Epic Rivalry

by Von Hardesty

  The roller-coaster Apollo reentry trajectory also helped reduce the g-forces that had to be endured by the astronauts aboard. Slamming on the brakes in your car while traveling at highway speed throws you forward with some force. Imagine hitting the brakes at 25,000 mph! The astronauts, lying on their couches with their backs to the heat shield, were hit with a growing “brake-effect” deceleration force that at its peak of 6.35 gs squashed each astronaut’s body with the weight of over a thousand pounds.

  The Apollo space capsule design afforded maximum control through high technology and a complex design, a typically American profile. Soviet designs show a contrasting emphasis on economy and simplicity. Soviet Vostok and Voskhod space capsules were spherical and had no reentry maneuvering controls. They relied on “passive” attitude control during reentry: The positioning of heavy equipment inside a capsule put the craft’s center of gravity deliberately off-center, and thus made the sphere naturally turn one face into reentry. Uncontrolled, the capsules had to plunge like stones in a simple “ballistic” reentry path, which built up a maximum force of over eight gs. Fighter pilots typically black out at nine.

  American space capsules were single-room units, little more than flying cockpits until the debut of the Apollo capsule, which offered some additional usable interior space. In all of these spacecraft, the entire capsule was constructed to survive reentry. Soviet spacecraft designers took a different approach with the Soyuz craft that became the mainstay vehicle of cosmonaut missions. The Soyuz included a “living room” orbital module in addition to the “cockpit” reentry module, offering two distinct spaces in the vehicle. Gear that did not need to be brought home such as dining, lavatory, and orbital operations equipment was all located in the orbital module, which was closed off and discarded before reentry. The remaining reentry module needed only to contain the cosmonauts themselves, so it could be made small and compact, minimizing the amount of heavy (and expensive) construction that must be built to withstand reentry forces, another typically economical Soviet choice.

  Reentry subjects the delicate components of a spacecraft’s complex operating system to tremendous strains and has proven to be the most dangerous portion of a space traveler’s journey. On the Soyuz 1 mission in 1967, Vladimir Komarov survived a harrowing series of orbital malfunctions that forced him to make a dangerous manual retrofire to begin his reentry. After Komarov’s capsule emerged successfully from the hot phase of the return, in a heartbreaking twist of fate, his parachutes failed. Trapped in the free-falling capsule, Komarov died upon impact.

  Soyuz 11 made a soft landing in 1971, but recovery crews opened the hatch to find that all three cosmonauts—who could not wear spacesuits in the cramped capsule—were dead. Just before reentry, a faulty valve had opened and bled all their oxygen into space, sucking the very breath from their lungs. The automated craft had returned their lifeless bodies to the Earth.

  It is only in these tragic failures that we see clearly the specter haunting every return to Earth. Through them we appreciate the extraordinary accomplishments of the designers who make successful returns possible. The dire prospect of a Komarov fall, a spacecraft’s disintegration, or any other mode of fatal failure drives engineers to build into each vessel the very best defenses they can create.

  Each space traveler who boards a spacecraft for launch prepares to enter the realm of the heavens and the pages of history, to see sights and dare deeds reserved for a privileged few—but as they strap in and as the hatch is closed behind them, they must anticipate these rewards in the knowledge that the fires of reentry may exact the ultimate price.

  * * *

  * * *

  Neil Armstrong’s reflection is visible in this iconic photo of Buzz Aldrin on the moon, July 1969.

  7

  A DISTANT PRIZE

  By the mid-1960s, Project Apollo was moving in full stride toward the goal of a lunar landing. The Apollo missions were the culmination of America’s building-block approach to manned spaceflight. Project Mercury had provided the first manned flights, ranging from the early up-and-down suborbital ventures to short-duration orbital flights, all for single astronauts. The next vital step was Gemini, a much more sophisticated undertaking that launched two astronauts on orbital journeys lasting as long as two weeks. Gemini enabled the United States to develop skills essential to going to the moon, including orbital rendezvous and docking techniques. The American space program was now poised to pursue its most ambitious goal, the final lap to the moon. NASA allocated massive financial and human resources to achieve this end. Apollo’s success rested on the ability of NASA to mobilize a vast cadre of talented managers, engineers, scientists, and astronauts to achieve this singular goal. There remained the all-consuming technical challenge of designing, testing, and flying spacecraft capable of reaching the distant prize of the moon.

  NASA was not alone in this endeavor. The Soviet Union had demonstrated in the past a formidable capacity to pull off space spectaculars; many NASA observers regarded this technical prowess as preparation for a Soviet manned lunar mission in the near term. They also felt the pressure of fulfilling the mandate of President John F. Kennedy, expressed on May 25, 1961, to send humans to the moon by the end of the 1960s.

  From the start, Kennedy’s call for a lunar landing had resonated with the American public at large. Congress had expressed its support through lavish financial backing. These factors had helped to instill in NASA a keen sense of institutional purpose and high morale. The stakes were high. The whole enterprise was pursued in the Cold War context, which meant that anything less than triumph would lead to national humiliation. Going back to the early Kennedy years, then Vice President Lyndon Johnson and other high officials had examined the question of manned spaceflight and concluded that the United States had a “reasonable” chance to overtake the Soviet Union.1

  Nevertheless, the managerial tasks faced by NASA head James Webb remained daunting. “The Apollo requirement,” Webb observed, “was to take off from a point on the surface of the Earth that was traveling at 1,000 miles per hour as the Earth rotated, to go into orbit at 18,000 mph, to speed up at the proper time to 25,000 mph, to travel to a body in space some 240,000 miles distant, which was itself traveling 2,000 mph relative to the Earth, to go into orbit around this body, and to drop a specialized landing vehicle to its surface.” Moreover, he concluded: “There men were to make observations and measurements, collect specimens…and then repeat much of the outward-bound process to get back home…. One such expedition would not do the job. NASA had to develop a reliable system capable of doing this time after time.”2

  As NASA administrator, Webb would be at the epicenter of this project during much of the 1960s. His leadership played a large role in the ultimate success of Apollo. Before coming to NASA in 1961, Webb had carved out an impressive career as a capable bureaucrat and Washington insider. He had served as director of the Bureau of the Budget and undersecretary of state during the Truman administration. He was adept at negotiations with Congress and various entities in the federal government. He built a broad and powerful constituency for NASA. His tenure oversaw the construction of new facilities, mainly in the South, and the award of massive contracts to the aerospace industry to build the essential spacecraft and components for the staged NASA space program.3

  NASA gave considerable attention to the development of spacecraft for the manned spaceflights. As early as mid-July 1961, Webb invited hundreds of aerospace industry representatives to attend a NASA-Apollo Technical Conference in Washington. At the conclave, each representative received written guidelines containing the technical specifications for a future Apollo spacecraft, including a command module, a service module, and a lunar landing module. Each component was deemed essential to transport humans from Earth to the lunar surface and back. The number of technical details for such an ambitious project was mirrored in the size of the written guidelines, which weighed a gargantuan 250 pounds.4

  One key debate within
NASA focused on the optimal method of landing on the moon. This “choice of mode” was a pivotal concern, one that shaped ultimately the design for the launch rocket and the spacecraft. Early on, there was great uncertainty over Soviet intentions and capabilities. Moreover, the engineering challenges were profound and unprecedented: The NASA leadership was fully aware of the fact that going to the moon would be a pioneering journey, and there was no guarantee of success.

  One option, later to be dubbed the “Direct Ascent” approach, was advanced by von Braun and his Huntsville team. The proposed technique for a lunar landing was simple and straightforward: A rocket fired from Earth took a trajectory that would “lead” the moon—in the same fashion as a hunter aims in front of a flock of geese—so that the two objects arrived at the same place at the same time. But this approach had significant drawbacks. It would require the development of a huge rocket called Nova, which von Braun envisioned with 10 engines in the first stage alone. Such an immense space vehicle—with a flyable stage for the return flight to Earth—would have been complex and costly to build.5

  A second option was Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR). This plan called for the assembly in orbit of separately launched components—the spacecraft, lunar lander, and equipment module. The EOR envisioned a sequence of launches, which promised less expenditure of energy to get a lunar mission under way. Writer William Burrows aptly described this option as a “hightech mule train” to the moon. The detractors of the EOR pointed out its cost, difficult assembly, and inherent dangers. Such a complex enterprise struck many engineers as impractical, even foolhardy.6

  A third scheme finally prevailed. Known as lunar orbital rendezvous (LOR), it had to overcome strong initial resistance.7 The plan was advocated by John Houbolt, a structures engineer at NASA’s Langley Center, who advocated his ideas with great enthusiasm. The LOR required that the Apollo command and service module (CSM), be placed in a “parking” orbit around the moon, while the lunar lander carried astronauts down to the lunar surface. Initially, fierce opposition greeted the idea, both at Langley and NASA headquarters. Concern was voiced that if the astronauts were unable to rendezvous with the CSM when they left the moon, they would almost certainly die in lunar orbit, their lander becoming their crypt. Despite the opposition, Houbolt refused to give up. In November 1961, bypassing many management levels, he wrote an impassioned letter advocating LOR directly to NASA associate administrator Robert Seamans, Jr. In it, he characterized himself as “a voice in the wilderness.” His perseverance won him a serious review of his proposal, though it took considerable time and effort to win the doubters over to his side. Houbolt, who had joined NASA’s predecessor agency, NACA, in 1942, received the prestigious NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement for his LOR work.8

  What ultimately carried the day for LOR was the fact that it required fewer resources than either of the other two options. Moreover, the rival Direct Ascent and EOR modes would have required a massive rocket—perhaps as tall as six stories—to land on the moon. By contrast, the LOR mode required only a single Saturn V, much smaller than the proposed Nova “super booster” for Direct Ascent, for example. In addition, using an orbiting command module to retrieve the astronauts as they ascended from the moon meant the weight and design of the lunar lander could be simpler, smaller, and lighter. That was because part of the lander would remain on the moon when its “ascent module” blasted off to carry the crew up to meet the command module. Von Braun eventually endorsed the LOR mode because it alone offered a solid chance to meet Kennedy’s lunar goal on schedule. NASA publicly announced selection of the LOR mode on July 11, 1962.9

  NASA grew exponentially during the 1960s. Employment rolls increased to 36,000 in 1966, a significant leap from the 1960 level of 10,000 employees. NASA’s management had decided at the start of the manned lunar program that it would be most efficient to rely on outside researchers, universities, and private industry for the bulk of the work. As a result, the total number of persons in these three categories working on Apollo expanded from 36,500 in 1960 to an astonishing 376,700 in 1965. Project Apollo required federal funding for NASA commensurate with the program’s lofty goals, which Congress provided. NASA’s budget exploded from 500 million dollars in 1960 to 5.2 billion dollars in 1965, representing 5.3 percent of the entire federal budget that year. The following year, with Apollo’s costs largely funded and the increasing budgetary demands of the Vietnam War, NASA’s budget began a decade-long decline.10

  A considerable portion of Apollo expenditures was allocated for three new facilities. One was the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, later renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, responsible for developing the Apollo spacecraft in addition to its role in training the astronauts and serving as Mission Control. Ground testing of the huge Saturn rockets for Apollo required the construction of the Mississippi Test Facility (later renamed the John C. Stennis Space Center) on a large bayou. Finally, NASA developed the immense Merritt Island spaceport adjacent to the Air Force’s Cape Canaveral launch pads, including pads for the moon rocket and the Vehicle Assembly Building to stack its components.11

  Webb and his deputies coordinated the many NASA program offices in Washington and in the field. Cordial relations with the White House and Congress were paramount, taking a huge amount of time and energy. They also had to maintain relations with other federal agencies and the scientific community, both of which did not always agree with NASA’s policies. Separate from the government’s largely Washington, D.C.–based constellation of participants were Apollo’s prime contractors and their thousands of subcontractors. It was imperative that these participants work efficiently with NASA and with each other. The most visible aspects of Apollo—the moon rockets and the astronauts—were thus only part of a complex effort.12

  Webb and his senior staff sought to keep Apollo on schedule. In the fall of 1963, George Mueller, newly appointed as NASA’s associate administrator for manned spaceflight, asked his staff to estimate the chances of Apollo meeting its decade-end goal. After surveying various NASA programs, including the troubled and significantly behind-schedule Ranger unmanned lunar exploration project, they reported that the odds were only one in ten. Mueller, with a Ph.D. in physics and years of private-sector experience in ballistic missile development, realized that new approaches were needed to avoid significant delays in the program. His solution, promulgated in a November 1963 memorandum, was to shorten the entire Saturn test program by rejecting incremental testing for a concurrent or “all-up” approach. This meant that the mighty Saturn V moon rocket would fly with all three of its stages “live” on its first flight, rather than each stage being tested and flight-qualified individually.13

  At first Von Braun and his team resisted when Mueller came to Huntsville in 1964 to introduce his new test philosophy. “To the conservative breed of old rocketeers, who had learned the hard way that it never seems to pay to introduce more than one major change between test flights, George’s idea had an unrealistic ring,” von Braun wrote later. Compared with testing the Saturn rocket ‘a stage at a time,’ “adding a second stage only after the first stage had proven its flightworthiness, [Mueller’s] ‘all-up’ concept was startling,” von Braun noted. “It sounded reckless, but George Mueller’s reasoning was impeccable…. In retrospect it is clear that without all-up testing, the first manned lunar landing could not have taken place as early as 1969.”14

  As part of his effort to keep Apollo moving, Webb also recruited Air Force Major General Samuel Phillips, a World War II combat veteran who later directed the Air Force’s highly successful Minuteman ICBM program. Minuteman, the nation’s third ICBM, entered service on time and under its projected cost. Joining NASA in 1962, Phillips became Project Apollo director in December 1964. He brought with him dozens of other Air Force officers experienced in the management skills and procedures needed for fast-track ballistic missile development. They successfully applied these procedures to Apollo, including centralized authorit
y over design, engineering, logistics, and other critical program aspects and the use of formal management reviews, to keep the program on schedule. Phillips’ management operation efficiently oversaw and coordinated the work of more than 500 Apollo contractors as well as NASA’s own major contributions to the lunar effort.15

  PERILS OF THE SPACE AGE

  The year 1967 set the stage for dramatic reversals in the space programs of the United States and the Soviet Union—unwelcome and grim reminders of the high risks associated with space technologies. At dusk on the evening of January 27, the crew of the Apollo 1—Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee—began a series of pre-launch simulation tests high atop their Saturn IB on Pad 34 at Cape Kennedy. The projected Apollo mission, scheduled for a February launch, would signal a new phase in America’s drive to make a landing on the moon. The newly designed Apollo command module accommodated a crew of three astronauts. On this evening they were supposed to conduct the vital “plugs out” test, where all electrical and ground links were disconnected to verify that the spacecraft could function solely on internal power. Nearby a large cadre of technicians assisted with the test, scattered among the launch facility in a blockhouse, the service structure, the swing arm of the umbilical tower, and the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building. The simulation tests were monitored from a nearby concrete bunker.16