Read an Excerpt
Go, Flight!
The Unsung Heroes of Mission Control, 1965â"1992
By Rick Houston, Milt Heflin UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Rick Houston and Milt Heflin
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8494-4
CHAPTER 1
Who Did What
At first glance, the room appears to be just another auditorium in just another office building. There are nondescript spaces like it in a million different places all over the world. The carpet is old and a bit bunched up here and there. A few stains dot the floor, the result of who knows how many spilled coffees over the years. There is also a distinct smell to the place, not quite musty and not really even a hint of the tobacco smoke that once hung over the room. Maybe it is a faint remnant of the electronics that once hummed and buzzed here. The odor is neither pleasant nor unpleasant. It is just — distinct.
The four rows of consoles facing the front of the room are almost quaint in their simplicity — workstations feature a rotary dial phone. And canisters, too, to send messages to back rooms via pneumatic tubes, the very same kind of transport system featured at your local bank's drive-through window. No email or instant messaging here.
Yet if there's a temptation to dismiss the room out of hand, images of events past begin to sink in and the sheer enormity of everything that took place here hits like a ton of bricks. Only a handful of places inspire such an overwhelming sense of history.
Independence Hall.
Gettysburg.
Westminster Abbey.
Ford's Theater.
Pearl Harbor.
Normandy.
Jerusalem.
Hiroshima.
Dealey Plaza.
Battles were fought and presidents were murdered at most of these locations, but not in this average-sized room on the third floor of what was once known as Building 30 at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston. It was only after the end of Apollo's lunar landings that the complex was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center (JSC). Although there was no great bloodshed here, it served as a critical battleground of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. Had it not been for the Russians, it is quite likely that the events that took place here would never have happened.
Officially, the room was known by two different names while it was in service from 1965 to 1992 — it was the Mission Operations Control Room (MOCR, pronounced "MOH-ker" in NASA-speak) during the Gemini and Apollo era and the Flight Control Room (FCR, pronounced "FICK-er") during the first decade or so of the Space Shuttle era. It has also been called "the Cathedral" in tones that border on pure reverence because of the things that happened here, as if it were actually a church. Others refer to it simply as "the Palace." Gene Kranz, on the other hand, called it a "leadership laboratory." Either way, the point remained the same. So important were the events that took place in this room, it is now listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
Think of the words that were first uttered to and from this magnificent room.
You are go for TLI.
Until December 1968, never had a human being left the bonds of Earth's gravitational influence. Michael Collins was the capcom sitting right there in that seat on the second row, when he gave the call that began the crew of Apollo 8 on its journey to lunar orbit.
Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.
And then later ...
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
When Neil Armstrong called out those instantly iconic lines, he was talking to this room, and through this room, to hundreds of millions of people watching around the world.
Houston, we've had a problem.
When the crew of Apollo 13 announced their dire circumstances in hurried yet never panicked voices, they were talking to this room. And it was the men in and around this room who, over the next three and a half days, spearheaded a massive effort to save the lives of astronauts James A. "Jim" Lovell Jr., Fred W. Haise Jr., and John L. "Jack" Swigert.
Roger, go at throttle up.
As momentous as the events of Apollo 8, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, and so many other Gemini and Apollo missions were, this room is also where some of the darkest moments in NASA's history began to unfold on a January morning in 1986. When STS-51L commander Francis R. "Dick" Scobee spoke the last words he would ever speak, he was talking to this room.
Most of the people who worked here during the Gemini and Apollo eras were born just as the country was coming out of the depths of the Great Depression, only to find itself embroiled in the even greater agony of World War II. They were from small-town America — one of their hometowns no longer exists — and a good many were the first in their family to graduate from college. And in fact, college had not been all that long ago. Their average age was in the mid-to-late twenties, and there they were, helping to land people on the surface of the moon.
Who were they, and what kind of work did they do here?
There it was, the very first thing anyone who walked in the main door on the left-hand side of the MOCR would see.
The Trench.
The way the folks who worked in the Trench sounded once in a while, that was all anyone needed to see. It was a Trench world, they seemed to figure, and every other controller in the MOCR just so happened to be living in it. The home of the Flight Dynamics Branch might have been on the lowest of four stair-stepped rows, closest to the front of the room and the huge screens that dominated it, but that was just a function of location and darn sure not mission priority. Although Flight Dynamics did not fire the gun at launch, it certainly aimed the trajectory of the bullet wherever it needed to go.
"We were a proud bunch, okay?" said Jerry Bostick, the chief of the Flight Dynamics Branch throughout most of the Apollo program. Then, Bostick invoked the memory of one of the Trench's biggest legends among its own. "As John Llewellyn used to say, 'If it's the truth, it ain't bragging,'" he continued. "We had a deep appreciation for what the systems guys did, but, of course, we thought all they were doing was providing us with the hardware to do the real job, which was to get them there and back."
The left side of the first row was technically in the Trench but its positions were not exactly of the Trench. That space was reserved for the booster and tanks station during the Gemini years and then consoles for booster systems 1, 2, and 3 in Apollo. On Apollo 9 and Apollo 11, extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuits were also monitored from there once the booster controllers vacated not long after launch. The tanks controller watched propellant pressures and temperatures, and was usually manned by a young eager-beaver astronaut. Eugene A. "Gene" Cernan walked on the moon during his command of Apollo 17, but nevertheless he wanted to know why he had not been asked to tell the story of his tanks duty on the unmanned flight of Gemini 2 as well as Gemini 3 and Gemini 4 in the Trench's self-published book From the Trench of Mission Control to the Craters of the Moon.
A booster 1 controller like Frank Van Rensselaer did not have much responsibility at all, other than to oversee the mammoth 363-foot-tall Saturn V, from about twelve hours before launch all the way through docking of the Command and Service Module (CSM) with the Lunar Module (LM). After that, commands were sent to the spent S-IVB third stage to target it for an impact on the moon near a previous landing site. That way, instruments deployed by astronauts on the lunar surface could pick up vibrations from the impact and possibly allow analysts to determine the moon's composition in the area.
Booster 2 monitored the S-IVB third stage, while booster 3 kept an eye on the launch vehicle's Instrument Unit. Their next-door neighbors in the Trench joked with those on the booster consoles, calling them their guests and insisting that they shape up lest they be forced to ship out and move elsewhere in the MOCR. That kind of joking was fine with Van Rensselaer. Although he lived in Houston, the Tennessee native was not technically an employee of the MSC. Van Rensselaer was instead employed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, home to the Saturn V and the adopted home of the legendary German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who designed it.
There were, to be sure, rivalries between Marshall and Houston. "Early on, there was some, let's say, pushback when we were doing mission rules," Van Rensselaer said. "The guys at Marshall, their attitude was, 'Don't touch the booster. It'll be fine.' The guys in the control center were saying, 'Well, if there's anything you can do about it, let's get ready for it.'" After substantial issues developed during an April 1968 unmanned test of the Saturn V, however, working for a solution finally helped everyone onto the same page. The acceptance from the rest of the MOCR in general and from the Trench in particular from that point on seemed to be "just fine," Van Rensselaer said. He then continued, "We went through all the sims with them. We were part of the Trench, still are. We have gatherings every now and then, the Trench does. Even though we were the booster guys, they considered us part of the Trench."
Next were spots for retrofire, abbreviated to retro (just the way all things NASA are always shortened as much as possible); flight dynamics, or FIDO for short; and guidance officers, who were sometimes referred to as guidos — the three positions for which there was no debate as to whether they were members of the Trench. The people who worked this particular trio of consoles had an esprit de corps about them, an air that said they were the ground pilots of these grand spaceflight adventures. Were they maybe just a little bit cocky? Oh, absolutely. There were "The Trench" matchbooks scattered about the control room, and years later, members of the Trench put together a book, DVD, and website to commemorate their work.
That is not all. Kenneth A. "Ken" Young, a rendezvous specialist who once trained as a FIDO and was named an honest-to-goodness honorary member of the Trench, became the MOCR's unofficial poet laureate by penning a number of original and parody poems through the years. The first stanza of his work "The Trench" read:
Since the very first days of Houston mission control
There has been a unique front row of spaceflight
consoles;
Although these vital positions never got much publicity,
The flight operators there controlled the spaceflight
trajectory.
This row of three positions, labeled: retro, FIDO, and
guido
Began with Gemini and rose to prominence during
Apollo.
These crucial controllers, always under fire, yet never
known to flinch;
Soon began to call their front-row position as, simply, The
Trench!
How The Trench got that name is uncertain but it really
makes sense;
For controllers it formed a space mission's first line of
defense!
John the Legend worked the retro console, Young continued, while FIDO had Big Red, the Not-Always-So-Jolly Mental Giant, Bones, Fast Eddie, Stump, and one that rhymed with Superduck. Last came the Fox, Mother, and Gonly at the guidance console.
They were the Trench.
Just to the right of the booster consoles was the retro officer's domain, and retro was responsible for continually calculating both planned and unplanned maneuvers that could be executed by in-flight astronauts to return the spacecraft to Earth. Jerry Bostick had been a retro, and so were Bobby T. Spencer, Dave Massaro, Thomas E. "Tom" Weichel, Robert White, Charles F. "Chuck" Deiterich, Thomas F. "Tom" Carter, Jerry C. Elliott, William "Bill" Gravett, and James E. "Jim" I'Anson. However, there was one man every fellow retro, every Trenchmate, and everyone else in the MOCR respected and, yes, maybe even feared a little, and that man was the late, great John S. Llewellyn — his middle name was Stanley, but to his NASA coworkers, the "S" stood for "Star," because that was what he was to them. A star.
Years before joining NASA, Llewellyn experienced things as a member of the U.S. Marine Corps during the Korean War that no human being should ever experience. He was still a teenager when he hit Red Beach during the crucial Battle of Inchon on 15 September 1950, and then was part of a vicious fight that began at Chosin Reservoir two months later. United Nations forces wound up encircled by Chinese troops during that sixteen-day clash, which was fought over some of the worst terrain and in unspeakably terrible freezing conditions. "The Chinese ... their bugles ... I could see them coming," Llewellyn told friend and longtime MOCR coworker Glynn Lunney during an interview for the short booklet From the Trenches of Korea to the Trench in Mission Control. "I saw them when they stopped all their running around in circles like ants down there. I couldn't believe there were that many people. And I just looked at it. I never saw anything like it in my life."
The booklet goes on to describe Llewellyn hearing the click of an empty Thompson submachine gun, and then coming face-to-face with the Chinese soldier holding it. Llewellyn killed him, and then spent the rest of the night in the foxhole with his dead foe and hearing other enemy troops passing nearby. The experience impacted Llewellyn in ways few could ever imagine or comprehend, and it was only once in a great while that he might mention the war to his coworkers. Much later in his life, Llewellyn admitted to those around him that he had struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). "I guess deep down, there was always kind of a sorrow that I felt for the guy that he had been through all he had been through in the Korean War," Bill Gravett said. "He had terrible PTSD, and he bore that burden all those years. Occasionally, he would give us a glimpse of that horror that he went through at the Chosin Reservoir. I used to think about that and wonder, 'How did he survive that?' I had a lot of respect for the man, I really did."
Most credit Llewellyn for the Trench's nickname, either in whole or in part. It was during the flight of Gemini 6 that pneumatic tubes from the messaging system began piling up around him on the first row, and he thought they looked a lot like empty 105-millimeter howitzer shells he encountered in the trenches back in Korea. If that did not seal it, Llewellyn once issued a challenge to the simulation team during a particularly testy debriefing.
Why don't you come on out here in the trenches and see how tough this really is?
To many, John Llewellyn was a larger-than-life force of nature. He was known to down his fair share of drinks. He could be profane. He spawned countless stories — a good many of which were true.
Some were relatively tame. He could sometimes get the numbers out of order during countdown to retrofire for reentry into Earth's atmosphere.
10, 9, 7, 6, 8, 4, 5, 3, 2, 1 ...
That was the kind of thing, though, that could have happened to anybody. What others might not have done was challenge astronaut Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom to a drag race on the beach, Grissom in a gleaming new Corvette and Llewellyn in an old "Official Use Only" Plymouth. Afterward, Llewellyn promptly drove his losing car straight into the surf. When the Soviet Union established some new high ground in the space race, it was John Llewellyn who came banging on the door of Glynn Lunney's home early in the morning, demanding that the both of them go into work right then and there to do something about it. Legend also has it that while in Australia for work at a tracking station during the Gemini program, Llewellyn was caught trying to sneak into his locked motel. When told by the manager that if he did not like the rules that he could just buy the motel, Llewellyn apparently responded by doing just that.
Then, there was the time he overslept for a shift during the flight of Gemini 5. He raced into work, and after not being able to find a parking spot for his Triumph TR3, drove up the steps to Building 30 and parked directly in front of the door. That stunt got his car pass yanked, but Llewellyn was not deterred in the least. He responded by parking a horse trailer across the street from the main gate and absolutely, positively rode his horse into work. That was Llewellyn, born a hundred years too late, a Wild West devil-may-care gunslinger if ever there was one.
Llewellyn was known as a force in the MOCR as well. "John was somewhat on the short-tempered side against those people that he considered 'pogues,'" remembered Gene Kranz, who competed in judo with Llewellyn and Dutch von Ehrenfried. "Pogues were people that in his mind did not measure up at being steely eyed missile men. This was particularly noticeable shortly after we moved into the Houston area, when we had a bunch of people who were trying to be flight controllers, but really didn't have the background for it. I always had to keep John separated from our pogues at the beer parties."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Go, Flight! by Rick Houston, Milt Heflin. Copyright © 2015 Rick Houston and Milt Heflin. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
