The Apollo Chronicles
The Apollo Chronicles
Engineering America’s First Moon Missions
Brandon R. Brown
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© Brandon R. Brown 2019
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ISBN 978–0–19–068134–0
eISBN 978–0–19–068136–4
For my father and my mother.
For the Apollo engineers and their families.
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. 1945—Origins
2. 1957—Paths, Power, and Panic
3. 1960—Silent Movies and Old-World Evenings
4. 1961—A Toddler’s Marathon
5. The Moon
6. 1962—Punch Cards and a Key to the Trunk
7. 1964—Of Doubts and Bugs
8. 1965—Saturn Breathes
9. 1966—Of Software and Star Balls
10. 1967—From Madness to Miracle
11. 1968—Of Timeless Views and New Perspectives
12. 1969—Alarms and Lightning
13. 1972—From Rovers to Regrets
14. 1981—Farther Along
15. Today—Mementos and Returns
16. How We Did It
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
On a winter’s night three years ago, I looked up at the full Moon, with its dark and light patches, and realized all at once that I knew very little about my father’s early career. Almost nothing. I’d met many of his fellow engineers, heard stories of their quirks and their humor, but I had no idea what living and working the Moon missions was like in the 1960s. As of this writing, my father has just turned eighty-five. He has some very sharp memories of certain segments and certain projects, while other parts are understandably hazy now. After I started peppering him with questions, he brought out a box of keepsakes and memorabilia from his career days, talking through a review of each piece. He also shared a few phone numbers with me, of surviving colleagues. And when I showed him a list of names from NASA’s archive of oral histories, he gamely circled those he knew would have interesting and important stories to tell.
I started reading everything I could find about Apollo—America’s program to land people on the Moon and return them alive to our planet’s welcoming surface—and the steps that came before it. Many wonderful narratives focus on the astronauts and the blow-by-blow missions in space. But I mostly wanted to understand the project’s earthly trenches, with engineers sweating details, deadlines, and decisions of a sort no person had faced before. In the eleven years spanning the formation of NASA in 1958 to the first Moon landing in 1969, the engineers cleared or circumvented every hurdle. If they did not solve every problem, they solved most and cleverly soothed the rest. Another set of books, fewer in number, detail the engineering work, including the piles of acronyms, the shifting, expanding organizational charts, the precise titles and versions of the various systems of each rocket, spacecraft, testing platform, and so on. The combination of NASA’s strange internal parlance and Apollo’s monumental technical complexity raises a significant hurdle for many readers who might otherwise want to understand the work, the process, and the experience. What was it really like, day to day and month by hectic month?
The Apollo engineer Peter Armitage once told an interviewer, “The real story is in the people and why they behaved the way they behaved. Nobody’s ever written a book like that yet—the real people, the mistakes they made.” With humility, I have tried to write a book that could leave the remaining engineers nodding in approval. But I also have written this book for anyone my age or younger. I was born in early 1969, months before the first Moon landing, and by the time my generation became aware of the world, Apollo was old news.
This book is not a memoir. As the least interesting element involved, your author will now recede. Neither is it my father’s story, though a few of his anecdotes will improve the pages that follow. And while I now appreciate just how brave our astronauts were, to sit on towers of explosive fuel and venture into a deadly realm, this book is more concerned with the astronauts’ protectors. In it, I focus on the Earth-bound: the welders of space-worthy seams, the designers of heat shields, the stitchers of spacesuits, and those who computed razor-thin trajectories through space, with disaster awaiting any deviation or missed step. As you read, you’ll sit with the mystified engineers who, barely out of college, watched warning lights blink on at the worst possible times. You’ll hunker with the rocket engineers in the shaking walls of a block house during tests of the world’s most powerful rocket engines. You’ll crawl with draftsmen over sprawling, improvised tables, drawing around the clock to complete hundreds of schematics. And you’ll sit with young, farm-raised Americans learning rocketry from imported German experts.
The stories, even the ones we haven’t yet lost, are nearly endless. Any attempt to comprehensively honor the four hundred thousand minds that pioneered the missions would be as impossible to assemble and write as it would then be to read. You will meet a number of the engineers but avoid long parades of names. This book will explore the Apollo years using a handful of main characters like blood cells moving through the various limbs of NASA. I want to urge the reader against the impression that these individuals were super-human. Two were most definitely visionaries, but I’ve selected others because they were involved in key milestones, worked in multiple parts of NASA, and, crucially, have retained detailed memories of the Apollo era.
The first act of a dramatic arc to the Moon began in October of 1957. When the Soviet Union put a metallic “artificial moon” in orbit around the Earth, Americans quite nearly lost their minds. What did it mean that our enemies, at unprecedented speeds and heights, could methodically paint these bands—these orbits—again and again over our skies? Could the Sputnik see us? Was it a hostile device? Could it drop an atomic bomb? As the political historian Walter McDougall wrote, “For the first time since [the War of 1812] the American homeland lay under direct foreign threat. . . .” Newspapers compared flat-footed America to “some fat Roman lolling in the baths” before a barbarian invasion.1
Never mind catching up, the nation thought. How could we get into space at all? What did the country have in its engineering cupboard? If nameless Soviet scientists were plotting even larger and more menacing missions, who would lead the way for the humiliated United States?
Before experiencing 1957, you will meet some of our cast in earlier times. In most cases, they had little inkling that history would sweep them up and push them onto a brightly lit technical stage. The world would soon watch them working in a theater of bewildering scale and scope. When the curtain rushed open, they wo
uld stand without script or rehearsal, looking to one another for whatever relevant experience they could muster. And to a surprising extent, humanity’s peaceful path to the Moon relied on ideas born in war.
July 2018
Acknowledgments
I first want to thank the engineers and scientists I have interviewed. In sharing their recollections and expertise, the following people breathed great life info this project: Bob Austin, Hal Beck, Eugene Benton, Aldo Bordano, Robert Brown, Marlowe Cassetti, Nesbitt Cumings, Caleb Fassett, Gerry Griffin, Mack Henderson, Frank Hughes, John Kastanakis, Ed Kowalchuk, Arnolia McDowell, Elric McHenry, Jack Miller, Thomas Moser, Debra Needham, Lee Norbraten, Catherine Osgood, Thomas Parnell, Henry Pohl, Wesley Ratcliff, William Sneed, Ken Young, Renee Weber, Cynthia Wells, Don Woodruff, and Len Worlund.
I want to acknowledge Hal Beck, Lee Norbraten, Thomas Parnell, and Henry Pohl for sharing some of their unpublished writings about their careers.
For providing further background and for their interview time, I thank Ann Faget, Carol Faget, Guy Faget, Chip Lord, and Karl Pohl.
For historical and archival assistance, I gratefully acknowledge Brian Odom, Historian at the Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville, Alabama; Pat Ammons and Carolyn Lawson of the United States Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama; and Steve Garber and Bill Barry of the NASA History Office in Washington, D.C.
In terms of source material, I acknowledge all those who have compiled and documented so very much already, and I apologize to those I have yet to discover. I leaned heavily on NASA’s Oral Histories project, incorporating dozens of voices from those digital archives. The book Apollo: The Behind-the-Scenes History of the Most Triumphant Years of America’s Space Program, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, was a wonderful companion on my learning curve. Finally, a lesser known tome, Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun by the late Bob Ward, provided an intimate portrait of the rocket pioneer and his center in Huntsville, Alabama.
I want to gratefully acknowledge the patient and eagle-eyed readers of various drafts: Dana Smith, Sue Brown, Arden Hendrie, and Dean Rader, as well as, from the Apollo era, Robert Brown, Gerry Griffin, and Frank Hughes. All of these people improved the book, and any remaining errors are mine alone.
I appreciate Jeremy Lewis, my editor at Oxford University Press, very much for his trust, support, and astute suggestions. I also want to acknowledge the expert and timely assistance provided by Book of Earl Indexing. As always, I thank my agent, Jennifer Lyons, for her guidance, encouragement, and brainstorming.
Some research costs were covered by the University of San Francisco’s Faculty Development Fund. I also appreciate the supportive community of my department at the University.
Finally, special thanks go to my wife, Dana, for her daily patience and reflection as I nattered about this project. Olive the whippet also endured it, with many a heavy sigh.
The Apollo Chronicles
1
1945—Origins
After surrendering to American forces in May of 1945, the lead scientist of Nazi Germany’s rocketry program prepared to embark for the United States. Wernher von Braun cooperated with his captors. He alternately charmed and shocked them with his cheerful good will and confident self-importance. (In truth, he watched his plan coming together. As he’d confided to a few fellow Germans late in the war, he had hoped to end up in the United States.) He asked if he could bring hundreds of his engineers and workers with him to America. He amazed his interrogators as he rattled off the strengths, skills, and weaknesses of each man. Washington eventually approved 118, who came to America in two waves.
In September, von Braun and a handful of his closest German colleagues deplaned at the Newcastle Army Base in Wilmington, Delaware. At age thirty-three, his first American steps were painful ones. After surviving a near-fatal car wreck in Germany, the rocket pioneer suffered from a poorly set broken arm and a nasty case of hepatitis. His new military keepers let von Braun recover his strength for a couple of weeks but then covertly booked him a civilian train ticket. When his accent attracted the questions of a fellow traveler, von Braun said he was Swiss and concocted business interests in the states.
From his window, von Braun saw the vast expanse of a nation rumble past for days. Completely unlike the craters and ash piles of Europe, this land was free of war’s scars. The trees thinned as the train clacked onward and eventually, in the middle of Texas, the grass gave up as well. He arrived in El Paso, a town perched between two stands of dry mountains. Fort Bliss became the new home for von Braun and his German colleagues. The enlisted locals deduced the basics about their new prisoners-turned-guests: These were the infamous enemy scientists, plucked from Nazi Germany and set in the cage of a rocket laboratory. They jokingly called von Braun “the Dutchman.”
The initially secret Project Overcast hauled ten thousand tons of military and industrial equipment, about seventy-five rockets (many of them in piles of parts), and six hundred former enemies from Germany to the United States, largely whitewashing their political affiliations and wartime work. In von Braun’s case, the cleansing covered, for many years to come, his advanced rank within the Nazi war machine. He later claimed a tin ear for politics, calling himself “downright naïve” in his early political views, blind to the meaning of the changes around him. He said he was simply “too wrapped up in rockets.” When the Nazis took control of Germany, he was barely twenty-one. He joined the Nazi party and eventually became an officer in the Nazi SS (Schutzstaffel, or “protection squad”). Heinrich Himmler’s brutal wing ran the concentration camps and, for von Braun, they eventually supplied slave labor—thousands of prisoners of war and other enemies of the state toiling to build von Braun’s massive rocket weapons.1
According to the story he relayed in America, his Nazi masters had tilted his career away from his visions of space travel in favor of earthly and more nefarious trajectories. He said he always would have preferred to perch spaceships, rather than bombs, atop his rockets. He had even lapsed late in World War II, dangerously wishing aloud for the war to end so he could return to his real passions. He possessed an almost deadly naïveté, scribbling sarcastic comments like “Final victory? Well, well!” in his notes, mocking the late war slogans of Josef Goebbels. The Gestapo arrested von Braun in early 1944 and charged him with scheming to subvert the Nazi weapons program. If not for his skills, plus some friends carefully extracting him from the Gestapo’s bureaucracy, the von Braun story could have ended there. Under increased scrutiny, he followed orders and survived the war, with rocket schematics tucked under his arm.2
Once Project Overcast became public in America, it took on the more benign name “Project Paperclip,” and newspapers even printed quiet notice of von Braun’s arrival. He was just one of the “certain outstanding German scientists and technicians . . . deemed vital to our national security” who would have a “temporary stay.” For von Braun that would span the rest of his life.
At Fort Bliss, von Braun and his German colleagues expected tension with American soldiers, or perhaps retribution for years of war. But he found the opposite. The soldiers invited him to join their card games. “In America,” he later wrote, “you don’t seem to carry grudges, as do many Europeans who have been enemies.” He encouraged his fellow Germans to learn English as quickly and thoroughly as possible. They watched whatever movies they could and listened to the radio. Not long after they arrived, some Germans took to wearing cowboy hats and boots.3
But before he could build new rockets, the Americans wanted to see his most famous work up close: He and his fellow Germans trudged into New Mexico’s nearby white sands, with loads of their rocket parts. He was to revive his chief accomplishment for Adolf Hitler, a weapon of incredible size and speed.
From von Braun’s perspective, he could help the United States develop long-range missiles, yes, but with the victors’ resources he might return to his visions of space travel. With enough time and money, he was certai
n he could build a rocket powerful enough to refuse Earth’s gravity and glide calmly through the cosmos. So he made a new home willingly and joined his second army within one year. “It all made sense,” he said later. “The V-2 was something we had and you didn’t have.”4 (See Figure 1.1.)
figure 1.1 German and American workers prepare a V-2 rocket for a test at the White Sands Proving Grounds in New Mexico, circa 1946. (Photograph courtesy the U.S. Space and Rocket Center.)
The Vergeltungswaffe-2 was the second of Nazi Germany’s “vengeance weapons.” The desperate Reich had hoped the V-2 would reverse the late course of the war.
When preparing for launch, it stood forty-five feet tall, tethered like some sort of laboratory monster. Oozing vapors, it was part science fiction and part Gothic horror. If the rocket would launch with flame, why did tendrils of super-cold mists hang from its fuel lines?
As with most combustible materials, the liquid fuel in the V-2 required oxygen to light and burn, but the air around us only offers so much. And at the heights von Braun craved, oxygen was incredibly scarce. Von Braun had his rockets carry their own oxygen supply: five tons compressed and liquefied at a chilly –300˚ Fahrenheit. The use of liquid oxygen predated von Braun. As a student, he had absorbed the speculative idea while reading The Rocket into Interplanetary Space by his eventual mentor, Hermann Oberth. In the early 1920s, Oberth had exchanged letters with the American physicist and rocket pioneer Robert Goddard. And, largely unknown to those tinkering dreamers, the Russian schoolteacher and visionary Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had already proposed using liquefied oxygen many years before.i As with so many technologies, when civilization was ready to make a leap, an idea bubbled forth in many places and from many minds.5
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