muttering in my direction, “We told you the crew was too damn tired!” This was a good test of the flight director’s mandate. I respected both Kraft and Slayton for not second-guessing me and letting me get on with my job.
The second spin-up attempt worked, and we initiated the complete power-down of the spacecraft. It was now twenty-six hours after the explosion. The crew and my team could finally get to sleep. I tried not to think about how cold it was going to get for the crew, but I knew we had decided on the right option, staying powered up until we went around the Moon.
With the shift over, I called a brief meeting of the White Team in Room 210. Aaron’s battle plan had the crew powering down to a twelve amp load (about a quarter of the power consumed by a household vacuum cleaner) for the return journey. It would be an ordeal for the crew. It would get cold, damned cold, but there was nothing we could do. Crew comfort was our last priority; they would have to tough it out. The power numbers had improved as a result of the work of Peters and Aaron, but we were still too tight on water. When we ran out of LM water we planned to use waste water and urine for cooling, if needed.
Engineering gave a status report indicating that they were close to a solution on another problem. The crew’s breathing was slowly poisoning the cabin atmosphere with carbon dioxide. We had run out of the cylindrical air scrubbers used in the lunar module, and engineering was testing an adapter for the square command module canister that was being fabricated from cardboard, a plastic bag, a sock, and a hose from one of the crew’s pressure suits. You have to picture a plasticized flight plan cover, to funnel air flow, curved over the top of a lithium hydroxide air scrubber (for removing CO2) and a hose attached to the scrubber’s bottom, which in turn ran down to a small fan, which pulled air through the scrubber and sent it through the sock, which served as a filter. The device was all held together by duct tape, a commodity which, fortunately, was always carried in the spacecraft.
By the time we arrived at this rather bizarre but functional contraption, we had been awake for a day and a half, so I told the White Team to get six hours’ sleep. Then we would start working out the final set of procedures for the reentry phase. I had developed a habit on previous missions of resting in the viewing room when we had problems. The room was as cold as a meat locker, quiet except for the crew and flight director voice loops, and with few occupants except during major events. I staked out the upper corner of the viewing room as my home base when I wanted to rest, and after a thirty-to forty-five-minute catnap generally got back on track quickly. Since there were a lot of people in the third-floor room, I went down to the second-floor viewing room. It was also close to the action if someone needed me.
The final phase of the struggle to return the crew now began. Flight Control had fought a delaying action. We had stabilized the situation and protected the options. We had a pretty good idea of the resources available in both spacecraft. The show now belonged to Aldrich, Peters, and Aaron. Their job was to manage the resources, trade off the options, build margins wherever possible, and finalize the detailed procedures for the final entry phase of the mission. If ever there was a trio prepared for battle it was this one.
The ebb and flow among the design, test, and operations communities provided answers to the questions we had yet to ask, problems we had yet to identify. Aaron Cohen and Owen Morris, the NASA spacecraft program chiefs, rolled up their sleeves and joined with their counterparts Dale Myers from North American and Tom Kelly from Grumman. Together they directed a superb effort to solve a complex technical problem in a very tight time frame. These four engineers were the highly respected generals who commanded the engineers in the factories, laboratories, and test facilities. I believed that this team could move mountains. The flight directors had worked with all of them during the spacecraft redesign after the Apollo fire and subsequently in preparation for the missions. The trust among program manager, designer, and mission control was absolute.
Added to this respected group were two other great engineers, Don Arabian and Scott Simpkinson, whose pedigrees traced back to the early days in Mercury Control. They were well versed in real-time troubleshooting and were fully aware of the high-stakes poker we were playing. Above all, they knew that you had to have answers before the clock ran out.
This task force worked in the SPAN (spacecraft analysis) room, focusing on only one thing—how to get the crew home. They provided the missing pieces we needed. The handovers between engineering and operations were smoother than on an Olympic relay team and we did it repeatedly for almost four days. There were a lot of heroes but the SPAN team never got the gold medal and the recognition it deserved.
Aldrich was the scribe, watching the clock, assembling the pieces, listening to the debates, then deciding when enough was enough and it was time to put the plans on paper. Aaron was the accountant, keeping a meticulous balance sheet on the precious resources. Aaron became critical for power, Peters critical for water. Aaron checked every procedure entry, exercising his sole and absolute power of veto, often sending the controllers back to square one, telling them, “Your input was not good enough. Give it another shot and be back to me in an hour with your bottom line.” Aaron, with his veto authority, soon became the dominant player in the return planning. The LM water available for cooling dictated an extremely low power level during the return journey. As a result it soon became clear that we could make it home with the LM battery power.
When Aaron recognized we would now have some power to spare he wanted to recharge the command module batteries. The three CM batteries would be the sole power source for the final hours of reentry. Since the batteries had provided the CSM power in the minutes after the explosion, they were no longer fully charged. Aaron wanted to find a way to charge them to maximum capacity.
When the two spacecraft were designed, it was never envisioned that we would need to charge the command module batteries from the LM. But now the controllers started looking at ways to use the LM heater cable in the reverse direction to charge the batteries for the final entry phase. Aaron and Aldrich now started bartering with Peters for the excess power in the LM batteries. The controllers were intensely debating the risks to both systems, trading off options but keeping an eye on the clock. Aaron finally resolved the issue: “We’re going to charge the CSM batteries. I can’t see leaving any power in the LM when we jettison it. I want a test rig set up to verify the procedures and to measure the power loss during charging.” With the decision made, he turned to the SPAN team to set up a test rig to prove the procedure.
While we labored in Mission Control, SPAN continued to dig out the answers and give us their best judgments about tough, critical questions that would lead to irrevocable decisions. “How cold can the thrusters get and still fire?” “How many amp hours are really in the battery beyond the spec values?” “We don’t want to chance skipping off the Earth’s atmosphere because our trajectory is too shallow—how critical is the reentry angle?” These questions triggered other questions; discussions of alternatives abounded; engineers wanted priorities. The engineers needed to know how their piece of data fit in to that of other engineers working on related problems.
A 100 percent correct answer, too late to be of use, was worthless. The White Team needed answers quickly to develop the procedures, integrate them in the simulators, and voice them up to the crew. Personally, I wanted a few hours to sit and think before the White Team and crew started the final eight hours of entry.
I don’t think Aaron got any sleep in the last forty-eight hours. He had delegated well, but he knew where the buck stopped. His intuition was incredible. He kept turning up at the place where the logjams were building. With a few words he cleared the jam, then moved to another room, another debate. His prescience was almost mystical.
Throughout this period, astronauts in simulators tested the entry procedures, looking for traps that could endanger a near-freezing, deadly tired, and dehydrated crew. We all knew that cold and dehydration impair cognitive and motor responses—and it was now damn cold in the spacecraft.
In the final thirty-six hours the White Team came together at four-hour intervals with Aldrich, Aaron, and Peters to review the progress. Buck Willoughby, my GNC officer, was concerned about his thrusters. The LM would provide attitude control until jettisoned, then control would switch to the CM. Without heat since the explosion, the CM thrusters were dangerously cold, the propellant valves sluggish. Willoughby wanted a “hot fire” test to make sure they were all working before separating from the LM. The Trench joined in supporting the request. Slayton lobbied to power up early, using excess power to warm the spacecraft and his crew.
I vetoed most departures from the agreed procedures, stating that we had to keep them simple, and I wanted to be able to function in case of an LM battery failure. I intended keeping everything possible in reserve until I knew we had it made. Then and only then would I consider other options. The flight planners started a shopping list to be used when power became available. The hot-fire and early power-up were put at the top.
Since the White Team would handle the final shift for reentry, my deadline to Aaron and Aldrich to complete
