—the GUIDO—were racing the clock. The three had joined Flight Control after Gemini and had grown in their skills during the Apollo unmanned missions. Greene and Paules flew their first manned mission on Apollo 7. When the countdown resumed after the planned hold, Jay Greene finished configuring his displays for launch. After he gave the command, “Flight, FIDO is Go for launch,” he muttered a silent prayer that it all worked. In Mission Control, for a few moments, time seemed suspended, everything happening in slow motion. Then in a collective fashion, the momentum built and Mission Control surged forward. Today we would go to the edge of the Moon.

It was at moments like this that we counted on “Captain Refsmmat,” our imaginary mascot. In the Trench a “refsmmat” is shorthand for “reference to stable member matrix,” a set of equations used among controllers, crews, and flight designers as the mathematical means to determine angles with reference to navigational stars. It is the one constant that ties together all of the other reference systems used during a mission, often as simple as a line drawn from the center of the Earth through the launch pad. With data from navigational stars and a refsmmat, the crew can determine the spacecraft’s position and velocity in space with the spacecraft computer. The guidance officer at the control center is the keeper of the refsmmats during the mission, synchronizing the ground and spacecraft updates so that the computations will always agree.

The Captain was born during a discussion between John Llewellyn and a newcomer to the Flight Dynamics Branch. Standing by the coffee pot, the rookie asked Llewellyn the name of a controller who had just placed an IOU in the cup next to the pot. Llewellyn responded instantly, “Sheeet, man—that’s Captain Refsmmat, the ideal flight controller! He’s the best we’ve ever had in the Trench.” The new guy nodded knowingly, glad to pick up the name of his new working partners, especially one considered the model for the Trench.

Ed Pavelka, a gifted FIDO of the Gemini era, heard of Llewellyn’s joke and decided to sketch a picture of Captain Refsmmat for the branch. Within days, a two-foot cartoon was hanging in his office. Almost immediately, ideas from other Trench inhabitants poured in and Captain Refsmmat was outfitted in the tools of his trade. He wore a pot helmet with a hinged top opening to a radar antenna and truth-seeking glasses with a black line inscribed across the lens showing the correct deorbit attitude. He had a supply of refsmmats in a pouch on his belt and a variety of awards and decorations, consistent with his august status as the ideal controller.

The Captain was a patriot. He wore a crisp military jacket with captain’s bars on the lapel and a pair of khaki shorts. With knobby knees, tennis shoes, and a broad military brassard, he was an apt replica of the ideal. For all of the things wrong in the world, Captain Refsmmat stood for what is right. Pavelka hung the cartoon on a gray metal locker in the hallway, and within days graffiti started to appear, expressing the various controllers’ thoughts, opinions, gotchas. Over the weeks and the months, the graffiti provided an outlet for the working guys’ feelings