Highways Into Space: A first-hand account of the beginnings of the human space program (8 page)

John was one of a kind; nobody could make another mold like the one John came out of.

All of this focus on the problem of creating a safe-flight-protection concept workable in the real world of tracking, computing and the control center lead to an early assignment for me, which was a terrific learning experience. It was the need to understand the workings of the range safety function at the Cape. It was a similar discipline to the one we were beginning to invent but it was aimed at protecting the safety of people and facilities on the ground. Our focus was aimed at protecting the safety and return of the spacecraft and crew.

One of my early trips to the Cape was in November 1960. At that time, we were trying to launch the first Mercury Redstone flight, MR-1. It was my assignment to observe the range safety officer in order to get a better understanding of what that position did to protect facilities and people from a wayward launch vehicle. I remember being impressed at how cool Captain Davis, the range safety officer, was. This was my first real countdown. My stomach was turning over at maximum RPM and yet he was so calm. When we had a hold in the countdown, he invited me to join him for breakfast. Captain Davis did a great job with the platter of eggs, bacon and all the trimmings. I was not able to do any more than a cup of coffee.

Range safety operations were a critical and important function. In a sense, it was similar to the job that we were beginning to invent for the flight dynamics officer. The RSO ensured that the vehicle would not deviate from its nominal path beyond a set of destruct limits designed to protect the people and the facilities on the ground. In those days, reliability of the launch vehicles was low enough that they had an average failure rate of about fifty percent. The RSO was often called on to destroy the launch vehicle before it did any damage. He had a number of systems that were used to aid him in that task. The first was a system of radars that displayed present position and projected impact location on plot boards in the range safety control room. There were also visual observers, located at strategic positions, who watched the launch vehicle through a template to detect deviations from the nominal path.

With this kind of information, the RSO could make a decision that the vehicle was approaching a destruct limit line. The RSO could then send the destruct command that would initiate the firing of a set of shaped charges usually running lengthwise along the tank or outer structure of the launch vehicle. These destruct systems were quite effective in splitting the stage open and spilling the propellants until the whole vehicle turned into a fireball. His action to destruct the vehicle was designed to protect property and people and, in a similar fashion, I was working on the problem of defining the limits of trajectory deviations that could imperil the safety of the astronauts.

The spacecraft had different abort modes, consider them escape routes for the crew, and our efforts turned towards assuring that those escape routes were not compromised by any trajectory deviation, hence some of our eventual limit lines. We also tried to control the location of the landing in case of a launch abort. Late in the launch phase, there was also some limited ability to vary the time of retro fire and control the landing point of the spacecraft to a designated recovery area in the Atlantic. Observing the RSO operation and knowing how often he had to take destruct action certainly underlined the importance and urgency of our efforts to develop a sound approach for limit lines that would protect the crew.

Eventually, the Mercury-Redstone countdown picked up and continued towards T-0. My stomach did not get any better. The countdown clock finally arrived at T-0 and there was considerable smoke on the launch pad. However, as the smoke cleared, it became clear that the Redstone rocket was still sitting on the pad and parachutes were being deployed from the Mercury spacecraft. This put the whole situation in a really high-risk condition. For unknown reasons, the Redstone had apparently begun to ignite its engines and then shut down. Although I didn’t figure all this out at the time, the spacecraft reacted as it should have following a normal shutdown of the rocket at the end of its planned firing. This resulted in the jettisoning of the escape tower and, since the barostats sensed an altitude below ten thousand feet (the normal altitude for chute deployment), out went the parachutes.

MR-1 Escape Tower Fires

So we ended up with a rocket that had been pressurized, armed, fired and released for flight and it was still sitting on the pad unconstrained by any hold-down device. On top of that precarious condition, the concern was that the parachutes would fill in the breeze and perhaps pull the vehicle over and cause it to collapse on the pad. The Redstone team in the blockhouse was scrambling to decide on a course of action to stabilize and “safe” this condition. I did not hear those conversations but I do know of one option that was being discussed with the range safety officer. Since all the ground umbilicals to the vehicle had been released for flight, there was really no way for the blockhouse to exercise any control. The option being discussed involved shooting a high-powered rifle at the Redstone tank and letting the fuel spill out.

I was completely new to this environment and knew nothing of “safing” techniques. But this did not sound like safety. My gut reaction to this rifle scheme was really negative. It was soon set aside.

The team in the blockhouse considered an option involving reconnecting the umbilicals. This approach involved sending some people, maybe only one, out to reconnect the umbilicals with a completely fueled vehicle precariously balanced on the pad. This was dropped soon also. Eventually, since the wind was very light and forecast to remain so, the concern about filling the parachutes and causing a tip-over seemed less threatening. Finally, it was decided to simply wait, let the launch vehicle batteries drain down and this would cause some of the valves to go to the safe position. There was risk with this path, but it was the one selected and resulted in the complete “safing” of the vehicle by the next day.

Up until this event, I had a rather constrained view of what my job as a flight dynamics officer might entail. This experience drove home the fact that unplanned failures or events could really happen, and that the automatic system, or the crew, or some intervention by the ground crew could start another chain of events. All of a sudden, the preparation for effectively operating in the MCC took on several more dimensions than I had been imagining. This was much more of a lesson than I had expected on my very first day of limited operations involvement. From that day on, my thinking and that of my colleagues embraced the idea that the unexpected could happen and things could get even more complicated from there.

Besides these lessons from the RSO world, another important job on the ground was to make sure that the spacecraft was in a suitable and safe orbit. We spent considerable time deciding what conditions had to be met in order to consider the orbit safe and give it a “GO.” The geometry of the launch phase was such that the point at which the launch vehicle was commanded to be shut down and the spacecraft was in orbit occurred halfway between the Cape and the station at Bermuda. These and other trajectory-related conditions were the responsibility of the console operator known as Flight Dynamics Officer, call sign “FIDO.”

Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral

By this time, the planning for control of the spacecraft in orbit had evolved to the concept of a Mercury Control Center (MCC) at the Cape and connected to multiple ground and ship-based stations around the world. The MCC – an acronym that worked equally well for the later Mission Control Center in Houston – was the command center at the hub of this network of facilities. It also received the telemetry and A/G voice from the local facilities at the Cape. The MCC was also supported by the Real Time Computing Center (RTCC) at the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in Greenbelt, Maryland. This computing center’s primary function was to process raw radar data and provide position, velocity and other derived parameters to the MCC, in support of the “FIDO” and “Retro” positions. The telemetry processing was not performed by the RTCC but was routed directly from the analog telemetry ground system to display devices, such as meters, strip charts or discrete events lights for review by the spacecraft systems controllers.

The implementation of the RTCC was a landmark case of multi-organizational cooperation. It involved the mission analysis people for the requirements for analytical tools and software formulations. Carl Huss and I represented the needs of the console operators for the definition of the content of displays, limit lines, abort mode actions, propulsion maneuver targets, mission events to sequence the programs and other operational parameters for MCC monitoring and control. Since the computers at the time were severely limited by memory capacity, balancing a useful requirement set within that constraint became a daily struggle. The management of the implementation was performed by Langley employees like Jim Donegan who eventually moved to GSFC to oversee the RTCC work. IBM won the contract for the hardware and software work. Lynn Dunseith, originally from Lewis like me, was the STG interface to the implementation team at GSFC and Lynn performed this role superbly well into the Shuttle flight program. Modern observers will be amused at the memory size constraint but the system was at the edge of the state of the art at the time. It was a regular cause for management review and a real test of the STG, GSFC and IBM team. But, the effective interaction of all the involved parties was driven by a uniform dedication to the same goals and was a tribute to the competence and professionalism of this team.

The network stations, referred to as remote sites, would be in contact with the spacecraft for a maximum of five minutes, often less, each time the spacecraft passed in their vicinity. The remote sites were capable of receiving telemetry and voice, sending commands and tracking the spacecraft by radar. The stations were also manned by a small cadre of operators whose job was to function like a mini-MCC, for the time the spacecraft was in contact with their station. In effect, they were the eyes and ears and more of MCC as the spacecraft traced its ground path over the globe. The remote stations sent data back to MCC after the pass on a teletype system, but it was mostly a manual capture of a standard set of parameters plus news of any anomalies or significant items. It was tedious and slow, but the guys made it work as well as it could. Voice quality between the MCC and the remote stations was mixed – some were good, but some had a habit of dropping out at inopportune times. The orbit was such that the spacecraft would traverse and flyover most of the globe in about twenty-four hours.

We had thirteen of these stations and the manning, training and logistics were major tasks in themselves. There were usually three to five operators called flight controllers at each one of these stations. The tasks were monitoring of the onboard systems, the health of the crew, a capcom and sometimes a designated leader of the team for sites involved in critical mission coverage such as retrofire. This effort was a significant training and logistics problem to manage. Gene Kranz earned his spurs and more in the orchestration of this global infrastructure of intelligence gathering and real time response to the frequent problems of early space flight.

The Bermuda station was additionally configured with a set of plot boards driven by the local radar and identical to the plot boards at the Mercury Control Center at the Cape. These were the tools by which we were going to assure that the spacecraft was safely in orbit or to assist in a few specific abort conditions. With the support of John Mayer, I was selected to be the flight dynamics officer at Bermuda and served on three unmanned Atlas launches and on John Glenn’s flight, designated MA-6. The station worked very well for this purpose and gave clear confirmation of safe orbit, which was also verified by the tracking displayed in MCC.