Eight Years to the Moon

by Nancy Atkinson

  Working with the scientific advisory committee to develop a workable plan for the ever-growing and changing proposed facility turned out to be an interesting challenge for McLane and his team.

  “The biggest challenges were political,” McLane said. “All the scientists involved in studying the samples had laboratories of their own. They didn’t want to do anything unless it was going to benefit their facility back home. Others were suspicious that we were trying to appropriate activities that weren’t in the Manned Spacecraft Center’s charter at the expense of other NASA centers.”

  McLane found it challenging to get everyone involved to cooperate and agree on the initial receiving procedures. A few of the proposed experiments, such as those to determine the radiation properties of the lunar samples, were very time-dependent. Therefore, it became evident that the facility and equipment required to perform those experiments would have to be located near the point where the samples were first available. That point was Houston, and McLane said it particularly rankled some of the scientists to see new state-of-the-art facilities and equipment being located at Houston rather than at their home laboratories.

  “I had never worked with high-level scientists before, and our advisory committee usually consisted of people who were at the level of principal assistants to Nobel Prize winners,” McLane said. “Overall, it was a great group to work with, with one important exception. They each reserved the right to change their mind.”

  Frequently, a previously settled contentious issue was brought up again some weeks later and a different solution was proposed, with the instigator pleading, “Well, I was just wrong before,” or “I changed my mind.” McLane felt the committee was just ignoring an extremely tight schedule, as well as reality.

  For example, one issue was whether to use glove boxes or a closed container with mechanical manipulators to work with the Moon rocks. It took many discussions and debates to decide, and the ultimate decision would make a big difference in what direction the engineers needed to go for building the lab. With a limited time to decide, the glove box idea won out.

  But in the mid-1960s, lunar scientists still debated whether the Moon’s craters were volcanic or created by impacts. No one knew the elements from which the Moon was composed. Not knowing the answers to almost any scientific question about the Moon meant that planners for the Lunar Receiving Lab had to be wide-ranging in their preparations. King recognized the quality of research on the initial samples needed to support the increased scientific opportunities being proposed for succeeding Apollo flights.

  McLane was also surprised at all the different scientific speculations that took place. Astrophysicist Thomas Gold, a member of the Presidential Science Advisory Committee for Space, had long proposed the Moon was covered with several hundred feet of lunar dust and suggested a spacecraft landing on the surface would be swallowed up into the regolith. Other scientists proposed the Moon rocks—originating in hard vacuum and bombarded with radiation and meteorites—might catch fire or explode if exposed to Earth’s rich atmosphere.

  “The speculations by good, smart, reputable people were just unlimited,” said McLane. “But I guess they were trying to think of all the possibilities. We were fortunate that no one forced us to plan for any of these extreme speculations. Overall, our advisers did a good job.”

  But then at one of the meetings in Washington, DC, to meet with advisers at NASA Headquarters, a scientist from the Public Health Service arrived and asked how NASA was going to protect against contamination of the Earth by lunar microorganisms.

  McLane said the initial reaction by everyone else was, “What?”

  The Lunar Receiving Laboratory after construction was completed in 1967. Credit: NASA.

  Since the 1950s, a small group of scientists had discussed the remote possibility that any lunar samples brought back to Earth might contain deadly organisms that could destroy life on Earth. Even the spacecraft and the astronauts themselves could possibly bring back nonterrestrial microorganisms that could be harmful. Several governmental agencies, including the Department of Agriculture, the US Army and the National Institutes of Health got wind of this idea—perhaps blowing it a little out of proportion, McLane felt—and NASA was forced to take action to prevent a possible biological disaster.

  “The ‘lunar bugs,’ as we called them,” said McLane, “well, nobody that I worked with really believed there was life on the Moon, especially something that might affect people—make them sick or kill off our civilization, that sort of thing.”

  McLane said that the first time head astronaut Deke Slayton heard about this, he just about “flew out the window.”

  “No way is somebody going to step in and put these restraints on the program,” Slayton fumed. “It’s difficult enough to just fly to the Moon without all these precautions about contamination.”

  Dr. Charles Berry was the director of medical research and operations at MSC and felt pressures from both sides of the contamination debate. On the one hand, he knew some concern was warranted, but as a representative of everything going on in Houston, he “had been charged by NASA to say that we were indeed not going to bring back lunar plague.”

  Typical astronaut living quarters in the Crew Reception Area of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, Building 37, at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. Credit: NASA.

  So, while NASA believed the chance of lunar back-contamination was negligible, they were forced to institute a quarantine program because of the medical community’s and US agencies’ concerns. King and Flory’s team determined the initial handling and examination of the lunar samples would have to be performed in sophisticated, hard-vacuum chambers, upping the cost even more for the LRL. McLane and fellow MSC officials expressed concern on how the scope and the price tag of the lab continued to rise. But eventually, the scientific justification and worries of public fears won out over budget.

  “We had meetings with the surgeon general of the US,” McLane said, “and he took the attitude, ‘How much is the Apollo program going to cost—$20 billion or so? I don’t think it is outlandish to set aside one percent of that to guard against a great catastrophe on Earth.’ We said that we would take on the challenge of guarding against organisms, but the surgeon general would have to justify the increased costs to Congress. And he did. That settled that, so we developed a scheme and it was approved. Everyone had to accept it; there wasn’t any choice.”

  That changed the entire complexion of what McLane and his team had to accomplish before astronauts could go to the Moon. The initial small clean room would now have to be a research lab plus a quarantine facility, with living accommodations for the astronauts and several other people during a three-week period after each lunar mission. Plans for the facility grew to an 86,000-square-foot (8,000-sq.-m) structure that would cost more than $9 million. From the beginning, King and Flory were highly involved with designing the scientific experiments and facilities but now had to take on developing the detailed, initial tests on the rocks and the astronauts that had to be done quickly behind absolute biological barriers to test for any contamination.

  Gilruth assigned his assistant, Dick Johnston, as operations manager for the LRL and hired Dr. Persa R. Bell, a nuclear physicist, as chief of MSC’s Lunar and Earth Sciences Division to make sure the new lab met all the mounting requirements. Although many engineers at MSC felt the elaborate precautions for contamination provided superfluous impediments to the Apollo program, the scientific uncertainty meant NASA could not afford to take any risks. If they were wrong about the reality of “lunar bugs,” the consequences could be disastrous.

  ALTHOUGH SCIENCE PLACED A ROLE IN almost every aspect of Apollo, NASA needed as much science as they could get in regard to figuring out where and how to land on the Moon. To truly determine the conditions the Lunar Module (LM) and the astronauts would face upon landing, precursor reconnaissance observations of the Moon were necessary. With the expertise of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and
Langley Research Center, NASA began a broad program of lunar landers and orbiters to prepare for Apollo. During the 1960s, NASA launched a fleet of twenty-two robotic spacecraft, blazing a trail toward the Moon. While the early missions had not been designed initially to support Apollo, successive spacecraft were retooled to gather more data for mapping the lunar surface. The Ranger missions crash-landed (purposely), while the Surveyors soft-landed and the Lunar Orbiters circled the Moon. The missions sent back significant data and pictures of the Moon, providing more detail than astronomical observations could at the time.

  The three successful Ranger missions (out of nine total) took images with enough detail to show that a lunar landing was likely quite feasible, but the sites would have to be carefully chosen to avoid craters and big boulders. In February 1966, the Soviet Union soft-landed the Luna 9. The US soon followed with six Surveyor spacecraft, proving the lunar surface could easily support the impact and the weight of a small lander. The Surveyors included television cameras that beamed back grainy but eye-level views of the Moon.

  The Lunar Orbiters’ five missions showed that objects could successfully enter lunar orbit and provided the best images yet of the lunar surface. The onboard cameras could capture surface details as small as 4 feet (1.25 m) across. A technological marvel for 1966, the onboard camera took images using 70-millimeter film; it was developed automatically using a process similar to that of the Polaroid Instant Film camera, and an electron beam would then scan each developed image before transmitting the photos back to Earth. It used analog radio signals, similar to how television satellites in the mid-1960s sent signals to TV stations.

  A composite image from the Lunar Orbiter II mission in 1966, showing a close-up view of the floor of the Moon’s crater Copernicus. Credit: NASA.

  Through all five missions, twenty potential Apollo landing sites were targeted, with 99 percent of the lunar surface mapped at low resolution. Additionally, sensors on board the spacecraft indicated that radiation levels near the Moon would pose no danger to the astronauts. But analysis of the spacecraft orbits found evidence of what scientists called “mascons”—mass concentrations or lumps of high-density regions below the surface of the Moon that perturbed the motion of spacecraft in lunar orbit. NASA engineers would need to take these orbital perturbations into account, and more study was needed of how they might affect the Apollo missions.

  Tom Kelly, left, who led the development of the Lunar Module at Grumman, seated in the Apollo Spacecraft Analysis Room (SPAN) at the Manned Spacecraft Center, during the flight of Apollo 11 in 1969. Credit: NASA.

  EVEN WITH ALL THIS NEW INFORMATION about the Moon, unknowns still remained about the lunar surface. The uncertainties played a significant role for Apollo, especially in designing the LM. At its Bethpage, New York, facility, Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation had more than three thousand people working on creating the ship that would land on the Moon. Grumman had a history of designing and constructing reliable aircraft, fighter jets, intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and the astronauts’ favorite T-38 jets. Now Grumman’s engineers and technicians worked long hours to figure out the complexities of the LM, trying to meet the looming deadline.

  “The objective was clear: Man. Moon. Before 1970,” said astronaut Dave Scott. “Everyone understood exactly what the deadline was.” Scott, along with Jim McDivitt and Rusty Schweickart, had just been selected in April 1966 as the second Apollo crew, behind Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. The way the schedule looked now, Scott would be one of the first astronauts to fly an Apollo mission with an LM.

  The data from the Rangers, Surveyors and Lunar Orbiters helped narrow down the various constraints Grumman was trying to work under.

  The Lunar Module under construction at Grumman. Credit: NASA.

  “We had a very wide range of assumptions about the lunar surface, anything from deep dust to hard ice and everything in between,” said Tom Kelly, Grumman’s lead designer of the LM. “So, we designed for a combination of these things.”

  The spindly, gangly LM had to be compact but hold two astronauts and a lot of gear; it needed to be lightweight but sturdy.

  To figure out the best options for the LM’s landing gear, Grumman engineers conducted hundreds of computer simulations using various combinations of surface conditions and vehicle configurations. Ultimately, they chose large landing footpads (3 feet [1 m] in diameter), which provided a cushioned impact, allowed for landing in small potholes and helped prevent the LM from tipping over. The LM’s four legs included struts to absorb the impact of landing and were long enough to accommodate setting down in an area with a few 2-foot (0.6-m)-high boulders.

  As far as designing the oddly shaped vehicle, Kelly said the LM evolved into looking like a bug or spider.

  “We just pretty much let our imaginations run wild and let the form follow the function,” he said. “We realized it didn’t have to be aerodynamic or symmetrical. We had sessions where we’d get on the blackboard and sketch different ways of doing things. We basically started out with the two astronauts, and we designed everything around them.”

  They created a two-part spacecraft. The lower descent stage had the landing gear, engines and fuel for landing. The companion ascent stage held the cockpit, full of gear to communicate, navigate and rendezvous. When the ascent stage would lift off the Moon, the descent stage served as the launchpad.

  It took about forty-thousand engineering drawings to design both the LM and all the ground support equipment; but by 1966, the most significant efforts were geared toward making the LM as light as possible. Kelly and his team came up with a “brilliant, paradigm-shifting,” weight-saving idea: take out the heavy seats and have the astronauts stand. Seats would be unnecessary in the weak gravity of the Moon, and if the astronauts stood, they could be closer to the windows, which meant the windows didn’t need to be so large and heavy.

  Now came the challenge of trying to get the new designs built in time for one of the first Apollo flights. An initial schedule called for delivery of the first LM to Cape Canaveral by November 1966, but Grumman ran into difficulties at almost every turn in manufacturing and cost overruns. Joe Shea, George Low and other Apollo managers repeatedly expressed their concerns to Kelly, telling him if the LM wasn’t ready, the first Moon landing might be delayed. But the rest of the Apollo team forged ahead with plans for a landing in 1969, hoping the hardware for the LM would soon catch up.

  IN BUILDING THE COMMAND AND SERVICE Modules, North American Aviation’s space division workforce had reached thirty-five thousand employees by 1966, with most working at the plant in Downey, California. The 200-acre complex was located smack-dab in the middle of the city and encompassed dozens of facilities. The plant originated as an aircraft factory in the 1920s, with a small airport on-site. Parts of the runway could still be found in the 1960s, but most of it had been covered by huge manufacturing buildings, test facilities and offices for Apollo.

  North American was led by Harrison “Stormy” Storms, and his nickname befit his character. Known for his rough management methods, those working for Storms learned how to deal with his verbal thrashings. But he was an unparalleled leader in getting everyone to execute their duties.

  Rich Manley, left, the post recovery test conductor at North American Aviation, with the test crew. Image courtesy of Rich Manley.

  Around the clock, workers in white smocks assembled Apollo’s Command and Service Modules in Building 290. NASA engineers, administrators and astronauts (as well as subcontractors) regularly visited Downey, participating in planning meetings and technical consultations. The meetings were sometimes contentious but generally cordial and professional, depending on the topic of the day. Precisely developing each piece of equipment—down to the wires and bolts—and integrating all the systems in a cohesive manner would be critical.

  Dozens of conical plywood and metal mock-ups of the CM stood on the factory floor, near where the real spacecraft took shape, and workers cal
led the area Tepee Village. Building 290 contained the largest clean room in the world, where the spacecraft and all the systems and electronics came together. A telemetry ground test station was on the first floor, right alongside the clean room, and that’s where Rich Manley worked as a test engineer. His main job was testing the instrumentation required for all eleven major systems in the CM and assisting in troubleshooting problems, making sure the electronics would telemeter all the required information to the ground.

  “We had to verify the calibration of the transducers and make sure all the data from the instrumentation on board the spacecraft would come through the telemetry to the ground,” said Manley. “The instruments tell you how—and if—your system is working. If nothing else, you need a gas gauge to tell you how much propellant your thrusters are using.”

  Manley and his fellow test engineers performed testing and troubleshooting on the instrumentation for all eleven systems, including propulsion, guidance and control, communications and environmental control. The test engineers at North American needed to know the details of them all.

  “The company did all the specialized training we needed on-site,” Manley said, “and this was the best education I ever got, bar none. We had to know how all the systems worked so we could make sure all the calibrations were correct.”

  In total, approximately fifteen hundred measurements were transmitted from the spacecraft, and many were measured at least once a second (such as temperature and pressure sensors on every tank and the numerous thermocouples buried within the ablative heat shield). Other systems, like the biomedical sensors for astronaut health information (such as heart rate), were measured two hundred times a second.