Failure Is Not an Option

not superstitious, but we knew that every time we flew we were rolling the dice. We had beaten the odds on the last three missions. Probability said that someday we would run out of luck—as we almost did with Apollo 13. So we treated every mission as if it were our very first one.

I was out of the flight director rotation again. Frank, Griffin, Lunney, and Windler led the Apollo 14 teams. With a nod to the Wright brothers, the crew of Apollo 14 had named the spaceship the Kitty Hawk. Apollo 14 lifted off on the last day in January, headed for the Apollo 13 landing site, Fra Mauro. Alan Shepard, the first American in space, was the mission commander. Shepard had been scheduled to lead one of the first Gemini missions, but had been grounded by a rare inner ear disorder that caused severe vertigo. Like Slayton, he had been looking out for the interests of the astronaut corps. Then, in the summer of 1968, when he was partially deaf, he took a chance on experimental ear surgery to correct the vertigo and, against the odds, it worked.

There wasn’t enough time to get sentimental, but all of us shared the pleasure of Shepard’s comeback. Ten years earlier, while the nation watched and prayed and wondered, he soared into space in a capsule called Freedom 7. In just fifteen minutes the ride was over, but we had opened the door to space just that much wider.

Now forty-seven, Alan’s appearance had changed little. He still resembled the actor Steve McQueen, and had a direct, no-nonsense, I-am-what-I-am kind of air about him. He always looked you right in the eye, and you felt he was looking right through you. (He would go on to become an admiral, one of the few who attained that rank without ever commanding a major ship. The list was small but distinguished, and two of the other names on it were the explorer Richard Byrd and Hyman Rickover, the pioneer of the nuclear submarine program.)

Shepard’s compatriot in Apollo 14’s lunar module, the Antares, was Ed Mitchell, a naval aviator flying his first mission and a virtual unknown to most of the controllers. Mitchell dabbled in psychic phenomena and for once I was sorry that I had moved Llewellyn out of the RETRO job. I would have liked to see if they could pull off a retrofire data exchange via mental telepathy. Stu Roosa, the command module pilot, had been my CapCom on Apollo 9 and had won the “most valuable player” award. At mission completion, when we light up the cigars, an eighteen-inch replica of the crew’s mission patch is hung on the wall of the control room. The flight directors, by consensus, select the single controller considered most valuable to hang the patch. Like many of my controllers, Roosa came from Oklahoma, bringing with him the cheerful exuberance of a farm boy. You might say we had a mixed bag of characters playing in this one.

Roosa faced the first challenge when the docking system malfunctioned. In spite of Roosa’s precise maneuvering, three docking attempts in two hours failed to dock the CSM with the LM. Even the tiniest debris lodged in the mechanism would account for the latches failing to engage. Running out of time, fuel, and options, MCC decided to advise him to come in fast and dock with a bang. Roosa would ram the lunar module, in effect, doing a ring-to-ring docking. Shepard turned to Roosa and said, “Stu, just forget about trying to conserve fuel. This time, juice it.” While Roosa thrusted against the docking ring, Shepard manually fired the latches. The technique worked, and after some hair-raising moments, the mission was back on track.

Spaceflight rarely gives you a second chance, but Apollo 14 was the exception. Crisis management textbooks use the term “prodrome” to define a warning or intimation of an impending crisis. I define it as the signal that causes the hair on the back of your neck to rise. With luck, someone picks up the signal, recognizes something is wrong, and starts an action that short-circuits the crisis.

The mission had gone well, and Shepard and Mitchell were in the LM, setting up the switches and computer for the descent to Fra Mauro. The timeline had been followed almost perfectly, the crew and ground were in sync. It was the way we like it when we are getting ready to land on the Moon.

Bordered with black and yellow tape and centered in the LM control panel was a round, red push-button switch. The white letters ABORT on the in button distinguished this switch as the one that started an irreversible process to terminate a mission. It was used only when there was no other alternative. The switch had electrical contacts to issue signals to the LM engines, computer, and abort electronics. When the abort switch for Apollo 14’s LM had been manufactured, a small piece of metal had been left in the switch. Now, in zero gravity, and with both crew and ground oblivious, this piece of metal was floating among the contacts of the switch, randomly making intermittent connections.

Dick Thorson was the LM control engineer for the descent and landing. Using his console television display, he was tracking the crew’s progress through the checklist. The CSM had undocked and separated from the LM. Shepard and Mitchell in the LM were passing on the front side of the Moon on the final orbit, one hour before starting the lunar descent. All was looking good in both spacecraft and in the MCC.

After Apollo 13, the controllers’ console warning light logic had been reversed to aid the controller in rapidly recognizing a changing status in critical systems. Of the hundreds of event lights on Thorson’s panel, only a few were now illuminated. The earlier problems with the docking system were long forgotten; the focus now was keeping to the precise timing for the landing trajectory.

Out of the corner of his eye, Dick noted a change in his status panel. He glanced up quickly to see a red light at his console that indicated the crew had pushed the LM abort switch. This did not make sense. Thinking there might be a telemetry patching error to the light panel at his console, he selected a TV display that let him look into the guts of the computer. Rapidly scanning down the list he saw that Computer Channel 30, Bit 1 (Abort) had been set on. He kept his cool and called the back room to get a reading directly from the data stream. The technician confirmed, “Channel 30, Bit 1 is set.” There was no doubt now, this was a valid indication. If the LM engine had been running, the abort bit would have signaled the computer to change operating modes from the landing mode to the ascent/rendezvous mode. When this occurred, the descent engine would automatically throttle up. If the LM was close to the lunar surface and near fuel exhaustion, the computer would command a fire-in-the-hole staging. This staging sequence would shut down the descent engine, fire the explosive bolts to separate the ascent and descent stages, and ignite the ascent engine, while simultaneously changing computer programs and switching electrical power and control to the ascent stage. When you started the ascent engine, which was buried in a cavity inside the descent stage, under these conditions, you had a fire-in-the-hole situation. All events occurred in fractions of a second. The sequence had to work perfectly.

If the crew was near the surface and the abort bit set, it would, at best, eliminate the possibility of landing. Coupled with other malfunctions, it could lead to a lunar crash. The abort bit now illuminated on Thorson’s console quickly got his full attention.

In the SPAN room, two of Thorson’s counterparts, Hal Loden and Bob Carlton, also noticed that the abort bit had been set. Without hesitation Carlton, the Silver Fox, leaned over Loden’s shoulder. In a laconic drawl he said, “We should get the crew to knock on the panel.”

Great controllers seem to have a prodigious memory and the gift of excellent recall. Carlton remembered a NASA ALERT bulletin, that cited problems with internal switch contamination. Loden concurred with Carlton’s rather unusual troubleshooting and told Thorson on the intercom, “Dick, have the crew knock on the panel by the switch and let’s see if the abort indication goes away. We may have a contaminated switch.” Thorson momentarily wondered if this wasn’t a crazy idea, but he didn’t have any alternative to offer. He stood up, stretching his headset cord, and walked to the side of flight director Gerry Griffin’s console. In the high-tech age of Apollo, he was embarrassed to resort to shade-tree mechanic fixes in front of the whole world.

Leaning toward Griffin, Dick puffed on his cigarette and hoarsely muttered, “Gerry, I’m seeing an abort indication in the lunar module. Have the crew verify that the button is not depressed.” Thorson now had Griffin’s attention as he continued, “If they say negative, have them knock on the panel while we watch it.”

The CapCom, Fred Haise, passed the instruction to the crew. The crew, unaware of the potential gravity of the situation, acknowledged the call. Mitchell reached over and tapped on the switch with a flashlight.

At Thorson’s console the light and TV indication disappeared. Thorson called out, “Gerry, I’m NoGo. I’ve got some problems here and it is going to take some time to work them out.” Griffin waved off the landing attempt, and Apollo 14 had dodged a bullet. The crew and control team received another chance. The crisis was real, but with advance warning the team could develop options to save the mission. The critical element once again was time. We had precious few hours to work on the problem. Thorson’s dilemma was a thorny one: to land, we needed to bypass the switch, but if we had problems during landing, we needed the switch to abort. It was a hell of a risk-gain trade.

While developing the mission rules, the LM controllers studied every switch and circuit breaker in the spacecraft, assessing the failure potential of each and options to work around a switch failure. This included the