debrief.
Awarding the “dumb shit medals” (DSM) was the focus of the festivity. Flight directors, controllers, and crew compiled a list of errors, both perceived and actual, during the course of the mission. In an elaborate and highly graphic fashion, we stepped forward to make a speech or accept our honors. The Hofbraugarten oompah band often joined in, playing a dirge as the stories got longer and wilder. The awards took many forms—elaborate certificates, dented and broken equipment, photographs, and multicolored ribbons to be worn around the neck. By the end of Gemini, I had enough awards that the controllers presented me a set formatted like the bars of military campaign ribbons.
One of the highest-order dumb shit medals passed out at the debriefing party was for anyone who missed a pre-sleep checklist item and then had to wake the crew to correct a switch position or pump up the pressures in the tanks. My awards ranged from triggering a fire alarm during a mission when I emptied my ashtray into the wastebasket, to locking the control room doors for launch before all my team members had returned to the room. A common DSM among the flight directors was awarded for leaving the console log behind at the press conference, or for a poor selection of crew wake-up music.
The festivities often included a chug-a-lug contest or some old-fashioned Indian arm wrestling. The controllers and crews put forward their own champions. The parties reminded me of the fighter pilot hijinks back at the Officers Club in Osan, Korea.
Emulating the traditions of a fighter squadron, I decided that Flight Control needed to fashion a beer mug. Maureen Bowen, secretary and den mother to Mel Brooks and the Experiment Systems Branch, was recruited to work with the Balfour Mug Company to design a mug for the flight control team. In a typical engineering fashion we provided some specifications: the mug must hold one and a half liters of beer, be decorated with a copy of the crew’s mission patch, and contain the controller’s name and MCC console position. By the time we finished, the beer mug had become grand and unique, containing crew signatures and Armstrong’s words from the Moon landing.
Maureen started collecting the money, and within weeks she had over $5,000. We had moved beyond the normal coffee pot finances into the big time. She did not want to keep the money around the office so she opened a checking account in the Nassau Bay Bank across from NASA.
Everything was going nicely. The mugs were ordered and we had raised enough money so that we could afford to throw a party at the Hofbraugarten to christen the mugs when they arrived. Then the roof fell in. The NASA inspector general, located in the Manned Spacecraft Center, and two members of the regional inspector’s office entered Maureen’s office quoting the fines and jail time for violation of NASA directives on the use of the Apollo 11 astronaut badge. It looked as though Maureen, a young secretary, would be terribly old and poor by the time she got out of jail. By the time the bureaucrats were done, Maureen and I were charged with violation of many NASA directives. (The NASA seal, insignia, logo, program, and astronaut and mission operations badges are protected from commercial use or sale.) Maureen was more concerned that the NASA inspectors had confiscated her checkbook, and a lot of bills for the mugs were coming due.
Neil Armstrong asked Mike Collins to refer all of the mug data to headquarters, confirming that the Apollo 11 crew endorsed the design and gave us permission to use their patch. Once he saw the guns aligned on him, the inspector who started the flap backed off. He even purchased a mug for himself.
The lesson, as with any mission, was well learned. Over the years, we in the Flight Control Division managed to build the biggest party fund in NASA, and when it grew too big, we donated a lot of money to charity. We sold mugs, lapel pins, and sweatshirts, and threw good-sized parties at fancy places. Although the NASA legal folks watched us, we never had any further problems with the inspector general.
In 1999, on the thirtieth anniversary of the first lunar landing, we cast the mug for the final time, then broke the mold.
18. THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
“Aquarius/Let the Sun Shine In,” a song from the rock musical
Lunar exploration began in earnest after the pinpoint landing of Apollo 12. Mission targeting moved to more difficult and hazardous landing areas. The landing point for Apollo 13 was a target 3,000 feet in diameter, located north of a large crater dubbed Fra Mauro. The crater was located in a geologic formation south of the Imbrium Basin. The basin, one of the largest on the Moon, had been formed by a gigantic cosmic collision. Scientists hoped that samples of the material ejected during the collision would establish the date of the Imbrium event.
Veteran astronaut Jim Lovell commanded the mission. His experience on Gemini 7 and 12, as well as his being one of the first humans to orbit the Moon on Apollo 8, made him a logical candidate to lead a rookie crew. The LM pilot was Freddo (Fred) Haise, a member of the fifth class of astronauts, who had graduated from test pilot school in 1954. Fred knew the LM, especially the software, like the back of his hand. Ken Mattingly, the command module pilot, was a favorite among the controllers for his in-depth knowledge of every aspect of the business. But two days prior to the launch Ken was scrubbed from the mission because he had been exposed to measles. He was replaced by Jack Swigert, a member of the backup crew. During the pre-mission meetings and in training we had spent a lot of time with the backup crews, so Jack was no stranger to the MCC teams. After two days of refresher training he was ready to go.
I was the lead flight director on Apollo 13, a transition mission in many ways. The new flight directors, Griffin, Frank, and Windler, were pulling more weight, preparing to alternate the lead responsibility for the final four missions. Charlesworth had flown his last mission on Apollo 12 and was forming the Earth Resources Project Office as part of a plan to apply space technology to Earth’s problems. Operations was my business and I liked teaching the young controllers, watching them grow during their four-year training period as they progressed from the back room to the MCC main control room. Every new controller was assigned a mentor to test his knowledge, build his confidence, and prepare him for the painful and necessary lessons he would learn from SimSup. When controllers make it to the ranks of the front room and meet the flight director, they fully understand that the price of their admission is
Failure does not exist in the lexicon of a flight controller. The universal characteristic of a controller is that he will never give up until he has an answer or another option. By the time someone graduated to the front room consoles either he was ready—or he was gone before he got there.
The Apollo 13 flight director chemistry was unique. Windler and I were jet fighter pilots; Griffin flew as a radar operator. For the first time we were working together on a mission. Lunney, the fourth flight director, was the last of the original flight dynamics officers, the master of his craft.
