There were five controller positions for the RTCC, and each was responsible for providing assistance to a number of different Mission Control flight controllers. They needed to be available to respond to any requests for specific data, as well as requests from the backroom support teams.
“The MOC would complete the requested processing with the results displayed on the CRTs,” Cools said. “For example, computing a new trajectory or ephemeris based on the latest radar vector. Some of the data processing was automatic, such as processing all telemetry parameters, which was done once every second. It was our job to see that all the data was processed properly and the output was displayed correctly.”
In short, without the RTCC, NASA’s flight controllers would be flying blind. After the computer upgrade, and with all the testing and simulations, the RTCC and flight control management teams knew they were ready for the first crewed flights to get under way and could give a hearty “Go!” for Apollo.
BY LATE 1967 AND INTO 1968, IT WAS common for several astronauts at a time to be out at North American’s facility in Downey, California. North American had accommodations for about twenty people to stay in private rooms. The company also provided cars for the astronauts: Ford Mustangs.
“If they were on facility,” said Rich Manley, “they were assigned a Mustang, and they could pick it up at LAX. They could come and go as they needed, and they would be on site for four to five days at a time, maybe even weekends. We had seven days a week testing and the astronauts were part of it. The primary crew and backup crew were each assigned to the spacecraft they’d be flying, and it was their responsibility to follow their spacecraft along its development, monitor it and to get to know it well.”
Each astronaut was assigned to specialize in a specific system, to know it inside and out, then follow the technical development and mainline testing—many times adding input on the design or testing. They’d have meetings with the other astronauts to share details of changes or anomalies, just to keep each other informed on the status of the spacecraft. The astronauts regularly came into Manley’s lab in the engineering ground station.
“We’d have the coffee pot on, and they would come in and BS sometimes, but mostly it was strictly business,” he said. “They were all very precise and if you were not on board ready to go when the switch turned on to do the test, you better damn well be there, they’d have you thrown out.”
But Manley also found the astronauts were either 100 percent work or 100 percent play, and when it came to play, interesting things could take place.
One night when Manley finished work at about midnight, he drove out of the parking lot, about to turn right on Lakewood Boulevard. Lakewood ran northeast–southwest in front of the North American plant, with three lanes in each direction. In the late ‘60s, there was a mile-long stretch where no other streets came onto the highway, except for the access road to the plant.
Before turning, Manley noticed two sets of headlights barreling down the highway, bat out of hell, one car right on the butt-end of the other. As the cars flew past, Manley saw they were both Mustangs. Attached to the trunk of the lead car was an Apollo docking port, and on the hood of the second was a docking probe.
“They were docking and undocking with each other, probably doing about 50 to 60 miles per hour down the highway,” said Manley, who almost couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “I never found out who it was because when I mentioned it the next day, they all said they didn’t know anything about it.”
AFTER THE APOLLO 1 FIRE, WHEN NORTH American Rockwell changed the designs for the Block II version of the Command Module (CM), some of Honeywell’s designs required modifications as well. And the Instrumentation Lab’s upgrade to their own Block II version of the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) affected the work that Earle Kyle and his colleagues were doing too.
The requirements set by the Apollo program were many. Every part needed to include an individual stamped identification so that if there were any problems, the part could be traced back to its origins on the assembly line. Kyle found that particular requirement quite useful several times while tracking down a specific issue. But the paperwork requirement was seemingly endless, with no tangible benefit.
“We had so much paperwork in documenting everything,” Kyle said, “that we used to joke NASA had a secret plan that if the Saturn V didn’t work, they could climb to the moon on the stacks of paperwork.”
Kyle and his colleagues always wondered if anyone at NASA or North American Rockwell had time to read all the paperwork they generated. If they added up all the paperwork they spit out, plus the paperwork from the other contractors, reading it would be humanly impossible. After compiling one particularly laborious and lengthy 3-inch (8-cm)-thick report, Kyle and his coworkers decided to conduct a test. Behind some well-placed introductory pages, they put a Minneapolis phone book inside the binder. No one ever called them out on their prank, confirming Kyle’s assumptions.
Honeywell’s design lab included a big blueprint machine that could print out the schematics of their electronic designs on huge rolls of paper. The engineers would tack the large blueprints on the wall, all the way around the room and they could walk around and make notations. If they realized a problem with the design, they’d rip down the paper and start over.
Kyle and his colleagues constantly used the Honeywell Visicorder, a multichannel strip chart recorder (similar to an EKG machine) that could test out the electronics and provide a printout of how each chip or diode was functioning. Standing about 3½ feet (1 m) high, the Visicorder was on wheels so it could be moved wherever it was needed. The thermal paper for the printouts came from another Minneapolis company, 3M, and the 11-inch (28-cm)-wide paper would continuously stream out, displaying the squiggly lines that showed details of the performance of a component. But paper jams happened frequently.
“I can remember many, many nights at 3:00 a.m., lying on my back on the cold concrete floor in the lab where there was no heat in the winter,” said Kyle, “reaching up into that machine to unjam the paper roll. I’d be so exhausted I’d just lay on the floor with the warm thermal paper falling down on me. I’d take a quick nap, and then go back to analyzing the printout to see where things went wrong.”
Each of the electronic modules Honeywell built had to be tested and subjected to the torture they might endure during a launch, while in space or being stored for years in the warm, humid Florida weather. Kyle and his colleagues used vibration tables, vacuum chambers and environmental simulators that included salt spray and temperature extremes. They also had to make sure that the big specialized computer they built, the Bench Maintenance Equipment (BME), could operate after sitting in the Cape’s humid, salty air. (The BME in Minneapolis didn’t have that problem as it had its own glass-walled, air-conditioned room.)
Kyle was responsible for the analog computer that fed signals to the display for the Flight Director Attitude Indicator (FDAI), the eight ball. The display told the crew which way the engine on the Service Module (SM) was pointing when they needed to make in-flight course corrections. During the first several “builds” of this piece of flight hardware, the modules worked well. But during testing of the sixth set, some electronic signals started to drift—they would intermittently be too close to being outside the required voltage or frequency range. The drift could be a problem because Minneapolis-Honeywell needed to ensure their modules would work correctly two or three years down the road. Some of the modules they were building wouldn’t be flown until a later Apollo flight.
“There are two kinds of problems you run into in this business,” said Kyle. “One is completely broken, which is usually easy to find and fix. But intermittent problems, those are hard. Sometimes it can take weeks or months to find the culprit.”
The Honeywell Stabilization and Control System that operated the thrusters on the CM and the LM used a hybrid of both analog and digital silicon computing chips that were packaged in small metal rectangular “cans.” The
se cans were about ½ inch (1 cm) long and about ¼ inch (0.5 cm) wide with wire leads coming out on both sides so they looked like daddy longlegs. These leads were welded onto circuit boards with other external components like power resistors and capacitors. Several circuit boards were then placed in various special sealed shoebox-size boxes, or modules, containing hundreds of circuits. So finding the culprit responsible for the problem of signal drift was painstakingly difficult. It became a months-long investigation, and since Kyle had a reputation as a problem solver, he was appointed to lead a team to figure it out.
“My boss told me I had unlimited resources, but I needed to solve the problem in less than three months or we could lose the contract,” Kyle said. “This was one of the biggest contracts Honeywell ever had, and so I eventually had a team of eighty people working on it, and we used all sorts of exotic gear, like electron microscopes, wide bandwidth oscilloscopes and X-ray machines, to run our tests to figure out this spooky, intermittent problem.”
Finally, Kyle and his team were able to determine the problem: It came from the advances made in the mid-1960s with new miniaturization techniques in building computer circuits. “The supplier had figured out a way to make the microchip inside the can smaller, but they didn’t tell us about it,” said Kyle, “and we couldn’t know because the can surrounding the chip was still the same size with the same part number on it. When Honeywell’s specialized technicians used their capacitive discharge welding machines to fasten the microchip cans onto the circuit boards, the smaller chips inside each can were heat stressed where the larger previous designs weren’t. And this set the stage for the hardest type of problem to solve—one where you don’t have a catastrophic part failure, but one in which the part is stressed and is now going to be flaky and unreliable and go off on its own from time to time and do all sorts of strange things that are hard to find the reason and the cause and then, of course, the fix.”
But still, Kyle marveled how this era seemed to be a convergence of time where the digital age met the rocket age, where everything came together to make Apollo possible.
“And the same thing was true for me too,” Kyle said. “I seemed to run into the right people at the right time to solve a problem or to be exposed to an idea or experience that helped me along the way. I had so many serendipitous things in life, it was spooky how things just meshed together. I always said, you couldn’t make this shit up in a million years.”
Of course, with the pressure of meeting the goals and timelines of Apollo, there were conflicts and people who made life difficult. One of Kyle’s bosses was a cigar-chomping tyrant, and when he walked through the maze of cubicles and heard someone laughing, he’d threaten to fire them. Another was a Bible-thumping zealot, continually grumbling about the waste of money on Apollo when there were so many problems here on Earth.
One meeting, in particular, stands out during that time. Kyle and his team were meeting with members of other engineering groups at Minneapolis-Honeywell, trying to sort out some issues that had been plaguing the various groups. Each week the groups met in design-review committees to make sure they had considered everything in ensuring that nothing like the Apollo 1 fire would happen again. Among one of the groups was a black engineer, but he had to leave the meeting early. A short time later, after the group worked through a particularly tricky problem by identifying a subtle engineering error that slipped by the design review, Kyle’s boss said, “Let’s be more careful. I don’t want to see any more ‘nigger in a woodpile’ incidents like this again, as we can’t keep falling behind schedule.”
When Kyle heard that word, he sharply drew in his breath and his blood started to boil. His initial instinct was to call his boss out for his derogatory insensitivity, his bigoted racial views. But he knew a private conversation would better serve the situation.
“I was hot because I’m half black but very light skinned so obviously he didn’t know he offended anyone who was left in the room,” Kyle recalled. “Clearly he waited until the dark-skinned engineer left before making his racist comment.
I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of the others so waited until later to explain he should never say that again while I’m around or I’d probably ‘deck him.’ Of course, he turned beet red, apologized all over the place, said it would never happen again. He probably wouldn’t have said it if he had met my very dark-skinned wife. He’d probably think we were just an interracial couple.”
Kyle had experienced this before, had “been to this movie many times before” in his life.
When he was in high school, he overheard his trigonometry teacher talking to the track coach. He said, “I wish I could figure out a way to not give that Kyle kid an A grade for this course as I’ll be damned if I’ll help a nigger be the valedictorian of Minneapolis Central High School.”
The coach was confused. He thought Kyle was white. The math teacher explained, “I’ve had his older brother and sister and they are very dark, and so is his dad.”
But Kyle received the A in trigonometry and became the first African American valedictorian of Central High. In his valedictory speech, he talked about his dream of sending people into space. And now, the convergence of all the right elements in his life meant he could work to make that dream a reality.
AT 7:00 A.M. ON MAY 6, 1968, NEIL Armstrong took off to conduct simulated lunar landings using the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV). Armstrong had been assigned as backup commander for the Apollo 9 mission, and all prime and backup Apollo commanders were expected to complete training in this awkward-looking “flying bedstead,” as the astronauts called it. The LLTV’s tendency to be persnickety in operation was superseded by the realistic training it provided for flying the Lunar Module (LM). To avoid any extra instability, standard procedure was to fly it early in the morning at Ellington Air Force Base to avoid the Gulf breezes that usually came up later in the day.
After conducting landing maneuvers for about five minutes, Armstrong rose to about 200 feet (61 m) above the ground when he suddenly lost control of the vehicle. He quickly made the decision to eject just seconds before the LLTV spun out of control and crashed onto the runway in a spectacular fireball. Incredibly, Armstrong’s parachute opened and filled, even at such low altitude. He floated down safely to the nearby grass and was uninjured except for biting his tongue when he hit the ground. Firetrucks standing by at Ellington quickly came to the rescue and put out the flames, but the LLTV was a total loss. Anyone who saw the event couldn’t believe Armstrong escaped unscathed. It all happened in just seconds and was an incredibly narrow escape.
Word about the accident slowly made its way around MSC, and later that morning Glynn Lunney came by to talk with astronaut Alan Bean, who shared an office with Armstrong. As Lunney walked into their office, the two astronauts were looking in a textbook, talking about lunar surface features.
Lunney said, “Hey, that was a pretty close call this morning, Neil.”
Bean looked at both of them quizzically. “What are you talking about?”
Armstrong hadn’t mentioned his brush with death to Bean, even though the two were good friends and had been in the same room for a couple of hours. Bean later said, “I can’t think of another person, let alone another astronaut, who would have just gone back to his office after ejecting a fraction of a second before getting killed.”
Neil Armstrong parachuting to safety after ejecting from the LLTV-1, which is seen burning on the ground after it crashed on May 6, 1968. Credit: NASA.
Years later, Ken Young from the rendezvous team was chatting with Armstrong at an MSC reunion event and he took the opportunity to ask about the LLTV crash. “You know, Neil, I heard from Glynn that you never even told Bean-O that you almost bought the farm that day when you bailed out of the flying bedstead,” Young said. “Is that really true?”
Armstrong smiled and looked down bashfully. “Well, yeah, I suppose that’s true,” he said slowly, and then looked up at Young with a wry grin. “But do yo
u know what the worst thing was about that day?”
“That was a pretty bad day, Neil,” Young said. “What could be worse than almost getting killed?”
“Well,” said Armstrong, “when the LLTV crashed, I floated down into that tall johnsongrass alongside the runway, and the parachute dragged me through the grass. I ended up getting chiggers in both legs, and it took more than a month to get rid of ‘em.”
Astronaut Neil Armstrong flying the Lunar Landing Training Vehicle (LLTV) at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston, Texas. Credit: NASA.
Apollo Command and Service Modules (CSM) being moved within Kennedy Space Center’s (KSC) Manned Spacecraft Operations Building in 1969. Credit: NASA.
Technicians prepare a Lunar Module for the LTA-8 test in the vacuum chamber in the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory at the Manned Spacecraft Center in 1968. Credit: NASA.
THE NEW BLOCK II VERSION OF THE Command and Service Modules (CSM) was undergoing design and engineering reviews at both North American Rockwell and within NASA to certify the designs for flight-worthiness and flight safety. Certification meant plans could go ahead for scheduling the Apollo 7 and Apollo 8 missions. But before the designs could be verified—and before any humans could fly in these spacecraft—engineers needed to conduct critical tests in the enormous vacuum chamber at MSC, the Space Environment Simulation Laboratory (SESL).
“The management asked me to lead up a team of several hundred people to do what we called the LTA-8 and 2TV-1 tests in our big space chambers,” said Bob Wren. “We wanted to put the spacecraft and astronauts through simulated flights lasting several days to make sure everything was going to work in the vacuum and temperatures of space. It took us several months to even set these tests up, and we even brought in the designers and technicians from North American and Grumman to help us.”
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