The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Rendering all previous work quaint by comparison, von Braun’s engines pumped oxygen to meet ethanol in a fiery brew. “The whole sky seemed to vibrate,” said one team member of their first successful V-2 test. “This kind of unearthly roaring was something human ears had never heard.” They understood they had sparked a new era. As their rockets sped from our thin atmosphere and first grazed what lay beyond, they started humanity’s journey into space.6

  Germany’s rocket weapons, launched by the hundreds against Belgium and southern England, alarmed the Allies, but the sonic boom of the rockets proved worse than their bite. Frequently inaccurate, they had little effect on the course of the war, but they indirectly shifted the fate of an American family and the nation itself.

  Aiming to defang Germany’s rocket threat, the Allies hatched an ill-conceived marriage of self-guided rockets with Japan’s kamikaze attacks. Operation Aphrodite was a failed U.S. attempt to have small crews take off in explosive-packed bombers, turn piloting over to radio remote control, and parachute to safety before the drone-like vehicles struck German rocket facilities. An experienced American pilot named Joseph Kennedy, Jr., volunteered for the risky missions. As he prepared to leap from one such bomber, his cargo detonated prematurely. The heir apparent to the Kennedy family’s political ambitions died in a fireball over the English Channel.

  In the summer of 1945, with von Braun starting a new life in America, a younger Kennedy walked through the ashen ruins of Germany. At the age of twenty-eight, John had just started his first civilian post. After surviving combat in the Pacific, he flexed his father’s connections. Hearst newspapers placed him in a prime role, documenting the war’s aftermath in Europe. But his private journal reveals less about the news of 1945 and more about a keen soul discerning the world’s shifting politics. John F. Kennedy looked at smoldering central Europe, with its new partitions, and acknowledged a new, colder war. “I do not agree with those people who advocate war now with the Russians on the argument of ‘Eventually, why not now?’,” he wrote. He predicted that a new technological superweapon could put the next major war on indefinite hold. These journal entries preceded the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by mere weeks. “Thus Science,” he mused, “which has contributed so much to the horrors of war, will still be the means of bringing it to an end.”7

  Also in the summer of 1945, Maxime “Max” Faget toiled in another theater of war and in a very different environment. He glided through the dark depths of the Pacific Ocean. As a junior officer on the submarine USS Guavina, he returned, he presumed, to another terrifying battle with the Japanese navy. Short, lively, and shrewd, he had chosen submarine duty over other military service for one primary reason: He had never met a veteran of submarine battle with tragic injuries. It was all or nothing—a simple death or unscathed survival (see Figure 1.2).

  figure 1.2 Maxime “Max” Faget in 1944. (Photograph courtesy the Faget family.)

  Given that his father, the doctor Guy Henry Faget, researched tropical diseases, Max had been born in Belize and raised in British Honduras. When Dr. Faget subsequently decided to focus on a new treatment for leprosy, he returned the family to their southern roots. In Carville, Louisiana, he took over one of the nation’s largest leper hospitals. Son Max earned his mechanical engineering degree from Louisiana State University before joining the war effort.

  By August of 1945, the Guavina had already seen some of the most intense action of any U.S. submarine. After recording a number of high-profile hits on a Japanese convoy in February of 1945, the Guavina barely survived an intense seven hours of Japanese retaliation, including nearly one hundred depth charges. In relatively shallow water, the Guavina could only lie silently on the sandy bottom, hoping none of those charges would tear it open. Each underwater explosion was, according to Faget, “like a sledgehammer slamming the hull next to you.”8

  Soon thereafter, the Navy alerted the Guavina of a ditching American bomber. As soon as the sub surfaced, Faget dove into the water to save a number of stunned airmen from drowning, earning him Navy commendations for bravery.

  The submarine life taught Max Faget about survival in a hostile environment, a place humans were never meant to be. A machine could hold enough air around a crew to keep them alive for a surprisingly long time, even with violence swirling outside. And the submarine required a technological awareness. It had to navigate murky or sometimes pitch black realms. These long, tense hours planted seeds in Faget’s unique engineering imagination, one that would someday design ships that transformed impossible goals to practical simplicity.

  This life at sea also provided moments of wonder. He later told his children about a night, on the surface, when he was keeping watch. It was a moonless night, with the water lit only by stars, and he grew nervous when he saw a bright spot growing on the Eastern horizon. If this was another Japanese squadron, the Guavina would need to dive. But no, he could see a pinpoint rising now and its orange glow spread across the calm ocean. Jupiter, king of the planets, marked a path through space and cared not one bit about little Earth or humanity’s sad wars.9

  What Faget would not carry with him from his military days was any love of authority or concern for hierarchy. In his engineering work to come, his colleagues quickly came to recognize not just his quirky brilliance but also a requisite long leash. He would do things his own way, often sinking into what they called a “trance” for days on end until a new design fully revealed itself.10

  Von Braun and Faget, two veterans and former enemies, adjusted to life after war, and each hungered for new peacetime challenges. They would become central cogs in America’s space-faring efforts. Other minds, by the hundreds of thousands, would also join this push to leave Earth and its atmosphere behind. In 1945, most of them were just children or teenagers.

  At war’s end, a twelve-year-old named Henry Pohl worked on his family’s farm in rural Texas, and his only aim was to someday have his own land and try his hand at agriculture. During World War II, his father made a luxury purchase, a three-dollar radio, and listened to war reports during midday lunch breaks. Neighbor families would walk over on Saturday nights to listen to the radio with the Pohls. Henry burned out their first battery (advertised to last one year) in just a few weeks because he couldn’t get enough of it. Devices captivated the young Pohl, and he still recalls the precise steps and tools his family used to dig a well, cut beams, or level a house.

  The Pohls lived in what the locals called “the summer thicket,” a few miles from the small town of Ezzell (pronounced “easel”). He recalls “underbrush so thick that at places you could not crawl through it.” Henry grew up with no plumbing and no electricity. Nights ended strictly at 8:30 p.m. because Pohl senior worried over the nickel per gallon they spent on kerosene. On some winter mornings, when Henry rose to start the kitchen stove, he found the family’s tub of water frozen solid.

  Henry and his brother worked alongside their father: bringing up gallon after gallon of water from the well; milking the cows; carrying cans of milk-soaked corn to the turkeys; and gathering chicken eggs. He ranks these days as the best of his long life. “I have often thought of how nice it would have been,” he says, “if my children could have had the opportunity to live one year like we lived between the years of 1940 and 1950.” Pohl has maintained a deep Texas cadence and twang. He speaks in no particular rush, choosing his words like so many engineering decisions, with care.

  Shortly after the summer of 1945, Pohl lived one of his proudest moments, bringing home a marvel: the family’s first tractor. He carried a signed check to town and then rode the tractor back to the summer’s thicket. “It was about forty degrees out, and it was raining. I was terribly cold and wet,” he says now. “But I was the happiest boy on this Earth.” The tractor would not provide nonstop delight, however. As Henry worked the family’s land with this new machine, the steel steering wheel vibrated so violently that his hands would be bruised and swollen by the end of each day.


  Within a few years of the war’s end, not only would high-schooler Henry have built, from scratch, a sturdy barn for his family but he would also have connected their old home to the marvel of electricity. Vast swaths of rural America went without electric power until the mid-twentieth century. Henry used a Sears, Roebuck & Co. manual on wiring; it just made good, logical sense to him, and the Pohl home was one of the few to pass electrical inspection at the time. Henry was better than the professionals, a building inspector told him. But all Henry wanted was his own farm, and he planned to start in earnest after he finished high school.11

  Young engineering minds blossomed everywhere as electric devices and new machines worked their way into all aspects of American life. In the small town of Elmira, New York, Marlowe Cassetti lived a less agricultural version of childhood, as a grandson of Italian immigrants. In August of 1945, Marlowe, not quite a teenager, was playing with one of his model planes when a friend rode up on a bicycle. “Did you hear the news?” the friend said. “We dropped an atom bomb on Japan.” Neither boy really understood what the weapon entailed, but the war was soon over. And on “VJ Day,” (victory over Japan), Marlowe’s father gathered the family in their car and said they must go experience the pandemonium. Once in town, cars were everywhere, honking. A grown man sat on the hood of one, beating a little snare drum over and over, grinning ear-to-ear. “It was a fantastic relief,” Cassetti says of the celebration. “It was kind of depressing as a kid during the war.”

  His father, Dr. Angelo Cassetti, had escaped crushing poverty in New York City’s slums in the early twentieth century. Angelo’s immigrant parents had told their bright boy there would be no more schooling for him—he needed to push a fish cart and bring in money—so he ran away from home and read every book he could find. By 1945, Dr. Cassetti worked in upstate New York, making house calls throughout a broad, hilly region, where doctors were scarce. Now a father of three, he maintained this passion for reading. When he returned to New York City, about once a year, it was never to visit his parents but to buy used books with his kids. “He could buy a trunk full of books for fifty cents each,” son Marlowe recalls. More often than not, Dr. Cassetti spent evenings returning to work after dinner, but on those precious nights the doctor stayed home, Marlowe recalls reading magazines with his father, including True: The Men’s Magazine, featuring fantastic stories of past lives and flying saucers.

  As with many eventual NASA engineers, Marlowe was fascinated by flight. He recalls the grim Christmas holidays of 1941, after Pearl Harbor shocked the nation. His aunt brought grade-schooler Marlowe something amazing in that bone-chilling December: a model airplane kit. He carefully assembled the balsa wood parts. “I’d never done anything like that,” he says. He wound up the propeller and stretched its coiled, rubber band engine. “I [would] go to one end of the kitchen, let it go from the linoleum floor, and it would fly off,” he remembers. “It was a life-changing experience.” Cassetti’s voice retains a hint of a New York accent. He speaks quickly when excited about a story, moving nimbly between delight and wry analysis.

  He went on to assemble larger, gas-powered versions and helped organize a model airplane club. He gathered ten or fifteen junior-high kids, and they even had special T-shirts printed in town. “All walks of life,” he says. “Different economic classes, races, and everything else.” (See Figure 1.3.)

  figure 1.3 Marlowe Cassetti, with one of his model airplanes, at age thirteen. (Photograph courtesy Marlowe Cassetti.)

  He struggled mightily with his first gasoline-powered model airplane. “I unrolled the large set of construction plans and started to build the fuselage from sticks of balsa and bass wood,” he says. “After many days, I realized that I was in over my head. . . . To add insult to injury, I couldn’t get the engine to run beyond some occasional pops and backfires.” An older neighbor boy (after overcoming a racial reluctance to set foot in an Italian’s home) eventually helped Marlowe get it going. Cassetti points to that as the start of his life as an engineer.

  Marlowe quickly cultivated a reputation. His junior high school yearbook listed prophesies for students. Marlowe Cassetti, it claimed, “will be happily sending rockets to the Moon.”12

  Worldwide fascination with rockets had grown since the early 1920s. News outlets breathlessly reported physicist Robert Goddard’s suggestion that self-guided rockets might one day visit the Moon. And in Germany, Hermann Oberth’s writing dared to suggest that the technology could transport people into the cosmos; the first printing of The Rocket into Interplanetary Space sold out quickly, and subsequent editions spread across Europe. Science fiction stories, books, and movies adopted rocket travel as a staple. And, by 1930, filmmaker Fritz Lang had even introduced a dramatic element for starting a space voyage—the countdown—in his silent film Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon).13

  Circa 1945, a less central member of our initial cast, another twelve-year-old boy, enjoyed innocent visions of space travel in a mercifully dark movie theater, his sanctuary from Louisiana’s sticky heat. Bobbie Brown—my father—marveled at a sleek rocket weaving a black-and-white path across the screen, guided by strings and sounding like an angry electric fan.

  Bobbie was the youngest of five boys. Near their home in New Iberia, their father had worked the oil fields, shoveling coal into drilling rigs, as one fossil fuel sought to release another. Often in hand-me-down overalls, Bobbie roamed the dirt roads and swamps with his dog and best buddy, Susan. He developed what he now calls a “hungry litter appetite” as the smallest puppy at a table of older dogs. Dinner was often little more than rice and beans. As they moved about, from one oil town to the next, home sometimes had a dirt floor.

  Even in rural Louisiana, they had seen constant signs of war. On the coast, pulling down blackout shades was not just a patriotic drill. Surrounded by a chorus of insects and frogs, Bobbie witnessed ghostly fires spreading on the Gulf of Mexico. German U-boats regularly torpedoed oil tankers and freighters leaving the Mississippi River. And in the streets, not even the few families with money drove new cars—the nation only built tanks and ships. Old beaters bumped through lumpy roads with stacks of cheap tires strapped to their roofs; any quality rubber went to jeep and airplane wheels, so the stateside tubes routinely burst. And in the Brown home, they prayed for the two older boys—one in the Air Force and the other in the Navy—to come home safe, while the three younger sons awaited whatever their mother could cook up with rationed staples.

  When they weren’t snagging frogs, crawdads, or fish from the bayous, Bobbie and his friends loved to lose themselves in movies. By collecting pieces of scrap metal, especially copper when they could find it, they earned pocket change from Uncle Sam. In assisting the war effort, the boys could parlay a sack of scraps into a double feature.

  Interspersed with dramatic newsreels from Europe and the Pacific, westerns traded screen time with installments of Bobbie’s favorite serial, “Flash Gordon.” With the scientist copilot Dr. Zarkov, Flash used a submarine-inspired periscope to view distant worlds, enemy space ships, and the strangely cloudy cosmos. The serial’s special effects appear laughable now, but they enthralled audiences at the time. “I remember the smoke from the ship’s rocket engine would go upward, and that didn’t bother anyone,” my father says. “But there is no ‘up’ in space. We had a lot to learn.” At the time, his dreams didn’t rise much above a life with regular meals and a better fitting pair of shoes. Maybe in his boldest moments, he pictured a grown-up life that wouldn’t involve shoveling coal. Working on a rocket ship was just something for the movies.

  In retrospect, our story’s cast could leave an audience shaking their heads. How could men from such different backgrounds, with such divergent dreams, find themselves knitting their brows and rolling up their sleeves together on behalf of a young president, hatching plans that lived somewhere between heresy and lunacy? It started just twelve years after the war, when their attention snapped to an alarming Cold War surprise. Pohl, Cassetti, and Brown,
with thousands of other Americans, many the first of their families to leave swamps, farms, factories, and mines, would gather in response. They followed a path set by a handful of visionary designers, including Faget and the transplanted von Braun. Together, these were the men and women for whom a Moon landing would become the unlikely last step in a long series of problems solved, calculations perfected, and gadgets tweaked.

  * * *

  i Tsiolkovsky’s inspiration, in turn, sprang from the space-faring novels of the French writer Jules Verne.

  2

  1957—Paths, Power, and Panic

  They both cried out. They both stood. The chairs toppled back, fell flat on the lawn. . . . They saw the brightening color in the sky and, ten seconds later, the great uprising comet burn the air, put out the stars, and rush away in fire flight to become another star in the returning profusion of the Milky Way. . . . Staring up, they heard themselves sobbing and crying.

  —Ray Bradbury, The End of the Beginning, 1956

  In just over a decade, Wernher von Braun had become a popular national figure. In retrospect, his climb from a mothballed artifact to a dashing national space darling could not have been more remarkable. But it fit his lifelong pattern of never accepting obstacles. His father recalled “absolute futility” in parenting Wernher. “Nothing worked. Any attempts to admonish him, or convince him of the inappropriateness of certain action, ran off not only like a drop of water, but like a drop of mercury, without leaving the faintest trace.”1

  After World War II, the United States had wanted to wind down its war machine, and the government viewed new missiles as an extravagance. Von Braun and his imported colleagues sat disillusioned in the American desert. Among his military supervisors, nobody seemed to care about his rockets. He was left to just reassemble the leftover scraps of old V-2’s and watch them, more often than not, flame out, fall, and break apart over the sand, all while his new bosses shrugged. He submitted multiple resignation letters, but received only smug chuckles in response. When given the chance, like an invitation from the El Paso Rotary club, he practiced his English, buttoned his suit, and held forth. He spoke of rocket ships, space stations, and journeys to the moon and other planets. In these years, von Braun determined he would take his case directly to the American people.