Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (20 page)

Once at the Agena 8 stage, the crew had already undocked from Agena 10 and initiated preparations for the second EVA that was an umbilical based excursion by Mike Collins to retrieve an equipment package mounted on the Agena 8. The EVA was limited to forty minutes (one daylight pass) because of the need to conserve fuel and not spend any more on station keeping with the Agena 8. It went okay, but the sample package slipped away on Mike Collin’s return to the hatch. The Trench team was the same one as GT-9 and they were getting very good at this rendezvous game.

Because of the complex set of mission options that Tom Holloway developed and coordinated with the rest of the team, his contribution and understanding were seen as vital to the execution of the flight. Therefore, I had decided preflight to move Tom Holloway into the front room of MCC, and it was the first time we ever had a FAO serving on console in the front room of MCC. (And, it has remained that way ever since.)

We had spent time over several months perfecting this set of mission options and I wanted Tommy’s expertise available to the Flight Director and his team. That caused some problem in the Astronaut corps, because the checklist and flight plan activities had been located in a back room and in direct support of the cap com. This was an organizational accident of sorts due to the fact that the astronauts and the FAO people worked in Deke’s flight crew directorate, which was parallel to Chris Kraft’s flight operations directorate. Two of our astronauts complained to Chris Kraft that this move of the FAO to the front room was a bad idea. Chris referred their complaint to Cliff and me. We were exceedingly ticked that they had gone to Chris directly without asking us for the rationale. Cliff and I went to see them in their office and after some discussion, the conclusions were: yes, the FAO position belongs in the front room reporting to the Flight Director and if they had any other problems, they would take them up with us first.

Cliff was the lead Flight Director for Gemini 11, and it flew on September 12, 1966, with Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon. Cliff was lead and I was in support. In this context, the “lead” role mostly affected pre-flight choices. The “lead” was the primary interface for coordination with the crew, mostly on scheduling activities and selected subjects. He also selected the rest of the Flight Directors and made their assignments as to mission phases covered. In this case it was easy, Cliff did the prime crew wake shift and I did some of that and all the rest. The Trench team carried over from Gemini 9 and 10.

Bill Tindall had been stretching the team to even more of a rendezvous challenge. One lunar rendezvous scenario envisioned an accelerated sequence with station keeping at the first apogee, or in about one-half of an orbit. So we needed to develop techniques to achieve this very fast paced rendezvous. Bill had managed the planning team through all the arguments and difficulties and by flight time, had an enthusiastic crew on board and in the MCC, ready to rendezvous in less than one orbit.

The third launch attempt was a charm. Gemini 11 made a small plane change correction after insertion, then a terminal intercept maneuver, and then a few mid-courses and braking had the crew station-keeping by an hour and twenty minutes. Docked burns and docking practice added to program experience and on the second day another umbilical EVA commenced. After hatch opening, Dick Gordon proceeded to the nose of the spacecraft and attached a tether from the Agena to the Gemini docking bar. Again, like Gene Cernan, all of this proved very difficult for Dick and his labored breathing, coming to us over the air-to-ground loop underscored his difficulty. The EVA was terminated early after about one-half hour, but the tether had been secured. The crew difficulty was clear evidence that we still could not execute an EVA successfully with reasonable crew workload and that we had more to learn.

One of the highlights of Gemini 11 is the series of iconic photos over the Indian subcontinent, taken from an altitude of seven hundred fifty miles. Gemini 11 flew in this kind of orbit for two revs after a docked burn by the Agena 11 stage. Once returned to the usual one-hundred-sixty-mile orbit, the crew did a stand up EVA, and later undocked from the Agena for tether operations. As Gemini 11 backed away from the Agena and the tether played out, the crew began the first experiments in tether dynamics. The crew was able to spin up the two vehicles attached by the tether and it seemed to be easier to control than we expected. We didn’t have a planned use of this capability but the sponsors of the tether test thought it might serve someday as a way to keep vehicles together in orbit when they weren’t able to dock. It was also thought that this might be a form of inducing a minor G-field on the vehicles.

Because of the high fuel usage during the terminal phase of Gemini 10, my intuition led us to try a modified terminal phase approach that slowed down the relative motion, as the chase vehicle approached the target. We were only going to try this re-rendezvous if we had sufficient fuel and the crew was okay with an early wakeup. Even before MCC called, the crew was up and powering up the guidance equipment for the test. As usual, the crew wanted to learn as much as we could about this new world whenever we had an opportunity. We called this a standoff rendezvous because we positioned the Gemini chase vehicle in exactly the same orbit as the target, but displaced behind so that it trailed the target by twenty-five miles. The rendezvous worked fine. And as late as the ninth manned Gemini flight (GT-11), we were still adding to our inventory of knowledge and experience at every opportunity. Some of this experience probably helped when the Shuttle/Station approaches were being adjusted from fighter pilot intercepts to the berthing of very large vehicles, which do not permit a lot of braking plume impingements on appendages. The terminal phase of the approach was targeted so that the point of apogee of the approach path coincided with the target vehicle. Just add the impulse of a posigrade maneuver at apogee and the ships will be in range for formation flying and then docking. This avoids a braking maneuver as the vehicles close on each other at velocities around twenty miles per hour.

Gemini 12 was crewed by Jim Lovell and Buzz Aldrin. It was the last of the Gemini flights and we were still looking for a solid EVA success. All other program goals had already been exceeded. Lift-off was on November 11, 1966, at 3:46:30. By three hours and fifty minutes GET, the crew was docked to the Agena. The rendezvous radar did not work for the last phases of rendezvous, but the experienced Trench team vectored Gemini 12 to its terminal phase conditions. Once on the intercept, Buzz Aldrin was the class expert on terminal phase without a rendezvous radar and lived out his PhD dissertation.

There were three EVAs – an extended standup EVA with hatch open for two and one half hours, a planned umbilical EVA that was the big test of new EVA restraint provisions and a later stand-up EVA to eject unneeded equipment from the cockpit. There was a continued set of Gemini system problems besides the radar loss – oxygen to water warning lights in the fuel cell system, some degradation in fuel cell performance, little or no thrust from several thrusters, and an increase in regulated pressure in one of the two entry control systems. The team of flight controllers and flight crew were quick to stabilize all these problems.

The EVA went very well. One significant improvement was a set of handrails for the crew to use in traversing to the rear of the spacecraft. Other handholds were in the rear of the ship where Buzz slipped his boots into very large slippers that restrained him at this workstation. Gemini 12 training for EVA also initiated the first time use of a large water tank to simulate some aspects of the EVA environment. This combination of aids and new training method coupled with scheduled rest periods led to a very controlled and successful EVA.

I have often wondered whether the Gemini EVA planning would have been more successful if it had been done in the same fashion as the Bill Tindall model that galvanized the attention of the total community on the rendezvous subject. The EVA planning was more of a closed shop exercise, totally within the flight crew directorate, where the leadership changed on each flight to the EVA astronauts themselves.

The Gemini flight program concluded with the return of Gemini 12, but the benefits cascaded down through the Apollo program and all subsequent manned flight programs. As the Gemini program finished, the operations team, comprised of mission planners, MCC flight controllers, and the flight crews, was ready to roar into Apollo, with the hard earned portfolio of solid competence, wide experience and strong self-confidence in the ability of this team to do the Apollo job well.

Since the Voshkod flight featuring Leonov’s EVA immediately before our first manned GT-3, the Soviets did not fly a manned spacecraft that we knew of during the ten manned flights of Gemini.

Dave Scott at Hadley Rille

President Kennedy announced in May 1961:

“First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal of before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

In fourteen months, NASA announced the selection of the Apollo mission mode of lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), a dark horse and latecomer to the competition of ideas for how Apollo should be done. There were already two other options: all-on-one launch or earth orbit rendezvous (EOR). LOR became the mission framework for deriving the necessary flight hardware elements that then set the stage for the definition of new facilities, especially at the launch site. NASA had also contractually engaged American industry in the design and building of these major equipments.

By the start of 1967, five-and-one-half years after President Kennedy’s speech, many Apollo growing pains had already been experienced, overcome, rendered acceptable or were still pending:

• Most of the development work of the vehicles was well along, engaging ninety percent of the total workforce of more than three hundred thousand people.
  

• NASA assessment and critique of contractor progress was ongoing and shaking up some of the major companies, especially North American aviation, the builder of the Command Service Module (CSM). The progress at North American was the subject of the critical Phillip’s report, written before the Apollo fire.
  

• Many personnel and organization changes had already occurred during this early period.
  

By this time, the Apollo effort felt like a national mobilization, consistent with the fact that the peak NASA budget in the middle sixties was about four point five percent of the annual federal budget. (This compares to half a percent in the last decade or so.) There had been significant growth in the NASA ranks of the manned spaceflight team and the NASA organization structure. This process evolved from 1961 on and there were various regimes in NASA headquarters, plus the new roles for the Marshall Space Flight Center (MFSC) in Huntsville, Alabama and the launch team in Florida (now named the Kennedy Space Center, KSC). The new roles for these organizations were reasonably well established by the start of 1967.

In NASA Headquarters, a strong central program management function had been formed lead by George Mueller, previously of TRW, with General Sam Phillips of the Air Force as the Headquarters level program manager. There was considerable staff at NASA HQ and a special contract for Bellcom to assist headquarters as an integration contractor. Almost all of the new Headquarters executives had different background than NASA or NACA. With the new players and cultures came tension, some conflict, but also new ideas. Perhaps most significantly, George Mueller forced the concept of “all-up testing,” rather than “one component at a time,” an approach that was favored by the Von Braun team at MFSC, primarily for engines. Sam Phillips brought a wealth of program management experience from running the Minuteman ICBM development, and as vice commander of the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division. General Phillips established a formal design review process that became the core model for all of the subsequent NASA developments, with modifications as appropriate for new conditions. But NASA HQ was a major new player and it took some adjustment, especially at MSC that had been the singular leader of manned space until this shift. To the credit of all the management parties at HQ and the Centers, they gradually, and often painfully, worked their way through this “newness” and made it work, sometimes bending the rules to local culture.

For MSC, in Mercury and the early Gemini, the HQ interface was much simpler and more in the tradition of NACA. STG/MSC managed the spacecraft contractor and the procurement of the Air Force launch vehicles in the “Walt Williams” mode. The original Mercury launch site team was mostly staffed by STG engineers from the Lewis aircraft organization and some Langley engineers. They were a detached field site group from STG and then MSC.