Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

The idea for Apollo came from Jack Trombka, who told us fascinating stories about life in Building 30.

Eight years and eight weeks later, Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the lunar module Eagle onto the Sea of Tranquility. This is the story of what happened in between, and something of what went before and came after. It is not a history, but the tale of a few of the people of Apollo. Some of them held high positions; some worked in the trenches. A few were in the public eye; the rest were not. They have in common that they remained on the ground (for this is not a story about the astronauts) and that each played a part, large or small, in putting men on the moon and returning them safely to earth. These few must stand for all the others, for Apollo was an epic, and epics must be captured in miniature.

A small globe of metal with a few crude instruments weighing 184 pounds, Sputnik I was not much of a satellite by later standards. But it was the planet’s first artificial satellite, and it was not America’s. Two weeks later, the Russians compounded their triumph by orbiting Sputnik II, a much larger satellite with a dog named Laika aboard. Not only did Sputnik II carry the dog, which suggested that the Soviets were thinking about putting human beings into space, the final stage of the rocket had remained attached to the satellite—which meant, incredibly and ominously, that the Soviet rocket had managed to put a six-ton weight into earth orbit. The United States, on the other hand, was working on a grapefruit-sized satellite weighing three and a half pounds. Two months later, the Department of the Navy tried to launch this puny competitor to Sputnik in front of television and newspaper cameras from around the world. The Vanguard rocket being used for the launch rose four feet into the air, fell back, and crumpled onto the pad in a spectacular explosion. A few days later, the Soviet delegate to the United Nations inquired solicitously whether the United States was interested in receiving aid earmarked for underdeveloped countries.

the Germans had been held back by a combination of jurisdictional disputes (only the Air Force was supposed to build missiles with intercontinental range) and the Administration’s lukewarm interest in rocket technology. These barriers fell quickly after Sputnik. Given the go-ahead, von Braun’s people put America’s first satellite, Explorer I, into orbit on January 31, 1958.

Eisenhower was not willing to appoint von Braun head of the space program. There were many reasons for this—among others, it would have been embarrassing for the American space program to be so blatantly a German enterprise. As important, von Braun was tied to the Army, and Ike was adamant that the American space program not be run by the military.

Immediately to the north of the White House stands Lafayette Square, a formal park of grass and trees crisscrossed by brick paths. During the first half of the nineteenth century, when wealthy Washingtonians built townhouses along the three sides of the square facing the White House, Lafayette Square became the most fashionable address in the city. One of these houses still stands at the northeast corner of the square. It is one of the larger houses, washed in a pale lemon, with a handsome bay window overlooking the park. Built in 1820, it was given to the widow of the fourth President of the United States in payment of a debt owed to her husband, and it has been called by her name ever since: Dolley Madison House. In the spring of 1959, Dolley Madison House was the headquarters of NASA, an organization still so compact that its entire headquarters staff could be housed in that one townhouse and a small adjoining office building on H Street.

It was also obvious to Silverstein that they had better not pretend to be farther along than they really were. In fact, Silverstein said, they ought to emphasize that this was not a coordinated set of presentations. This was known around NASA as “the country-boy treatment,” Disher explained later. “You could have been spending your life on it, but you go in and say, ‘This is just something we threw together.’ It helped disarm people sometimes.”

Jim Elms called Webb a “politician in the best sense of the word.” He told a story in later years that encapsulated what he meant. It happened after the lunar program had been approved and Elms was down in Houston as Gilruth’s deputy. They were trying to get the Control Center built. Fresh out of industry and not understanding how government funding worked, Elms and Earl Hilburn had laid out the Control Center on the assumption that I.B.M. computers were going to be installed—at that time, only I.B.M. was making the kind of equipment they needed. But when the Control Center was half built, one of the other computer companies got wind of this and started to raise a fuss. This was all the more inconvenient because the General Accounting Office had just issued a directive saying that no one was to buy I.B.M. equipment except via a competitive bidding process. But if NASA went through the competitive procurement process, the entire Apollo program schedule would slip disastrously. A non-politician would have bought the I.B.M. computers and embroiled NASA in a scandal, said Elms. A careful, cover-your-ass politician would have followed the rules, let the program slip a year, and blamed his subordinates. What Jim Webb did was to call in the chief executive of every major computer company in the United States, including the one who was complaining. As each came to his office, Webb told him (as Elms reconstructed it, in a convincing drawl), “I want to thank you very much for comin’...

Describing the scale of his creation, Buchanan used to suggest that his listeners imagine the infield of a major-league baseball diamond being cut out and made into a platform. Then they should imagine the platform, elevated on its monster treads, moving along a track for three miles. Now all Buchanan’s listeners had to do was imagine the elevated baseball infield moving along a track for three miles carrying two-thirds of the Washington Monument on top, coming to a five-degree slope, and then climbing it. Last of all, they must imagine that as the assembly climbs the slope, the baseball infield is hydraulically jacked so that it remains level throughout the climb. That was the crawler. It was a marvel for which Buchanan was honored with some of the most prestigious awards in the engineering fraternity, but the ways in which it was a marvel are for the most part too technical to be appreciated by anyone except other engineers. For the lay reader, perhaps this is enough: During its voyage from the V.A.B. to the launch pad, including its climb up that five-degree slope, the tip of the Saturn, 363 feet above the platform, never moved outside the vertical by more than the dimensions of a basketball.

[* The joke that made the rounds of NASA was that the Saturn V had a reliability rating of .9999. In the story, a group from headquarters goes down to Marshall and asks Wernher von Braun how reliable the Saturn is going to be. Von Braun turns to four of his lieutenants and asks, “Is there any reason why it won’t work?” to which they answer: “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” “Nein.” Von Braun then says to the men from headquarters, “Gentlemen, I have a reliability of four nines.”]

Caldwell Johnson was once reflecting on the accounts he had read about the design of the Apollo spacecraft. “The way the history books say things came about,” he said, “they didn’t come about that way. The official records and all, that’s a long way of explaining a lot of things. It turns out that the thing was done by people, not by machines, and people have a way of getting to a very rational conclusion in a very irrational manner.”

An even better example of Johnson’s principle is the way that Apollo came to have those gracefully rounded corners. “You’ll talk to some aerodynamicists, or some heat transfer people, and they’ll explain to you the marvelous characteristics of this rounded corner, and why it was this way, and all,” said Johnson. “That’s a bunch of nonsense. When I first laid that thing out, it was a cone like Gemini and Mercury. And there’s a good reason for it, too. That’s a nice clean separation of flow on those sharp corners.” And, imperatively, the diameter of the bottom of the spacecraft was no bigger than the diameter of the third stage of the launch vehicle that Marshall was developing—160 inches. According to Johnson, things were going fine until they got a call from von Braun saying that Marshall had reduced the diameter of the third stage to 154 inches. “We said, ‘Jesus Christ, now we can’t leave this sonofabitch hanging out over the edge like that, and we can’t change the mold lines, because that’ll cut in on the interior space.’ So we said to each other, ‘Let’s just round the corners, nobody’ll ever know the difference.’ And that’s how that command module got rounded. I don’t doubt that the rounded corners are very beneficial and all that, but that was not the driving reason when it was done.” Owen Maynard saw another benefit. He knew from experience that whatever design they submitted would inevitably accumulate weight as time went on, eventually reaching “the density of water...

If it hadn’t been for John Houbolt, that might have been the end of it.* The Langley engineers on Brown’s team had done what Langley did best. They had explored an interesting research problem, prepared a technically careful discussion of it, and published the results in a Langley paper. If the practitioners cared to use their work, they were welcome to it. If not, that was their business. But by that time John Houbolt had gotten involved. [* Herein lies contention. In 1969, at the time of the first moon landing, Life magazine ran a long article that portrayed John Houbolt as both the creative force and lonely crusader for L.O.R. This was an exaggeration, perhaps customary in glossy magazines but scandalous to Langley engineers, who were always finicky about questions of scholarly attribution. Subsequently, Robert Gilruth was to become the leading proponent of an alternative interpretation of history, that Houbolt’s contribution really wasn’t that important—L.O.R. would have won on its engineering merits anyway. It is of course impossible to be sure what would have happened without Houbolt, but the text reflects our own reading of this history: Houbolt was not the originator of the L.O.R. concept (nor did he claim to be), but his advocacy was crucial, probably decisive, in leading to the adoption of L.O.R. There is a fascinating doctoral dissertation yet to be written on this episode, however.]

In the F-l, just pumping the propellants to the combustion chamber raised unprecedented demands. The F-l used liquid oxygen (LOX) and R.P.-1, a form of kerosene. The pumps, one for the fuel and one for the LOX, had to deliver the kerosene from the tankage to the combustion chamber at the rate of 15,741 gallons per minute, and the LOX at the rate of 24,811 gallons per minute. Driven by a 55,000-horsepower turbine, the pumps had to operate at drastically different temperatures: 60 degrees Fahrenheit for the fuel, –300 degrees for the LOX, while the turbine itself ran at 1,200 degrees. To complicate matters, the whole assembly had to be light and compact enough to fit on board the rocket and nonetheless sturdy enough to resist the pressures, vibrations, and other stresses of launch and flight.

The injector plate was pocked with 6,300 holes less than a quarter of an inch in diameter through which the kerosene and LOX entered the combustion chamber. Most of the propellant streams were arranged in groups of five. Two of the five, both kerosene, impinged on each other at a carefully defined distance below the top of the plate, forming a fan-shaped spray. The other three in each five-hole group were of LOX. These also impinged on one another, forming another fan. The two fans intersected. There, given the presence of a flame, they would combust. In the F-l, the combustion chamber was a barrel about thirty-six inches wide and thirty inches long, closed at one end by the injection plate and opening into a nozzle at the other end. A few seconds before ignition, four small pre-burners in the combustion chamber—pilot lights, in effect—were lit, providing a flame at the point of impingement. As the pumps screamed up to speed, valves snapped open and more than a ton of kerosene and two tons of liquid oxygen burst into the combustion chamber. Per second. The gases produced by their ignition roared out through the throat, the open bottom of the barrel, into the cone of the nozzle below. In the course of the few seconds from ignition to full power (mainstage), the interior of the combustion chamber went from ambient temperature to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. At the face of the injector plate, pressure went from zero to 1,150 pounds per square inch. Given that combination of prop...

Acoustical shocks that hit the chamber at the moment of ignition were the most troublesome of all. With the sole exception of a nuclear explosion, the noise of a Saturn launch was the loudest noise ever produced by man. The only sound in nature known to have exceeded the noise of a Saturn V was the fall of the Great Siberian Meteorite in 1883. Sound waves of such force tended to disrupt the burning process.

Canoga Park.

To get control of the program, Shea called in his new assistant, Tom Markley, and said to him that somehow they had to keep this thing on track. “Go out and fix me a management tool,” he told Markley. Markley sent his men out to look at the major aerospace companies and their sophisticated management control centers. Then Markley himself went to visit what everyone said was the best of them all, at the Martin Company. It was beautiful, Markley thought, sort of a management war room. He figured he would set something like that up for Joe—which would be a big relief to Markley because, until he did, Shea was expecting him to know all the answers. Whenever Markley didn’t know something, he had to live with Joe riding the living hell out of him until he found out—“so it was best if I got a good system going.” Shea turned the Martin model down flat. Markley submitted a revised plan, scaled down a little. Shea turned that down flat too. This is ridiculous, Markley thought, so finally he walked in and asked Shea what kind of management system he wanted. Shea told him. “What he wanted,” Markley said, “was to get a notebook every Thursday night, and in it he wanted the entire program structured, meaning all the interfaces with Marshall, everything going on with the command module, everything going on with the service module, everything going on with the SLA, everything going on with guidance and navigation, everything going on with the LEM, everything going on with the launch pad, ...

[* “LEM” refers to the lunar excursion module, the lunar lander. The word “excursion” was insisted upon by Owen Maynard and others at Langley who wanted to emphasize its limitations. Eventually headquarters shortened the official title to lunar module, and the official abbreviation was shortened to LM. Everyone continued to call it the “lem,” so we have compromised with purity by spelling it “LEM” throughout the book. The “SLA” was the spacecraft lunar adapter, the slanted section just below the C.S.M. that contained the lunar module during the launch. SLA is pronounced “slaw,” as in cole.]

And so Markley went away to produce the first edition of the loose-leaf notebook that he and his staff would prepare for Shea every week for the next 165 weeks. Each notebook ran to more than a hundred pages and was on Shea’s desk by close of business Thursday. Shea would get up at 4 A.M. Friday and start to annotate it, usually with technical comments and instructions, occasionally with remarks such as “You’ve gotta be kidding.” He would work on the notebook intermittently from Friday morning through the weekend and return it to Markley on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon, everyone in the ASPO network would have gotten his response from Shea. With the annotated notebook in his hands, Markley became the action officer. “I’d take this notebook, and then I’d fan it back out very quickly and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got these questions and I want the answers in the notebook by this Thursday.’ We’d get the answers back and then we’d take Joe’s marked-up notebook and start off in the front, anything he had marks on. We’d have the answers there. And then we’d have the brand-new section with the newest status too.” The scrawled notations to and fro were a way of keeping up “a running commun...

If you had a change you wanted to propose in the spacecraft, and if it got by the Change Board, the last step in the process was to go into Shea’s office on the seventh floor over in Building 2 at M.S.C. You’d walk in, and there Joe would be, by himself, behind his desk, and you had to explain to him what it was you wanted and why it was absolutely essential that this change be made in the spacecraft. And then Joe would begin to grill you. There was no point in trying to sidestep or fudge an answer. It made no difference if Shea wasn’t a specialist in your area. “If you understand it, you can make me understand it,” Shea kept saying, and you had better understand it absolutely cold or Shea would dissect you.

“The better is the enemy of the good,” Shea told them again and again.* The biggest problem with a new product in its developmental phase, Shea thought, was that a good engineer could always think of ways to make it better. This was fine, except that they couldn’t keep changing the spacecraft forever. Sooner or later they had to lock it into one configuration, so that they could make that configuration work. Keep the changes down.

Keep it simple—that was the other half of the Shea doctrine. To Shea, it seemed as if everyone was saying, “Apollo is the most complex job in the world; therefore, every part has to be as complicated as possible.” And that was exactly backwards. What they should be trying to do was figure out how to do things as simply as possible, with as few ways as possible to go wrong.

There was the problem of the heat shield. The specification the North American engineers were trying to meet required, logically enough, that the heat shield maintain its integrity under the extreme shifts from cold to heat that it would experience on its way to the moon and back, depending on whether it was in sun or shadow. But when they began testing the heat shield material under entry conditions, they found to their consternation that after exposure to severe cold it began to crack and craze and flake. They were going to have to create a new heat shield material, which would take untold quantities of money and time. Shea asked how long it took for the heat shield to cool down to the point where the problems began. The answer was about thirteen hours. So why did the spacecraft have to stay in the same attitude for that long? Why couldn’t it rotate, so the heat shield would remain nice and warm all the time? And that was the origin of what came to be known as the barbecue mode, or passive thermal control, in which the spacecraft rotated once an hour all the way out to the moon and back. Keep it simple.

There were only three sacred specs, and they were man, moon, decade. “If those are the real three things you’ve got to do, then everything else can be traded off underneath,”

This philosophy can be applied to shift goals (motto).

The better is the enemy of the good.

so don’t get yourself in a state of mind thinking that it’s too complex. It really is very simple. It’s piece by piece.” It’s awfully big, that’s all, Shea kept saying. Piece by piece, it’s simple.

Keep it simple. Keep to the schedule. Do your job or get out of the way. Shea’s methods could be abrasive and tough, but they could be exhilarating. It all depended on your point of view, and the people down in Houston had all sorts of opinions of Joe Shea.

At the Cape, the last half of 1965 and the beginning of 1966 saw the pieces of the launch complex finally begin to come together. In October, the first portions of the High Bay in the V.A.B. were occupied. In January 1966, the crawler, which had been giving Don Buchanan fits for almost four years, successfully returned the mobile launcher to the V.A.B. (for six months, the launcher had been stranded a mile and a half away, where the crawler had taken it and then broken down). In March, the first stage of a full-sized Saturn V test article, called the Saturn 500-F, with the same tankage and umbilical connections as a real Saturn V, was lifted to a vertical attitude in the V.A.B. Ten days later, the second stage of the 500-F was lifted 200 feet into the air and mated to the first stage. Five days after that, on March 30, 1966, the crews in the V.A.B. mated the third stage, then a test-article version of the C.S.M., and for the first time the people of Apollo saw what a Saturn V really looked like when assembled—all 363 gleaming white feet of it, standing under the harsh lights of the V.A.B. On May 8, the last of the swing arms that had caused so much trouble was installed on the umbilical tower. On May 25, 1966, five years to the day after John Kennedy had made his speech promising the moon within the decade, the giant doors of the V.A.B. slid open and the crawler emerged, bearing on its back a launcher, an umbilical tower, and a full-sized, full-weight mockup of the Saturn...

He pulled on his cigarette, trying to decide how to explain it to an outsider, then took out a pen and sketched the floor plan of the Apollo spacecraft on a napkin. “The commander was on the left,” he began. “On the pad he would be lying on his back. And right here”—the pen etched a delicate ´ —“in the side of the spacecraft beside him was a compartment for lithium hydroxide, which takes out the CO2 so the crew can rebreathe the oxygen. It had a metal door with a sharp edge . . . .” The door opened into the Environmental Control Unit (E.C.U.). Just underneath it was a cable, part of the E.C.U.’s instrumentation harness. The cable was wedged against the bottom of the door by other bundles of wires beneath it. Each time the door was pushed shut, the edge of the metal door scraped against the cable. The slight but repeated abrasion had exposed two tiny sections of wire in the cable. Something—maybe Grissom opened the door—caused a brief electrical arc between the exposed portions of wire. Even with the pure oxygen environment, the spark from the short would not have caused a conflagration. But it also happened that, just below the two scuffs in the cable, a length of aluminum tubing took a ninety-degree turn. This particular ninety-degree corner joint, one of hundreds in the tubing that interlaced the spacecraft, probably had sprung a leak. The joint had passed redundant inspections, but it had been subject to “creep” from stress at remote points in the system—the spacecraft ...

Shea decided later that night to move into the astronauts’ quarters on the third floor of the Operations and Checkout (O&C) Building. He later explained it as part of a shift into the mode he had used to resolve prior technical crises: Move onto the site, work all three shifts, understand what has gone wrong, fix it.

It was a tortuous experience. Marty Cioffoletti, the young North American engineer, remembered writing Test Preparation Sheets (T.P.S.) for removing the engines from the command module and disassembling the propulsion system. He explained the process. Suppose the disassembly was approaching the point where the team would be ready to take out a screw in one of Cioffoletti’s systems. Before Cioffoletti or any of his technicians could touch it, Cioffoletti had to write a T.P.S. that would specify the physical action (unscrew the screw). The part number of that particular screw. The torque that was supposed to be necessary to break the screw loose. With the T.P.S. in hand, Cioffoletti, the presiding engineer, would read an instruction. A North American quality inspector would move into place. One of NASA’s inspectors would move into place. A photographer would be called over. A North American technician would get into the burned-out spacecraft (observing whatever specific precautions were detailed for getting to that particular part of the spacecraft at that particular stage of the disassembly process) and then, using the specified mechanical device, take the screw out. The engineer would record the torque necessary to break it free. The technician would hand the screw to the North American quality inspector, who would make sure that it was the right part and the right part number, recording his results on his copy of the T.P.S. The North American inspector would hand it to th...

fait accompli, so Mathews’s refusal was presented to Webb along with the suggestion that they ought to talk Low into taking the job. Webb thought it was a terrific idea, and nothing would do but that they call Page Terminal at National Airport and have them hold Gilruth’s and Low's plane. Webb, Seamans, Phillips, and Mueller all piled into Webb’s official car, went out to the airport, and “persuaded” George Low. In recounting his selection as head of ASPO to NASA historians, Low never wavered from the official version. 1 By good luck as much as anything else, the Apollo Program seemed to get the right men at the right time. In 1963, they needed an impatient, charismatic man who would seize the spacecraft and pull it through North American. Because much of Houston was preoccupied with Gemini during this period, they also needed a man who liked to do everything himself. They got Joe Shea. In 1967, they needed a “knitter of people,” in Glynn Lunney’s graceful phrase, someone who could win the trust of the disparate elements in Houston and bring them together as a working whole. They got George Low. Except in ability, Low and Shea were mirror images. They were both born in 1926, but instead of Bronx working-class Irish, Low was Viennese Austrian, the son of a well-to-do manufacturer, educated in private schools in Switzerland and England before his widowed mother brought Georg Wilhelm to the United States in 1938. Instead of a systems engineer working on nuclear missiles, Low ...

[* Following the fire, Gilruth made it known to others that Shea had not kept him informed about what was going on. The “Apollo Notes,” as Low called them, were part of Low’s way of avoiding that problem. In the process, he also provided historians with a unique day-by-day narrative. The Apollo Notes are now part of the George M. Low Papers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.]

O’Malley was out at the pad one day, watching liquid oxygen being pumped from a tank up onto the umbilical tower. He asked the engineer where the LOX was being pumped to. “It beats the hell out of me,” the engineer replied. “Once it gets up there, I don’t know what happens to it.” Shortly after that, O’Malley called a meeting. Thenceforth, every engineer was expected to learn everything about the system he was running—where the stuff came from, where it was going, and all the things that might go wrong in between. And they did. “You understood it from the very beginning of the tank farm to the last nut and connector in that system,” said one engineer, “and you could just about close your eyes and draw a schematic of the electrical and mechanical systems by heart. Everybody had a thing called a ‘Smarts Book,’ and in that Smarts Book each system engineer had every fact that you could possibly collect about that system that you worked on. . . . You understood that system from womb to tomb and there was nothing in that system you couldn’t recite by heart, including torque values, safety wire specs—you name it and a system engineer down there could tell you what it was. Those guys were terribly intense.”

Kraft became what Kranz and some of the others called “The Teacher,” developing precepts that became the catechism for later generations of flight controllers. The first of Kraft’s precepts was simplicity itself: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.” But it was simple as a koan is simple, for flight controllers were trained and conditioned to solve problems; the temptation was for a controller to think that he knew what to do when he really didn’t. True wisdom in flight control lay in being able to recognize one’s own ignorance. Much of the training of the flight controllers consisted of showing them how they could be fooled.

Another of Kraft’s precepts was not at all simple. According to Kranz, “Kraft always believed that once you accepted the risk of launch, once those engines ignited, you had bought a good portion of the risk associated with that mission. Once you got into orbit, what you wanted to do was exploit the environment you were in. It was really a philosophy of risk versus risk and risk versus gain which we debated many, many times.” For example, during the Gemini V mission, there was a risk of losing the fuel cells if the spacecraft remained in orbit. If Kraft brought the crew home, another crew would have to repeat the mission and accept the comparatively higher risks of the launch phase. The conclusion, according to the Kraft philosophy, was that although it was risky to use the fuel cells, it was safer in the larger scheme of things to continue the mission than to bring it home with its work uncompleted.

If “safety before everything” was impossible, what then was the guiding principle for deciding to abort a mission? The canon was voluminous, but the unifying tenet was based on the ability to tolerate one more major failure. As Lunney explained it: “You will continue [flying] only if the next thing that happens to you—and it’s the worst thing you can think of to couple with the problems you already have—is still survivable.” If you thought in those terms, the flight controllers pointed out, a great many ...

Kraft was the model for flight-controller cool, taking in bad news without changing expression or tone of voice, making decisions quickly, controlling people and events as the situation demanded. He had the indefinable quality called presence as well. “I’ve seen people argue and argue and argue with him, trying to get their way,” one controller recalled. “He’d look at them very casually, and he’d say, ‘I have your input.’ And it would just terminate the conversation—just terminate the guy into a dummy load, is what we used to say.”

“He’s got to be the best motivator of people I ever had anything to do with,” said Rod Loe of Kraft. For example, said Loe: During Gemini, Loe, a flight controller for the environmental control system, was worried about one of his subsystems. He couldn’t get the contractor in charge of it to pay any attention to him—Loe was just a little guy. Kraft somehow heard about this, and when a few days later the contractor people were discussing another problem with Kraft, Kraft casually walked over to Loe and put his arm on his shoulder and asked, “What do you think, Rod?” That’s all it took. “‘Rod? Who’s Rod?’ Those guys didn’t know who ‘Rod’ was,” Loe said. “But from then on, those guys started looking me up to get my opinion, because they thought, ‘God, Kraft listens to this guy.’” It didn’t take many such episodes to build a lot of loyalty among Kraft’s people.

“We had a few guys who came into Flight Operations who had been around awhile, and they had trouble believing that they were able to do what they were doing. I had a guy who was uncomfortable with it, and he used to ask me, ‘How can you have the confidence to do this?’ My reaction was, ‘Well, how the hell do I know? I don’t go around analyzing that, I just do it!’ The people who’d been around for a while maybe had been blunted. They didn’t do too well. The people who came in new, out of school, they didn’t know any better. They didn’t know they shouldn’t do things or couldn’t do things, or that life was going to beat them up sooner or later.” The confidence and the closeness were to be indispensable to the way that Flight Operations functioned during crises.

M.S.C.’s distinction between command and control, as originally formulated by Walt Williams: The astronauts controlled the spacecraft, the MOCR commanded the mission.

Kraft also set the tone for one of the most striking features of Flight Operations, unquestioning trust—not of superiors by subordinates, but the other way around. In the flight control business, where the consequences of mistakes could be irretrievable, this level of trust was sometimes an awesome thing to receive.

Give a lot, expect a lot: That was the credo Kraft left for the other flight directors. “Chris Kraft was the kind of guy who would leave you alone, and let you do your job,” FIDO Jerry Bostick said. “But without him ever saying anything, you knew you’d better not screw up. You’d better get it right. Don’t try to fake it. Because he didn’t give people a second chance.”

The key was not so much being perfect—the nature of the controller’s job meant that sometimes he was going to make a mistake. The key was being smart enough to recognize the mistake, correct it, and then never repeat it. (“To err is human, but to do so more than once is contrary to Flight Operations Directorate policy,” was another of Kraft’s sayings.) And above all else, when you found out you had made a mistake you had to admit it immediately. “The flight director’s looking at a lot of data, and sometimes the information [to be inferred from the data] is not clear,” an EECOM once explained. “Your data are one thing, information is another.

“I think the biggest role of the flight director was asking the right questions, which is an art more than a science,” said Gerry Griffin. “It’s anticipating what questions need to be answered.” The objective was to stay as far ahead of the spacecraft as possible, to have already thought about a problem before the problem demanded an action. And then, having asked the right questions, Flight had to listen carefully to every word and nuance of the answers. “The most likely error we can make in the business is not listening,” said Kranz. “We’ve got very smart people [in the controllers]. We breed them to be very smart, we breed them to give opinions. We breed them to work in an arena of conflict. Sometimes they may disagree with you. Sometimes they may not be too smooth in words. Sometimes they may come in on an untimely basis and disrupt your train of thought.” But none of that can interfere with your listening and understanding precisely what it is that you are hearing. If you can’t listen to each person and understand exactly what that person is saying, said Kranz, “we’re going to screw up. As you get down to having to work a problem in twenty seconds, you’ve got to have that relationship with the people.”

And once Flight had remembered, calculated, ordered his priorities, and made the decisions, he had to communicate them. “It’s very important to be able to communicate what you want to get done in as few words as you can,” Cliff Charlesworth observed. “I used to spend time on my own thinking about how to do that—‘How can I say what I want to say so that this guy will understand in the fewest words?’ Because you didn’t always have a lot of time to sit there and laboriously go through it.” Thinking about what to say “slows you down,” Charlesworth continued. “I used to sit [beside the flight director’s console] when, say, Glynn was on the console, and even as quick-witted as he is, I’d get ahead of him sometimes, when the problems started coming in. I’d scratch my head and say, ‘Why is that?’ It’s because I wasn’t having to talk, and he was.”

Tindall took from that experience a conviction that the only way to resolve so many competing interests was to get everybody into the same room and let them fight it out.

Tindall recognized that what matters most to people is not that they get their way, but that they feel they have had a chance to make their case.