Copyright © 2019 by James Donovan
Cover design by Gregg Kulick
Cover photograph by Mondadori Portfolio
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All photographs courtesy NASA unless otherwise stated
ISBN 978-0-316-34182-0
E3-20190201-DA-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
I.: UP Chapter One: Cossacks in Space
Chapter Two: Of Monkeys and Men
Chapter Three: “The Howling Infinite”
Chapter Four: Man on a Missile
II.: AROUND Chapter Five: In Orbit
Chapter Six: Under Pressure
Chapter Seven: The Gusmobile
Chapter Eight: The Walk, and a Sky Gone Berserk
III.: OUT Chapter Nine: Inferno
Chapter Ten: Recovery
Chapter Eleven: Phoenix and Earthrise
Chapter Twelve: “Amiable Strangers”
Chapter Thirteen: A Practice Run and a Dress Rehearsal
IV.: DOWN Chapter Fourteen: “You’re Go”
Chapter Fifteen: The Translunar Express
Chapter Sixteen: Descent to Luna
Chapter Seventeen: Moondust
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Photos
About the Author
Also by James Donovan
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For my sister and brothers,
in memory of a Brooklyn room with four beds:
“Whenever the moon and stars are set…”
Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily.
François de La Rochefoucauld
Prologue
Cape Kennedy, July 16, 1969, 4:15 a.m.
The beast—what some early missile men called a rocket—stood on the launchpad, dozens of spotlights bathing its milky-white skin, hissing, groaning, gurgling, thick umbilical hoses pumping fuel into it, sheets of ice sliding down its sides from the super-chilled liquid oxygen inside, some of it boiling off in thick white clouds of breath, and looking as if it might shake off the arms of its gantry, rip itself from its moorings, and stalk off down the Florida coast.
Eight miles away, on the third floor of Kennedy Space Center’s Building 24, Deke Slayton walked down the hall of the crew quarters and rapped on three doors. With each knock, he said cheerily, “It’s a beautiful day,” and he meant it.
Raised on a farm, the unpretentious Slayton was fiercely protective of his charges—part den mother, part dictator—while at the same time envious of every one of them. A former World War II bomber pilot and test pilot and an original Mercury Seven astronaut, he’d been made chief of NASA’s astronaut office when a minor heart problem grounded him before he had a chance to fly a mission into space. Slayton understood better than anyone that to a certain extent, the men’s fates were in his hands, since he selected the crew for each mission and could make or break their careers. He was scrupulously fair in his choices—for the most part.
The men behind the three doors were astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins. They constituted the crew of the Apollo 11 scheduled for launch that morning. In three hours, they would climb into a small chamber atop the 363-foot, three-stage Saturn V, the most powerful machine ever built, and blast off into space. A few days later, two of them would attempt to do something that had never been done before: pilot a small, fragile craft down to another world, 239,000 miles from Earth, and walk on its surface.
These three men and others, most of them culled from the ranks of the nation’s top test and fighter pilots, had committed their lives to this goal and worked tirelessly toward this moment.
When the American space program began, in 1958, no human had journeyed into the hostile environment of space—an airless, low-gravity vacuum with temperatures of extreme cold and intense heat that no living being could withstand. Without an artificial life-support system, a man would die instantly. Even with one, he might die; the effects of weightlessness, radiation, meteors, and the enormous forces accompanying launch and reentry were largely unknown. Each astronaut had trained for years to overcome these dangers and others.
Along the way they also spent thousands of hours learning how to use the machines that would carry them into space, machines far more sophisticated and complex than any previously invented, machines designed by a cadre of visionary scientists and engineers united by a dream of space travel, an insatiable curiosity, and the determination to make that dream come true. They all worked insanely long hours, often at the expense of their personal lives and relationships. Along with the four hundred thousand other men and women who actually built the machines, the astronauts devoted themselves to helping their country triumph against the Communist threat. At stake was not just supremacy in space but quite possibly America’s survival as a democracy.
They had not reached this point without major setbacks and great tragedies. Rockets exploded. Systems malfunctioned. Men died. The murder of a visionary president whose bold challenge had fired the program only reaffirmed their dedication to finishing the job.
But in October 1957, still flying high just a dozen years after their victory in World War II, Americans had no idea how a small metallic ball with a radio transmitter would change the world.
I.
UP
Chapter One
Cossacks in Space
Our aim from the beginning was to reach infinite space.
Major-General Walter Dornberger,
coordinator of Germany’s V-2 program
One Saturday morning in October 1957, a fourteen-year-old boy in the small farming town of Fremont, Iowa, woke up to find the world a different place. The Soviet Union had launched a beach-ball-size silver sphere into orbit around the Earth. They called it Sputnik—literally, “fellow traveler.” The Russians, those steppe-riding, vodka-swilling Cossacks who were widely seen as a second-rate technological power, had beaten the United States into space.
The boy’s name was Steve Bales, and he was of average height with thick brown hair and glasses. His mother worked in a beauty parlor, and his father, who at the age of thirty-nine had been drafted into the U.S. Army and served with the 102nd Infantry Division in World War II, owned a hardware store. Steve told his parents, his three younger brothers, and anyone else who’d listen how angry he was that America hadn’t launched a satellite first. He’d been interested in space ever since he was ten, when he an
d his father and brothers spent many a summer night sleeping outside on well-worn gray blankets in the field behind their house on the edge of town. As darkness fell, their dad would point out the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia, and other constellations, and nothing seemed as wonderful as the universe and its mysteries. That excitement spiked when the boy watched a 1955 Walt Disney TV special that featured an intense rocket scientist with a slight German accent describing how one day man would reach the moon.
Now there was an artificial satellite, and it belonged to the Soviets—the enemy in this Cold War. But it was only a matter of time, the boy knew, before the United States would launch its own, and there would be more space exploration. And he wanted to be a part of it.
Lyndon Johnson, Senate majority leader, was relaxing with some friends at his family ranch in the Texas Hill Country that Saturday, October 5, when he heard about Sputnik. After dinner, they took a walk down a dark road, and everyone looked up at the sky. “In some new way,” Johnson remembered, “the sky seemed almost alien.” He spent most of that evening calling aides and colleagues, mobilizing them to begin an inquiry into the nation’s satellite and missile programs. Johnson knew more about this new frontier than any other elected official in Washington—he had been spearheading congressional hearings and inquiries into America’s space programs since the late 1940s—and he didn’t like the feeling of being second to America’s greatest enemy. He wanted to respond immediately to the Soviet challenge, and he began plans to chair a Senate Preparedness Subcommittee. It was clear to him that a comprehensive space program was necessary. That the Eisenhower administration’s ineptitude in space provided an opportunity for political gain—so much the better.
In the dozen years since the end of World War II, America’s onetime ally had become its greatest enemy. Some 418,000 Americans had lost their lives in the war, but that number paled in comparison to the twenty-seven million Russians who had died. While the United States emerged from the struggle as the world’s most powerful nation, a wary USSR viewed America’s constant meddling in the affairs of other countries—some overt, but much of it covert—as imperialism and believed the Western powers might finish off what the Nazis had started: their country’s conquest. (After all, in 1941, Senator Harry S. Truman had publicly equated Nazi Germany with Stalinist Russia.) Increasing the tension between the two countries was the fact that the long-term goal of the totalitarian form of Communism, as frequently enunciated, was the elimination of the Western capitalist system. The Soviets’ espoused desire for world domination (albeit preferably by a series of national revolutions, “small wars of liberation”), their nuclear and ICBM capability, and their frequent saber-rattling (for instance, in 1956 they threatened England, France, and Israel with hydrogen bombs if those countries did not end their war against Egypt, a Soviet ally) created a constant state of paranoia in the United States. That mentality was reflected and refracted in a burgeoning wave of science fiction and fact concerning rocketry and space travel in movies, TV shows, books, and magazines. All this was magnified by the realization that nuclear bombs were completely capable of annihilating mankind.
And there was most certainly a war going on, regardless of temperature, and the stakes involved were serious. Most Americans expected smaller countries around the world to gradually succumb, one by one, to the creeping menace of Communism. In November 1956, at a party at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev, the tough, blustery Soviet premier, told Western ambassadors, “We will bury you,” and while the phrase as translated might not have represented his precise meaning, it was accurate as to his intent. That declaration jibed with his publicly stated prediction that President Dwight Eisenhower’s grandchildren would live under socialism, since capitalism was in its death throes. And the Soviets weren’t the only ones rattling their nukes. In 1953, Eisenhower had threatened to use a hydrogen bomb against China, and U.S. senators had often called publicly for an atomic bomb to be dropped on Russia.
Soon after the Soviet Union had detonated its own nuclear device, the two superpowers had begun to coexist under an unwritten but clearly understood doctrine known as “mutually assured destruction,” meaning that everyone was aware that the full-scale use of nuclear weapons would cause the almost complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. This knowledge—and each country’s fear of a massive, preemptive nuclear strike from the other—was all that kept the Cold War from becoming hot. Both developed massive forces of nuclear weapons and long-range bombers and missiles, more than a thousand on each side, though the Russian Tu-4 bomber, a direct copy of the American B-29, was inferior to most of the U.S. fleet.
Americans had always taken comfort in the fact that their country was superior to Russia in every way, including in the realm of science and technology. It was Americans, after all, who had split the atom and created the nuclear monster that had ended the war—even if the Russians had developed their own A-bomb in 1949 and then a much more powerful hydrogen bomb in 1953, a year after the United States.
So when Americans awoke on October 5, 1957, to the news that a shiny, 184-pound steel ball with four trailing antennas and two radio transmitters was beep-beep-beeping its way around the world and that this Russian moon was traveling right over the United States, hundreds of miles above their heads, seven times a day, most people in the country were aghast.
But leaders of the U.S. satellite program were not surprised by the announcement. In 1955 both Russia and the United States had announced their intention to launch a satellite during the International Geophysical Year, a multinational agreement to share scientific information that would run from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958, and involve sixty-seven nations in various earth-science projects. And just weeks before the launch, the Soviets had gone so far as to provide the frequencies at which Sputnik’s telemetry—its electronic data transmission—could be monitored.
Not all of America’s military leaders were intimidated by the satellite; one U.S. admiral called Sputnik a “hunk of iron almost anyone could launch.” A few others, including President Eisenhower, tried to play down its significance, a position somewhat weakened two days later when the United States offered the United Nations “a plan to control outer-space arms.” Ike had no intention of entering into an expensive space race, especially when it appeared that the Soviets were so far in front. And Sputnik, it was noted, was not large enough to carry a nuclear weapon.
But the press, Johnson, and Johnson’s Democratic colleagues, sensing an opportunity to do damage to the opposition, disagreed. “The Soviet has taken a giant leap into space,” proclaimed the New York Times, and Senator Henry M. Jackson, a Democrat from Washington, called the launching “a devastating blow to the United States’ scientific, industrial, and technical prestige in the world.” The industry monthly Missiles and Rockets made it even more Manichaean: “The nation that controls space will control the world. The choice is democracy or slavery.” The magazine also revealed Soviet plans to land a small tank on the moon that would constantly move about, film the Earth, and relay the images back to Russia. Over six weeks, Johnson’s Senate Preparedness Subcommittee hearings paraded an impressive array of aviation, military, and rocketry experts before the public. Each one emphasized the dangers of ignoring the Sputnik achievement and what it portended. When the committee finished the hearings on January 8, Johnson’s no-holds-barred summary statement threw down the gauntlet. “Control of space means control of the world,” declared Johnson, echoing the Missiles and Rockets editorial. He linked the fate of the free world to it and virtually dared anyone to argue cost—“bookkeeping concerns of fiscal officers,” he made clear, were “irrelevant.”
Prestige—a code word for political strength and one that would pop up frequently in speeches and reports—was something statesmen worried about. In the global tug-of-war between the democratic free world, led by the United States, and the Communist countries, headed by the USSR, dozens of less advanced, recently decolonized nations were st
ill undecided as to which side of the ideological rope they would grab onto; in a sense, they were waiting to see which team had the advantage. Neither superpower knew exactly what would persuade them, though, clearly, superiority in science—particularly its military applications—would play a large part. So advances in these crucial areas were trumpeted loudly, with Western Europe a rapt audience. If America’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies could be shaken loose from that coalition, the Soviets felt, Sputnik and its descendants would be worth every ruble.
Until Sputnik launched—an event that followed the Russian announcement six weeks earlier that a Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile had been fired a great distance—the United States had appeared comfortably in the lead. “The Soviet Union is thought to be making a conscious effort to persuade people, especially in Asia and Africa, that Moscow has taken over world leadership in science,” warned the New York Times on its front page in October 1957, and another op-ed in the paper was even bleaker: “The neutral nations may come to believe the wave of the future is Russian; even our friends and allies may slough away.” The struggle for the undecideds’ hearts and minds—and pocketbooks, since another worry was the international market for American goods and tools—was a very real part of the Cold War. A top secret government report just a week after Sputnik launched seemed to agree; it concluded that American prestige had suffered a severe blow and cited several examples of how the satellite had enhanced the Soviet Union’s prestige and damaged America’s. Another reported that “within weeks there was a perceptible decline in enthusiasm among the public in West Germany, France and Italy for ‘siding with the west’ and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
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