The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Engineers cleared just enough of the egg from their collective face to focus on what went wrong. Within weeks, the team had busily diagnosed the sensitive rocket’s premature shutdown and prepared another test. Just in time for Christmas, they had their first success, lifting one of Faget’s empty capsules into space and having it safely parachute into the Atlantic Ocean. The rocket worked. The capsule endured its moments above the atmosphere without leaking air. The heat shield kept it from burning up on return. Finally, the capsule survived impact on the waves and floated long enough to share its story. NASA had wobbled to its feet.

  * * *

  i The original blunt-body idea is credited to Dr. Harvey Allen, working at the Ames Research Laboratory in the 1950s. Faget turned it into a viable space-faring module.

  4

  1961—A Toddler’s Marathon

  Max Faget recalled some of the earliest discussions of man-to-Moon missions, starting within months of the formation of NASA. On short notice, NASA headquarters asked him how he would recommend flying to the Moon. “So I spent a couple of hours before I went to Washington that time, thinking about it,” he said.

  A team of engineers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, also attended. They had already been considering Moon missions, planning to send unmanned probes (the “Surveyor” program) to land there and take measurements. They recommended their ballistic approach for any manned landings as well. “You know what the Surveyor does,” Faget recalled. “It comes screaming in at the Moon at something like about nine thousand feet per second [over six thousand miles per hour], and when you get about twenty miles high, they turn on the rockets and slow down.” Faget saw that as too risky, especially with humans on board: slow down too soon, and you’ll waste all your fuel; slow down too late, and you’ll slam the mission to pieces on impact.

  He proposed a more cautious, step-wise approach. “I got up and said, ‘Well, the first thing you’d do is you’d fly around the Moon,’ and told them how much velocity that would take and all that, made the typical figure-eight drawing, you know. You’d just go out there, fly by, and you’d come on back, and we wouldn’t go very close to the Moon. We didn’t know exactly what the gravity number of the Moon was.” He compared it to something more familiar: flying a new breed of airplane. “First you taxi it, then you take off, and you maybe go up to four or five thousand feet, you fly around the airport a couple of times.”1

  A debate emerged over the exact conveyance that would land humans on the Moon and bring them back. At first glance, most people assumed that we would build a sleek ship, launch it up into space using a three- or four-stage rocket, fly it to the Moon, carefully land the ship there, butt side down, later launch again (an easier launch, since the Moon’s gravitational pull is just one sixth that of Earth), and finally fly home. Such visions spilled from science fiction magazines, with silvery, planet-hopping ships. Why complicate matters?

  All these single-craft approaches were called “direct ascent” in the debates, but a single-ship trip to the Moon faced a number of practical hurdles. First, the rocket would have to hold all its fuel for the trip to the Moon and back, including—and this is the real killer—all the fuel needed to lift itself from the Moon. Meanwhile, to start its journey with one of von Braun’s new and evolving Saturn rockets, the entire ship would also have to be somewhat thin, relatively speaking, to fit on top of the rocket. To be appropriately skinny while also holding the crew of humans, all their supplies, and all the round-trip fuel, this spaceship would then need to be tall. That created another problem: a necessarily unsteady spaceship. We couldn’t assume the Moon’s surface would be perfectly flat, and a tall ship risked tipping over, forever trapping astronauts in a lunar casket. More fundamentally, however, the planned Saturn rocket series could never lift something heavy enough for a direct ascent plan in the first place. The Huntsville team began exploring an even more ambitious rocket, called Nova, but in 1961 it was nearly science fiction.

  The main competition to the straight-shot approach suggested multiple rocket launches, each lifting a piece of the eventual Moon-bound ship, and then having these pieces link together as they orbited Earth. After coming together, the unified ship would then trek to the Moon and back. This was called “Earth orbit rendezvous” and introduced a new, risky maneuver that led many engineers to shake their heads: take two (or more) objects moving faster than any human-made object had ever moved—say ten or twenty thousand miles per hour as they ran laps around Earth—and have these objects knock into one another and link up without damaging the thin hulls, explosive tanks of fuel, or any of their fragile contents.

  Myriad other technical complications followed. Objects could inhabit an infinite number of different elliptical and circular shapes to orbit a planet. How could we launch two different objects and get them to inhabit exactly the same orbit so that they could dock with one another? Also, to make such predictions, our ability to compute the arcs of these ships would have to dramatically improve. Our planet is not actually a perfect sphere—it suffers a middle-age bulge about its waist—and since Earth is not a completely smooth rock inside, its gravitational pull varies slightly from location to location. Real orbital paths are, in their minutiae, much more complicated than they would be around a perfectly spherical and uniform planet. Furthermore, Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t quite end at a certain height; it more fades away. So, any object making loops around Earth is still encountering a thin, wispy gaseous atmosphere that is slowing the object down. We’d need to perfectly understand that if we wanted to achieve rendezvous.2

  Even with its intimidating levels of complexity, Earth orbit rendezvous looked more possible than direct ascent in early 1961. But a sort of stepchild of Moon plans lingered on the sidelines. “Lunar orbit rendezvous” also involved a modular approach, with multiple ships taking on different roles and equipment. In this case, a special moon vessel, exceedingly light and nimble, would depart from the main spaceship, descend on a “lunar excursion,” and then pop all or part of itself back upward. Once it rejoined and attached itself to the main ship, they would travel back to Earth. A light little craft descending to the Moon featured a certain logic because it took much less fuel to launch itself again. But the idea was the craziest yet. “No one wanted to do rendezvous at the Moon,” Faget said, “simply on the basis that that’s a pretty ticklish maneuver.” If the engineers hadn’t yet figured out how to track a spaceship and reliably communicate with it as it orbited Earth, why would they try a complicated maneuver with two ships that were a hundred times farther away? Thinking through these little craft in lunar orbit, engineers realized that any ships orbiting the Moon would spend substantial time blocked by the Moon itself, completely cut off from any radio link to Earth.i

  Through the spring of 1961, these thoughts of a Moon mission were speculative, perhaps decades away. The former president had expressed reluctance over a big-money space program. The newer administration hadn’t shown much excitement for space either, but it did strike a different, more futuristic tone. As President Eisenhower left office, he granted an interview, wherein he worried over the growing clout and intermingling of technology and defense. “When you see almost every one of your magazines, no matter what they are advertising, has a picture of the Titan missile or the Atlas,” he said, “there is . . . almost an insidious penetration of our own minds.”3

  The incoming White House politely viewed that thinking as outmoded. John F. Kennedy and his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, largely ignored Eisenhower’s warnings of industrial technology and large, government-funded scientific and military projects. Many historians have put Kennedy and Johnson among the first and most influential disciples of a “technocracy”—better living, better governance, better everything, through a systematic embrace of technology.

  Despite a bright-eyed new administration, job candidates did not line up in 1961 to direct what was seen as a struggling new space agency. Johnson later recalled seventeen dif
ferent individuals saying “no thanks” to running NASA. And after he supposedly twisted the arm of one James Webb to take the reins, Kennedy informed the new director to expect no new funding for that Moon mission idea. In early 1961, Kennedy ranked the fledgling “Apollo” project—named just months earlier for the chariot-riding God of prophecy, light, and progress—as a fanciful solution in search of a problem.4

  More practically, NASA made progress with near-Earth plans. They’d successfully, if traumatically, kept a chimpanzee named Ham alive during a shot into space. Once aloft, Ham had work to do, as NASA doctors sought to understand how well his mind worked in orbit. He was to get food rewards for completing tasks correctly and little electric shocks to his feet for wrong answers. Unfortunately, the experiments went haywire in orbit, regularly zapping poor Ham no matter what he did. While Ham’s spaceflight and return to Earth were awful enough, his recovery at sea might have been the most violent. He hit the water so hard that his capsule sprang a leak. And of their many problems to solve, NASA had underrated the difficulty of snatching a floating capsule from the rolling sea. “When you pick [the capsule] up,” said recovery engineer Peter Armitage, “it becomes essentially a wrecker’s ball, and it bangs into the side of the ship. Poor Ham got more G’s [strong accelerations] from the recovery than the whole space flight.”5

  But the program inched forward. An Atlas missile, with its humbling new belly band, stayed in one piece and carried another unmanned version of Faget’s one-seater capsule into space and back. By springtime, they were ready to risk the real thing: lofting a human on the same, brief arc.

  On April 12, another shock arrived: The USSR commandeered the world’s headlines again and beat NASA to another punch. The Soviet Union launched a small Vostokii craft into a single orbit of Earth. Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space and the first to orbit Earth. Soviet engineers had put the entire mission on autopilot. If Gagarin had lost consciousness, or in case he’d entered some sort of delirium, they didn’t want him to screw things up. (Rocket designer Korolev felt for Gagarin, however. He’d created a sort of manual override option and slipped a 3-digit “unlock” code into a sealed envelope in case Gagarin needed to adjust controls manually.) Though photographs weren’t released for days, the Soviets announced that their mission had returned Gagarin safely to Earth. American engineers debated how their rivals were able to set a heavy spaceship directly on land, but in details that only emerged years later, Gagarin and other early cosmonauts ejected from their spacecraft and parachuted to the ground while their ships made violent impacts with Earth.

  Reporters called NASA’s PR representative at 4:00 a.m. local time in Virginia seeking a response. “We’re all asleep down here,” he accurately said, but the negative headlines then wrote themselves.6

  Later that morning, a young President Kennedy, still getting his feet set in a most difficult job, paced his White House office. Unbeknownst to most Americans, he faced debilitating health problems, including a long fight against an adrenal illness. (Not long after Kennedy’s post-war tour of Germany, a British physician had worried that the young American might not live another year.) According to his wife’s complaints in 1961, he was also obtaining under-the-table Demerol—a narcotic painkiller with known psychological side effects—from a secret service agent. He stood and composed a rapid-fire, multi-point memo full of questions for Vice President Johnson. His first item: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic result in which we could win?” Another item in this memo was also telling for the future of NASA employees and those of hundreds of contracting companies. “Are we working twenty-four hours a day on existing programs? If not, why not?” Johnson, over the next couple of weeks, composed a reply. He spoke with a number of people, including Wernher von Braun and, interestingly, the president of media company CBS.7

  But before Johnson could deliver his results to Kennedy, another PR disaster greeted America the following week. Kennedy okayed the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, which failed as completely as it did quickly. Engineers recalled working to set up a communications station in Guaymas, Mexico—one of about a dozen stations in the works around the globe, so that NASA could stay in regular contact with orbiting space ships. They had just finished an embassy briefing that spring on how to build a working rapport with local government officials. First, the engineers heard of the Russians putting a man in space, and they worried the locals might think NASA was second-rate. A week later, America had invaded a nearby Spanish-speaking neighbor, while the engineers awkwardly cleared their throats and continued to negotiate an allegedly peaceful communications station.8

  Johnson’s recommendations on space arrived on Kennedy’s desk a week later. They included a dramatic increase in funding for NASA, and he noted that, in particular, a Moon landing would have “great propaganda value.” While we can convincingly connect a path from von Braun’s advocacy to Johnson’s spring 1961 statement that “second in space is second in everything,” and from there to Kennedy’s Moon decision, other channels were active as well.iii Bob Gilruth, the leader of the Space Task Group, recalled direct talks with President Kennedy in spring of 1961. “Kennedy came along and said, ‘Look, I want to be first. Now do something.’ I said, ‘Well, you’ve got to pick a job that’s so difficult, that it’s new, that they’ll [the Soviets] have to start from scratch. . . . Going to the Moon will take new rockets, new technology, and if you want to do that, I think our country could probably win.’ ” Both von Braun and Gilruth had major influences, by all appearances, but von Braun may have had more impact on the eventual timeline. For years, he had produced a steady stream of ambitious goals with date stamps, and his reply to Johnson emphasized the possibility of getting to the Moon before the year 1970.9

  A week later, a NASA test flight went awry. An Atlas rocket held together, but this time it shot too straight. Engineers typically have rockets launching from Florida roll and turn as they rise, flying out over the Atlantic on their way to space. (This practice moves a mission toward an orbital path, and it also avoids a failing rocket taking out hundreds of unsuspecting Floridians.) But on April 25, the rocket’s internal guidance system failed and it never altered its course. After watching the rocket go straight up above Florida for about forty seconds, NASA’s control team sent a destruct signal so that it wouldn’t hurt anyone; the mission became an expensive firework. As a silver lining, Faget’s escape tower worked perfectly, rocketing an empty capsule away from the Atlas explosion. The capsule then drifted by parachute to the sea, where NASA recovered it for use in later missions.

  Cold War paranoia infected the aftermath of every misfire. A mysterious Russian “fishing trawler” had started attending launches, floating near Florida. Some engineers openly wondered if the boat, bristling with antennae, might be sending disruptive signals, but NASA never found evidence of foul play.

  Meanwhile, engineers fine-tuned a rocket for, at last, launching an American into space—not a chimp but a human being. Cassetti, Pohl, and their colleagues did their best to push all the earlier rocket explosions from their minds.

  On May 5, NASA learned that while the normal parade of countdown delays was not necessarily a problem for machines, it might take its toll on a human being sitting within a tiny capsule, seventy feet above the ground, with everyone watching and waiting. Some spectators of that launch said they became increasingly concerned about the poor, brave astronaut, Alan Shepard. After a number of hours, our first astronaut finally, with no complaints, urinated in his spacesuit. Despite thinking of every possible obstacle, the engineers, in planning what would be a very short flight, hadn’t thought of a rocket-ready bedpan. Finally, the countdown made it past every delay. The rocket from Huntsville lit and held together. The mission’s fifteen-minute parabolic arc into space took
Shepard about one hundred miles east and safely plopped him and the capsule in the Atlantic Ocean as a wholly new type of American hero. The nation cheered its first astronaut.

  The good news encouraged President Kennedy and his inner sanctum. In preparing a major speech for a joint session of Congress on May 25, they decided to include a space-related announcement as a ninth and final bullet point. While we now remember this speech as promising to land a man on the Moon and bring him back to Earth by the end of the decade, that was appended to fifty minutes detailing progress and challenges, continent by earthly continent. The Apollo goal, as announced to the world in 1961, sat buried in the context of battling the spread of communism across the globe.10 As he committed America to the Moon, Kennedy also committed to the “Alliance for Progress,” sending money and agents into South America in hopes of short-circuiting leftist uprisings, and he spoke of increased activity against communists in Vietnam.11 If the full-court, anti-communist agenda stretched across the globe, why not extend it beyond the atmosphere? For Kennedy and Johnson, the space program would establish a statement of superiority and proof of principle for peoples of the world who teetered on the fence, in terms of which superpower and which system they would follow.

  We might assume today that the NASA engineers would have reacted to the public Moon pronouncement with cheers, and some, like von Braun and his inner circle, were indeed very happy. No city was more excited by the events of early 1961 than Huntsville, Alabama. At a celebration of the first American astronaut in space, von Braun quieted a boisterous crowd in Rocket City’s Courthouse Square for an impromptu speech. “We will go farther and farther,” he promised them, “eventually landing on the Moon.”12