Science: Conductor in a Command Post

One of the basic maxims of space travel, says Flight Director Chris Kraft, is: “If you don’t know what to do, don’t do anything.” Then, if the problem does not correct itself, there is almost always time enough to take remedial action−as there was last week when the gremlins of Gemini 5 battled against the determined ingenuity, intelligence and hardheaded courage of crack U.S. spacemen.

Launch to Retrofire. Command post of the tense scientific conflict, where Chris Kraft and his crew matched wits with the unpredictable troubles plaguing a pair of orbiting astronauts, was the brand-new $170 million Manned Spacecraft Center southeast of Houston, near Galveston Bay (see color). Started only three years ago, the center now has more than 30 completed buildings that rise like an attractive college campus above the dreary salt flats where scraggly Brahman cattle used to graze. Another 15 buildings are planned or under construction.

Inside the center, out of the blazing Texas sun, every corridor hums with space-age intensity. Besides directing spacecraft in flight and training astronauts, the Houston center also develops new engineering techniques and supervises the testing of every piece of equipment that will be used−from transistors to space-suit zippers to fuel cells. A vibration laboratory shakes the very innards out of equipment; a thermochemical complex tests rocket thrusters. In the simulation and training building, an astronaut can climb inside a spacecraft and practice all the functions of a mission, from launch to retrofire.

A computer-controlled centrifuge will soon be available to determine how crews and their systems stand up under the G forces of rapid acceleration. The world’s largest vacuum chamber, which bulges into the shape of a 120-ft. stainless-steel beer keg and is big enough to swallow an entire Apollo moonship, will go into operation later this year. At the edge of the space center, a field covered with heaps of steel-mill slag and pumice is used as a practice area for simulated exploration of a crater-pocked lunar landscape.

Operational heart of the whole place is Chris Kraft’s Mission Control, a $7,000,000 building crammed with $100 million worth of electronic equipment. It is a mass of dull grey cabinets, closed-circuit TV equipment and banks of computers−all linked together by more than 10,000 miles of wire and 2,000,000 cross connections. The ground floor houses IBM 7094 II computers that monitor on-board systems of telemetry. On the second floor of the windowless structure is a master control room, with four rows of 20 consoles facing a huge world map on which the path of a spacecraft is projected. Above, on the third floor, is a second control room, permitting the center to run simulations of future flights while a real flight is in progress.

Missiles Went Ape. Each flight is, in fact, a preparation for the next−a check on technologies and techniques, a test of the men on the mission and the men behind the mission. And always it is source material for changes in the Mission Rules, the fat blue notebooks that Kraft has been putting together since the start of the Mercury flights in 1959. “We got plenty nervous during those first few launches,” he recalls, “because we didn’t know how to fly and we didn’t know enough rules. All we knew was that missiles sometimes came off the pad and went ape.”

With nine manned missions behind them, the flight controllers have accumulated an astonishing compendium of practical knowledge. “We’re not Christopher Columbus,” says Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr., with an almost angry pride. “We know a lot more about what we have to do than he did. And we know where we’re going.”

The Mission Rules book has fattened to 300 pages; a copy is available at each console at the control center. The 882 entries, subject to continuous review and revision, summarize all the known contingencies, all the possible malfunctions, all the “what ifs” of space flight. What if the control center loses voice communication? What if cabin pressure fails, or a hurricane closes in the chosen landing area? Last week all such questions faded in the face of the one big one: What if a relatively simple heater fails and vital fuel cells quit supplying necessary power?

Each flight controller must know all the answers that affect his special area. Kraft, whose retentive memory can still dredge up long passages of poetry memorized in high school, is an expert on the whole book. The fuel cell problem was exasperating, but Kraft was equal to handling it.

Public Confessional. Because he knows that putting book learning into practice is an art in itself, Kraft runs his controllers through weeks of simulations before each launch. They practice at least a dozen aborts, a half-dozen re-entry simulations, and another half-dozen assorted orbital situations. No one in the control room, not even Kraft, ever knows just what problem has been programmed into the computer-run simulation system. Not until they are actually faced with the artificial emergency can Kraft’s men be sure whether they are dealing with an oxygen leak, an unsatisfactory orbit, or a violently ill astronaut.

Sometimes the “sims,” as they are called, involve only the Houston controllers working with a Gemini mockup, a sort of space-age Link trainer. But as the real launch draws near, the astronauts climb into the Gemini simulator at Cape Kennedy and the entire tracking network joins in. Simulations are played through in deadly earnest. Once started, there is no stopping; if the controllers hesitate too long or make a mistake, they must work their own way out.

After each simulation, Kraft gets on the intercom to conduct the “wake.” That debriefing, says John Hodge, a deputy flight director, “is a public confessional.” Kraft does not hesitate to praise one man’s performance or tear another’s apart. And he is quick to acknowledge when he himself has made a mistake. “We’re not being critical of each other for the sake of being critical,” he says, “but so we can find out what went wrong.”

Back of all Kraft’s unforgiving perfectionism is always the knowledge that the final decision, the final responsibility, is usually his alone. “He’s a virtual dictator,” says Gene Kranz, the other deputy flight director, “which is the way it has to be.” Kraft prefers to think of himself as conductor of a symphony orchestra. “The conductor,” he says, “can’t play all the instrument−she may not even be able to play any one of them. But he knows when the first violin should be playing, and he knows when the trumpets should be loud or soft, and when the drummer should be drum ming. He mixes all this up and out comes music. That’s what we do here.”

Practiced Precision. To match his own quick, cool confidence, Kraft has gathered and trained a young (average age: 30), dedicated staff of 568 men−mostly engineers, mathematicians and physicists. For their new profession, they have an appropriately new name: aerospace technology. They take for granted long hours and many weekends on the job; their dedication can be measured by the fact that of the 500 employees who were in space-flight operations last year, only 27 have left. Of that number, only two men have left NASA altogether.

Controllers are split into three self-contained teams to keep a round-the-clock vigil. Kraft serves as flight director on the red team, which handles both launch and reentry; he is always on call in a crisis when either the blue team, headed by John Hodge, 36, a British-born engineer and sometime glider pilot, or the white team, led by Aeronautical Engineer Eugene F. Kranz, 32, is on duty.

Working together with practiced precision, all of the teams stick to Kraft’s patient maxim and do nothing when in doubt. But when the occasion demands, they are capable of making and executing quick decisions. During the powered phase of the unmanned Gemini 2 launch early this year, power at the old Cape blockhouse control room went dead. Kraft himself was in command, and he wasted not a moment alerting the tracking ship, Rose Knot, some 500 miles east of the Cape. “RKV,” he snapped into the mike, “you’re prime on control. We’ve had a power failure.” About 45 seconds later, power was restored, and Kraft’s control of the flight went on successfully.

Impromptu Art. On almost every mission, such split-second decisions occasionally make space-flight control seem an impromptu art, a creation of the moment−or at least of the mission at hand. But while its rules trace back to the earliest Mercury flights, its practice goes back even further, to the X-1 experimental rocket plane tests conducted by the Air Force at Edwards A.F.B. in 1947. In those days, to be sure, the control center was nothing but a radio mounted on a Jeep. Later, telemetry was added, and for the X-15s, ground control was run from three stations across Nevada. At each step along the way, a young aeronautical engineer named Chris Kraft was contributing to the program with his work at Langley Field, Va., then a laboratory for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). He was learning his trade, acting as if the thought of doing anything else had never entered his mind.

Looking back, it seems almost prophetic that when he was born, on Feb. 28, 1924, in the small tidewater town of Phoebus, Va., he was christened Christopher Columbus Kraft Jr. (His father, now dead, was a finance officer at a veterans’ hospital, and got his name because he was born in New York City in the year of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ 1492 voyage, the week of the dedication of Columbus Circle.) Young Chris grew up in a modest duplex in a tough part of Phoebus, played a good game of sand-lot baseball and dreamed of becoming a big-leaguer. To this day, his most prized possession is a baseball he had autographed by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig one hot summer day when he was nine years old. In high school, he handled mathematics with such facility that he decided to study engineering−in case he should fail to make the grade in baseball.

At Virginia Polytechnic Institute, which he entered in 1941, Kraft enrolled in the school’s new department of aeronautical engineering. He was rejected for service in World War II because of a childhood injury that left his right hand scarred and slightly shriveled. After graduating from V.P.I, in 1944 with a .325 batting average, a B-plus scholastic average, and a fascination with the problems of aircraft stability and control, he went to work as a flight research engineer at Langley.

Working under Division Boss William Hewitt Phillips, whom Kraft credits as the man most responsible for his development as an aeronautical engineer and flight-test conductor, his first project was to help build a quarter-scale model of the X-1 to be dropped from a B-29 at 35,000 ft. to determine its ability to withstand the stresses of breaking the sound barrier. Rigged with sensitive instruments, the model measured and relayed the effects of near Mach 1 to engineers huddled in a couple of old trailers−one of the first uses of the telemetry that was to become so important in space-flight control.

Madder than Hell. Of all his NACA work, Kraft is proudest of a system that he and Phillips devised to smooth out flights in rough air. They redesigned an old twin-engine Beechcraft C45 and fitted it with automatic controls that reduced the plane’s lift when it was hit by an upward gust, increased it when hit by a down draft. The system worked well, but commercial aircraft builders considered it too heavy and expensive−a decision that still infuriates Kraft. “It makes me madder than hell when I fly and have to bounce around,” he complains. “I know it isn’t necessary. And all I can see are the stresses in the wings.”

While at Langley, Kraft married his high school classmate Betty Anne Turnbull. He had time in those days to play some semi-pro softball until Betty Anne insisted that he either improve or quit. He quit. He was also frustrated by the slow and relatively unexciting pace of work at Langley, became increasingly restless, and developed a serious stomach ulcer.

In 1957, Sputnik 1 supplied the needed boost to get the U.S. space program off its pad, and the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration began its talent hunt. Kraft volunteered. He was assigned to study the problems and needs of running ground operations for manned space flight. What he was getting into was a far cry from the crude trailers and optical trackers of his Langley days, but he was ideally suited for the job in both training and temperament. “There’s a natural wedding between the technologies of aircraft test flight and space test flight,” explains Dr. Robert Gilruth, Kraft’s boss at Langley and now director of the Manned Spacecraft Center at Houston. Kraft even lost his ulcer in the satisfaction of his new duties.

Buffalo Steak. Now a veteran of 22 launches, he is calm enough about it all to leave his exciting job behind when he drives his 1963 cream-colored Chevrolet home from the Houston space center to his four-bedroom brick ranch house in the nearby village of Friendswood. He sees to it that his daughter Kristi-Anne, 10, takes piano lessons; he takes his son Gordon, 13, to ball games at the Astrodome. He treats his wife to dinner out on Saturday evenings, takes the family to a nearby Episcopal church on Sundays, and tries to get in some golf when he can. When visitors drop in, he likes to tend bar, specializing in frozen daiquiris. An adventurous eater, he makes a point of ordering buffalo steak and chocolate-covered beans when such delicacies are available.

But all his calmness cannot begin to mask the pervading enthusiasm that he brings to the drama of charting new paths along a scientific frontier−a frontier that he sees expanding indefinitely. “We’re going to find man flying in space for as long as a year some time in the future,” he predicts. “The doom-and-gloom bit about man’s inability to perform in a hostile environment has been vastly overplayed.” His optimism, however, does not exceed his engineering caution. “We’re doing all this within the realm of logic, precision and nature,” he insists. “I don’t look at my job for the romance I might get out of it. But I know that what we’re doing is extremely important to the history, prestige and scientific development of this country.”