The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  The engineers devised careful sonic measurements near the rocket as well. They set up little orchards of carefully spaced microphones in the lawn near the test stand. In this way, they monitored exactly which directions were getting the loudest sounds.8

  It was an earlier, smaller type of engine test that had snared young Henry Pohl and changed his life. By 1960, Pohl’s attention to detail and inexhaustible curiosity continued to accumulate responsibility. He recalls a typical Saturday night, still turning wrenches at 11:00 p.m. “We had a [liquid oxygen] valve froze up, and trying to get it thawed out, when one of the technicians came to me and says, ‘Henry, you ought not be up here tonight. You ought to be in downtown Huntsville having a good time.’ ” Pohl paused, thinking but not replying. “And I really couldn’t sit there and explain to him that there was nothing in this world that I wanted to do worse than what I was doing then. I was up there that Saturday night because I enjoyed it. . . . I was hooked on those rocket engines.”

  At about this time, Pohl met and started dating a school teacher named Helen. Years later, she liked to tell their children about their first date, an outing so dull and nerdy that it almost didn’t lead to a second date. Henry took her—where else?—on a tour of the Marshall Space Flight Center.

  Pohl had just completed a special project for von Braun, building a one-twentieth scale model of a Saturn rocket’s first, most powerful stage. It was more than just a proof of principle. Such a model let the engineers study possibly catastrophic problems in great detail, with a fraction of the risk and expense. “So I got the job of developing some model rockets, small ones, and clustering eight of those little rockets in a thirteen-inch circle diameter,” Pohl said later. “I’d never designed a rocket engine, didn’t know much about them. . . . I checked out all the books that I could find. . . . I’d stay up ’til two o’clock in the morning studying those things and playing with them.” With this scale model, the engineers could test the entire first stage of a Saturn in any environment they wanted, including in a vacuum (simulating high altitude or space), or in a wind tunnel (simulating a rocket punching through the lower atmosphere).

  His model of eight clustered little engines eventually worked flawlessly, and with a number of tiny sensors placed throughout the model, the Huntsville team came to understand the spread of heat through a rocket’s business end. They then used Pohl’s model to examine a crucial challenge: deflecting a rocket’s output, be it on a test stand or in an actual launch. Several early Saturn rockets had destroyed themselves with their own exhaust. When an engine’s super-hot leftovers linger or return to the blast chamber, they can overheat and rupture the entire engine.

  Contrary to what a layperson might expect (and contrary to what several leading newspapers had published in the mid-twentieth century), the billowing exhaust of a rocket does not functionally “push” against a rocket pad to provide lift. If that were true, the engine wouldn’t lift a rocket once it was airborne, to say nothing of firing in space, with nothing to push against. Instead, the rocket is literally throwing pieces of itself in one direction, so the rest of it will necessarily move in the opposite direction. Picture a child on ice skates, throwing rocks at one side of a lake only to find herself sliding toward the other.

  Given that a rocket doesn’t need its exhaust to push against a launch pad, the pad usually includes a large hollow underneath, aiming to keep the exhaust from disastrously fouling the engines. For smaller rockets, a deep cavity is good enough. For the types of engines in the enormous Saturn series, there was still trouble brewing, as Henry Pohl’s model discovered. A normal, flat-bottomed cavity (even a deep one) would just bounce the exhaust right back into the engine. Henry and his colleagues came up with a solution, and it was not unlike a plow blade, with a long curve on either side, splitting the exhaust and gently ushering it out to side vents underneath the launch pad. This worked well for Pohl’s model, and NASA eventually incorporated this solution for their launch facilities in Florida.

  The rocket model turned out to be a showpiece for Wernher von Braun, and when he ordered a short film summarizing the project, Pohl became a movie producer. “So I took mostly test film, and I’d go home at night and I’d sit there,” he said, “and I’d spool it back and forth and . . . back then you’d cut and glue it together.” He took a voice recorder and narrated the film and handed it over to his bosses. They liked it, but “of course, they didn’t like my voice, the way I talked.” Henry still has a copy of this film, in its finished form with tell-tale 1959 “I’m narrating a serious project” voice. Missing is Henry’s cayenne-and-vinegar south Texas twang. But we get to see young Henry, slender and intense, assembling his model. The plumbing for the engines looks like the intertwined roots of an ancient tree, and you wonder if this thing could actually work until they light it up and all eight fire in perfect unison.9 (See Figure 3.1.)

  figure 3.1 Henry Pohl in a 1959 NASA film detailing a small-scale working model of a Saturn rocket. (Still taken from footage provided by Henry Pohl.)

  At about this time, Bobbie Brown, having changed his named officially to Robert Brown, took a new job in Florida. As so many Americans did in the mid-twentieth century, my father used the GI Bill as a climbing rope from poverty. He’d enlisted in the navy during the Korean War. Far from the battle lines of the Korean peninsula, he learned the world of electronics, using sonar to track and chase Soviet submarines in tense games of cat and mouse around the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico. After his four-year term, he used the GI Bill to complete a physics degree back home in Louisiana, and by 1960 he was fine-tuning missiles for government contractor Honeywell. My mother still tells a story of their first hurricane season near Tampa Bay, Florida, where storm winds blew rain through the cinderblock walls of their small rental.

  Robert liked the work, despite its old-school industrial setting. He and the other young engineers worked all day at their desks and tables in a large open room, with supervisors a floor above, literally overseeing the work through a glass window. He was tasked with “inertial guidance,” a big topic for missiles and rockets alike, starting with von Braun and moving into true spaceships. Once an object leaves the ground, how does it know up from down and north from south? How can it tell where it is or how far it has traveled? In particular, how can a rocket discern any of this without eyes?

  Remote control, with ground-based engineers constantly detecting and sending information to the missile, including correctives like “a little to the left,” becomes impractical for long-range flights. Instead, self-guided missiles use clever devices and a few calculations to orient themselves. The primary device is a gyroscope, simply a glorified spinning top. As a precisely machined metal sphere rotating rapidly within a well-oiled pocket, the gyroscope always maintains an “up” direction. Imagine a fast-spinning top on a cutting board; if we tilt the cutting board a bit, the top still points directly to the ceiling. Similarly, as a missile changes its direction, the gyroscope simply pivots in the oil, maintaining its original “up.” (A spinning object always seeks to maintain its spin direction; this principle also helps a well-thrown football, or a rifle bullet, maintain its trajectory without tumbling.) By using a few gyroscopes, with each one pointing and spinning in a different direction, a missile (or a rocket) can always know up from down, left from right, and forward from backward. These become even more important once an object ventures into the completely disorienting realm of space. Another device benefiting a missile or spaceship is an “accelerometer.” It detects how motion changes when an object speeds up or slows down. If such a device, placed in your car, carefully records each lurch, each speeding up, each turn, and each stop, it can know precisely how far you’ve traveled and in what direction. (Humans have their own inertial guidance devices at work in the inner ear; symptoms of vertigo, for instance, occur when the inner ear falls out of whack.)

  One of my father’s jobs was to make sure these guidance instruments would keep functioning at altitudes high enough
to flirt with the edge of space. He recalls battling a leaking instrument box. To keep functioning at high altitude, the electronics needed a normal envelope of air, just like the original Sputnik, but no matter what he tried, air would start escaping the box when they put it in a vacuum chamber. Finally, in scrutinizing an access plate on top of the box, he removed a leaky rubber gasket and turned it upside down, completely against its designed orientation. “That fixed the leak,” he says. Those particular instruments continued to fly in tests and launches for years to come, all with their gaskets upside down.

  The rocket work of 1960 served two masters: national defense (trying to bridge the supposed “missile gap” with the Soviets) and the space race. And the Soviet Union showed no signs of slowing. Unknown outside Khrushchev’s and Korolev’s inner circles, they had faced some catastrophic failures as they pushed for further humiliations of America. In one case, Korolev’s cluster of five rockets came unhinged after the central one exploded, sending the four supporting engines sketching their own random trails through the air, like snakes loosed from the head of Medusa. In another, the Soviets suffered what is still the deadliest rocket accident of any nation: the Nedelin disaster. In the fall of 1960, Khrushchev wanted a spectacular ballistic missile test to coincide with his famously bombastic visit to the United Nations in New York. The Soviets set Korolev aside for the moment, using a rival scientist’s rocket that was capable of delivering heavier warheads, something to put a proper scare into the Americans. Shortly before launch, Soviet engineers detected something amiss and stopped the countdown. As technicians swarmed the launch pad, looking to find the problem, a fire burst forth on the second stage. Suddenly, an angry flood of burning rocket fuel cascaded onto the pad and the doomed technicians. Records released in contemporary times list a death toll of 165, including the supervising military official, Nedelin. The Soviet control of information hid these events for decades to come.

  What the American public heard about the 1960 Soviet rocket program was one new accomplishment after another. Now the Russians could take live dogs (collected like true members of the proletariat, from the streets of Moscow), have them pant their way around Earth for an orbit or two, and then return safely to the ground, alive and ready for kibble. The Soviets also put a mannequin in orbit, hinting of things to come. It seemed that they’d soon have a comrade alive in space, looking down on the heartland of America, smirking at inferior engineers and helpless politicians.10

  Such fears stoked America’s already restless presidential election that year. Life magazine asked a series of questions about “our national purpose.” The editors noted the roaring economy but asked, “What now shall Americans do with the greatness of their nation?” One presidential candidate emphasized that the Soviet menace might short-circuit the postwar success of America. Many citizens of Earth, John F. Kennedy said, “are not at all certain about which way the future lies,” but they saw two clear paths, and the way of communism beckoned. “The first vehicle in outer space was called Sputnik, not Vanguard. . . . The first canine passengers in space who safely returned were named Strelka and Belka, not Rover or Fido, or even Checkers.”11 The latter pooch belonged to Kennedy’s rival in the presidential race, Richard Nixon. Kennedy, who narrowly (to put it kindly) won the election that year, promised to challenge communism on all fronts, from Asia to South America, and from the sea floor to outer space.

  And what progress could NASA claim by the end of 1960? At the agency’s birth in 1958, Robert Gilruth, the long-time veteran of the Langley flight research program, brought together what he called a “Space Task Group”: thirty-seven male engineers, and eight female technical secretaries, literally called “computers.” Gilruth himself was the oldest person involved, just entering middle age. By the end of 1960, this group had grown to about six hundred people, and their first main task was to shoot a human being into space and retrieve him more or less alive.

  Gilruth would guide a lot of NASA’s manned spaceflight efforts through the end of the Moon missions in 1972. As Space Task Group member and eventual NASA center director Chris Kraft has written, “No man of space did more or received less credit than Robert R. Gilruth.”12 There are several key aspects worth noting here, at the ground floor of the NASA program. First, Gilruth favored administrators with all the grease stains, burns, and reflexes that came from building devices and fixing machines themselves as engineers. Next, Gilruth was excellent at hiring people who could do things he could not. Far from wanting to surround himself with the comfort of slightly inferior clones, he sought out smarter people (when available) and certainly people with skills he lacked. He was also incredibly persuasive, giving opposing points of view a full listen before calmly sharing his own. Gilruth told his troops in 1960 that “the most important” aspect of their work would be that “designs, procedures, and schedule must have the flexibility to absorb a steady stream of change” (emphasis added), as they learned more about “space problems.”13 He could not have been more prescient.

  Though it may be difficult to believe today, when he started recruiting young talent to the Space Task Group, many engineers were leery of chaining themselves to the novel idea of space missions—older engineers warned younger ones that space would be a flash in the pan and a sure dead end for their careers. Cathy Osgood, one of the first women to join NASA’s efforts, recalls sitting with her husband, trying to make the decision. He had a job offer from NASA, where he could help them establish a number of remote communications stations at strategic and hopefully friendly spots around the globe. (It was a wholly new problem, with any orbiting spaceship spending most of its time out of touch with North America.) But he also had an offer from the navy that would land him and his young family in sunny San Diego. “So what we did,” she recalls, “we had a long legal pad and we made lists of each job, its pros and cons, and what it meant to us as a couple, of what it meant to our family, and what it meant to our future. It had to differ by ten percent for us to make a decision.” How did they measure ten percent on a list like that? Osgood pauses and then speaks of her husband. “He was a very interesting person. He graduated from MIT in chemistry.”

  The couple went over and over their list, trying to quantify this big decision, but they could not reach the required ten-percent threshold. Then her husband’s parents visited for the holidays, “and they started talking all about what was in the news about space,” she says. “I hadn’t paid attention to it, Sputnik and all that. I was busy and had kids to take care of.” Her in-laws’ enthusiasm tipped the balance. Her husband took the NASA job, based in Virginia, and Cathy joined the agency as well.

  Osgood became one of the female computers, performing calculations equivalent to what we might do today with a spreadsheet program. “You’d multiply column one by column two and that sort of thing,” Osgood says. “We were just crunching numbers, and then we had to plot it all by hand.” Starting in the 1930s, Langley had employed groups of mathematically skilled women to support the computation-intensive grind of aerodynamics research. The need for their reliable math skills provided a unique opportunity for women at the time, though their work was sometimes overlooked. (And until 1958, the work was segregated as well, with separate wings for white and black computers.) Even inside Langley, many staff members passing by these wings thought the women were performing routine secretarial work.

  Just as Osgood joined the all-female computer squad, the Space Task Group cautiously began using a new type of equipment, namely an electronic computer. Engineer Hal Beck recalls everyone gathering as they “oohed and aahed about the wonder of flashing lights and how fast it could add two numbers.” But the humans were by no means out of their jobs. Early electronic computers were not especially reliable, and humans frequently double-checked and corrected the electronic calculations. In addition, an enormous early IBM machine could spare none of its scarce memory to display results. It would print out its raw lists of numbers, and the team of women computers would then turn that into
displayed data, including hand-drawn plots of rocket paths, rocket speeds, and capsule orientations in space.14

  I’ve asked a number of members of the Space Task Group about the relationship between men and women at Langley and between white and black employees. They emphasize witnessing and experiencing respect flowing in all directions, and, as one said, “The government already had quite a few rules for how you were supposed to treat one another” by 1960. But many engineers admit to hearing “vernacular” in the workplace, referencing an array of period terms that today range from uncomfortable to unacceptable. But they all return again and again to what united everyone: the intense focus on the work, on getting things exactly right. Langley—the roots of NASA—tended to celebrate intelligence in any package.

  Langley employees recall mixing socially across gender and color lines in the mid-1950s. At the dawn of NASA, it was especially poignant that a keen African American mathematician like Katherine Johnson could share a telephone, or a slide rule, or a lunchtime game of bridge with her white male colleagues at Langley, while her daughters had to attend a segregated high school. On the one hand, she could openly discuss the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision with white colleagues, who tended to agree: It was high time to integrate the schools. On the other hand, in 1958, Virginia’s governor chained the doors of any school seeking to obey the Court’s integration order.15