was cut from a different piece of cloth than the majority of astronauts we worked with. the previous crews had been the missilemen, the test pilots i'd known when i was back working with mcdonnell. but jim was, i think, the first astronaut who really made an effort to reach out and work with the controllers. he had established a game plan for the mission and one of the key elements in the game plan was to make sure that the controllers here in mission control had exactly the same procedures that would be used by the crews on board. now, this sounds like a very simple change to the process, but at the time of the earlier apollo program, we still had not quite come together. we hadn't fully come together as a team. and deke slaten's troops guarded

their checklists and flight plans very jealously and it was very difficult to get one of the crew copies. the exact copy. and at times we would find minor discrepancies between what the crew was carrying on board in previous missions and what the procedures we had in mission control. so mcdivitt said finally, enough's enough. people in mission control are going to have exactly the same copies of the flight plan and procedures that we're going to be using in the spacecraft. that's the way i want to do business. and from then on, every team, actually every crew followed mcdivitt's lead. >> that's remarkable, particularly because looking back on it, apollo 7 rang out essentially of the module, and from that point in, apollo 8 demonstrated it could fly around the moon, apollo 9 was the first all-out test of all the hardware. so i guess it was a good time to start indoctrinating new procedures. >> it was a good way to establish a new game plan.

the other thing was dave scott was a command module pilot in that mission. and basically he started putting out what he called pilots notes. and he would write down everything that he understood coming out of the training. every timely debrief simulation, he'd try to write it down. and then he'd simplify it to the point where this is the way i understand it, this is the way we're going to proceed. and he'd sent it out to the mission controllers. again, this was another step in closing the loop to make sure the team on the ground and the team in the spacecraft were perfectly synchronized. and again, this was a standard that was carried forward by many crews and subsequent missions. >> what was your role on apollo 9? >> i was a lead flight director. it was basically my responsibility to not only pull together my team for the mission events that we had. i would launch the saturn with the crew. i also had many of the maneuvers

associated with rendezvous, so it was basically to make sure that my team was up to speed but also to oversee all of the other mission control teams that would be working. one of the real surprises that came out of apollo 9 that really wasn't -- it wasn't picked up immediately, was the workload associated with following two spacecrafts. each with crew members. and that the time that we separated for the rendezvous process, i really had difficulty tracking the spacecraft that was the lunar module, which was the performing the majority of the rendezvous maneuvers and the command module which was basically acquiescent, but it still required a looksy. and i came after the mission debriefing and i talked to the flight directors and i said, you know, once we get into the lunar phase of the program, we go up to the moon with two spacecrafts, we better have a

way that we can split team and mission control. so you've got one entire team that's working with a lunar module, another team working with the command module. glenn and cliff were flight directors and they had the next two missions, and they were somewhat skeptical that you could actually take and break the mission control team into two chunks. they then got their experience on apollo 10. and by the time that we were on apollo 11, we had started moving in the direction where once we got into the lunar phase of the mission, we had separated the spacecrafts, we would have two mission control teams operating in the same room at the same time. in fact, we had two flight directors following these spacecraft. but the entire process of apollo was getting the flight test experiences, both on the ground as well as in the spacecraft, and finding what is the best way to assemble the pieces so that we have the greatest chance of

success for the final step, which was to go for the moon. and i believe apollo 9 fit in a very key part in that building. the confidence needed to go to the moon. from my team's standpoint, it was very important because this was my second experience with the lunar module. and we found out that grammen aircraft had built a spectacular spacecraft. it was rugged, it was capable of doing the job. as a result of the apollo 9 mission, we had total confidence in the spacecraft that would have ultimately taken us to the moon. >> this was your second experience with them. what was the first? >> the first experience was an unmanned flight test, probably one of the most difficult times i'd ever had in mission control. it was a mission that was supposed to be totally automated under the control of the on board computer. but 3 1/2 hours into the mission, a programming error in the computer caused a glitch

that, just as we were starting the key parts of the flight objectives, the engine shut down. and we had to take over manual control from the ground. and for a very fast-moving set of sequences like starting rocket engines and accomplishing abort staging, it's sort of a tough business on the ground. but this team hung together, and over a four-hour period, accomplished all of the mandatory objectives on that unmanned mission so that we could proceed with the manned phase of the program. >> once you got to the manned phase, was it still able to be automated, controlled from the earth? >> we had a lot of capability from the earth, but basically the majority of the control, exercised from the control center here, was basically to make the crew's workload easier on board of spacecraft.

we would initialize the computer with data, what we called the vector, the velocity data. we'd manage the communications, we'd operate the recorders. but basically these were all what i'd say satellite services so that the crew wasn't bothered with the routine, the mundane. they could do the thing that they'd been placed up there to do, which was accomplish the flight test and go for the objectives. >> and actually make a landing in a safe place, as was proved rather rapidly later on. getting back to 9 for a moment, how did the crew split up? were there two aboard the command module? >> we had the jim mcdivitt and rusty shrikert were the crewmen that moved into the lunar module. apollo 9 had several aspects we hadn't faced on a mission before. once the spacecraft had separated the lunar module from the command module, they had to come back together because the lunar module was incapable of

re-entering the earth's atmosphere. and through this process we had accomplished and were testing many of the rescue rendezvous sequences that we might need to use later on in the mission. in the process, however, we had a very critical training exercise that at that time we didn't realize the importance, training people left us, they killed the lunar module engines, so you couldn't use them anymore so we had to perform a rescue with the command module. we performed this rescue and training very successfully, but then the debriefing, the training boss said, why did you leave the lunar module powered up? don't you recognize how important resources are in case you have you some trouble? and we listened, we thought it over, hey, that makes a lot of sense. well, this was the beginning of what we would later in missions call the lifeboat procedures. that if, for any reason, we were

run into problems during the mission we had a series of procedures in place where we could evacuate the command module temporarily and use the lunar module as the lifeboat. and on apollo 13 mission, as history proceeded, this was the first set of procedures we went to when we had the problem on board the spacecraft. this was the characteristic of the training. the training, there wasn't anything, no matter how obscure, no matter how way out, that we didn't look at and say, hey, we might be able to use this downstream. so let's take it, write it out completely and assign responsibility, establish a set of procedures and then put it in a bookshelf, in a library. but in desperation when time is short, you want to go back to something that you've known and maybe tested before as opposed to try and inventing it on the spot. and the lifeboat procedures were

part of that package. >> if i'm reading you correctly, you're saying apollo 9 was the focal point around which the later procedures were built. >> oh, yeah. >> you checked them all out, didn't you? >> yes. going through the flight sequence, demonstrated the capability of the command module to do the job, and the procedures that we had written for the command module. apollo 8 demonstrated our ability to work with the saturn booster, inject the crew out to the moon. we then got around the moon, we determined how well we could navigate, proved our ability to navigate around the moon, proved our ability to perform maneuvers and to return to earth coming in at the extremely high velocity of seven miles a second. so apollo 8 put that. apollo 9, then, really gave us the flight test checkout, the single flight test checkout of the lunar module, along with the rendezvous technique so that we

had a building block, apollo 7 proved the command module, apollo 8 proved our ability to work in the vicinity of 9, the 9 with the model and then the full dress rehearsal for the lunar landing. >> as i remember apollo 9, it was a fairly uneventful mission, it went pretty much by the book. at least what we saw from the outside looking in. from the inside looking out, was it? >> the thing that surprised us on 9, and we never really realized the significance on the ground, the medical doctors did, is that we had the first of the crewmen, rusty, who indicated that he had been sick in the early days of the mission. in fact, it was to the point where we deferred the vehicular activity to give him time for recovery. again, in mission control, we looked at that as a singular event.

yes, space motion sickness crewmen did get sick, but we sort of put it aside because we didn't have any other reports. much later we found out from the medical community that almost half of the astronauts experienced some form of space motion sickness and in the early days of the mission to the point where today in the shuttle program we really don't schedule highly-critical activities in the first two days of the mission and we try to work around that particular malady that seems to be experienced by many crews. >> didn't boreman show something like that on apollo 8? is that the first real symptom? >> again, this is a question of having enough instances occurring. the only real focus that we had, or i had in mission control, was basically the rusty incident because i had to come up with a game plan to work around it. and in those days we were moving

so fast, we were launching a mission every two months as we were approaching the end of the decade and we had to fulfill the pledge we had made to president kennedy that only the most significant events stood out and you would find some way to reshape the mission to accommodate the lessons learned. again, without the crew incapacitated, are unable to accomplish the job. we just assumed that we'd press on and that's exactly what we did. >> how serious was this motion sickness? how serious was this illness? was he really incapacitated or was he capable of some -- >> i think the principle concern here is internal to the spacecraft. that the crew is capable of continuing the work, albeit at a reduced level of -- reduced skill level. but they could get the job done. but once inside a space suit, if they would get sick, vomit,

throw up, there's a possible chance that they'd be able to choke, it became a very serious concern in the program. and again, this is why in the later programs that we avoided extra vehicular activity if at all possible in the early days of the mission. >> as flight, how did you work around it on apollo 9 the first time you really experienced? >> the principle task was to replan the mission, and we had -- apollo 9 was a ten-day mission. it was broken down into two periods, a five-day period with a lunar module and the five-day solo period with the command module. so we had a lot of maneuvering room to actually defer the extra vehicular activity until we had indications from the flight surge that the crew was feeling much better. but this is -- this was not an option that you would have in the early hours, say, of a lunar mission where you're injecting

to the moon. you have limited number of opportunities to use that saturn booster. so the process, what we call of, what would eventually be called the space adaptation syndrome, everybody has to have an acronym, s.a.s., and the crew would refer to it as the dreaded s.a.s., really never compromised a mission to a point where we were unable to achieve our objectives. >> looking back now, was there anything else about apollo 9 that comes to mind before we leave it behind? >> again, it was this continuing flight test of the lunar module. it was the second test, and again, it gave me the conviction that we had a very stout product in the lunar module. i also had the opportunity to work with tom kelly and the engineers who designed this magnificent spacecraft.

they're here in mission control during the course of a mission in what we call the spacecraft analysis area. and this is, i think, essential to develop the chemistry of the engineering operations relationship, such that we, when we need information on short order, they have the confidence in us to give it to us, and we have the confidence of what they give us is going to be the best data they can provide in those minutes and hours that we give them a chance to get that information for us. so it's a continuing process of building the team. that actually started, actually, in the gemini program, because in gemini, we had continued adding in the small pieces so that by the time we got to apollo, we were approaching maturity in this business of crisis management.

>> you were welding a team together that would stand you in good stead during later flights, weren't you? here in mission control, weren't you? in this room filled with memories for you, gene, and i'm sure it is, there must be a few that perhaps might be good to tell. do you remember anything in particular, any anecdote that's happened on the way to flying to the moon? >> well, we were speaking of apollo 9, and one of the responsibilities -- jobs of the flight director is to not get ahead of his people. in fact, don't make decisions that they should be making. that's essential, really, for two reasons. one, you want to build the team and you want to give these people the ultimate responsibility to provide you the information so that you can assemble it together and pick the course of the mission. in the training process, the trajectory officer is called the flight dynamics officer.

and they -- the training process not only is verifying the integrity of the knowledge, it's also looking at the integrity of the team and the decision process and can we make decisions in short seconds, et cetera. they -- i had a simulation training run that was starting to unwind on me. i had propellent leaks on board the command module. i was faced with some type of an abort, and as you approached the final seconds of attaining earth orbit, your options are dwindling very rapidly. but one of the keys is you have options to continue to go forward, to try to get into orbit as well as you have another option that brings you back into the eastern atlantic, atlantic ocean. and my fido couldn't make up his mind as to which abort mission he wanted to call. and i proceeded to do his job for him.

i exercised what they call a mode three abort, which was trying to drive the spacecraft back to the atlantic, and i called the abort that he should have called. and i passed it on, the crew executed this thing, and it was obvious that with the time delays in this entire process, that i had picked the wrong abort mode and the spacecraft, instead of ending up in the atlantic, ended up in spain. well, this wasn't a good landing point, and, you know, you feel real bad when you blow one of these training runs. but the instructor really drove the stake in that i had done the wrong thing. when he says, not only did you put the spacecraft down on land, you killed the crew because of the mountains that you brought them in are above 10,000 feet

and that's where the parachutes should open. so basically they hit the mountains before the parachutes opened. and you will debrief these runs, but the key thing was, i was reading the flight dynamics officers display, i can read them, i know when you get into the cutoff box, i know when you're running out of the abort modes. but basically, i usurped his responsibility to make those calls and this is the process of training that teaches you very profound lessons. and this is a lesson i never forgot is, that i am going -- anybody whoever works for me, whether it be in mission control or in my organization, i expect to do his job and i'm not going to do it for him and if he can't do it he's going to have to find some other employment. so basically it was a lesson well learned in mission control and i think every flight director went through similar lessons some time in their career. >> wasn't that one of the things that your own management was doing for you, too, they were giving you the leeway to make the decisions, weren't they?

>> i was amazed, growing up in mission control here, that our bosses had so much confidence in us. chris craft, i'll tell a story about chris craft, this is back in the very early days of gemini. gemini 5, it was time for handover, we had all kinds of problems. we didn't expect the fuel cells to continue working, we're now moving into the phase of the mission where we had to what we call shoot the gap. we had to move from orbit six to about 16, very limited orbital coverage. i expected craft to give me the game plan. and instead of writing it down in his logs, he put his head set away and got ready to leave and i said, what do you want me to do? craft looks at me and says, you're the flight director. make up your mind. and he walked away. and it was this kind of a

confidence that was extruded by our management that at times you couldn't believe they would give you literally the entire future of the space program and put it in your hands and let you wrestle with it. you'd hear a bit of growling from the consul behind me, but in no way did he ever interfere with the direction of the mission control team. and this is an amazing level of confidence, when you're doing something that -- not only out in front of the entire world you're doing it for the first time, it has the ability to basically rewrite the history books. >> with your background as a marine, you were used to being the guy who would take charge when you had to. you had to unlearn some of that, didn't you? >> yeah, it was -- i think every flight director, and myself

included, had very strong learning -- mission control is a spectacular leadership laboratory. it has the ability to give you the ultimate in confidence that you can walk right off that cliff and literally walk on air. at the same time, it can strip you literally naked and show every flaw that you have in knowledge, ability to form teams, trust between individuals, right on down the line. but the mission control process, as a laboratory for leadership, is one where you accumulate these bits and pieces of knowledge. you learn to work with peoples of all races, nationalities, i think they give the military services a lot of credit for being able to cope with the various rights and privileges of diverse groups of people. i think in mission control we demonstrated that well prior to the military stepping in.

because we would have men, we'd have blacks, we'd have mexican-americans, we'd have whites from all parts of the country. and the whole focus was getting the job done. it was you used every available asset and talent to get it. and it didn't matter what they came from or what their background was. and in later years we added women into this very critical equation. and they had no problems. not only in measuring up but taking the lead. in fact, in mission control today, you look at any one of these pictures on tv, they're about 40% women. so it was probably one of the first truly equal opportunity employers within the federal government and it's a real privilege to grow up here. >> you had a team concept, too. can you tell us a little bit about that? >> a mission control team, the flight director's got a job description that is one sentence

long. flight director may take any action necessary for crew safety and mission success. from a standpoint of american industry, this is probably the simplest job description of the chief executive of a facility. the flight director's given a team between 15 and 21 controllers, there are people who specialize in trajectories and spacecraft systems. we have medical doctors, planners, facility operators. we have an astronaut that serves as the communication link between the crew and ground. each one of these controllers, when they move into the control room itself, is expected to be able to make 100% correct calls on anything within his area of discipline literally within seconds. a flight director's job is basically to assemble the

pieces, and again, make the mission decision literally in seconds. the controllers have always used a principle that i would call "learn by doing." there is no piece of paper, there is no technical information, there's no schematic, there's nothing in this control room that was not developed by a controller. a controller in the, say, the guidance system would provide all the information on that system and then he would hand it over to a flight planner who would use it. and the flight planner wouldn't resign it or change it, it was basically trust in that handover that that data was correct. then the flight planner would basically develop a flight plan, hand it to the trajectory officer down further design of the trajectory. so each one of these controllers is totally accountable not only for getting the job done, but for the 100%, what i'd say perfection of the information at his console. i think everyone knows how difficult perfection is to

achieve, but in mission control it's the name of the game. it's what i call excellence in the art of crisis management. >> since no single individual can carry all that information, nor can they make rapid computations, this was really just the tip of the iceberg, however, here in mission control. each one of those flight controllers had support rooms and support people. can you tell us a little bit about that? >> well, the control team itself and sitting in this room basically had the responsibility for the seconds to minute-type decisions. once they move beyond that time frame, now, and we had a little bit more time to work on it, they had a support staffer. and the support staff room was basically one layer deeper, one layer more knowledgeable in the specific spacecraft systems, the jobs we were trying to do. and once we moved beyond the minutes into the hours time frame, we had hotlines out to all of the contractors where you

could literally reach out and touch the individual who designed, tested, checked out the last individual who had ever worked with the component in the spacecraft. you could go into the laboratories. it was not unusual that within hours of a problem we would have a test rake set up in one of the contractors, subcontractors' laboratories, trying to duplicate the exact problems we were experiencing in flight. so it was a -- it was not only literally the tip of an iceberg, it was really an incredible focusing mechanism for decisions that were coming at us and recommendations from all over the country. and a mission is probably the most incredible place -- wrong statement here.

the process of preparing for a mission and executing a mission is an incredible force for us because it requires each individual to step up to their concerns, the problems they have, the gut feelings, and make a commitment. am i go or no go? and it starts from the slowest guy in the factory up through his chain where again you have this kind of decision. there's no such thing as a perfect spacecraft. there's no such thing as a perfect mission. what have you to do and have you to learn to make decisions short of certainty. and i believe this was how we were able to achieve the lunar landing, starting from a cold start in ten years. we were willing to accept some level of risk to get the job done, and we believed, and this to a great extent goes back into the design of the program manager, whatever risks remained would be put on the back of mission control to find some clever way to work around that risk, to accomplish your objective in spite of a problem on board the space craft.