Apollo by Catherine Bly Cox & Charles Murray

Author:Catherine Bly Cox & Charles Murray [Cox, Catherine Bly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: South Mountain Books
Published: 2004-07-28T23:00:00+00:00

1

“Flight Operations was not born effective,” one veteran reminisced. “It became effective.” Back in 1959, when the Space Task Group was first struggling to put the program together, nothing was yet Standard Operating Procedure. “We accept this Control Center and operations mode that we have now,” said Glynn Lunney, who was part of the Operations Division from the Space Task Group’s first day, “but the truth is, it easily could have [evolved in] any number of other ways, and it could easily have been a failure.”

In the beginning, preparing for Mercury, it wasn’t clear how much Operations would have to do. In the flight-testing of aircraft, which was the closest analogue, the ground’s role consisted of getting the airplane into the best possible mechanical condition, spelling out the day’s test objectives for the pilot, and retrieving the data from the instrumentation after the plane landed. During the flight itself, the people on the ground talked to the pilot and kept track of where he was, but little beyond that.

Thus when the Operations Division at the Space Task Group began thinking in early 1959 about what their job really was, the possibilities were vague and open-ended. Because none of Mercury’s systems was actually operated from the ground, many from the N.A.C.A. envisioned a flight-test operation that would check out the capsule before launch and then let the astronaut do the rest. It didn’t make sense to acquire a lot of real-time data on the ground if nobody was going to do anything with it.

And yet it didn’t seem adequate to stand on the ground with just a voice link to see how things were going. The operations people at Langley began groping toward another, more ambitious understanding of their role. “I don’t know how to describe it exactly,” Lunney recalled, “but we began to realize that, ‘Hey, we’re going to fly this thing around the world!’ and then a number of things began to emerge.” There was already the matter of range safety, for example. If you were launching an unmanned rocket from the Cape, you had range-safety limits. If the telemetry told you that the rocket was outside the safety limits, you blew it up before it descended on downtown Cocoa Beach. The Space Task Group people began to conceive of similar kinds of limits that protected not “the range” or the population of the Cape, but rather the man inside the spacecraft.

Thinking about them quickly led the Operations Division to realize that, whatever these limits were, they would keep changing during the mission. For the first few minutes after launch, the capsule would have its escape rocket; then the escape rocket would be jettisoned and a new set of procedures would come into play. A new concept that focused on the alternative ways of getting the astronaut back at different points in the mission began to emerge. This was the concept of the abort mode.

“We began to realize there were some things we could make decisions about,” Lunney continued.

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