Failure Is Not an Option

voice as he said, “I know all of us here want to thank all you guys down there for the very fine job you did!”

Lovell chimed in, “That’s affirm, Joe.”

Kerwin’s response indicated how close it was: “I’ll tell you we had a good time doing it”… pause… “Just for your information, battery C will fail about the time your parachutes come out. You have enough in the other two for landing.” Moments later, after a brief burst of static, we were in blackout.

As I’ve indicated, the blackout is the toughest time in a mission for the teams. Every member does his soul searching, reviewing the decisions and the data, knowing we had to be damn near perfect and knowing how tough perfection is. Every member of our team on the ground, whether at the consoles, in the back rooms, or seated with SimSup, shared this common agony. Lovell’s description of the damage to the service module made this agony particularly acute. Controllers were trained not to worry about things over which we have no control. We were now in the hands of God and a deadly tired crew, executing a set of procedures written on scraps of paper in the command module, procedures that had not existed eighteen hours ago. The teams knew the fragile hold we had on the many variables, the many decisions we had made in the four days since the explosion. But this is the nature of our business—to live with risk.

Everything now was irreversible. As the spacecraft and crew went through the final braking in the lowest part of the atmosphere, the heat was intense, preventing communications. The aerodynamic braking slowed the command module from five miles a second to less than 100 miles per hour when the chutes opened. The glow of the ionized atmosphere surrounded the crew in brilliant fire-orange as the temperatures soared outside the spacecraft.

The control room was absolutely silent. The only noises were the hum of the electronics, the buzz of the air conditioning, and the occasional click of a Zippo lighter snapping open, followed by the rasp of the lighter wheel against flint. No one moved, as if everyone were chained to his console. Cigarette smoke filled the room, creating a blue haze as we watched the track on the big world map tracing the path of the spacecraft to Earth. All eyes were on the clocks counting down to the end of blackout. Blackout was an eternity. I always said a prayer for the crew at this time.

We were pretty good at computing the blackout times, nailing the start and stop to within seconds. I worked it out in my mind; the beginning of blackout occurred over Australia, as RETRO had predicted, so the end of the blackout time should be on the nose. As the minutes passed, all eyes turned with a thousand-yard stare to the wall clocks as they counted down the final few seconds.

When it hit all zeroes, I told Kerwin, “Joe, give them a call.” Kerwin responded immediately: “Odyssey, Houston standing by.” There was no response, only static. More seconds passed and we called again. There was only static. Controllers pressed their earpieces farther into their ears, listening for the faintest signal. Kerwin called again. We were now almost a minute past the expected signal acquisition time. Still no response. Seconds turned into minutes and minutes into infinity. A sinking feeling, almost a dread, filled the room. When the wall clock rolled past one minute, we wondered what the hell had gone wrong. I wanted to smash something, hold on to something. Was there some screwup in the communications setup or relay? I told myself: they are there; we just are not hearing them.

There was one irrevocable piece of data yet to come. There would be a sonic boom as the command module reentered the atmosphere. When we received the report we would know the crew was coming back to Earth. Quietly, in hushed tones I called Deiterich, my RETRO: “Chuck, were the clocks good?” In a whisper he responded, “They’re good, Flight.” We waited. The world waited. We were 1:28 past the expected acquisition time when a crackly report from a downrange aircraft broke the tension: “ARIA 4 has acquisition.” I pounded the edge of the console; the room erupted, then quieted down quickly.

In the movies, the controllers always stand up and cheer each mission event, but if a controller ever did that before the mission was over and the crew was on the carrier, that would be the last time he sat at a console. There was only one thought now on our minds; all we need now are the parachutes, just the parachutes. The crew was almost home.

Kerwin called again and a few seconds later we heard, “Okay, Joe!” Just two words, but the intensity of the relief was overwhelming. The viewing room, the back rooms, and our instructors erupted again as they saw the chutes blossom on the TV. In the control room each controller has his moment of emotional climax. I find myself crying unabashedly, then I try to suck it in, realizing this is inappropriate. But it doesn’t work; it only gets worse. I was standing at the console crying. When the crew hits the water we once again sit at our consoles. Our job is over only when the crew is on the carrier and we have handed our responsibility to the aircraft carrier task force commander.

When this happened on Apollo 13 we finally realized that Flight Control and the people in the back rooms, factories, and laboratories had won the day. Our crew was home. We—crew, contractors, controllers—had done the impossible. The human factor had carried the day.

I was totally unprepared for the events of the next two weeks. The day following landing the flight directors and I stood on a platform with the wives and families of our crew as we received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on behalf of the mission operations teams. The cheers of our teammates, NASA engineers, and our families rose in crescendo as President Nixon concluded reading the award citation, “Three brave astronauts are alive and on Earth because of their [the mission operations teams’] dedication, and because at the critical moments the people of that team were wise enough and self-possessed enough to make the right decisions. Their extraordinary feat is a tribute to man’s ingenuity, to his resourcefulness and to his courage.” When our glittering technology failed us, our resourcefulness and courage, as well as every bit of the experience gained since the abortive four-inch Mercury launch, had carried the day.

Two weeks later on May 1, 1970, the flight directors and our wives flew to Chicago on the NASA Administrator’s private aircraft for a luncheon and ticker-tape parade. As the aircraft pulled to a stop, the throbbing pulsing tempo of “Aquarius” played by city high school bands filled the air on the tarmac. The tempo matched my heartbeat as we waved to the airport crowd and were greeted by the City Council. During a luncheon at Chicago’s Palmer House, Lovell was awarded the city’s Medal of Merit and we were each given the key to Chicago by Mayor Richard Daley. After lunch Marta and the wives took their place in the reviewing stand as we were escorted to the parade automobiles.

Jim Lovell and Jack Swigert took the lead in a Lincoln convertible. Sig Sjoberg took the second while the flight directors were paired in Cadillac convertibles. Milt Windler and I rode in the third car and were followed by Lunney and Griffin. (Fred Haise did not attend, as he was still recovering from the flight.) The convertibles were flanked by three layers of police, plainclothes men next to the convertible, a second row in crisp uniforms with white gloves, and a third row of police motorcycle escort. Screaming sirens and flashing red lights of the police outriders added to the cacophony. As we passed around the Chicago Loop, fireboats in the Chicago River sent streams of water into the air. The cheers of the crowd made it impossible to talk.

Chicago will always remain in my memory as a class city, and I thanked them for the moments they gave us to bask in the eye of the public. When we returned to the airplane after the exhausting day, a box containing a silver punch bowl was on each of the wives’ seats. (Upon return we each had to submit paperwork to the NASA legal folks to determine whether we could keep the gift from Mayor Daley and the City of Chicago. Since the punch bowls were engraved, the lawyers decided we could keep them.)

I think everyone, once in his life, should be given a ticker-tape parade.

The Apollo 13 debriefing had few surprises. We learned that the tank failure was due to a combination of a design flaw, mishandling during change-out, a draining procedure after a test that damaged the heater circuit, and a poor selection of the telemetry measurement range for the heater temperatures.

The debriefing party at the Hofbraugarten was merciless, beginning with a parody of the mission. The tape prepared by the Apollo 13 backup crew and the CapComs was not for the thin-skinned. The parody began and ended with the “immortal words” Liebergot and I exchanged early in the crisis.

Kranz: “I don’t understand that, Sy.”

Liebergot: “I think we may have had an instrumentation problem, Flight.”

The clips of the voice tapes from the mission and the press conferences were interwoven with a Spike Jones record, gospel music, and various sound effects. No one was spared. As the tape continued, the crews and controllers roared and poured more beer. The tape took a shot at every flight director and crew member, as well as