How a Thanksgiving Day gag ruffled feathers in Mission Control

The phone call from the “Mountain” to mission control in Houston came at about the worst possible time. It was the wee hours of Thanksgiving morning in 1991. In space, the crew members aboard the space shuttle Atlantis were sleeping. Now, all of a sudden, flight director Milt Heflin faced a crisis.

The mission control flight dynamics officer informed Heflin that the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force station, which was tracking orbital traffic, had called to warn that a dormant Turkish satellite had a potential conjunction with the space shuttle in just 15 minutes. Additionally, this potential debris attack was expected to occur in the midst of a communication failure with the crew, as the spacecraft passed over the southern tip of Africa.

Heflin’s engineers had no way of calculating an avoidance maneuver, awakening the crew, and communicating with them before the blackout began. Heflin was furious – why hadn’t the Air Force given more warning about a potential collision? Typically, they gave about 24 hours’ notice. By God if this satellite hits Atlantis, they could very well lose the astronauts in their sleep. The STS-44 crew might never wake up.

A seasoned flight director who had started working at the space agency more than two decades earlier during the Apollo program, conducting ocean recovery operations after moon landings, Heflin was largely unfazed. But now he has become tense. “When I think about all of my time, I can’t remember ever being as nervous or upset about something as I was then,” he recently told Ars.

What Heflin didn’t know at the time, however, was that he had been snooked by two of his flight controllers during an otherwise boring night shift, during a fairly common shuttle mission. to deploy multiple Air Force payloads. There was no abandoned satellite – the reference to the “turkey” on Thanksgiving Day had passed over his head. But the story did not end there.

Practical jokes

In the beginning, NASA was not the button-down space agency it is today. In the beginning, especially during the Mercury program, NASA decision-makers moved quickly, often flying by the seats of their pants. There was also more room for practical jokes, even in the Mission Control Sanctuary.

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

At the time, missions were planned and managed from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Base Mercury Control Center, and prior to Glenn’s flight there were several cleanups. One night, to break up the boredom, Kraft’s key lieutenant, Gene Kranz, decided to play a prank on his boss the next day when two activities were to take place simultaneously. Kraft would conduct a mission simulation while Kranz lead a launch pad test with the Atlas rocket. While performing the mission simulation, Kranz knew that Kraft would be watching the pad’s activities on a TV console.

Working with John Hatcher, a video support coordinator for the Control Center, Kranz had an old video of an Atlas launch replaced in the Kraft feed. Additionally, Kranz and Hatcher timed it so that the rocket appeared to take off immediately after Kraft threw the “Firing Command” switch as part of its simulation.

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

As the simulation unfolded, Kraft would ask Kranz how the cushion test was going and Kranz would give him a quick check on his condition with a straight face and bowed head. As the simulation began to take off, just as Kraft flipped the switch, Hatcher played the old Atlas take-off video on Kraft’s TV console. Kraft’s eyes widened and his forehead narrowed as he watched TV. He turns to Kranz and says, “Did you see this?” Kranz plays the idiot and says, “See what?” Without a pause, Kraft says, “The damn thing has taken off!” Hatcher and Kranz tried to keep their straight faces but couldn’t hold back the laughter. Kraft says, “Who did that?” He then realized that he had been “had” and burst out laughing. Kranz and Hatcher pulled off Superman’s cape and survived!