problem. If we couldn’t come up with answers, we would abort the landing and start a rendezvous to recover the LM, then jettison it and head back home. If problems surfaced beyond five minutes, we would try to land and then lift off from the surface after a brief stay. We would try for the landing even if we could only touch down and then lift off two hours later when the CSM passed overhead in lunar orbit with the proper conditions for rendezvous. (The LM had limited electrical power. The lunar liftoff time had to be precisely established to allow rendezvous and docking before the LM batteries failed.)
I knew Armstrong never said much, but I expected him to be vocal on the mission rule strategy. He wasn’t. It took time to get used to his silence. As we went through the rules, Neil would generally smile or nod. I believed that he had set his own rules for the landing. I just wanted to know what they were. My gut feeling said he would press on, accepting any risk as long as there was even a remote chance to land. I believed we were well in sync, since I had a similar set of rules. I would let the crew continue as long as there was a chance.
The SimSup presided over some of the most complex technology of the space program. The only
Every time an astronaut threw a switch or a controller sent a command, a series of equations was triggered in the simulation computer. This pulse started a chain reaction: the data cascaded through sixteen other computers, sending impulses to the cockpit or the controllers’ displays. SimSup needed a thick skin. When the simulation hardware and computers misbehaved, he had an unhappy crew and control team while we waited hours to restart the training. If they balked too often, Slayton, Kraft, and the flight directors would get involved. The squeaky wheel invariably got the grease, priorities were rearranged, and someone downstream, another flight director and group of astronauts, would be stuck with less and would start screaming about being cheated out of their training. Simulator training was routinely conducted sixteen hours each day. Both primary and backup crews were being trained for the subsequent two or three missions on two sets of training hardware. For the coming mission in the sequence SimSup had a prime and backup crew and four teams of controllers to get ready for a mission in ninety days, and he always had the priority.
The simulation team, like the flight director, worked to the launch day deadline. When the controllers clocked twelve-hour days, the training team worked fourteen. When he was not training, SimSup was studying the controllers, crews, and mission strategy, looking for the holes and developing new training runs to exploit the perceived holes.
SimSup for the descent phase was Dick Koos, who struck me as a quiet young academic. In fact, he was a discharged sergeant from the Army Missile Command at Fort Bliss, Texas. Dick was an early hire into the Space Task Group, assigned to train the crews and control teams. His background was in computer guidance for the early ground-to-air missiles. Simulation was an entirely new field, but with his computer experience he took to his work with a passion.
Koos went up through the ranks rapidly and developed into an excellent SimSup. Dick was a thin guy, wore wire-rimmed glasses, expressed himself in incomplete sentences, and seemed unsure of what he was trying to say. His external demeanor set you up for his training sessions, which were like a rapier, cutting so cleanly that you did not know you were bleeding until long after the thrust. Koos was a worthy adversary and an excellent choice for training my White Team for the Apollo 11 landing.
SimSup had months to design the training sessions; we had but seconds to minutes to solve problems he posed. The early sessions were rugged. SimSup’s team attacked every aspect of our knowledge, even the relationships between space and ground teams. They pounded away at the strategy and timing. When we were through, we were in a place beyond exhaustion.
Landing training kicked off at launch minus eight weeks. My team, fresh from Apollo 9, had a “hot hand,” and from the beginning it seemed we could do no wrong. The first two training days were used to nail down the timeline for the landing preparation, establish the Go NoGo points, give the controllers a walk-through of the landing sequence, and become familiar with the three-second communications delay when working at lunar distances. Initially the three-second delay didn’t seem like much, but if things start to go wrong in the final seconds before landing you could quickly find yourself in the corner of a box with no more options. The mission rules and procedures were refined during the initial two days of training and I felt well prepared to start the landing abort simulations.
Mental preparation was key to getting through a simulation. Each individual on the team had to find his very own way to be up for the challenge. Marta always sensed when I had to start working on it; she would say, “Isn’t it time for you to get ready?” She would then round up the kids and give me the time and space to start my internal preparation for each day. She made sure that I had some internal peace and was centered as I left to face whatever the day would throw at me. We had so much to do—and so little time.
Dick Koos was as concerned about the adequacy of the training schedule as I was. Putting all of the pieces together in eleven days of training scattered over two months was tough. After the first two sessions Koos’s judgment was that we were too damn cocky, and a bit of humility learned early in the training might make us more receptive. Looking at my team through the glass wall in the control room, Dick gave orders to increase the pressure. Smiling confidently, he thought, “Kranz’s team will remember June 10 as the day that started them down the path to the Moon.” Koos’s team leaned forward at their consoles, savoring the coming battle. Today only the fittest would survive.
The first session was the warm-up. Seconds after we started the descent it seemed every controller had problems. The voice loops were jammed by controllers voicing instructions through Charlie Duke to the crew. Seconds after the crew responded another problem surfaced, then another, until Bob Carlton advised he had problems in the ascent stage. If we continued we’d leave the crew on the surface without a way home. Once the abort call was made and the engine throttled up, Koos called on the loop, “Good one, Flight. You nailed it. Let’s start the turnaround for the next run.” Through the glass wall I could see Dick standing behind his console. If the first run was an indication, today was going to be mano a mano. By the third run of the day the time criticality and complexity of each training run was peaking and my team was barely holding its own. Koos was having his own problems trying to keep the simulation computers from crashing.
The fourth run ended in a crash. In the Trench Jay Greene got behind on his calls, allowing the LM landing speed to build up. Our final instruction to abort was too late and Greene’s large plot board in the front of mission control was mute testimony to the futility of our action. With the three-second delay in communications to the Moon, the crew was splattered across the Sea of Tranquillity. This was our first crash, the result of a few seconds’ delay in our communication and decision process. After a tough and very frank personal debriefing, Jay and I dared Koos’s team to get us again.
On the next session Koos delivered the coup de grace with a virtual repeat of our previous crash. This time, with the crew approaching the lunar surface, the LM primary computer failed while I was working an LM electrical problem with the systems controller. The distraction caused by troubleshooting an electrical fault resulted in a late switch to the backup computer system for the abort. It seemed that no matter what we did, we just were not fast enough. We were learning the hard way about the
The next two runs were a washout. I felt like a novice flight director, the sweat soaking my shirt at the armpits. There was something in the air, something I could not put my finger on. I felt unprepared, edgy. My moves and calls became hesitant and unsure, and I believe my voice betrayed my unease and passed it to my team.
Koos never backed off; his pressure was unrelenting. We were just hanging on, and our performance was in a downward spiral. Every team member, frustrated, tried desperately to get the team on track. By the final training run I felt like the coach of a sandlot ball club behind 21-0 in the third inning. All this had taken place in one day. I had just had my worst day of simulation ever as a flight director. But when the LM headed for the lunar surface, I would be working in precious seconds. We had to work out the bugs now.
During training runs it was customary for the big bosses, Kraft, Slayton, and even George Low, to listen in on
