NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Glynn Lunney, NASA engineer and flight director during the Gemini and Apollo programs, part 2 of 4

You were heading right where I knew you wanted to get there, okay. Okay, Mark. Jim and I. Jim and I was really the key to the successful completion of Apollo. It really wasn't it's an unsung story and it should be told. We flew four mercury vehicles to orbit, four vehicles, four flights and the longest one was 34 hours. The rest of them were less than a day, a couple of revs. And then let me just set Gemini aside. We got to Apollo and we flew one vehicle in Earth orbit. We flew the second vehicle around the moon and we landed on the moon on the fifth flight. The reason that we were able to do that is because of the confidence and the capability that had been built in the team through the Gemini program. It was a boot camp, it was a vetting ground, it was a training ground. So by the time we came out of Gemini, the team, especially the operations team.

The planners, the flight controllers, the astronauts, they had been, there were veterans of a lot of difficult flights in Gemini, which really just opened the door for Apollo to go as easily and as quickly as quickly as it did. And Gemini wasn't even planned. Gemini came along as kind of a step in the middle, as a matter of fact we were doing mercury. People began to work on Apollo and then a number of people realized that there was a whole bunch of things that we could do in Earth orbit that we would like to do there before we ever went and tried them at the moon. And frankly in some quarters I think Gemini was viewed as an obstacle or a distraction to getting along with Apollo. But for those of us who were in the operations business, we built a new control center. We got to use a spacecraft that had a digital computer on board, digital telemetry. It had a real control system, compared to the simple thing we had in mercury.

We were able to do rendezvous, EVAs, we were able to dock with another vehicle, we were able to use that vehicle to propel us to a higher orbit. We were able to do a lot of things that we had to do going to the moon that we had no other basis for. And the teams of people, the planners, the flight controllers, and the astronauts that came out of Gemini were really just absolutely ready. And in fact, I think if it's coming out of Gemini, I kind of like gangbusters. We were ready to go to the moon. All we needed to do was get our hands on those spacecraft and the rockets and get started with the process of getting to the moon and getting somebody back within the decade. And it was a short window that we had to work with. What did you think? Did something take you back there a second? When Kennedy said we're going to go to the moon in a decade and come back, what was your guess? I was staggered. I was staggered. I was working of course as a flight controller by that time on planning for some of the early Mercury orbital flights. We just flown out and shepherd on this little couple hundred miles suborbital hop. And we had a little spacecraft that was about 2,000 pounds.

Then this president, I didn't know any of this was going on. This president gets on and says, we're going to go to the moon. And I was just flabbergasted because of the struggle we were having with what to us at the time was a big problem. But in comparison to going to the moon, it was a fairly straightforward simple thing. And he came on and said we were going to do that. And you had this, wow, wow, what a challenge, what a step forward. And I think everybody had about the same kind of reaction. At first they were stunned and flabbergasted by the idea. And then as it began to sink in that we were going to do that, everybody turned to. And yes, we're really going to do that. And off we went. Fabulous. Fabulous. Fabulous. I just used that. Talk of, you know, like, Shiran's effort. And they made it. Okay, six, 76. How big a challenge was it? 76 was a, as a matter of fact, it was kind of fabricated when we had a problem with one of the aginas so that we didn't have the target vehicle. It had a launch problem and we had to go fix it. So while that was, while that was going on, the idea of rendezvous in Gemini 6 with Gemini 7, the long duration 14 day flight that was going to be up there came into being.

At that time we had worked on rendezvous both in terms of what we needed to do from the control center. And just as importantly or perhaps more so, what the crews would have to have in the way of approaches to a target vehicle. Buzz Aldrin was a key thinker in that area and came up with the tail end of the rendezvous sequence from about 20 or 30 miles out that became the standard for all of the Gemini and Apollo missions. And he came up with this kind of an approach to the vehicle so that the pilots always had a very good line on it. And their line of sight to the vehicle was always against the star background that remained fixed. It was arranged that way so the pilots would know if they were drifting off by watching the star pattern in the background and couldn't know back. I would say that by the time we got to the flight, we were very ready to go try these techniques that we had been talking about on the blackboard and programming into our computers all along.

Wally was a perfect choice for that. Wally Shiraz is the commander. He had been on the Mercury flight and flew six orbits and went out of his way to do it by the book and exactly within and better than the fuel consumption estimates that had been made. So Wally was very careful with the stick and used only enough propellant to get the job done. And Tom Stafford took up the computer end of the game and he became a whiz at manipulating this small by today's standards relatively simple display system that they head on board to tell him how to do the rendezvous. So when we finally got to it from the control center, once the vehicle got lifted off right, we were able to do a number of maneuvers to get it close. They would fly in what were called co-eliptic orbits. That is, think of it as two circles with one circle being ten or twenty miles inside the other.

So it would catch up in the lower orbit and then they would transfer into the approach orbit. And that is when this star-brack round thing came into practice where the crews could just keep a good eye on the target, keep it nulled out and keep closing on it very well. The flight, the 76 flight itself went piece cake. It went right by the book. Everything that had been thought about, chalkboarded about, talked about, simulated for, trained for, worked perfectly. And 76 was a great rendezvous and a great mission. Now for our first one. They, they, they, they, they brought the food with Bournemon and Lovell, right, who were up there for long duration. What were the fears about 14 days in space? Why did we have to get 14 days in space? And what, what, what, what was the thinking would happen to these guys? There were a lot of, in the early days, even before a Gemini 76. There were a lot of concerns, especially even before we flew. There are a lot of people who thought that the pilots we become very disoriented by the lack of gravity and, in fact, being incapable of performing any duties. Most of us in the flight business tended on faith more than any analysis to reject that. We didn't think that was going to happen. But it was, it was based on the increasing envelopes that had been penetrated by the piloting community, man, man vehicles over the decades.

We felt confident that people would do that very well and be okay. But there was probably legitimate concern that the, the zero gravity could be a problem. We did want to get some long duration flights, one to see how the spacecraft worked, but also two weeks was probably a stretch for the lunar missions, but the lunar missions ran usually about 10 days. We wanted to know that people would be okay for the 10 day flights, plus a couple of days of margin, and that there would not be any effects that would affect their ability to steer the spacecraft and do everything that they had to do. How did Borman and Lovell do? They did fine. One thing, when they got back on the carrier, they noticed is that all the other people smelled a little funny. They'd been cooped up in this Volkswagen, front to front seat of a Volkswagen for two weeks, doing everything they had to do to camp for two weeks in this front seat of the Volkswagen.

By the time they get out of it, I think they were very happy to get out of it, although they didn't really realize how bad it had gotten. How bad it was. I actually interviewed them. It was absolutely great. I had been a flight controller out of Bermuda, and I'd done a lot of planning for the control center both at the Cape and here in Houston. I was a flight dynamics officer at the Cape and back here in Houston during the Mercury flights, and all the time planning for the control center here in Houston. In 64, I think. I was named as a flight director. I was probably about 27 at the time. That was the key job. Chris Kraft had set a standard of, I don't know how to describe it almost, but almost like perfection for people in that business. It was extremely knowledgeable, extremely capable. He knew exactly what to worry about, and he kind of, he looked for challenges to take him.

I grew up with that kind of leadership, and frankly, I thought that the whole world had that kind of leadership all the time. I found out later in life that that's not really the case. What about the Russians? How instrumental were the Russians motivated? Well, you know, the whole man program, I think, started as a response to Sputnik. And then once it got started, the Russians seemed to top us, get the things first, first man flight, first EVA, rendezvous, and we were sort of playing ketchup at the time. And we felt that it wasn't like it drove us every day, but we had this background or this environment of feeling like the country was behind and it was our job to catch up and beat the competitor, the Russians, the Soviet Union at the time. And we felt that fairly keenly. It didn't stay in front of us all the time. We didn't talk about it, but it was there. And every time they did something, we would realize that, they've done something here and we've got to really get going and so on, or we're going to lose out on this space race.

It was targeted, ours was targeted to lunar landing. I expect there was too, as we've learned in later years. But we didn't know what either of those things, or either of us achieving that, would result in in terms of an advantage of some kind or another for their respective countries. So we wanted to be sure not to lose out, not to miss the opportunity to take the high ground, if that's the right way to think about it, for our country. And it was there. It was on our mind, and every time the Russians did something, it was another reminder that, yes, we were in a competition, and we really had the Excel. So as flight director, how old were you when you were made a flight director? And why was it the best? I was about 27, I think I was 27, because it was 64. The flight director was the pinnacle of this control center, and it was the pinnacle of the flights for everybody on the ground, except for the astronauts. The other advantage of being though in the flight business on the ground was that you could participate in almost every flight. The astronauts kind of came, got a assignment, and then they recycled and got one maybe five or ten flights later.

In the control center, we were able to operate on almost every flight, not all of us did every flight, but almost every flight. And it was just exciting. It was just electric to be in the control center during those times. How were the flight director happy? Well, maybe one way to tell you that is we had a mission rule that said, approximately, the flight director can take any action necessary to complete the mission successfully or safely as he sees fit. And that was what was delegated to us, me at 27 years old in this control center, and that was operated on that way. People did not interfere. Management did not interfere with the flight. They were very supportive of it. And they went out of their way to be helpful to all of us in the flight business. And we grew up in it. Chris was our mentor. We always strove to be as good as he was or to live up to his example. And we always knew that we were struggling to do that.

But it was terrific. It was a heady time. We were engaged in something that we knew was very, very important to the country. We didn't know if we would be successful in being the Russians to the moon. We knew that we had one great big challenge, big bunch of work in front of us to get there and get that done properly. But it just pervaded place. This operation here was like a camel out of sorts. When I think about all of the difficult things that were going on in the country, especially in the later 60s with the Cold War environment as a background, but the assassinations, the civil rights movement, the hippie movement, and the Vietnam War, the protest that went with that. And all these things were just sort of tearing at our fabric. And we were part of that, but we had this thing we were doing that kind of was isolated. And it was right here. And it was in our hands. We felt like we could really make it happen.

And it was a tremendous source of energy for all the people involved in the program. I think anybody you talked to that was involved in the 60s looks on it as a marvelous adventure that they that they loved. Absolutely. Now, what was the feeling at the end of Gemini? You finished Gemini, I think even November. What was the feeling at the end of Gemini? As we moved through the Gemini flights, we just almost kept the mental scoreboard of all of the things that we were able to do that enabled us to be successful when we got to Apollo. And the more Gemini we flew, the more confident we felt about our capability to handle problems and still get missions performed properly. And by the time we got to 12, Gemini 12, Gem level in Buzz Aldrin, we had finally figured out how to do EVAs without fogging up the visors. We figured out how to do rendezvous several different ways. We figured out how to dock. We figured out how to do long duration flights. We really felt like we were getting all of the necessary tools under our belt.

And we were very confident that we were able to use those tools to pull off what the Apollo challenge was going to be like. And November 66, we finished the last flight. By the way, during the course of the rendezvous, the radar went out. And the rendezvous was completed based on the techniques that Buzz had developed and in this case sat in the cockpit and helped to pull off the rendezvous and docking on Gemini 12. So we felt really comfortable that we had really done everything that we set out to do in Gemini, that we had a full belt of experience and that we were confident in our ability, maybe even a little brash in our ability to get on with Apollo. And that's about the mood that we had of, okay, let's get on with it. And I'm now speaking of those of us who are in the operations business. In parallel with all of Gemini, there had been a whole team of people in the engineering world developing the command service module, the lunar module, the two new rockets, the Saturn 1B and the Saturn 5 that had to be used. And all of that was really starting to hum. And of course, brought up short, tremendously tragic way for all of us with the fire that occurred in January of 1967.

And we lost three good friends, three friends on the pad. And it was somewhat unimaginable for us. We had been on the pad in Mercury, we'd been on the pad in Gemini. Never thought of it very much as a hazardous operation. But in Apollo, the combination of the 14.7 or 151 atmosphere pure oxygen on the pad, coupled with a spark from somewhere and that set off a fire in the spacecraft. And it was like a stomach punch, I think, for everyone in the program. And everybody, no matter what role they had or what part they had in it, I think had a sense of guilt about it. Why didn't we think of that? Why didn't we foresee that? Why couldn't we see it coming? Why didn't we do something about it, et cetera? And I think it had a strong influence on everybody. As a matter of fact, people kind of rededicated themselves again to make in Apollo work.

Just for those of us in the operations business, we had been so tied up with Gemini, we just wanted to do everything we could then to make Apollo right and get it on track. Do you think that, I know this wasn't your area, but do you think that Gus kind of did himself in with that hatch after the problem on Liberty Bell 7 and that the whole hatch blowing off? No, I don't, did himself in in the career or something? No, no, no, did himself in the career in the sense that this hatch, he worked on the hatch. I don't think so. I think the hatch design we had was the best design. Do you think that Shura was affected by that fire? Do you think it affected? I think I would say that it certainly affected Wally. In the same way that it affected everybody on the program, everybody in the program had a bad feeling of probably guilt as a result of the fire. And especially for those who then are going to go put themselves in the spacecraft, and Wally's crew was the next crew out eventually to try Apollo 7 again.

And I think the background with the fire and his comradeship with Gus carried over. I mean, I think Wally was very, very concerned about anything that went out of the ordinary. And therefore, he reacted to it, both pre-flight and in-flight. And I think the fire carried over and had an effect on him, maybe even more intensely than the rest of us. Because he was Gus's backup. He was the backup crew. He was Commander of the backup crew for the original flight that Gus was assigned to. And he went through that and the aftermath of it. And I'm sure it was very, very personal for him. How did you characterize the behavior of these guys on Apollo 7? I mean, in-flight. Well, Apollo 7, some of the in-flight stuff was unfortunate, I think. I think the commander had a head cold, a bad head cold, and it kind of made him perhaps a little bit irritable.

We were trying to do everything that we could in this 10-day flight. Some people, I can't remember if I knew before the flight or right after it, that we were going to go to the moon on Apollo 8. So we were trying to accomplish as much as we possibly could. And there were times when we asked the crew to do things that they got upset about, and they didn't feel like they were quite ready to do, or perhaps not quite prepared to do, when the things would be new. On top of the things that were over and above the flight plan. And they reacted to that. And that has happened before, although not to degree that it had happened on Apollo 7. And I think it was unfortunate, and I think any of them having to do it over again would probably do it a little bit differently. But the team worked through it all, and it was successful, and it did do everything that we needed to do, so that we could make a nice decision, a comfortable decision, that we were ready to go on with Apollo 8 and go around the moon. So it was a big step, but we couldn't have made Apollo 8 decision without a good successful Apollo 7 flight, which we had.

Okay, I think we're probably ready to switch that. Good, terrific. Excellent. It's hard to capture this. I've tried to figure out words to capture the feeling that was permeating the group. I mean during the time that we were doing this stuff with Jim and I was, it's hard to capture it. General Patton movie. He's in Africa somewhere, and he's walking across his battlefield when everybody tanks and bodies all over the place. And he turns to somebody and says, so help me God, I love it. And I often think of that quote, his vocation, and that was kind of the way we felt about it. We just loved what we were doing. And they paid us. They paid us some money too.

It wasn't a lot, but they paid us money. I think we would have paid the government to allow us to be part of that. It was gangbusters. I think when it comes to Apollo 8, well, no. What last question on Saturn? I mean, I've asked the crap this, and he said, you know, we talked about it. We talked, you know, while he had resigned right before, two weeks before he took off on Saturn, he had resigned. From the Navy, you mean? No, from the astronaut corps. Seven was going to be his last flight. Oh, I didn't even know that. No, he had resigned. But the other two guys were looking forward to future missions. Okay, let's roll. Do you think that the behavior on the flight, cutting him and eyes, the cutting him, particularly? Do you think that they did themselves in? Well, as I said, I think there was an unfortunate set of circumstances that resulted in the kind of interchanges that we had. A safe level, so we would suck the batteries up too quickly. Things were, then we could decide what are we going to do?

Okay. There you go. What about... You know, on Apollo 10, we failed to feel so. Oh, we home. I was there. That was exciting. What do you got left to do? Oh, we got Lundy, do you got it? Yeah. Oh, that'll be fun. Think about this one. Oh, where? Good man. Think about this one time. Compare the catastrophe on Apollo 13 to what would happen when Apollo 8 at the same point in the mission. Not, you know, not like, you know, three hours back this way, or three hours back that way. If the same thing had happened to Apollo 8.

That's an easy one. That's an easy one. But that's me said. So you were on Apollo 10 when they tripled the land? No, Apollo 10, they didn't land. They got within six miles of the surface. Oh, I can't remember that. I remember a lot of swearing and cursing. Oh, it's time to turn in and staff it, you know. You know, I'm asked occasionally what would have happened if we didn't have the lunar module along on ice color graphics. They have all kind of extra calculations that could be done for them at the punch or at the at the click of a mouse and or the punch of a button and off they go. It's quite a difference.

Let's talk about Gemini first. I need a big overview statement. First of all, then we'll go to some specific missions. How big a job was Gemini was cut out for Gemini. How big a job that it had to accomplish and did it do it well. So this is like the Glenn Lenny summation of what Gemini was to getting us to the moon on time. Would we have made it without Gemini? And you want a short one. A short one. Gemini was the key to being successful in Apollo. We flew four mandor battle flights in America due to camp for two weeks in this front seat of the Volkswagen. And by the time they get out of it, I think they were very happy to get out of it. Although they probably realize how bad it had gotten.

How bad it was. We had a nice sequence of moonshot where the two of them were talking about. We interviewed them separately. That's the level in the other interview site. It was something. And the two of them came up to the song together. That's the song for 14 days. Appropriate. Appropriate. Okay. Portman sang a little bit of it. Oh, put your sweet lips a little closer to the fall. You were you were 28 when you became a flight director. Probably 27. Yeah. What did it feel like?

Second stick. Okay. Tell me what I felt like to be a 20s. It was great. I mean, it was absolutely great. I had been a flight controller out of Bermuda and I had done a lot of planning for the control center both at the Cape and here in Houston. And I was a flight dynamics officer at the Cape and back here in Houston during the murky flights.