The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  A reporter informed Wernher von Braun of Sputnik’s launch while they attended a cocktail party. In his consternation, von Braun marched directly to his army bosses and said they had to finally unleash him. “We can fire a satellite into orbit sixty days from the moment you give us the green light,” he told them. Within a few weeks, he was speaking in Washington, D.C., saying everyone had failed to foresee the effects of “an omnipresent artificial moon,” and he told the audience that surely the Soviets had more surprises to come. But the first crack at matching the Soviets was not given to von Braun’s army rocket, the Jupiter, but instead to the navy’s rocket, the Vanguard, already in advanced trials.

  At an untrained glance, the navy’s rocket and von Braun’s army version were quite similar.ii Each was about seventy feet high and in the best circumstances their handlers thought they could deliver a fifteen- or twenty-pound object into orbit around Earth. They each had three “stages,” or segments.

  A rocket’s fight against gravity makes every pound count. To minimize carrying dead weight, rocket architects often plan to discard segments, or stages, during flight, as soon as they’ve been emptied of fuel. By ejecting an empty stage, the rocket loses the weight of that structure, its storage tanks, and even its engines, making the remaining journey much easier. A rocket could have fifteen or twenty stages, but then it would need that many separate sets of engineered fuel tanks, monitors, plumbing, and so forth. And each stage must be precisely ejected by “pyrotechnics,” or little explosives that fire precisely to release the stage—still more places where engineering flaws could hide and doom the flight. In the end, rocketry requires a negotiation between fuel efficiency (more stages) and reliability (fewer stages). Three or four stages formed the best compromise for the early decades of the space program, from the Jupiter and the Vanguard all the way to von Braun’s eventual triumph, the Saturn V.

  As military branches lobbied for their separate rockets, Khrushchev delighted in America’s panic. He used satellite success to emphasize a shift away from conventional arms. He said his countrymen must embrace the missile era, where they would lead all nations. And to rub salt into the fearful wounds of his enemies, he offered the American government his services if they wanted to put payloads into orbit.

  He wanted more success, and he pushed Korolev for another milestone. In early November, the rocket scientist delivered and the USSR proudly announced a second satellite, a true whopper named Sputnik II. It placed over one thousand pounds of payload into orbit, and since it carried the shell of its last stage as well, it orbited as a six-ton monster. Sputnik had scared the public, but Sputnik II alarmed military analysts. The Soviets, by all evidence, could deliver something the size of a nuclear weapon into space or wherever they pleased. And hinting at future ambitions, they also included the first mammal in orbit, as Laika the dog survived the violent rocket launch, and the Soviet Union broadcast her heartbeat to the world. As the press dubbed this new milestone “Muttnik,” the American public actually wondered if Laika might once again set four paws on Earth. But that was never in the Sputnik II flight plan; Laika died from overheating, after just a few hours in orbit. (Despite the loss of Laika, more dogs were on the way, some of whom survived a return to Earth, and Korolev was reportedly attached to his pioneering space dogs, grieving any loss.)14

  As Khrushchev crowed that the Soviet Union would surpass the United States economically within fifteen years, Life magazine featured Wernher von Braun on its November cover. He told them of the many letters from youths that he answered, always emphasizing the study of math and science. And with his audience firmly in mind, he relayed a different letter. “One lady wrote that God doesn’t want man to leave the Earth and was willing to bet me $10 he wouldn’t make it,” he said. “I answered that as far as I knew, the Bible said nothing about space flight but it was clearly against gambling.” He had largely won the nation over, and now the nation needed his help.

  A few days after Sputnik II, the U.S. government gave von Braun permission to start preparing one of his Jupiter rockets for launch but pulled up short of a “go ahead” order. He had threatened to resign if they didn’t let him move full speed ahead, and the army relented.15 But the navy’s Vanguard would still have the first opportunity to loft an American satellite into orbit—just a modest start, a three-pound device.

  Non-military facilities started tinkering in rocketry as well. By 1957, Marlowe Cassetti had left rural New York and was a newly minted engineer from Georgia Tech. He accepted a job running tests at the government’s aeronautical research labs in Langley, Virginia. After his earlier moment of rapture, with a flimsy model plane leaving his family’s kitchen floor, he finally had his hands on the real thing, working with a wind tunnel to measure the way an airplane wing cut and molded the rushing air. He recalls being surrounded at Langley by flight veterans of World War II. On hearing the news of Sputnik “they were all very much shaken by it.”16

  One such veteran had found his way to Langley after his tours on the USS Guavina. On a lark, Max Faget and his friend Guy Thibodaux had followed a job lead from Louisiana to Langley, Virginia. “Max called me,” Thibodaux recalled, “and he said his dad had a little car that had airplane tires on it at that particular time, because you couldn’t get tires for civilian automobiles. His dad told him he could have the car, and we’d go look for a job.”

  The boys interviewed with a mild-mannered but earnest aircraft engineer named Robert Gilruth. Years later, Gilruth would still chuckle and shake his head at the memory. He recalled that the two Louisiana kids “were kind of grubby.” Unshaven and wrinkled, they had been sleeping in Faget’s father’s car. Despite those first impressions, Gilruth would eventually call the day he interviewed and hired them the best day of his life. He quickly saw the zeal of the two young men, doing whatever needed to be done, from any engineering task to carrying boxes or brewing the morning coffee.17

  Faget became a force at Langley, working on the design of hypersonic aircraft, planes that would have to withstand speeds greater than the speed of sound. “You know, when I joined [Langley] in 1946,” Faget later said, “most of the people that came in . . . were young, very young people who had spent two, three, four years in the war. . . . I think the experience of the war gave everyone a sense of urgency . . . to get into jet-powered airplanes, get into supersonic airplanes and things like that.” Langley, long a pioneer in aircraft research, would soon become the central hub of the nation’s efforts to reach space.18

  Despite a rough-edged confidence that didn’t suffer fools, Faget was also never far from a smile and a laugh. (Authors Charles Murray and Katherine Bly Cox summarize his persona as a sort of “cheerful ruthlessness.”) And colleagues quickly learned they had a dreamer in their midst. He once stood on a high balcony overlooking the main Langley workshop floor. He had taped together pairs of paper plates and stood earnestly tossing them around the shop to settle among the busy machinists and technicians. One coworker, less familiar with Faget’s modus operandi, asked him what the heck he was doing. “I think these things will really fly,” Max said of the flying disk model. “We have some lift over drag in this thing.”19

  Faget and his colleagues organized a national conference on hypersonic aircraft, set for October 1957. “A couple of weeks before that meeting, the Russians put up their Sputnik,” he later said with a laugh. “Of course, that set us all back, you know. At that meeting the discussion then was . . . maybe we shouldn’t try to fly up to those velocities with airplanes, but maybe we ought to bypass the airplane role and go directly into rocketry.” But the discussions in late October of 1957 went further. “We talked about rocketing men up into orbital velocity and how to get them back.”20

  Soon after, Faget and a small group of his coworkers started taking mandatory night classes. They pivoted from things that flew at high speeds through the air to things that flew at even higher speeds above the air. They had to absorb the basics of space and astronomy, and there was no time
to lose. They held classes in a local elementary school. One night they took a break when Sputnik was due to pass. As they tried to spy it racing overhead, some of them began to have hushed conversations about putting a man in orbit. Not only was there a lot to learn, there was even more that was wholly unknown, beyond what could be taught. This stuff wasn’t in any textbook yet. In 1957, scientists had only speculative theories as to whether a person could survive in the weightlessness of space. What would happen to their organs, their blood vessels, and their brains without an “up” direction or the grounding of gravity?21

  The engineers ramped up efforts on Virginia’s nearby Wallops Island to study not only rocket launches but especially what would happen to a rocket cone as it zoomed back to Earth. “Wallops Island was a mosquito- and sand-fly-infested beach that had a bunch of wild ponies on it,” Faget’s friend Thibodaux recalled. “We used to have to shoo them off when we fired rockets.” The engineers would live there for days at a time in a set of Quonset huts. After long days of work, Gilruth, Faget, Thibodaux, and the others would stay up into the evening trading issues of Astounding Science Fiction.22

  On December 6, racing the Soviets and history’s calendar, the navy’s Vanguard rocket ignited and lurched upward from a Florida launch pad. With cameras rolling and broadcasters relaying their excitement, Vanguard suddenly stopped its ascent and slowly fell to the pad. Like a fainting heroine of black and white movies, it careened to one side. A fireball consumed the scene, as all the unused fuel and oxygen combined at once, blowing the tiny satellite clear of the inferno. Nestled in the nearby shrubbery, it assumed it must be in orbit and started beeping out its signals. As the nation’s spirits sank, the press labeled the disaster “Kaputnik,” “Stayputnik,” and so on. The term “missile gap” emerged in Congress and in the newspapers, as did the notion of a “space race.”23 Surely the Soviets would next put a man in space, and eventually, a fleet of spaceships with unimaginable powers.

  * * *

  i This boy from Iowa was eventual NASA engineer Steve Bales.

  ii The precise rocket names are not critical to our narrative here, and we will oversimplify rocketry’s rich family tree. In the early weeks of the space age, missiles from three branches of the military provided some of America’s only space rocket options: for instance, Atlas (air force), Vanguard (navy), and von Braun’s Jupiter (army).

  3

  1960—Silent Movies and Old-World Evenings

  By the start of 1960, Wernher von Braun had become a sort of national hero. His rocket, a modified Jupiter, had redeemed America in early 1958, placing a small satellite, Explorer 1, into orbit around Earth. Within weeks, von Braun’s face and (sanitized) life story graced the cover and pages of Time magazine. The following year, Notre Dame University honored him with their “Patriot of the Year” award. By the end of 1958, the military had given his team a green light on developing a new super-rocket, something much more powerful than the Jupiter series. And his outward ambition only grew; as the Soviets were now sending unmanned probes toward the Moon (their Luna series), von Braun manipulated his army bosses to the point that they drafted “Project Horizon,” a preliminary plan for a manned lunar garrison.1

  The town of Huntsville had blossomed. In one decade with von Braun and company building rockets, its population had quadrupled to seventy thousand. Formerly a cotton depot for northern Alabama, the town swelled with wave upon wave of scientists and engineers—it was morphing into “Rocket City.” And some of the new citizens, the ones of German extraction, wanted more of the comforts of home. The Huntsville Symphony Orchestra (now Alabama’s oldest and longest-running) emerged in 1955 with many of its forty members hailing from von Braun’s ranks.

  Young Marlowe Cassetti made regular work trips from Langley to Huntsville for coordinating the early launches. To his eyes, the rapid growth never disguised the town’s roots. “Can you imagine that place in the late fifties and early sixties? It was really a cow town kind of thing,” he says now. There were few options for lodging, and he usually stayed in an antiquated hotel downtown, a place with huge gaps under the transom-topped doors, awkward plumbing bolted to rooms as an afterthought, and no air conditioning to fight the summer heat. “It reminded you of a place from the 1930s. . . . I used to call it the Erskine Caldwell after the southern writer.” (Caldwell, author of Tobacco Road and other novels and short stories, highlighted social dysfunction in the American South.) But Cassetti appreciated that his government allotment of $16 per day went a long way in Huntsville, laying down a handful of change for a generous southern breakfast of ham, grits, and eggs.2

  By 1960, Cassetti, Pohl, Faget, and von Braun had joined forces under a new banner. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) emerged from the Congressional Space Act of 1958, a symptom of the national post-Sputnik panic. NASA owed its basic DNA to an older organization, Langley’s National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. (NACA had also formed in response to breathtaking technology, the first flights of the Wright brothers.)3 Cassetti notes that, from the start, none of the engineers pronounced the acronym: “I would use the analogy of the FBI,” he said. They would just spell it out, pronouncing each letter: N, A, S, A. The first he’d heard it spoken as “nasuh,” “nayza,” or “nasaw” was in a reporter’s radio broadcast. Whether pronounced or spelled, NASA quickly began absorbing relevant government laboratories around the nation, and von Braun’s army ballistic missile group looked like an essential piece. Despite the army’s reluctance, von Braun and company joined NASA in 1959, and von Braun, at the age of forty-eight, had his first non-military post since his college days. In a last nod to the army, Eisenhower agreed in 1960 to name von Braun’s own outfit after a recently departed five-star army general, George Marshall.4

  Wernher von Braun’s prestige within the U.S. government and his national profile continued to grow in 1960. A sentimental biopic, I Aim at the Stars, hit theaters that year, and a common joke emerged, again referencing his former employment: “I aim at the stars, but sometimes I hit London.”5

  Despite his excitement as America joined a space race, von Braun and his colleagues faced enormous challenges. His chief scientific advisor, Ernst Stuhlinger, set out some of the obstacles to space exploration in a clinical list. When first briefing their new NASA bosses from Washington, D.C., Stuhlinger said that, even ignoring the difficulty of lifting people into orbit, possible spacefaring ships would face many hazards that were still completely uncharted. While the atmosphere shields us from a great deal of radiation flying through space, a ship would lack such protection. What would space radiation, including all sorts of heavy, fast-moving particles, do to the electronics and materials of the spaceship, to say nothing of any humans inside? How often would a ship collide with asteroids, even tiny pebbles, moving at orbital speeds? Furthermore, how could a ship withstand the absurd temperature extremes in space? One side, facing the sun, would automatically start roasting at 250˚ Fahrenheit, while the same ship’s backside, facing the darker depths of space, would freeze to –250˚ Fahrenheit. And the weightlessness expected for a ship in orbit posed its own mysteries. Many mechanical systems and engines use fluids, and gravity helps us control them. We always know where the fluid will be: at or close to the bottom of its tank. But in orbit, away from Earth, fuel could float around wherever it wanted within its container; how would we convince it to move toward a specific valve and onward to an engine? Moving from humans and fluids, Stuhlinger listed an even more daunting set of material problems. In the vacuum of space, sealants would start evaporating around doors, windows, and seams. Various metals would violently expand and contract their sizes as they moved from the scalding, sunny side of Earth to the frigid, shaded side. He saw deficiencies everywhere.6

  Even in Huntsville’s earthly laboratories, problems with materials multiplied. To build ever more powerful engines, von Braun’s teams worked to perfect turbopumps that had no function other than rushing fuel and oxygen toward the blast chamber and
the controlled explosion providing the rocket’s power. But these turbopumps had to withstand unprecedented extremes of temperature, including the yin of liquefied oxygen mere inches from the yang of rocket fire. By the end of 1960, the team in Huntsville had suffered eleven dramatic pump failures as materials wilted during tests, leaving fuel and oxygen mixing in uncontrolled passion for one another. Violent explosions punctuated a number of these dead ends.

  But the Germans brushed the soot off and worked in the same logical stepwise approach they had used in World War II. A few new rocket engines did survive their “static” test phase (bolted in place). The first test of a new “Saturn” type of rocket stage—the type we’d need to go to the Moon—took place in the summer of 1960; it had roughly fifteen times more power than von Braun’s Jupiter series. And now the newly named Marshall Space Flight Center had a wholly different kind of impact on Huntsville and Alabama: a sonic wallop. The first Saturn model strapped eight rocket engines together. Skeptical engineers had labeled the concept of gathered engines “cluster’s last stand.”7 When the eight simultaneously roared to life, deep sound waves rushed outward in all directions. Engineers of that era talk of meetings suspended during the engine tests, watching the seconds tick past as their pencils vibrated on conference tables. Henry Pohl recalled engineers staggering about the test site and retching after an early Saturn test. Even for the sound below the range of human hearing, engineers felt the vibrations in their stomachs and ribs.

  Soon, townspeople for miles around reported similar effects. It felt like an earthquake: plaster chunks fell from walls; windows rattled and broke. All sorts of complaints made their way to the center from homes and businesses up to fifty miles away. A team of engineers took over both investigating these claims (e.g., “You say it made your porch fall off?”) and devising tests to minimize future damage. Near the test stand, they erected horns several feet wide, and they equipped a couple of vans with sensitive recording equipment. Before any Saturn rocket test, the horns would emit a low-toned, obnoxious squawk, and the vans, moving about town, would report the day’s sound results in various neighborhoods. The day-to-day difference was striking, as certain weather and cloud patterns reflected sonic blasts back to Earth with great swings of intensity. The squawking program helped the engineers call off certain tests and avoid most damage to the town. And citizens begrudgingly preferred the frequent honking to shattered glass.