KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Florida -- Gene Kranz was the NASA flight director for the Apollo 11 lunar landing and was the leader of the ground team that brought the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth after an explosion crippled the spacecraft in flight.
He visited the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday to attend the launch of space shuttle Discovery (which has now been postponed.) Though there are similarities between this mission and the ones he managed in the 1960s, the public's attitude has changed considerably, he told Wired News.
Wired News: Do you think NASA is more risk-averse today than it was during the Apollo missions?
Gene Kranz: I think the entire nation is more risk-averse. Everyone's looking for guarantees.
You could look at the loss of the Challenger and Columbia crew (and say), "Absolutely, I can't understand how that would happen." But you could also take a look at (it from the perspective that) here you have the world's most reliable space system.
It's gone through well over a hundred missions and your batting average has been over 98 percent. So you could look at it to say this is a pretty damn good space system.
Now, we had all of the symptoms that we should have paid attention to and (if we did) it would have been a perfect space system. If you think about it, if we had paid attention to the O-ring problem (on Challenger), if we had paid attention to the debris problem (on Columbia), we would have had a perfect track record.
WN: You say "pay more attention to." Do you think that NASA's culture was responsible for not paying attention to problems?
GK: I don't think culture (was responsible.) And I am somewhat of a radical on this topic. Culture is the legacy of a leader. What is the leader's responsibility? To establish trust, a set of values, and to foster communications that forms the team.
I would say that where the (Columbia Accident Investigation Board) report wrote of a "culture" problem, I would change that word to say a "leadership" problem. For the decade of the '90s, we just did not have the trust within the agency that we needed....
You can talk culture, you can talk leadership -- I'm not trying to parse words -- but I was in this business until the mid-'90s and I have always looked at culture as the responsibility of the leader.
WN: You're talking about Goldin specifically? (Daniel Goldin was NASA administrator from 1992 to 2001).
GK: Yeah. Yeah.
WN: Do you think that O'Keefe left too early, before seeing out the launch? (Sean O'Keefe was NASA administrator from 2001 to February 2005.)
GK: Well, O'Keefe didn't -- he walked into this job and then the (Columbia) accident occurred. He really had not been long enough within the agency to know who to put into responsible positions, so he really inherited sort of a management team in there.... That's one side. On the other side, I'd say that (current administrator) Mike Griffin is exactly the guy we need. He understands the agency, he understands the risk, he is an engineer first, foremost, etc.
He seems to have the ability to not only work within the NASA team but to work with the U.S. Congress and it's going to be interesting. I think he's going to be dynamite when working with the media because he's honest and open and straightforward. And if you get that kind of a guy, who's willing to stand up for what he believes, you can work with that guy.
WN: It has taken two-and-a-half years for NASA to prepare Discovery for flight after the Columbia accident. But it took little more than a year and a half for a new manned mission after the Apollo 1 accident and several months after the Apollo 13 malfunction. Did the competition with the Soviet Union play a big part in getting missions out quickly even after the Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 incidents?
GK: It did and it didn't. To a great extent, the competition with the Soviet Union provided the stimulus for the early part of the program -- the Mercury and the Gemini program. But by the time we finished Gemini, we had developed the technologies to rendezvous and dock. We had developed the space system technologies, the fuel cells, computers, rockets and such. So we knew that we were well ahead of the Russians -- the Soviets -- unless we screwed up.
Now, this screw-up occurred very early in the program. But again, as I say, we refined, we built a better spacecraft and we went into the program with a better mentality. And I believe this is what carried us to success.
WN: What goes through a flight director's head when you get bad news, like with the Apollo 13 mission?
GK: The flight director's job description reads: The flight director may take any action necessary for crew safety and mission success. That's the place where the buck stops. There's no higher authority.
The flight director has a spectacularly well-trained team. And the training process prepares you to act rationally under stress. As a flight director, in the first moments -- I don't care whether it's a moon landing, Apollo 13, whatever it is -- you almost go on autopilot. You start fine-tuning every one of your senses to pick up every nuance in every word that's being stated.
I always had a checklist on my console. When I was under stress, I would always go through the checklist. Get the data, call the backups in, start running d-logs (data logs), etc. So that carries you through the first moments of this crisis. It also carries the team through these first moments of the crisis. So you get through.
I would say Apollo 13 broke into three time frames. First thing, I had had two electrical problems on my shift before that explosion occurred. And I immediately -- as soon as my controllers called and said we had a main bus fault, antenna switch, computer switch -- as I heard this, I thought, ah ha, electrical short. And I maintained that frame of mind for about the first three to five minutes.
Then, one of my controllers came to me and said, "Hey, I've got a whole bunch of valves that seem to be shut closed." I had exactly that same kind of a problem occur to me on Apollo 9. Now I moved into the mode (of): Something happened onboard, we don't understand, but it's now "tread lightly...."
OK, so that was the next five minutes. Then (astronaut) Jim Lovell calls down from the spacecraft, "Hey, Houston, I see something venting." That is when you look in the eyes of the tiger. And you recognize you're in survival mode....
WN: Was there ever a point when you thought you might not be able to bring those astronauts home?
GK: No. No, no, no. I always like when everybody says failure is not an option.... I liken me to a heart surgeon. I am standing over (a patient). I've got his chest open and I'm ready to make a first incision down there and he looks into my eyes. Do you want to see any doubt?
How would you work with a flight director -- a team down on the ground -- who had some doubt about their ability to pull off these miracles? There was no doubt.
