Failure is not an Option - The Apollo 13 Rescue

Introduction

“We've got a problem here." The day was 13th April 1970. The voice was that of astronaut Jack Swigert, speaking from aboard the spacecraft Odyssey (Apollo 13 Command Module (CM)). Immediately, NASA's Mission Control queried back: "This is Houston. Say again, please." Astronaut and mission commander James Lovell responded this time: "Houston, we've had a problem." For flight director Eugene Kranz, the message from Apollo 13 presaged the test of a lifetime. Only nine months earlier, on 20th July 1969, Apollo 11 had landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in the Sea of Tranquillity, fulfilling John F. Kennedy's promise to place a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Five months earlier, Apollo 12 had placed Pete Conrad and Alan Bean in the Ocean of Storms. Just fifty-five hours earlier, at 1:13 P.M. on Saturday, 12th April 1970, Apollo -13 had lifted up from the Kennedy Space Center on what to this moment had seemed a flawless trip to the moon's ridges of Fra Mauro. Now, suddenly, the bottom was falling out.

As Gene Kranz sifted through damage reports, the picture was distressing. One of CM's two oxygen tanks had exploded. Kranz was watching his mission spin out of control: his crew would consume their oxygen and power long before they neared Earth. Even if they survived to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, they would have no way to control their capsule's fiery plunge. Kranz faced an almost continuous stream of decisions, each bound by time and each with the potential to become the single disastrous decision that would undo all that had thus far been accomplished.

• If the astronauts did not move from the command module into the LEM within minutes of the explosion, they never would.
• If their course correction when rounding the moon was not executed at the precise moment, they would sail away from Earth forever.
• If they could not reverse the carbon dioxide buildup, they would be asphyxiated.
• If they could not restart the command module in the most energy-efficient way, they would lack power for re-entry.”

Kranz’s actions in the hours ahead give us glimpses of why system engineering remains one of the most trusted disciplines today. It enabled NASA to avoid one of its biggest disaster in the history of space flight. During the entire effort to bring the astronauts back, the team showed mutual understanding, shared obligations, a clear sense of common purpose and a well-formed camaraderie. They were able to anticipate what problems lay ahead and what preparatory steps were required to meet them. What ensued was one of the finest example of leadership and system engineering excellence.

This view of the severely damaged Apollo 13 Service Module (SM) was photographed from the Lunar Module/Command Module (LM/CM) following SM jettisoning.Rapid Decisions

Kranz, then aged thirty-six, had worked with NASA for a decade, being part of all Apollo missions. As he sensed signs of panic in the Mission Control, he stated,

• "Let's everybody keep cool. Let's make sure we don't do anything that's going to blow our electrical power or cause us to lose fuel cell number two. Let's solve the problem. Let's not make it any worse by guessing."
• With the oxygen for CM's life support systems in rapid decline, he issued rapid-fire demands for information and support to attack the problem.
• To the telemetry and electrical officer: "Will you take a look at the prelaunch data and see if there's anything that may have started the venting?"
• To the technicians running NASA's fast, on-site computers: "Bring up another computer ... will you?"
• He quickly concluded that among the mission's first problems was that the return trajectory would miss the Earth by some forty thousand miles. The astronauts would need to fire the Aquarius’s (Lunar Module (LEM)) rocket to close the gap.
• Producing the precision adjustment, however, would require immediate, massive recalibrations of instruments. The right teams were activated and they delivered the requisite data with enough time to spare.

Then he laid down his new mandate:

• From now on, what I want from every one of you is simple: options, and plenty of them."
• He sought to build, he later reported, "a positive frame of mind that is necessary to work problems in a time-critical and true emergency environment."
• He kept on firing quick questions and demanding answers, "How long can you keep the systems in the LEM running at full power?" "Where do we stand on water? What about battery power? What about oxygen?" "In three or four days we're going to have to use the command module again. I want to know how we can get it powered up and running from a cold stop ... and do it all on just the power we've got left in the re-entry batteries." "I also want to know how we plan to align the ship if we can't use a star alignment. Can we use sun checks? Can we use moon checks? What about earth checks?" "I want options on ... burns and midcourse corrections from now to entry." "What ocean does it put us in?"
• ·        He insisted on strategies and solutions without guesswork: "For the next few days we're going to be coming up with techniques and manoeuvres we've never tried before," he concluded. "And I want to make sure we know what we're doing."

He kept on reasserting his expectations:

• We "don't concede failure," and "we will never surrender. This crew is coming home."
• Ed Harris, playing Kranz in the Ron Howard film Apollo 13, uttered a paraphrase that perfectly summarized Kranzs attitude: "Failure is not an option."

Team Work

Such unwavering optimism is a product not of blind faith but of trained confidence. An excellent teamwork started among the actors both onboard and on the ground. Minutes later Lovell and his colleagues executed a flawless blast of the LEM's engines. They had corrected their path perfectly. The new course required nearly four days for return, and LEM was provisioned for less than two. It’s oxygen supply was not a problem since enough had been placed on board for several moon walks, yet its supply of lithium hydroxide was another story. At this crucial moment, a manager gave a solution to assemble an air scrubber from CM that could be “made to fit” into the appropriate opening. Ground mission control provided instructions, and astronauts built a supplementary carbon dioxide removal system out of plastic bags, cardboard, parts from a lunar suit and lots of tape.

Kranz' 'White Team', which established the parameters for consumption of spacecraft consumables (oxygen, electricity, and water) during the Apollo 13 mission

The biggest challenge still remained restarting the switched off CM. LEM had been life-sustaining, but it would disintegrate on re-entry. CM came with a heat shield to endure the reentry's 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. For that, though, it would have to be brought back from dormancy with a defunct regular electric supply and a mere two hours of power remaining in its auxiliary batteries. It was now late Wednesday evening, and most of the team members had worked nonstop for more than forty-eight hours. Kranz finally ordered a six-hour respite.

John Aaron, the electrical officer found a way around Odyssey's repowering problem. One of the CM's chief engineers, Arnie Aldrich, worked with Aaron to ensure that the switches for the various systems would be thrown in a workable sequence so that early systems would be ready for later ones as needed. Kranz examined each step, and had it tested in a nearby command module simulator.

Leadership

Kranz did not avoid conflicting suggestions from seniors. Chris Kraft, Deke Slayton, and Max Faget each superior to Kranz in the chain of command-insisted on opposite actions in the moments after the key course correction. Kranz heard them out, interrupting little, but once each had said his piece, he decided at once. "Firmness at the helm" he recalls, "was the only thing that was going to get us through it." When speed and precision count, sharing information and keeping everybody's eye on both goals simultaneously are essential for achieving both

Kranz defined his role this way:

• "My job was basically to orchestrate all the players, recognize the problems, point people in the right direction....." Even with the best troubleshooting, optimal outcomes can be blocked if all the options are not on the table. "Being a pilot," recalls Kranz, "you always want to keep as much runway ahead of you as you can... . You always want to have as many options out in front of you, because those are the things that give you the ability to change course."
• It is akin to playing "multidimensional chess: You have to think options." "We always tried to use every second, every minute....," he observed, "to individually prepare ourselves for what is coming next."

As CM neared its plunge into Earth's upper atmosphere, all radio contact with the crew was lost as intense heat enveloped the plunging craft. Four minutes of anxious silence passed on the ground until the fiery spray around the capsule subsided; then, faintly, came the scratchy but unmistakable voice of astronaut Jack Swigert: "OK, Joe." Moments later Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise were floating down on three parachutes for a soft landing in the Pacific. Kranz punched the air.

Fred Haise signed color 8x10 photograph of Apollo 13 Command Module splashdown.

Kranz endured the crisis with an unshakable faith that it would be resolved the right way. His optimism stemmed from an optimistic appraisal of the decision-making apparatus he had fostered since taking control of the Apollo missions just two years earlier. "I thought that as a group we were smart enough and clever enough", he would later say, "to get out of any problem." Kranz’s lattice work of teams and specialists served as half the leadership formula. His driving optimism and demand for accuracy among the teams and specialists added the other half. Kranz, James Lovell, and their crews orchestrated thousands of dense-action-minutes, some momentous-to fix acivities what seemed unfixable. In the end, they triumphed over one of NASA's worst nightmares. Kranz’s orchestrated the victory through the deft combination of the two attributes of leadership: personal and organizational. His force of personality, technical depth, power of persuasion and ability to meld and exploit a team of associates and seniors made the difference.

Apollo 13 astronauts aboard recovery ship

Lessons Learnt

Today developers of complex systems— especially large-scale mission-critical “systems of systems”—are facing challenges analogous to those of the Apollo 13 engineers and scientists. The story of America’s rush to moon using the Apollo program is rich in content relevant to systems engineering. It includes examples of unique design efforts, changes in requirements and their impact, technical data management, overall technical integrity, communication and decision making, transitions (from one contract to another, for example), interface definition, anomaly response, and processes. It is worth taking a moment to think about the complexities of technical design, organization, and processes. NASA historically promotes a practice that enables growth of leaders with depth of imagination and the courage to take risks. NASA stands as a shining example of “Engineering Culture” at its best. This is something the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) also displays. There is a need to learn from NASA, about how engineering culture flourishes based on research and dreams going hand in hand, leading to innovative breakthroughs. Leadership at NASA transcends much beyond vested powers in both personal and organizational ways.

Astronaut John L. Swigert, command module pilot, is lifted aboard a helicopter in a “Billy Pugh” net, while astronaut James A. Lovell, commander, awaits his turn. In the life raft with Lovell is a U.S. Navy underwater demolition team swimmer, who assisted in the recovery operations.

The most important aim of the systems engineering approach is to promote early action, in relation to the initial design activities often referred to as left-shift. When the design focus is drawn to activities further downstream in the lifecycle, such as manufacturing, test or maintenance, there is design-for-test as an additional factor. This approach, requires technical sharpness, involvement and commitment across the entire range of engineering disciplines. It needs continuous technical studies, understanding the significance of each module/ component/sub-system and the clear knowledge of the end state right at the start of the project.

The other important aspect of the system engineering culture is its stress on continuous effort to develop concept demonstrator or pre-prototype in the early stages of the requirement capture and also at each significant milestone. User requirements are ratified at multiple levels through feedback loops. Focus is on user needs, not requirements. Requirements are developed as an intermediate work product in the system development process, and are developed to provide formal communication between the stake holders.

Gene Kranz former NASA mission director signs a copy of Apollo 13 for Ed Edson

Conclusion

It is imperative to note that, of all the Apollo missions from 1 to 17, only Apollo 17 went through without a glitch. In all the other missions, there were problems and these problems were resolved by a team work between the Mission Control and the astronauts. In complex programs, managing the unexpected is what gives advantage to people over systems. It is the necessary operational glue that maintains the overall stability and integrity of human-machine systems. It is essential that these engineers are creative, an ability, that comes after repeated, extensive training and real-life handling of events over a long period of time. Creativity enables handling of everyday unexpected situations that cannot be resolved by regulations, standards and procedures.

Creativity is a perishable trait. It needs stability, and stability requires a proactive attitude from leadership. Right flavour of leadership needs engineering experience and important skills such as familiarity, availability, adaptability (or flexibility), dependability and boldness. And leadership promotes trust among team members, preparing them to deal with life-critical systems and, face unexpected life-critical situations.

Astronaut Thomas Stafford, left, and Donald Slayton, Director of Flight Crew Operations, puff on big cigars and applaud as the Apollo 13 made a successful splashdown, April 17, 1970, Houston, Tex. Other members of the Mission Control teams surround the console. 

The unexpected will occur and dealing with the unexpected requires a new philosophy of operations departing from the traditional linear approach. It needs promoting imagination or “thinking beyond the obvious”. While it is not possible to predict and plan for every conceivable emergency, however, well designed systems provide engineers with an opportunity to apply creativity and flexibility for solving unanticipated problems. In the end, the leader needs to motivate and inspire system engineers to dream and innovate at initial design stage. This promotes “Breakthrough Innovation”.