How a Thanksgiving Day gag ruffled feathers in Mission Control

[Karlston]

How a Thanksgiving Day gag ruffled feathers in Mission Control

“I don't remember ever being so nervous or upset about something as I was then.”

Enlarge / Flight Director James M. (Milt) Heflin, in Mission Control during the flight of STS-26 in 1988.

NASA

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The phone call from the "Mountain" to Mission Control in Houston came at just about the worst possible time. It was the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning in 1991. Up in space, the crew members on board space shuttle Atlantis were sleeping. Now all of a sudden, Lead Flight Director Milt Heflin faced a crisis.

 

The flight dynamics officer in Mission Control informed Heflin that the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, which tracked orbital traffic, had called to warn that a dormant Turkish satellite had a potential conjunction with the space shuttle in only 15 minutes. Moreover, this potential debris strike was due to occur in the middle of a communications blackout with the crew, as the spacecraft passed over the southern tip of Africa.

 

There was no way for Heflin's engineers to calculate an avoidance maneuver, wake the crew, and communicate with them before the blackout period began. Heflin was livid—why had the Air Force not given more warning about a potential collision? Typically, they provided about 24 hours' notice. By God, if that satellite hit Atlantis, they could very well lose the astronauts as they slept. The crew of STS-44 might never awaken.

 

An experienced flight director who had started work at the space agency more than two decades earlier during the Apollo program, conducting oceanic recovery operations after the Moon landings, Heflin was largely unflappable. But now, he grew tense. "When I think about all of my time, I don't remember ever being so nervous or upset about something as I was then," he told Ars recently.

 

What Heflin did not know at the time, however, is that he had been snookered by two of his flight controllers during an otherwise boring overnight shift, during a fairly routine shuttle mission to deploy several Air Force payloads. There was no derelict satellite—the allusion to "turkey" on Thanksgiving had gone over his head. But the story did not end there.

Practical jokes

Back in the beginning, NASA was not the buttoned up space agency it is today. Early on, especially during the Mercury program, NASA's decision makers moved quickly, often flying by the seats of their pants. There also was more room for practical jokes, even within the sanctum of Mission Control.

 

In his book The Birth of NASA, Manfred "Dutch" von Ehrenfried wrote about a fabled practical joke that took place a few weeks before John Glenn's first orbital flight, in 1962, atop an Atlas rocket. Chris Kraft, NASA's legendary first flight director, led his teams through long days and nights of training, simulations, and discussions on mission rules for this critical flight.

 

At the time, missions were planned and managed out of the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and leading up to Glenn's flight there were several scrubs. One night, to break the tedium, Kraft's key lieutenant, Gene Kranz, decided to prank his boss the next day when two activities were due to occur simultaneously. Kraft would be leading a mission simulation while Kranz led a launch pad test with the Atlas rocket. While performing the mission simulation, Kranz knew Kraft would be watching the pad activities on a console television.

 

Working with John Hatcher, a video support coordinator for the control center, Kranz had an old video of an Atlas launch substituted into Kraft's feed. Moreover, Kranz and Hatcher timed it such that the rocket would appear to liftoff immediately after Kraft threw the "Firing Command" switch as part of his simulation.

 

Here's how von Ehrenfried characterizes what happened next in Florida:

As the simulation proceeded, Kraft would ask Kranz how the pad test was going and Kranz would give him a quick status check with a straight face and his head down. As the simulation got down to liftoff, at just the same moment Kraft threw the switch, Hatcher started the old Atlas liftoff video on Kraft’s console TV. Kraft’s eyes bulged and his forehead wrinkled as he stared at the TV. He turns to Kranz and says, “Did you see that?” Kranz plays dumb and says, “See what?” Without a pause, Kraft says, “The damned thing lifted off!” Hatcher and Kranz tried to keep a straight face but they both couldn’t hold back the laughter. Kraft says, “Who the hell did this?” He then realized he had been “had” and gave a half-hearted laugh. Kranz and Hatcher pulled Superman’s Cape and survived!

A turkey on the big board

Kraft was both a brilliant leader of NASA's first space missions—Mission Control in Houston bears his name—and a stern taskmaster. Milt Heflin is a gentler soul.

 

After working as an Apollo Landing and Recovery engineer, he moved into flight control, eventually becoming a flight director. Heflin served as a flight director for 20 shuttle missions, including seven as the lead flight director from 1989 to 1994. Later, he was chief of the flight director office before retiring from the space agency in 2013. He is the only person to have been present at both the final landing of the Apollo program in 1975, on the recovery ship, and the shuttle in 2011. He now advises NASA on its recovery efforts for the Orion spacecraft program.

 

In contrast to Kraft's dictatorial manner, Heflin was known as "Uncle Milty" in Mission Control. The two flight controllers who sprung the Turkish satellite prank, whom Heflin declined to name, probably would not have had the courage to pull such a trick on another flight director at the time.

 

As the shuttle entered its "loss of signal" period early on Thanksgiving morning, with the vehicle's fate hanging in the balance but knowing there was nothing he could do about it, Heflin recalls stepping out of Flight Control Room 1 to use the restroom. On the way out, one of the controllers stopped him and told him to look at the ground track display. This was the right-hand, up-front display at the front of the control room that showed the orbital track of Atlantis. Someone had coded a large turkey to appear on the computerized display.

A print-out of the right, up-front display showing the "Turkish satellite" in orbit.

Milt Heflin

 

“Flight, look at the ground track display, we’ve included the object," the controller urged Heflin.

 

But Uncle Milty was in no mood for this. He was tense, frustrated with the late notification from the "Mountain," and seeing a representation of the satellite when no one was quite sure how close it would get to the shuttle made no difference to him. “I don’t need to see the damn thing!” he responded, then went off to the restroom.

Calling Brewster

When he left, the two prankster flight controllers realized they had a problem. The boss had taken this seriously. After huddling, the pair met Heflin as he reentered Mission Control and confessed. Heflin felt relief... but also anger. He would meet with the two flight controllers after the shift, he told them, for a chat. He would make sure they never played such a joke again while on the clock.

 

That might have been it, but a few minutes after the "conjunction" was supposed to take place a representative from the shuttle's program office—also a good friend—came over to Heflin and said, "Milt, that was a close one, wasn't it?"

 

After Heflin explained to his friend that the whole thing had been a joke, that his team was just trying to have some fun on Thanksgiving, the shuttle representative turned white as a sheet. He had heard about the conjunction in the backroom position and telephoned Brewster Shaw, a veteran astronaut who had moved into the position of deputy manager for the space shuttle program.

 

Astronaut Brewster H. Shaw Jr., right, Astronaut Roy D. Bridges Jr. and Marianne J. Dyson are pictured during STS-4 in 1983.

NASA

 

Shaw had been woken up and informed about the situation. A former Air Force pilot, Shaw was hopping mad about the delayed notification from the "Mountain" as well. The shuttle commander and Air Force colonel was not the kind of manager you wanted angry at you.

 

This raised new problems for Heflin, who now realized the practical joke had spread beyond Mission Control.

 

"I got home around 4am and put the electric typewriter on the dining room table to prepare a one-pager to hand deliver to Brewster Shaw," Heflin said. He planned to intercept Shaw before he went into the daily Mission Management Team meeting that morning. And so when Shaw arrived at Mission Control at 7am, the sleepless Heflin was there, waiting for him, letter in hand. "As I tell Brewster this story, he is having a hard time not laughing," Heflin recalled. "I told him I would take care of it, and he honored that."

Reflecting on things

On an afternoon earlier this month, Heflin and I sat in his backyard, a stone's throw from Johnson Space Center, drinking a couple of beers. As we sat six feet apart, we talked this through, and he reflected on the prankster event.

Heflin says the lesson he took away from this was that, maybe, the "Uncle Milty" persona was a little too relaxed. Perhaps leadership works best when there's a little bit more distance between the troops and the boss.

 

That 30-minute period, he says, was the toughest time he ever experienced in Mission Control as a flight director. (Heflin was chief of the flight director office in 2003, when space shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry into Earth's atmosphere). The earlier years of the shuttle program were different times. Certainly, Mission Control in 1991 was not the more freewheeling place it was 30 years earlier, during the Mercury program. But 30 years later, it is difficult to envision such a prank taking place in the straight-laced Mission Control of today.

 

Context also matters. In 1991, orbital debris was just not an issue that raised all that much concern for NASA. Few collisions had occurred, and large constellations of satellites were not really a thing. So typically, a warning about a potential conjunction did not ring too many alarms. Obviously, this is a much more serious problem today, with nearly 3,000 satellites in orbit around Earth, and more than 21,000 pieces of debris measuring 10cm or larger. Today, a potential collision is not really fodder for amusement. The threat is all too real.

 

Of course, that doesn't mean we can't laugh about the past, especially when recalling how a Turkish satellite ruffled Heflin's feathers long ago. Space is hard. Space is serious. But it should also be fun.

 

Listing image by NASA

 

 

How a Thanksgiving Day gag ruffled feathers in Mission Control