Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (10 page)

In the case of Mercury, the spacecraft was equipped with an escape tower, which was designed to separate the spacecraft from the launcher quickly enough and to a sufficient distance to survive the fireball created by the vehicle being destroyed by the range safety destruct system. There was a small delay of three-and-a-half seconds built into the system such that the command first alerted the crew and then delayed the actual destruct function to give the escape system opportunity to propel the spacecraft to a safe separation distance. By the time that the escape tower was jettisoned at about two minutes and thirty seconds, the vehicle was out of the zone of primary concern to the range safety officer. Then, escape was like a normal separation except that the crew action to separate also initiated an engine cutoff command to the Atlas engine. These were the onboard systems to separate the spacecraft.

Next came the techniques to decide to initiate an abort. Some vehicle failure modes, such as a hardover control signal or engine positioning system, could result in very rapid loss of control and vehicle breakup, especially during the first sixty to ninety seconds when the ship can be experiencing high dynamic pressures and resultant loads. Because of these possibilities, an automatic sensing and implementation system (ASIS) was designed to protect against this type of failure that exceeds the human ability to react quickly enough. This launch vehicle system would then trigger an abort sequence by the spacecraft. As in the destruct system, loss of electrical continuity between the spacecraft and Atlas would also trigger an abort. Operator intervention to initiate an abort was also available to the crew and to the Flight Director.

Unless we had the luxury of selecting a time to initiate an abort, the spacecraft would land anywhere in the Atlantic based on the trajectory conditions at the time. There was some possibility of landing point control for an abort in the last thirty seconds or so of Atlas flight. After separation at these velocities and altitude, the time of retrofire could be varied from a minimum of thirty seconds to turn around to blunt end forward to a maximum of four minutes and still have coverage of the retrofire sequence from Bermuda. The responsibility for selecting the fire time was assigned to the position of Retro Controller, consistent with his on-orbit responsibility for the calculation and orchestration of the retro fire maneuver. These two positions worked in very close coordination for the return to earth planning, with the FIDO assuring the best quality navigation solution for the retro calculation.

We spent a lot of time analyzing what combination of velocity and flight path angle would constitute an acceptable orbit. We finally ended up with a boundary of velocity and flight path angles that would provide the spacecraft with enough energy for a safe orbit. On the plot of velocity on the horizontal and flight path angle on the vertical, the go-no-go line looked like a slightly curved bow, as if the line representing a zero flight path angle was an arrow in the bow pointing towards a lower velocity than nominal. The boundary was about one hundred feet-per-second below the nominal cutoff velocity to assure energy for at least one safe orbit before the drag would cause the spacecraft to re-enter. This margin was a very small percentage (less than half of a percent of the required velocity of about twenty five thousand feet-per-second) and the evaluation required to assure an adequate margin could include the judgment of the operator since the random deviations of measured velocity could be a significant portion of the one hundred feet-per-second margin.

I did not appreciate it enough at the time, but the support of John Mayer was very important and gratifying to me in terms of the confidence he had in my ability to perform this job. For the position of Flight Dynamics Officer (FIDO) in the Mercury Control Center at the Cape, Chris selected Tec Roberts. This choice had been made sometime in 1960. Tec had arrived at STG in April of ‘59 with the AVRO contingent and within one year had established himself as one of Chris Kraft’s key managers and advisors. Although Tec did not have a detailed grounding in orbital mechanics, his common sense and good judgment made him the logical choice for this job. His performance in this role set the standard for the FIDO position and it remains so over four decades later. Probably about the same time, I became the candidate for the FIDO position at Bermuda. I remember a short and to-the-point discussion as John Mayer recommended my selection to Chris Kraft. I was twenty-four years of age.

We all were well aware of the criticality of this job. John Mayer was unequivocal, “Chris, Glynn knows this as well as I do. I am completely confident he can handle this job.” Chris listened and soon agreed. Without any dramatics or hesitation, Chris’s ready confirmation of my selection was just another in a constant and daily delegation of responsibility to the people who worked for him. Looking back on this time, I have to be in awe at the level of trust and confidence that we were accorded. It was not cavalier. Both of these men had many opportunities to measure and test me before and after this decision because all of us worked in a very intense and open team fashion and were not constrained by organization position. All of us believed that Chris had a very accurate calibration of all of us and assigned us accordingly. But this willingness to trust us and give us the room to grow created an environment of can-do and will-do-no-matter-what, which was the hallmark of the operations organization for decades and still is today. It drove us to an even higher level of performance to live up to Chris’ confidence in us. In later years, I was exposed to many training sessions on leadership by national experts. My reaction always was, “Gee, I was living this lesson with Chris and others of STG when I was twenty-two. We just did not have the buzzword terminology.”

This is a good time to underline the positive and demanding environment we worked in. I was too junior to see the relationships with other Centers and NASA HQ in action, though I did see more of those interfaces when I became a Flight Director in 1964. Early on, the local scene was my daily reality. The tone was clearly set by Dr. Bob Gilruth. In all the notoriety, very strong personalities and press attention of the time, Dr. Gilruth seemed like the forgotten man. And yet he managed the direction of the work, the extremely strong management team of the STG and later, in Houston, the Manned Spacecraft Center. Neither I nor anybody else ever heard or felt anything but the utmost respect for our leader, Dr. Gilruth. He had as much to do with the ultimate success of the first decade of manned space flight as any other player on the scene.

You have no doubt heard of different management styles – management by: the numbers, consensus, goals, fear/intimidation, ambiguity, among others. One of his direct reports who had also worked with him at Langley, before the space business began, described his style in a way that I have never heard of before or since. He called it “Management by Respect.” Interpret that anyway you like, but I thought it was a real capture of his modus operandi. And it flowed through the STG and the MSC like the elixir of achievement. We saw it most often in the person of Chris Kraft, who lived this philosophy with a strong streak of trusting us with the job, and demanding that we get it right. What a fantastic opportunity for all of us to be part of this amazing team and charged with this national imperative of manned space and then, Apollo. We were truly blessed.

Working at the Bermuda station on TDY was a great experience and a smaller stage to learn on. John Hodge was the Flight Director of the team, which included a capcom, two systems flight controllers, a flight surgeon and the FIDO. We stayed at the BOQ lodging at Kendall Air Force Base, which is where the station was. I served there for four flights, MA-3, -4, -5 and -6. MA-3 was planned to go into orbit but was destroyed by the range safety officer at forty-three seconds into the flight. The vehicle pitch and roll program failed to activate and the vehicle was climbing vertically. After the destruct command, the spacecraft sequenced just as it should have and was recovered. It actually flew on MA-4. The next three flights, MA-4, MA-5 and MA-6 were conducted with increasing orbital duration of one, two and three orbits before returning to Earth. The flights also progressed in a biological sequence, from unmanned to the chimp, Enos, and then to John Glenn’s flight.

Besides the actual flights, we also deployed several times before scrubs and launch delays extended our stay or sent us home. This gave us time to explore the island. Our transportation was small motorbikes. The government of Bermuda severely restricted the number of cars and trucks allowed on the island and that was probably a good idea. We really enjoyed the motorbike mode of travel and it wasn’t long before Al Shepard had us driving in a diamond formation. It was fun most of the time except that I got stuck once in the rear slot position when it started to rain. When we got to Hamilton, everybody else was a little wet but I had been sprayed with dirt for the entire drive. Al’s comment was, “Lunney, you look like hell, but at least you kept formation.”

The roads in Bermuda were cut out of the coral, which is the basic structure of the island itself. One of our guys found out that coral is really not good for humans. He went over the handlebars of his motorbike and landed with his palms and arms outstretched. It didn’t take long for the blood poisoning to show up. Jim was in the local Air Force hospital and the cure seemed a little barbaric. Every day, the nurse came in and scraped his hands and arms with a wire brush. We were able to make one medication contribution to his recovery. It was a bottle of Jack Daniels delivered two hours before his scraping treatment and then self-administered liberally.

I learned a few things about cards, rum, scuba diving and other matters from these trips, but one travel story really stuck with me. Our team arrived at the Newport News airport for one of our excursions to Bermuda. The airplane was not available, some technical problem. We had a connection to make on Pan-Am out of Idlewild (now John F. Kennedy in New York City) to get to Bermuda. Immediately, Gus Grissom went off to find a solution. He soon came back with one. He hired two local pilots, a local and his nephew, and an agreement to fly us to New York City. The flight in two separate small planes was uneventful and the uncle kept his nephew informed as to the details. I was in the nephew’s plane. No problem. As we were pulling up to park the plane, one of the ground crew was guiding our pilot into the parking slot and was giving us the cut-the-engine hand signal. At about this time, the nephew decided that something was wrong (i.e. instead of Idlewild, he landed at LaGuardia, the wrong airport). No hesitation on his part. He revved up the engine, and started to taxi back to the runway. Maybe he did, but I never heard him talk to the tower. He knew he was at the wrong place, so he rolled out on the runway and took off. He was probably more afraid of his uncle than the other aircraft traffic or the FAA. We soon landed at Idlewild and parked by the other plane. Mission accomplished. We had a rousing time debriefing this bit of piloting in the Pan Am Clipper club.

On another trip, I ended up with a really severe cold – coughing, sneezing and feeling ugly. In this case, our flight surgeon Dr. Chuck Berry, came up with a civilized treatment. He got a humidifier and filled it with Drambuie and little water. I don’t know how helpful it was for me but all of the guys enjoyed coming to my room and breathing in the Drambuie flavored air while they enjoyed their evening cocktail.

Besides Al Shepard, Gus Grissom was our capcom for one of the flights and Deke Slayton was capcom for MA-6. Back in Houston, Gus and Deke would occasionally drop by our home in Friendswood to drop off a load of fish from their day’s excursion into the Gulf for king mackerel and sometimes red snapper. Even today, when I order red snapper, that association comes flooding back. After John Glenn’s flight of MA-6, Deke was looking forward to his assignment on MA-7. So we had several reasons to celebrate – both the first manned orbital flight and the upcoming flight of Deke. And we did so.

When we got back to Langley, it was rather quickly announced that Deke had been taken off flight status and would not fly the next flight. Only Deke can describe his disappointment with this turn, but all of us who knew him shared in the disappointment. Deke was a favorite of most people and we all knew how much the flight assignment meant to him. He finally did get his first space flight in 1975 on the Apollo/Soyuz test project. By that time, I was the Technical Director of Apollo/Soyuz. But in between 1962 and his assignment to Apollo/Soyuz, he served primarily as flight crew operations director for the rest of Mercury and all of Gemini and Apollo. NASA and the flight crews were fortunate to have such a highly respected and experienced pro steering and supporting the decisions during this historic era. Deke was always a voice of common sense and helped me a great deal on flights that I was serving as a Flight Director.

By this time, we knew that we were moving to Texas and building a new control center there. Communications around the world had become much improved since early Mercury and we would be able to remote the voice, telemetry, command and tracking reliably from the worldwide sites back to the control center in Houston. Gemini was expected to fly in 1964 (i.e. within over two years). And Apollo was coming. Besides other personnel assignments, Chris wanted Tec to be in the middle of the action for the new MCC. So Tec retired from the FIDO position and I was assigned the role for MA-7 and subsequent flights. The flight experience also allowed us to delete the FIDO function at Bermuda. I was delighted to be at MCC, the center of action for flight operations.

Most of 1959 and 1960 zipped by in a blur of putting theory into the practical reality of participating in the invention of a control center with a supporting computing center at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and the worldwide network of remote sites to provide the infrastructure for a mission control function. All of these elements were being created simultaneously while the concept for operations evolved from a set of thoughts in the head of Chris Kraft to a compelling vision in the minds of his leadership team and especially his young believers. This was what we wanted to do. Invent, create, cover all the bases, master the complexities and reduce them to workable sized packages. As 1960 drew to a close, we were at the point of testing ourselves and our ideas in the unforgiving world of manned space operations.