The Masters of Mission Control

THE courage of Apollo 13's three astronauts was apparent to all the world. A less conspicuous kind of courage was displayed on the ground. Inside the windowless Building 30 of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center outside Houston, hundreds of engineers and technicians assembled to guide the crippled spacecraft through its four-day ordeal. Perhaps the coolest and most professional of them were the two young flight director--Glynn Lunney, 33, and Gene Kranz, 36--who were at the helm in Mission Control during the first hours of crisis.

Kranz, a crew-cut and clip-voiced former test pilot, was just winding up his ten-hour stint with his "white team" of flight controllers when the first hint of trouble came from 205,000 miles away in space. Quickly responding, he made the first of the long night's many important decisions, ordering the astronauts to turn off a fuel cell, check their thruster rockets, and power down the guidance and navigation systems. Though he may well have anticipated the worst, Kranz never faltered or showed signs of panic. "We've got a bad situation in the oxygen tanks," he told the Manned Spacecraft Center's deputy director, Christopher Kraft, "one that I think is uncontrollable."

Finally, after an hour in the hot seat, Kranz yielded to Lunney and his "black team." Calm and unrumpled in the white vest he wears on duty, Kranz told his controllers: "Look, we've got a fresh team here. Let's get off the consoles and let them take over. They might come up with some different ideas, and we'll go back and look at the data and analyze it and see if we can find anything that might help."

Lunney, a lean and sandy-haired veteran of twelve years with NASA, was equally poised. Without loosening his tie or raising his voice, he swiftly executed a series of critical moves. As life gradually ebbed out of the service module's vital oxygen tanks and fuel cells, he ordered valves closed, switches turned off, and countless other emergency procedures. When it became all too clear that Odyssey would have to be evacuated, he made sure to check the lunar module's own critical functions--guidance, oxygen, power--before directing the astronauts to begin their "lifeboat mode" inside Aquarius.

Five and a half hours later, Lunney again showed his mastery of the moment. "O.K., everybody," he told his controllers. "Let's be quiet. We've got a lot of business to do. Let's concentrate on the bird." With those firm words, he began the procedures that would fire the lunar module's engines, kick Apollo into a "free-return" trajectory, and head the astronauts toward earth after they whipped around the moon.

Lunney remained firmly in control until the very end of his tour. "We'd like to propose a small, little test," his instrumentation control officer told him. "You know how I like those," Lunney replied. "Yeah," said the officer, "but this one will save us a little power." Hearing his assistant out, he quickly sensed the logic of the proposal and ordered the crew to make the changes. They worked. Finally, after going off duty, Lunney calmly and precisely answered reporters' questions during a nationally televised press conference.

Both Lunney and Kranz returned to their stations later in the flight. It was Kranz, in fact, who handled Odyssey's bull's-eye reentry. Says NASA's Chris Kraft, with obvious feeling: "We couldn't have planned it any better than to have had Kranz and Lunney on for those two shifts when the explosion occurred."

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