Eight Years to the Moon

by Nancy Atkinson

  And work continued on Apollo.

  “It was a shock here in Houston, just like it was all over the nation and the world,” said Norman Chaffee. “But I can’t say that Kennedy’s death had an impact on what we were doing or that it made us rededicate ourselves, because we were already dedicated. We were already totally committed to getting to the Moon.”

  CHAPTER 3

  1964

  An Agena Target Docking Vehicle in Earth orbit, during the Gemini 12 mission. Credit: NASA.

  We figured it out as we went along.

  —DICK KOOS, Simulation Supervisor

  IN JANUARY 1964, THE US NAVY SHIP Longview slipped silently through the Pacific Ocean waves on a covert operation. Sailing 50 miles (80 km) off the coast of Hawaii, the converted World War II Victory ship was retrofitted with state-of-the-art telemetry antennas and communications transceivers. Its mission: locate a small capsule returning from space.

  The Longview was part of a secret project, code-named Corona. This was the United States’s first space program, a clandestine Cold War intelligence project. It was operated jointly by the CIA and the US Air Force, with the goal of acquiring the first-ever satellite reconnaissance imagery of the Soviet Union and China.

  Corona started in 1959, in the days when US rockets exploded or crashed more often than not. It took fourteen launches to finally get a mission in orbit where all the components worked right, and it wasn’t until 1964 that operations became routinely successful. But it would go on to be a remarkable program, with 144 launches in a dozen years.

  The USS Longview, sailing near Hawaii. Credit: Bill Wood, Operations Supervisor, Bendix Range Systems Department, Air Force Western Test Range.

  The Corona camera system. Credit: National Reconnaissance Office.

  The mission plan for this secret space program was audacious: launch a high-resolution camera to low Earth orbit and snap pictures from 100 miles (161 km) up, then eject the film canister to plummet from space, down through Earth’s atmosphere where an airplane would snatch it in midair. Sounds crazy, but it worked. Corona’s cameras acquired photographs on traditional film (digital photography wouldn’t be invented for another dozen years or so) and stored the exposed film in an onboard capsule. Operators at a ground station would command the spacecraft to eject the film capsule, and the Air Force would deploy recovery ships and aircraft over the Pacific Ocean.

  The trick was determining the falling capsule’s trajectory.

  “On the recovery tracking ships for Corona we would go out and sit underneath the path where the spacecraft would be going over,” said Bill Wood, who oversaw a crew of about a dozen on the Longview. “And along with ground tracking stations on Tern Island and Kaena Point on the western tip of Oahu, we’d track the orbit of the Corona spacecraft and monitor the release of the reentry package into the atmosphere. Between all of us, we could pinpoint exactly where the capsule was coming down.”

  The crews learned to track the trajectory of the small spacecraft with such accuracy, they could send precise coordinates to pilots on board Air Force C-119 or C-130 aircraft. The pilots could then snag the parachutes of the film capsule with a special snare on the back of the planes.

  An image from Project Corona showing a missile site in the Soviet Union. Credit: National Reconnaissance Office.

  “If necessary, we could deploy helicopters and swimmers to pick it out of the ocean if the USAF aircraft missed it on the way down,” Wood said.

  The CIA’s cover story was that Wood and all his colleagues were working on a project called Discoverer, described publicly as a “scientific space program with a focus on biological research.” The Discoverer program did actually employ scientists who developed habitable space compartments for mice and monkeys, and several of these compartments were launched during the early Corona flights, sometimes in combination with the camera and sometimes alone. In a couple of the early failures, the biological containers crash-landed and were recovered by people in different countries—one ended up in South America, and another compartment was possibly recovered by the Soviet Union. This made headlines at the time (inspiring the novel and subsequent film Ice Station Zebra) and, somewhat by coincidence, fell right into the cover story that these returning space capsules contained animals, not reconnaissance film.

  Besides reaching its goal of gathering photographic surveillance, Corona made remarkable advances, ultimately helping NASA in many aspects. Corona proved that an object could come back from orbit and be recovered (an unknown when the secret program began), it paved the way for splashdown recovery for human missions, it demonstrated ground control and orbital operations and it proved it was possible to track a small object with incredible accuracy. Enough accuracy, in fact, to be able to send humans to the Moon.

  Also, because of Corona, the CIA compiled highly technical data on Soviet space operations, keeping NASA in the know about the USSR’s upcoming launches and buildup of launch facilities.

  “A small group of us at NASA were cleared for the overhead photography that was available,” said Robert Seamans. “It was very closely held at that time. But we had one room at NASA Headquarters that was built so that we could actually have somebody come over, a briefcase chained to their wrist, and they’d take out pictures and show us, then rechain it to their wrist and leave—all that kind of business. It was a glass room inside of a room, so that there was no window to the outside for people to get the vibration of the window and intercept the conversation that way, and all this spook stuff.”

  NASA received regular briefings from the CIA, so the space agency knew ahead of time about many of the Russian launches. NASA found they could ascertain the size of the rockets from these images because instead of taking rockets out to the pad vertically, the Soviets rolled them out horizontally on a railroad track.

  In 1964, images showed a new massive launchpad under construction, confirming the circulating rumors about a large launch vehicle designed by Russian rocket engineer Sergei Korolev, purportedly called N-1, capable of launching humans to the Moon or beyond. With NASA’s overarching goal of being the first to land humans on the Moon, knowing what the Russian space agency was up to encouraged NASA that maybe, finally they could get one step ahead. The CIA assured NASA that the Soviets didn’t haven’t any surveillance capabilities like Corona; but of course, there was no way to know for sure.

  The intelligence gathered by Corona’s cameras also showed the USSR’s buildup of planes, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and other arsenals were not as extensive as that country claimed. Consequently, the US felt they didn’t need to build up their own arsenal at breakneck speed, which—on the US side at least—helped cool tensions. Because of this reconnaissance, Corona would in due time profoundly alter the course of the Cold War. In April 1964, the US and USSR simultaneously announced plans to cut back production of materials for making nuclear weapons.

  Agena project overview. Credit: NASA/Glenn Research Center

  Corona provided one more thing to NASA: a highly reliable vehicle for the upcoming Gemini rendezvous demonstration missions. Corona launched on a Thor rocket with an Agena second stage. As the Agena’s capabilities developed through Corona launches, it became a dependable workhorse, just the kind of vehicle NASA needed for testing rendezvous and docking in space. Agena was the first space vehicle capable of multiple restarts during flight, and its navigation system could handle commands from the astronauts or ground stations.

  “I worked in real-time flight operations for the Agena at the USAF Satellite Test Center in California right after I got out of the Air Force in 1960,” said Gerry Griffin. “We launched some of the first spy satellites out of Vandenberg Air Force Base about as fast as they could pump the Agenas out of Lockheed’s factory at Sunnyvale. In the early days, we were putting about as many satellites into the ocean as into orbit. But we figured it out, and I learned a lot—maybe most importantly, I finally learned what an orbit was and how you shape it!”

 
Flight Directors Gene Kranz, Glynn Lunney and Gerry Griffin. Credit: NASA.

  But the entire time Griffin was at Lockheed (and when he later moved to General Dynamics), all he really wanted was to work at NASA. He watched the Mercury launches and kept tabs on NASA’s every move; he just wanted to be part of that fray.

  “I had actually tried to go to work for NASA in 1962, and the guy that interviewed me was named Gene Kranz,” Griffin said. “And Kranz and I couldn’t get together on money. And so I said, ‘To heck with you,’ and I went off and I did something else. But I knew I wanted to get into NASA so badly that, finally two years later, in 1964, I swallowed my pride and my wallet and took a pay cut to join Mission Control in Houston. It was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.”

  Griffin wanted NASA because of the adventure and challenge, and NASA wanted Griffin because of his expertise with Agena, so he started out as an Agena flight controller. But about a month later, Kranz asked if Griffin would mind switching from Agena to become a flight controller for Gemini.

  “There was actually a shortage of flight controllers,” Griffin said. “When I got there, the unmanned Gemini test flights were just starting, and they needed some more expertise for Gemini. I think the fact that I did have some experience because of being part of the real-time spaceflight operations for Corona was the reason Kranz decided to move me over into the Gemini side fairly quickly.”

  Kranz put Griffin to work as a flight controller responsible for the guidance, navigation and control systems on Gemini, call sign GNC. He loved it from day one.

  As Griffin got to know his new bosses, he noted that both Christopher Kraft and Gene Kranz had an uncanny ability to find people who could respond to the pressure-cooker, split-second decision-making environment in Mission Control. Since NASA was basically inventing the process of flight control as the missions and programs progressed, there was no cadre of preexisting flight controllers or flight directors to choose from. And even though no college had curriculum for how to be a flight controller, MSC soon developed the capability to identify and hire young engineers and “home-grow” them to do the flight control job, mostly through on-the-job training. The rapidly developing technology of digital computers required a steep learning curve for essentially everyone in NASA. A few of the young engineers had been exposed to computers in college, but it was a new capability, and NASA was actually driving much of its expansion.

  “Not only were we going to have computers in the spacecraft, we were going to have computers in Mission Control,” said Griffin. “But not a lot of us had experience with computers. So, that’s when Kraft and Kranz and others at MSC started finding people from colleges, universities and within the military that had some type of computer experience or aeronautical flight control experience. It was a matter of using all our country’s assets to get to the Moon.”

  NASA needed expertise wherever they could find it, because several test flights of both the Apollo and Gemini systems were scheduled for 1964. First came a successful test of the Saturn SA-5 on January 29, as a nationwide television audience viewed the launch of “the most powerful space vehicle in the free world,” as reporters called it. (SA-5 was the first Saturn rocket to fly with two stages.) Then in May, a Saturn 1 launched the first boilerplate version of Apollo Command Module (CM), a nonfunctional CM with the same mass to test the Saturn-Apollo launch configuration.

  Sandwiched between January’s and May’s launches was the first Gemini test flight in April to verify the structural integrity of both the Titan launch vehicle and the spacecraft, which successfully reached orbit. Then in September was another Saturn 1 test flight, providing final verification of the Saturn 1 rocket and successfully testing the Apollo CM’s reentry capabilities.

  These test flights helped NASA make significant strides toward the upcoming missions. Everyone at NASA, especially the astronauts who would fly these missions and the flight control team who would guide them, was encouraged that so many milestones had been reached. But where the flight controllers and astronauts would really learn their trade would be in the flight training simulations. Or as astronaut Mike Collins would later say, simulations became the “heart and soul of NASA.”

  OVER A BEER AT THE MOUSETRAP STEAKHOUSE in Cocoa Beach, Florida, Harold Miller and Dick Koos made a major decision.

  “We said, ‘Gosh, we’re going to have to use digital computers in the flight simulations for Gemini and Apollo,’“ said Koos, one of the few members of the Simulation Task Group (or Sim Group) who had computer experience at that time. “The ‘sims’ for Mercury had been frustrating enough because all we had was an analog computer. And we knew we weren’t going to do a very good job going forward without involving better computers. But we also knew it was going to be a challenge.”

  Harold Miller, left, in a discussion with NASA’s public affairs officer John “Shorty” Powers, astronaut Alan Shepard (back to the camera) and Art Hand in the Mercury simulation area in the Mercury Mission Control building. Image courtesy of Harold Miller.

  For the Mercury program, the big challenge for Miller, Koos and their small Sim Group had been unriddling the complex problems of not only doing flight simulations for the astronauts but also adding training for the fledgling flight control team. Just figuring out how to pretend you were flying in space was difficult enough, especially when no one had been to space yet.

  “In planning for the first space flights, Chris Kraft and a guy named Jack Cohen had the idea to combine the astronaut crew training together with the flight controller training,” said Koos, “but there was some disagreement about doing that, because some people just wanted to focus on the astronaut training. But Kraft and Cohen won out. But of course, nothing like that had been done before, so we just figured it out as we went along.”

  Their small group included Glynn Lunney, Stanley Faber, Miller, Koos and a few others, and together they organized the concept of what came to be known as integrated simulations. Kraft and Cohen’s idea was this: Since the astronauts and flight controllers needed to work together during the missions to figure out how to deal with problems, why not have them train together so they could practice doing just that? In the early days, the Sim Group figured out how to tie in the displays and switches on a Mercury capsule cockpit trainer (which McDonnell Aircraft had built for the astronauts) with the console displays at the Mercury Control Center (MCC) at Cape Canaveral. The Sim Group would conduct practice runs for every mission, inserting all the problems they could think of, preparing the flight crew and the flight controllers together for all the possible contingencies in all the various phases of flight.

  The Mercury simulation area at the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral. Image courtesy of Harold Miller.

  “In Mercury, the launch sims were pretty easy because there were only a couple of things we could do—either an abort or a nominal lift-off,” said Koos. “During the simulated flight was where we started exercising all the different problems we could.”

  They found ways to simulate the loss of cabin pressure and other gauge indications to induce the call for an abort or flight modification. The temperature data had to be faked, and medical problems were faked with either the flight crew or controllers.

  “We could at any time walk down to a controller and tell him that he was experiencing a heart attack or some other debilitating condition that would require him to leave his position,” said Miller, who would later become head of the Simulation Branch at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), “and the flight director would have to deal with the lack of a controller. Serious on-orbit medical problems were not simulated because we had a sim rule on not giving the controllers a problem that couldn’t be solved or was deemed unrealistic.”

  One time they simulated the loss of the entire MCC.

  “We shut down all the power in the building, and the flight controllers considered this an unrealistic failure,” said Miller. A few weeks later, a bulldozer cut through the power cables leading to the build
ing, rendering the MCC dead for hours. Fortunately, this occurred several weeks before one of the actual missions. The flight control team quickly developed backup procedures.

  But that was the goal, to get everyone to think about all what-ifs—all the possible things that could go wrong so they could develop a plan and have solutions at their fingertips.

  “Because of our sims, the flight controllers were developing these things called Mission Rules,” Miller said, “where if a certain thing happens, you do such and such or if this other thing happens you do something else. They went through each of the systems and decided what was really critical, and if you lost it, would you have to abort, or could you do a workaround?”

  The sims allowed the flight directors to hone their skills and instincts in leading their teams. Gene Kranz became a master at coming up with contingency plans, while Kraft prodded his controllers to think of every possibility.

  Over time, the Sim Group developed cohesive procedures for how they conducted the simulations and they, too, came up with their own set of rules for sims:

  • Simulations were to exercise procedures, interfaces (both human and hardware), Mission Rules and so on. They were not to teach systems. Classroom training was handled separately.

  • The simulations were used to screen the flight controllers, to weed out people who were not adept at real-time operation.

  • No grades were ever given or implied. It was the job of the flight director to decide on the readiness of the team and to choose the flight controllers.

  • And of course, no catastrophic failures were allowed. There had to be a way out.

  • The key decision, and I think this was critical,” said Miller, “was how much to involve the Control Center technical staff, the backroom guys, who were the experts on each system. The decision was to keep the interface as simple as possible and to involve as many people as possible in the simulations.”