Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (6 page)

This accident and recovery had two long-term effects. One is the consistent failure for Marilyn to pass the modern airport screening test and to be subject to special inspections. The other effect of my humanitarian visits to the hospital was the blooming of a flower which eventually became marriage and a full long life together with many wonderful fulfillments and joys. Some skiing accidents are for the best. This one certainly was for me.

At that time, something began that carried through my working career and even into retirement. And that was the association that I had with the pilots of the NASA aircraft division. Joe Algranti was a leader in the Cleveland aircraft operations and managed to get me back to Cleveland from Langley regularly. On one occasion, I was late getting from Goddard (GSFC) to Butler aviation, the private aircraft terminal at Washington National airport used by NASA, then called National airport and is now called the Ronald Reagan airport. Joe had already departed the terminal and was in line for takeoff. Butler dispatch called Joe, and Joe replied, “Bring him out but be quick about it.” Whenever I travel through Reagan airport today, I wonder how this high security complex would react to a Jeep driver discharging a scrambling engineer and helping him and his bag to climb through the rear open door of a DC-3 while ready for takeoff on the runway. I expect they would not be happy.

Joe knew that there was a reason beyond work for me to return to Cleveland. By this time, Marilyn and I were seriously dating. Occasionally, Marilyn also had to travel to the new nuclear facility at Plumbrook in Sandusky, Ohio, seventy-five miles or so to the west. And this travel was sometimes by way of the Lewis Navion, a two-seater that Eb Gough of Lewis Aircraft Operations loved to fly. Eventually all of this flying worked out. Both of us thank/blame Joe for keeping us together through those travel times. Afterwards, Joe moved to Houston and ran the MSC/JSC aircraft operations division for many years.

Over Christmas 1959, I worked up the courage to ask Dad Kurtz for permission to ask Marilyn to marry me. And we did on April 30, 1960. Marilyn loved her local church in Fairview Park, St. Angelas, in part because it was so beautiful. But our wedding turned out to be at the same time as a major repair and almost all of our photos included the scaffolds all over the sanctuary. So much for wedding planning.

Marilyn and Glynn 1960

Trenchmen from the Flight Dynamics Branch

This is the story of a relatively small group of young men, all very early in their careers, most of them brand new college graduates. Each in their own way had been preparing themselves for their adult future when they came to NASA and human space flight. Our astronauts were selected in a national competition from the best of all of our test pilots, and indeed they were. However, we ground operators (and all the other engineers at NASA) actually selected ourselves by showing up to participate in this grand adventure of going to the moon.

If it takes motivation and attitude to be successful, these young men were already there, even on a project that could easily seem impossible. We knew almost nothing about space flight. We certainly didn’t know what it would take to land people on the moon and return them safely to Earth. But these young men came and they met the challenge. They had to invent it all – the control center, and all the tools of the trade such as orbital mechanics, propulsion and guidance systems, communications, the integration with crew members, the procedures that were necessary, and then the mission rules that we learned to live by.

Some of these young men had to master a very new and complicated discipline that we called “flight dynamics.” And all of them had to prepare themselves to make decisions in the MCC on any and all of the matters relevant to their disciplines. As pioneers in the field, they faced decisions that had to be made in real time, without consultation or deferral, sometimes in seconds, and of the highest consequence. There was not much time to prepare.

In March 1962, I was named section head, a first level supervisor with all of two of us. In the summer 1964, I became the chief of the newly formed Flight Dynamics Branch with a total of thirteen of us. By this time, we had finished Mercury and were preparing for Gemini and Apollo. We had seven men assigned to Gemini and needed at least nine – three trained operators on three different shifts by 1965. Plus, much more depth was still necessary to do the planning for the upcoming flights. Apollo had a mountain of work for the five assigned, with manned flights scheduled in 1967, less than three years away.

This growth came by March of 1968 – the branch had twenty-nine men to begin the final sprint to the moon landings. They were tested and tempered by ten manned Gemini flights, four unmanned Apollo flights and uncounted simulation exercises. They were ready for Apollo.

In reflecting on the branch, I am not sure how the interpersonal dynamics all came about but there was an extremely strong sense of unity, comradeship and mutual dependence, united by a powerful commitment to make the program a success. They were also competitive about earning the choice – and most difficult – assignments. This was a “Band of Brothers” in the best tradition of that honored term.

Some of this magic was the sense of coming together to do something really big, something that had never been done before. Some of it was in the mutual reliance of all of these men on each other. This was especially true and even necessary in the operations environment in the MCC. They had to come to an answer, sometimes very quickly, and they had to earn the trust that gave their answer credibility, and the answer had to be correct. They gradually learned what it took to prove their choices to their office supervisors, to their fellow flight controllers, to the best test pilots, to the Flight Directors and, most of all, to themselves. It was a magic time to see these twenty-something boisterous males come to grips with their new responsibility and embrace it. The three flight dynamics operators even adopted a team identity for their three console positions and they called their unit “The Trench.” They were amazing and inspiring. I have always felt privileged to have served with them.

The outstanding performance that these young men delivered will stay with them forever. They earned it. Today, looking back forty some years to the decade of the 1960s, I am still extremely gratified that these men and I were granted this historic opportunity. We were not necessarily the best and brightest in the whole world. But we certainly were the most passionate and the most committed to making the program succeed. Today, we still gather up on various occasions where the same opinionated comradeship and hassling of each other is the order of the day.

In October 1957, Sputnik shattered American complacency and changed the world. The U.S. political system responded with remarkable speed and cogency. As has so often been the case in American history, there were at least two men in critical leadership positions, President Eisenhower and Majority Leader of the Senate Lyndon Johnson, who were prepared to lead and did so most effectively. As the political process moved through the fact-finding and the seeking of counsel, major legislation began which became the Space Act of 1958, forming NASA with its Space Charter.

While the national policy deliberations were underway, the same emerging leadership process was occurring at the implementation level. NASA Headquarters (HQ) tasked Bob Gilruth in May to plan a program to put a man in space. Max Faget had already proposed a concept in a conference in March 1958. Building on that concept and with more leaders from the ranks of the Langley Center, such as Chuck Mathews, Chris Kraft and Caldwell Johnson, the leadership cadre of the Space Task Group rose and took command of the response to the Sputnik challenge. Their mission was to invent an American manned space program and to put it into flight safely and as quickly as possible.

In June of 1958, my first month after graduation, I saw the first line drawing of what became the Mercury spacecraft, prepared by Caldwell Johnson from the Langley Center in Hampton, Virginia, and I knew it was my future. (Later in the ’70s, Caldwell and I would work closely on the Apollo/Soyuz project.) He was part of a group of engineers from the Pilotless Aircraft Research Division (PARD) and other units at the Langley Center. PARD had a similar research focus as the Lewis branch I was in. PARD testing was based on a ground launched solid rocket vehicle, known as the Scout. We both used the NACA range on the Virginia coast, centered on Wallops Island. And the Lewis Center test models were air-launched from a B-57. As a result of this common focus, we were asked to begin some special studies in support of this emerging man-in-space effort, to be later named Project Mercury.

My Branch Chief was George Low, a highly respected engineer and manager. Within less than a year, George was also at NACA HQ, as a key leader in the study of what to do after the Mercury project. Out of this and other work, came the core ideas for President Kennedy’s later commitment to Apollo as a primary national goal. Looking back, I have to believe that the high regard which George had earned contributed to our being asked to join the Mercury team.

So our work started on Mercury, first on a part-time basis. But very soon, it became full-time and increasingly intense. At first in 1958, most of my time was spent in Cleveland with occasional trips to Langley. Then, I began to travel to Langley, spending most of the week there. The work was like a whirlpool, drawing me into the trajectory planning and plans for a control center. Eventually, I had a permanent change of station (PCS) To Langley.

The core of the Space Task Group (STG) was identified in a November 3, 1958, letter, requesting the transfer of thirty-six Langley personnel to the newly independent group. Not counting steno and file support, and with the status of one person changed to remain with Langley, there were twenty-nine engineers and managers put in place to create and manage the human space flight program. In 1958, ten more engineers from the Lewis Research Center, who were already working on Mercury, joined the Space Task Group. I was one of those. Twelve more from Langley, including John Llewellyn, also transferred to STG.

The number and high caliber of transfers from Langley caused some problems. It was becoming increasingly difficult to transfer people from the existing Centers to the new Space Task Group. And then, there was a major aerospace tragedy in Canada when the development of a new supersonic military airplane (CF-105) was canceled. This resulted in the loss of thousands of jobs in the AVRO Company and Canada. But it was like a gift from heaven for the STG.

Eventually, by April of 1959, twenty-five experienced and very savvy AVRO engineers joined the U.S. manned space flight program. This was perfect timing to complement the mix of talents and experience levels of the STG workforce. We already had a world-class set of leaders in place and the importation of the AVRO engineers added a great deal of depth and capability to the growing organization. It also served to build out the management and supervisory structure that was then in place when STG began to hire a significant number of new college graduate engineers, especially in the early sixties after Apollo was started. And, most significant for me, it brought Tec Roberts, originally from Wales, who eventually became a strong influence in my early career.

This was another interesting coincidence in timing because it was the same time that seven test pilots also joined STG and became known as the Mercury Seven. Their presence quickly became commonplace in the few buildings housing the fledgling Mercury team. There was a first-name-basis environment in STG. It was a heady time getting to know these new heroes and eventually traveling with some of them as the Atlas flight program began. As the group who would strap on these vehicles, it made the work more focused and personal for us.