Failure Is Not an Option

Every system on a spacecraft is critical, but when you had to make up your mind whether or not to go into lunar orbit, the service propulsion system (SPS) in the CSM moved to the top of the list. It must work to get into lunar orbit, and once in orbit it was the crew’s ticket home. The SPS design provided redundant electronics, electrical power, and propellant feed systems, but there was only one engine nozzle and a single set of propellant tanks, so any leaks were cause for rapid mission termination.

Mission rules require full redundancy of the engine control electronics systems to enter lunar orbit and to allow LM separation once in lunar orbit. The job fell to Lunney’s team to make sure that the SPS was fully operable. By the end of Lunney’s first shift, troubleshooting limited the problem to the A engine control circuit. The B control circuit was fully operable. Time is one of the most precious resources of flight directors and, for a change, time was on our side during the three-day translunar coast. Lunney’s team GNC, Joe DeAtkine, was short, quiet, young, and unassuming. Flying his first mission as GNC, Joe felt the weight of the world on his shoulders.

A flight control team develops a keen awareness of situations in which someone needs help. Gary Coen and Jack Kamman were on each side of DeAtkine’s shift. Each extended his shift duties so that they overlapped, giving Joe the coaching and mentoring he needed to survive his first crisis. After developing the workaround Joe emerged with the confidence that he could do it on his own the next time.

Griffin executed the maneuver with the amended procedures and, most importantly, met the criteria for continuing the mission. This uncanny ability at assimilating data, making judgments, and balancing risk versus gain reached maturity in Apollo.

The Hadley Rille landing site was in a mountainous region of the Moon well north of the equator and on the edge of a mile-wide canyon. Scott and Irwin guided the Falcon through the descent, surprised to find that the landmarks were less sharply defined than expected. As they continued the descent, they searched for their specific landmarks, redesignating the landing location several times, steering to remain short and north of the one feature they recognized, Hadley Rille, a mile-wide canyon seven miles from 18,000-foot-high Mount Hadley. In the final fifty feet, they flew blind through the lunar dust. The round blue lunar contact light triggered Scott to cut off the landing rocket. The LM fell the final feet to the surface and then lurched in an unsettling motion, tilting back and to its right. Two of the landing pads were settled into the edge of a small crater.

My White Team started its shift work during the lunar orbit phase of the mission. A bay of the service module had been outfitted with a pallet of scientific instruments to obtain photographs of the Moon’s surface and map its chemical composition. I worked the same shift schedule as Gerry Griffin. Griffin’s team supported the lunar EVAs, while my team supported astronaut Al Worden’s operation of the service module experiments.

The mission continued smoothly through the first EVA period. Scott and Irwin were out to prove that an astronaut was capable of performing in a scientist’s arena. They were open to every change, driving to set a standard higher than that of any previous crew, and determined to prove that they were up to the demands of Lee Silver and his team.

Griffin, Mission Control, and the lunar scientists were not aware, however, of the price Scott and Irwin were paying to maintain a very heavy workload. By the end of the first EVA, the crew’s hands ached as if they were arthritic. As they continued, the skin under their nails hemorrhaged and turned black, the fingertips tearing from the constant rubbing against the gloves. Every task on the Moon demanded dexterity; this crew was not about to let physical discomfort get in the way of achieving the mission’s objectives.

After their second EVA Scott and Irwin began an intense timeline in their final twenty-four hours. After a six-and-a-half-hour sleep period, the crew was awakened to begin preparation for the third and final activity. The timeline was already short. As the crew in the LM slept, Lunney had worked with Bill Muehlberger and the science team to replan the EVA. To get a reasonable duration, the controllers started cutting bits and pieces of margin from the timeline. Fifteen minutes were taken from sleep, another fifteen from the period after eating, and twenty-five minutes more were snatched from the stowage and ascent preparation to allow a four-hour and thirty-minute EVA and still meet the scheduled lunar liftoff time.

Nearing the end of the final EVA Scott and Irwin had one last, sad duty to perform before they lifted off and returned to Endeavour. Four weeks before their flight, three Russian cosmonauts had died during the reentry of Soyuz 11. They had been in orbit for a record 23 ? days (570 hours), and the spaceship made an apparently flawless landing. The three were found unmarked, reclining in their seats as if asleep, killed almost instantly and silently by an oxygen leak. It was an eerie reminder, as if one were needed, of the unpredictable nature of space voyages.

Scott and Irwin left on the Moon a plaque with the names of the three Russian astronauts, adding theirs to the honor roll of others—the Apollo 1 astronauts, the Soyuz 1 astronaut, and all the rest—who had lost their lives in the quest to explore the universe.

Windler launched the crew off the surface, rendezvoused, and then docked before handing over to Lunney on the fifty-first revolution. The crew was on the timeline and there were few apparent problems for Lunney, the kind of shift you pray for. This was a time to catch a breath, clean up the spacecraft problems, and get ready for the trip home. The crew had been awake for sixteen hours, performing physically demanding work, which was followed by the intensity of a lunar liftoff, rendezvous, and docking. The principal activity of Lunney’s shift was to jettison the lunar module and then get the crew to sleep.

Lunney’s problems started during the crew’s seventeenth hour awake. As a precaution for a loss of pressure during the LM jettison, the crew donned helmets and gloves and performed a suit pressure check. Then, to make sure there were no leaks in the hatch seal, the crew gradually depressurized the tunnel connecting the command module (CM) to the lunar module (LM) while the CM pressure was monitored for any decrease.

The initial suit integrity check failed due to a pressure suit leak at the fitting where water is fed to the liquid-cooled garment. After both suits were plugged, the suit integrity test was passed satisfactorily. After a brief verbal update on the depress sequence, the crew continued the preparation for the jettison.

During communications with Mission Control, Scott commented on the difference between the pressures in the command module and in the tunnel. “The tunnel pressure was at 2.7 a while ago,” he said, “and now it is down to 2.0.” Scott was reading the pressure from a small gauge in the tunnel, one normally used by the crew prior to opening the hatch, or when separating the spacecraft. Lunney’s hairs stood on end; many things must be right in space, and cabin pressure is at the top of the list. Lunney, now concerned about the decrease in pressure, ascribed it to a possible hatch seal leak. Given the earlier problems in the suit integrity check, he scrubbed the LM jettison. The crew backed out of the configuration, removed the hatch, and visually inspected the seals. They were then given precise instructions for another command module pressure check.

While the astronauts were performing the pressure checks I was in the orbital science back room talking to the controllers and scientists prior to coming on shift. Dick Koos, my Apollo 11 SimSup, now operating in a new role as an experiments engineer, motioned me to his console. As I leaned over he said, “Lunney’s having a hell of a problem getting the crew through the separation checklist. Something is out of whack.” I thanked Dick for his heads-up and quickly moved to the control room.

At acquisition of the CSM telemetry and voice communications on orbit fifty-three, Scott had unexpectedly vented the tunnel. Lunney, absolutely unruffled, told the crew to pump the tunnel back up. Glynn was getting frustrated; he knew something was wrong and forcefully reminded his controllers to call out every step of the crew’s procedures as they were performed. He wanted his team’s eyeballs in the cockpit with the crew.

Lunney continued with his usual superb, unbridled confidence, his voice never exposing any emotion, so his people never sensed his frustration. Now satisfied with the suit and cabin-pressure check, Glynn gave the “Go for jettison.” I was spooked just listening. Even in the most bloodcurdling simulation I had never seen the crew and ground so out of phase.

The LM jettison delay changed the orbit geometry for separation. Approaching maneuver time, Scott remarked that the planned maneuver took the CSM toward the LM. After an intense discussion with his team, Lunney scrubbed the maneuver. Stoval, the FIDO, quickly planned a new one. “Glynn, have the crew stay in front of the LM, point at it, and thrust away for two-feet-per-second velocity. This will give us enough clearance.”

When Scott executed the maneuver, Lunney showed his only emotion, inscribing in the log, “Hurrah—I felt I was in one of those bad dreams where you can’t wake up and you can’t get anything to go right!” Even though I had come in only for the last two hours, I had the same creepy feeling. At no time on the console had I ever felt so apprehensive.

Throughout the pressure check and maneuver fiasco, Dr. Chuck Berry had been standing and talking to Dr. Gilruth and Kraft at the console behind us. With the maneuver completed, Berry approached the flight director’s