fog.
After only a few weeks of training, in March 1961 the controllers went to the most remote outposts, installations connected to Mercury Control by a communications system best described as brittle. Text messages were prepared by Teletype operators at machines that punched holes into a narrow paper tape. When the message was completed, the tape was fed into a machine and transmitted to the tracking stations. This took at least twenty times longer to transmit a data packet than a present-day $100 fax machine would take to transmit the same amount of information. The constant chattering of the Teletype machines provided the audible backdrop for virtually all of the work at a site.
The CapCom was the remote site team boss and handled all air-to-ground communications. His systems monitor assessed the capsule status with a bank of twenty-one meters and a couple of eight-pen recorders, like those used on lie detector, or polygraph, machines. The team flight surgeon had even fewer displays, thirteen meters, a scope to monitor the astronaut’s electrocardiogram, and an eight-pen recorder. Each three-man remote site team, with their brief contacts of eight minutes or less with the capsule during each orbit, provided the global coverage for early spaceflight. They were our eyes and ears as the spacecraft passed overhead. Their charge was simple: stay out of trouble, keep the mission on track, and provide any needed assistance to the crew. Easier said than done.
The Mercury remote site CapComs were all fresh college graduates; this was their first job. They were paired with systems monitors, also young, who worked for Philco, a high-technology (in those days) electronics company. The systems monitors had no more than two years’ experience working at the early global satellite tracking stations. Only the very young seemed to have the guts to volunteer for these assignments, living on their own in distant and remote places.
The tracking stations were often fairly primitive corrugated steel buildings like the hootches I lived in while in Korea, housing the electronic equipment and consoles. The sites were easily identified by their myriad of antennas. Primary site communications were provided by sixty-word-per-minute Teletype and a radio voice link from relay stations at London, Honolulu, and Sydney. The system was a daily crapshoot, susceptible to a variety of problems. When communications failed, the remote site teams were on their own, improvising and taking any action necessary during the period the capsule was in view to restore contact.
The key sites were located at the points for the major Go NoGo decisions, and the locations of the deorbit maneuver. These included Bermuda; Australia; Hawaii; Guaymas, Mexico; and the California coast. These sites were usually designated as critical, and the team was augmented with an astronaut CapCom. The more remote facilities were the Canary Islands, Nigeria, Zanzibar, Canton Island, and ships sailing the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. World War II cargo vessels had been converted into floating sites to track satellites. They were the length of a football field, manned by a makeshift crew recruited from the hiring halls at the local ports. Since the ships carried no cargo, a foot of concrete was poured on the top deck to make them ride lower, and the superstructure was filled with antennas and electronics.
Chris Kraft developed the concept of Mercury Control and taught the first generation of controllers. Like everyone else, he was drinking from a fire hose and needed every bit of help he could get. I was the operations and procedures officer. The job description consisted of keeping anything from falling through the cracks before or during the mission. I wrote the countdowns, prepared all message traffic, made sure the communications were working, briefed the tracking stations on the mission, and gave Kraft any assistance he needed. In effect, I was the flight director’s wingman.
I became the scribe of Mercury Control, originating and approving every outgoing Teletype message and most voice communications. Within weeks after I had come on the job in 1960, my relationship with Kraft was solid enough for me to take on responsibility to clear virtually all of the messages without having to bother him. On the first Mercury deployment this got me into big trouble with the U.S. State Department and President Kennedy’s Peace Corps. I sent out a message to one of our controllers requesting information on the health conditions at one of our sites in Nigeria. The controller replied that “a hospital of doubtful cleanliness is nearby” and noted that the local people were “extremely poor, local government performance rather feeble. There are no nightclubs or bars. Temperatures are as high as 115 with frequent dust storms.” The bad news? “When the rainy season begins it will get worse.”
The Nigerian government intercepted the message and threatened to remove the Peace Corps unless the U.S. government apologized. The flap filtered down through the NASA chain of command until it got to me. The message from Kraft was clear: “You screwed up. Next time you’re gone.” The U.S. apology kept the lid on the issue. The teams stayed on site and I got my first lesson in international diplomacy.
On the last day of March 1961, five months after my arrival, the tracking network was declared operational. We had twenty-one sites, thirteen of which were manned. The total cost of the network, built in one year, was $60 million.
2. “LIFTOFF; THE CLOCK IS RUNNING”
The Soviet Union was our rival in space. While we were blowing up rockets, they were impacting the Moon with a probe. They even photographed the far side. Each Russian breakthrough came as a shock. (Our “intelligence” on the Russian space program was pretty hot stuff—notebooks with newspaper and trade journal clips pasted in them. The military apparently didn’t feel that the civilians in NASA had a need to know whatever it was they knew.)
Most Americans followed the selection and training and further adventures of the seven original astronauts. That was about all they really knew about our infant manned space program. The astronauts were instant celebrities, not so much selected as anointed. The public, as well as the Mission Control team, was caught up in the beauty pageant aspect of the first manned launch: Which astronaut would be first? Who was the best?
In April, as we were deploying for a pair of missions, the Russians beat us again. Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, and in orbit to boot, and we neophytes in the Space Task Group viewed the Russian success with both frustration and admiration. We packed up our bags, kissed the wife and kids goodbye, and, a few hours later, were once again at Mercury Control. Marta was now expecting our third child. We were launching increasingly complex missions from the Cape every month. Over half of the year we were TDY, on temporary duty, at the Cape. Unlike the later years in Houston, our wives did not know each other and often lived pretty far apart, so it was a lonely time for them. Compounding the problem was the dispersal of so many of our people to far-flung remote sites. Working in Mercury Control, I was fortunate: I could easily stay in touch by phone—and I could share with Marta the excitement and pride that we felt as the program went forward.
Following two successful Redstone launches, we moved on to the unmanned Atlas mission, which was designed to test the spacecraft and the global network. The mission that would follow was the one we had been waiting for. It was planned to launch the first American into space.
After we arrived at the Cape, we found that the military, which actually ran the Cape and nearby Patrick AFB, as well as the recovery forces, had pulled the plug on our resources and reallocated them to deal with one of the worst crises of the Cold War. A force of 1,300 Cuban exiles, who had been trained and armed by the CIA and given decidedly insufficient American tactical support, had landed at the Bay of Pigs in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the predawn hours of April 17. Initially planned under the Eisenhower administration, this ill-advised invasion had probably been doomed from the outset, but its fate was sealed when President Kennedy, only a few months into his term and ambivalent about the entire operation, withheld American air support. Castro’s small air force decimated
