The Moon: MISSION CONTROL: FIDO, GUIDO AND RETRO

I’M like an orchestra conductor,” says Christopher Columbus Kraft, flight operations director for the Apollo missions. “I don’t write the music, I just make sure it comes out right.” Chris Kraft’s unlikely podium is the windowless Mission Operations Control Room on the third floor of Building 30 at NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center near Houston. His musicians are the 30 controllers who sit at four rows of gray computer consoles, monitoring some 1,500 constantly changing items of information registered on gauges, dials and meters. Kraft’s primary instrument is a pair of IBM 360 Model 75 computers with a total capacity of 2.5 million bits of information, which enables him to harmonize the thousands of complex equations and manifold instructions that program a lunar mission.

In the Trench

Most of the relaxed, casually dressed men under Kraft’s baton have degrees in engineering, mathematics or physics. Though their average age is only 32, many have been with the program since the space program’s first flights began with Project Mercury in 1959. They form four teams—labeled green, white, black and maroon—that serve around the clock in overlapping eight-hour shifts.

The first row of consoles in Mission Control is known as “the trench,” because it serves as the front line for the whole operation. Its four blinking consoles are managed by specialists in space dynamics; they report on booster systems, retrofire, flight dynamics and guidance—respectively known in the control room’s jargon as “Booster,” “Retro,” “Fido” and “Guide.” Working in concert, they are responsible for propellant tanks, for calculating the exact moment of retrorocket firings, computing maneuver times and keeping track of spacecraft computers and guidance systems.

In the second row are the flight surgeon (whose shorthand designation is “Surgeon,” never “Doc”), and the spacecraft communicator, or “Capcom.” White dots sliding across the surgeon’s console screen indicate heart and respiration rate’s of the astronauts. Capcom, always an astronaut himself, handles all communication with the crew, giving the men who are deep in space a direct link with one of their own. Only in emergencies does anyone else take the microphone. There were none with Apollo 11.

Behind them are the flight director and planning and operations officers. “Flight” is the captain of the team, the man who makes the crucial decisions. Head flight for Apollo 11 was Cliff Charlesworth, 37. His green team handled liftoff, translunar insertion and the moon walk, known in space jargon as “Extravehicular Activity,” or EVA. Charlesworth admits he liked EVA least of all the mission’s activities, “because there just wasn’t much I could do.” Other flight directors for Apollo 11 were Gene Kranz, 35, who wears a white vest to match his team’s color; Milt Windier, 37 (maroon), and Glynn Lunney, 32, whose black team handled the lift-off from the moon and Eagle’s rendezvous with Columbia.

In the back row sit Mission Control’s brass, overseeing the entire mission. Alongside Kraft sits NASA’s Mission Director George Hage, who has direct lines from his console to the White House, the State Department and NASA’s Washington headquarters, but who rarely plays a direct role during a mission. Near by is a Department of Defense representative, whose console has direct lines to all military forces supporting the mission, including recovery teams; for Apollo 11, Air Force Major General Vincent Huston was the Pentagon’s man. During most missions, George M. Low, Apollo program manager, Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, director of the Manned Spacecraft Center, and other top officials also sit at the rear of the control room.

Hot Lines

There is far more to Mission Control, however, than the control room. For each console there is a staff support room down the hall manned by a dozen or more experts. Complete telemetry from the spacecraft is received by staff-room consoles, which funnel the most important bits to the control room and store the rest. The space program’s major contractors—North American Rockwell for the command and service modules, Grumman for the lunar module—also keep staff members in nearby offices. In case of trouble with spacecraft equipment, the contractors can call major subcontractors on their own hot lines. Mission Control maintains an up-to-the-minute list of the whereabouts of some 40,000 key scientists and engineers associated with Apollo.

Beyond Houston, the communications web stretches around the earth—and above it. Key parts of the network are the huge radiotelescope dishes at Goldstone, Calif., Madrid, Spain, and Canberra, Australia, 17 ground stations, four U.S. Navy ships scattered over the seas and eight communications planes—all receiving and transmitting vital bits of data throughout the mission. No one is more aware than the astronauts themselves of how impossible a flight would be without such support.