One thing that follows me from IT job to IT job is a little lucite block that always has a place of pride above my desk. On it is printed a partial schematic, with the legend “Try SCE to AUX” across the bottom. I love being asked about it, because I get to tell one of my favorite stories, the story of The Greatest Tech Support Call in the History of Tech Support.
November 14th, 1969. Apollo 12. Pete Conrad, Al Bean, and Dick Gordon were on their way to the moon. The Saturn V stack had just lifted off from the pad—in the middle of a thunderstorm, because we were kinda stupid back then—and was slipping the proverbial surly bonds and heading to orbit. And then all hell broke loose.
Lightning struck the Saturn V.
Twice.
In the capsule, there was a sudden flash and one hell of a bang, and the master alarm went off. The master alarm in the Apollo spacecraft was the universal warning that Bad Shit was happening. To determine what Bad Shit was happening, there were a panel of warning lights, each emblazoned with the name of a vital spacecraft system on it. If the light turned on, there was something wrong with that system. And at that moment, most if not all of the lights turned on. To make things worse, the gyroscopic “8-ball” in the middle of the panel, indicating the attitude of the spacecraft, began to spin lazily around, suggesting that the enormous rocket was spiraling out of control.
In Mission Control, it wasn’t much better. All of their control panels, which usually provide telemetry data from the spacecraft, looked like utter garbage. All the data that was coming from the spacecraft was garbled and useless. No one had any idea what the fuck is going on, and it looked like the second attempt at landing on the moon was about to end in disaster.
But then John Aaron stepped into the story. In Mission Control, duties were carefully divided, and there were men responsible for various aspects of the mission. John Aaron was in charge of EECOM, which meant he was responsible for electrical, environmental, and communication systems on the spacecraft. And at that moment, it seemed that the electrics were utterly shot and the communications weren’t working properly, either. (And with both of those out, God knew what was going on with the environmental systems.) All around him, the finest minds in NASA were staring at each other, bewildered, as they tried to figure out what just happened and how to resolve it.
Aaron had an idea. He called out to Flight, “Have them try SCE to AUX.”
The problem is, Flight had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. (No one in Mission Control could possibly know every single switch and system on the spacecraft, which is why duties were separated. But this was a very obscure command indeed. But Aaron was in charge of EECOM, and so his word was law for anything in his bailiwick. So Flight told CAPCOM to send it up, and the command was relayed to Apollo 12.
Commander Pete Conrad didn’t know what the fuck that was either, and he said so, directly. He stumbled over the unfamiliar command and had to be corrected. The command was repeated up, but he still didn’t know what it meant.
Fortunately, Al Bean was the kind of nerd who is to other nerds what nerds are to normal people. His obsessive study of his duties paid off. In a high-pitched voice he called out, “I know what that is.” He remembered the switch in question, which was on one of the panels near him.
SCE stood for Signal Conditioning Equipment, which was a component in the spacecraft designed to interpret the electrical signals from other systems and convert the data into a format that Mission Control can accept and interpret. SCE to AUX meant to switch the SCE from the primary circuit to the backup, a sort of manual failover. Bean flipped the switch, and all of a sudden everything started to go back to normal. The warning lights began to cycle off, and Mission Control’s data returned. The rocket was still flying straight and true, and after staging—the moment at which the stack sheds the lower portion of the rocket after its fuel is spent—the astronauts were able to get things fully reset and continue their journey to the moon, landing and returning successfully.
For his quick thinking, Aaron was given the sobriquet of “Steely-Eyed Missile Man,” which is the civilian equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor for non-astronaut personnel. This term is a deep cut often found in films about NASA, such as when Rich Purnell earns it in The Martian, or when Ed Smylie is granted the title in Apollo 13 after coming up for a solve for the carbon dioxide filter issue. (John Aaron is also portrayed in the Tom Hanks movie, being the engineer who works with Ken Mattingly in the simulator to come up with the re-entry procedure to re-start the frozen command module.)
Now, the two heroes of the story are, of course, John Aaron for making the call, and Al Bean for knowing the system and correcting the issue. But I think it’s important to think about mission commander Pete Conrad. As the Saturn V rocketed heavenward, he had his hand on an abort handle. If anything went wrong, he could twist that handle, and it would ignite the escape tower, a rocket mounted on the nose of the spacecraft, that would disconnect the command module and (at least theoretically) give the crew a chance to escape a doomed stack.
So Pete Conrad was just a couple of minutes into his responsibility as commander when lightning struck. From his seat, it looked like every system on the spacecraft had failed at once, and the gyroscope indicated they were spiraling out of the sky. For all he knew, they were seconds away from slamming into the ocean at astonishing speed.
And he didn’t twist the handle.
Big, shiny brass ones. I’d probably have involuntarily yanked on it the moment the main engines fired. And probably cried and wet my pants.
(Incidentally, he later explained that one of the key reasons he didn’t abort was he thought it was even money the escape tower would’ve killed them just as stone dead as the Saturn V exploding. “Safety” equipment in the early days of NASA was often largely symbolic and the men flying those missions didn’t have a lot of faith in the systems.)