But in the engineering trenches, reactions to Kennedy’s speech featured more variety. “I thought that was the dumbest thing I’d ever heard in my life,” says Henry Pohl. “I mean, you have to appreciate where we were back in that day and time. . . . [W]e still had vacuum-tube technology.” Pohl notes that most launches of America’s largest rocket were still ending in failure. And longtime Faget collaborator Caldwell Johnson summarized the abrupt shift as follows: “It’s one thing to sit around the table at noontime and play pinochle and bullshit. It’s another thing for the president of the United States to all of a sudden tell the world what you’re bullshitting about!” Many engineers noted the vast gap between what they had done so far (a brief lob of a man brushing against space) and what the nation said they now must do (a round trip of nearly five hundred thousand deadly miles). “It was just absolutely—we were incredulous,” Marlowe Cassetti said. He laughed at the memory. “It’s like, you know, I can think of a toddler taking a first couple of steps and being unsure, and then you say, ‘In a couple of years, he’s going to run a marathon.’ ”13
To get there, no matter which mode won out—direct or modular, with rendezvous at Earth or at the Moon—NASA knew they needed new rocket engines. Even the lightest possible versions of a Moon mission would need engines more powerful than those Korolev was building for the Soviets. The design and perfection of such monsters fell to Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center.
In fact, they were already working on such an engine, one that could, by itself, create a force equivalent to one-and-a-half million pounds (compared to about eighty thousand pounds from their earlier rocket engines). Such a thrust could hold aloft a large, three-mast clipper ship from the nineteenth century. Clustering a few of these engines in concert could, with luck, start a trip to the Moon. In the weeks before Kennedy’s challenge, the rocket team had surprisingly good news. A prototype of their new engine had survived a short test and marked a record thrust. They had a long way to go—further than they even knew—but they had a start on what would eventually become the giant F-1 engine. Given the short deadline (years instead of decades), the engineers decided to use existing principles, souping up the basics of von Braun’s V-2.
As Henry Pohl tells it, “One pound of [kerosene] fuel can lift 250 pounds for one second.” So, the math and the challenge follow. The new engine would thirst for torrents of kerosene and oxygen brought together at unprecedented speeds and volumes. There would be no normal sense of “flow” to it, in the end. Enormous pumps would force-feed fuel to the engine’s inferno.
Pohl recalls the first time he entered von Braun’s main conference room. “He had all of his people . . . in some kind of pecking order,” he says now. “But he had brass plates with their name on it with their place to sit. So each time they were sitting in the same seat.” Other engineers have described the shifting fog of cigarette smoke in the room. Their chief ran efficient meetings, projecting calm, charm, and respect, smiling through tense moments of debate. Contemporaries, in recalling von Braun, often note his listening skills. He sought each and every opinion from the assembled and welcomed questions. His co-workers and deputies felt they’d had a fair shake.
Pohl recalls the first time he saw von Braun speak. At a conference in the late 1950s, von Braun lectured on one of his passions: a permanent, rotating space station. “When he got through,” Pohl says, “he wanted to know if there were any questions, and I said ‘Yes, you can’t balance it.’ ” Henry had mounted his share of tractor and truck tires on the farm, and he knew it would be impossible to stabilize something with people and equipment moving around in it.
“Ah!” von Braun said. He rifled through his briefcase, found an extra slide and dropped it into his projector. He explained to Pohl that expertly placed water tanks would maintain the station’s balance.
The structure of von Braun’s organization reflected the structure of his team back in Germany, with separate laboratories exploring different aspects of rocket design, testing, or control. On his frequent visits, Marlowe Cassetti noted their incredible independence from one another, toiling away like separate fiefdoms. The laboratories, he says, “almost operated as standalone space centers.”14 The official history of the Moon rocket’s development, the NASA-produced book Stages to Saturn, notes that the center’s management style lacked a defining character but was “more of an amalgam of various concepts.”15 While the different laboratories had their own structure and style, all would agree that they shared a central principle: Managers, directors, and team leaders owned engineering skills themselves. They could roll up their sleeves, don lab coats, and place their hands on the equipment to probe and troubleshoot any technical detail.
No matter their independence, von Braun liked to visit the different laboratories, often unannounced. One of Henry Pohl’s first encounters with him started with a misunderstanding. “It was just about sundown, and this old ’51 OD Chevrolet . . . come up from the piney woods. We had a gravel road that came in from the Tennessee River.” Personal cars weren’t allowed anywhere close to the test lab. Henry went out with a megaphone in one hand, waving the other. “Get that thing out of here. . . . Get it out!” Pohl yelled. “He just turned, come driving right up to me. He got within ten feet of me before I realized who it was, and, of course, then I got tongue-tied.” But cordial as always, the center director wasn’t annoyed; he just asked Henry to show him his current work. Pohl took von Braun into the laboratory, where he was using a set of tiny thermometers to follow the way heat flowed through an engine system. Pohl described every detail, including new pieces he’d designed just for this task, and von Braun absorbed it all. “He said, ‘Very ingenious, ingenious,’ and went on off,” Henry says. “Got in his car and drove off somewhere else.”16 This pop-in approach wasn’t always welcome, and when it came to working with the many contractors who would build the pieces of the Moon rocket and its engines, von Braun’s center was known for invasive oversight and laying a heavy hand on a private company’s internal workings.
For someone in charge of building the world’s most powerful rocket system, von Braun could also be surprisingly flaky and even petulant around non-rocket technology. One coworker recalled fixing the color balance on a television in von Braun’s office. “What did you do? What did you do?” von Braun exclaimed, marveling at having actual colors instead of just sepia tones. “It’s been that way for five years!” Later in his life, von Braun would literally tear VCR machines apart when he couldn’t get them to function properly.
Overall, stories of von Braun losing his temper are rare. One arose when two of his colleagues continued sniping at each other, trying to score points and prove one another foolish. He barked at them to cease and desist. He closed the meeting and ordered his deputies to reconcile their views before they all next met. Another story saw von Braun anxiously awaiting a key film from orbit; he needed the footage to promote the work of his Marshall Space Flight Center. Scientist Tom Parnell received and cued up the reel for von Braun. But a problem struck the two of them as soon as they started the projector. The other NASA center, a newer outfit near Houston, Texas, had mounted the entire film backward, rendering it useless for von Braun’s purposes. Sharp invectives followed. “That’s the only time I saw him pissed off,” Parnell says. But the Houston people didn’t do this on purpose, did they? “I thought it was quite likely,” Parnell says. “There was an intense rivalry between the centers.”17
In 1961, NASA christened a new Manned Spaceflight Center, to be directed by Langley’s Bob Gilruth. Its aims were to coordinate the manned space missions, including the construction and testing of the spacecraft, the planning of the flights, including lunar explorations, and the training of the astronauts. Placing the new Manned Spaceflight Center for Gilruth and company involved a necessarily political process. Marlowe Cassetti recalls rumors of various sites, as they huddled over a U.S. map in their Virginia office.
The site selection committee followed a sup
posedly clear process. According to Marlowe, a winning site needed: ocean or deep-river access, because some large rocket and space craft pieces might need to be moved by ship; proximity to at least one major university; access to a substantial local workforce; and, among other things, year-round easy flights for the relatively new commercial airlines business. (Ease of travel increased the odds for a southern or western site.) Within a whirlwind of two weeks, a selection committee visited twenty-three sites in all. The top choice, after deliberations, was Tampa, Florida, where the air force had planned to close their MacDill base, making a large, developed site readily available. At the last moment, approaching mid-September, the air force opted to keep MacDill open, effectively removing Tampa from the list. The runner-up site became the top choice.18
On September 19, NASA announced the result: a swampy cattle pasture south of Houston, Texas. Here, they would build a new campus, the Manned Spacecraft Center (eventually renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center). As designed, the modern, multi-building facility could transition into a college campus after the possibly temporary space program came to a close.
Many people have long assumed that the center is only in this location because of Vice President Johnson’s preference, but a more likely influence came from Albert Thomas, the chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee, who happened to be a long-serving representative from Houston. Most accounts include local Rice University simply “donating” a large swath of pasture to the federal government for the new center. But the reality saw vintage Texas real estate in action. The Humble Oil Company donated the land’s surface to Rice University, while maintaining their rights to what they needed, the oil and gas below. The company enjoyed a big tax break for their generosity, and Rice pivoted to make a triple play: They kept some of the land, donated some of it to NASA, and sold another chunk to NASA for $650,000.19
This flood-prone area sitting between the small towns of Webster and Kemah, some of the flattest and most humid land on Earth (with a sticky, black “soil” the locals call “gumbo”), borders an opaque, dishwater body of water called Clear Lake. I share this homeland with thousands of other children from the Apollo era because of the 1961 federal decision. NASA’s new site was a segment of bayou country still rooted in rice farms, cattle, and shrimp boats. The land oozed various snakes and every size of insect a child could want. My earliest memories include hot nights on a screened porch, with the keen of cicadas so loud I wanted to cover my ears. It was a great climate for spending most childhood days outdoors. Kids could chase crawdads in the perpetually full drainage ditches and go fishing in all sorts of little ponds and creeks. But I also remember the droning of distant, growing freeways. NASA aside, Houston’s suburbs eventually ebbed to our doorsteps and overtook the area like a storm surge.
We knew it wasn’t beautiful, exactly, but even as an adult I was a little surprised to hear the reactions of the Space Task Group. Some of them moved from Virginia as soon as the site was announced. New York native Marlowe Cassetti will never forget it. “It was such a dismal looking place,” he says. “And I thought to myself this is the end of the world. It almost moved me to tears.” Marlowe’s colleague Hal Beck recalls coming from “gorgeous” Virginia and checking the new digs in 1961; he “drove down I-45 and took this dirt road over to the site. It was gloomy, dreary, ugly and all you could see around you were—nothing; shrubs, and no pretty trees, no anything.”20
With perfect timing, concurrent with NASA’s announcement, hurricane Carla churned through Texas in September of 1961, devastating many of the low-lying fishing communities surrounding Clear Lake. When Bob Gilruth and a Langley team visited the area one week after NASA’s announcement, they found debris everywhere. Pieces of structures littered the main pasture, and Carla had snapped some of the sparse trees in half. Engineer Aleck Bond recalled looking for houses with his wife, just a few months after Carla. “All you could see was bare slabs of homes that had been swept away by the hurricane. That was kind of disturbing. . . . We went back to Virginia, shaking our heads, wondering what are we really getting into going to a place like that. But we made the move.”21
The area surrounding NASA’s new site had little housing available. Some of the Langley group chose to live in a tiny Quaker community called Friendswood, because, while you couldn’t buy cigarettes in the local grocery store, at least they had trees.
While bulldozing and surveying started in the cow pasture, NASA hurriedly rented clusters of office space around Houston. “What a mess,” Faget’s design partner Caldwell Johnson recalled. “It was a building over here and a building over there. . . . One of them even was an apartment building, and they knocked all the doors off the different apartments so you could kind of walk between one and the other, you know, and sometimes your office would be in the kitchen. I mean, literally, we’d be in the kitchen.” This ramshackle reality couldn’t square with the high-tech gleam most Americans assumed at the time.22
Given the scope of the new center, the largely unspoken tensions multiplied between Gilruth’s enterprise and von Braun’s outfit in Huntsville. The rocketeers were now confined to just the first few minutes of any eventual Apollo mission: the launches. The new center, and Gilruth, would take over from there. Engineer and eventual center director Chris Kraft had nearly come to blows with von Braun in their first meeting, as they argued about the design of Mission Control. He wrote that von Braun “always seemed rankled that he couldn’t run the whole show.” But tensions ran more deeply than that.
“It seems strange to be working with the same people we hated during the war,” Kraft said to Gilruth over lunch one day. He asked Gilruth what von Braun was like. “Von Braun doesn’t care what flag he fights for,” Gilruth replied.23 The simmering conflict grew in 1961, with von Braun sensing a new bright line between Huntsville’s workhorse rocket on the bottom, and Houston’s more glamorous space capsule on top.
Despite the gritted teeth of the leaders, old enemies often fraternized well in the trenches. Henry Pohl speaks fondly of his old German bosses and coworkers in Huntsville. He and his wife named their son Karl, for instance, after imported engineer Karl Heimburg.
Pohl tells a story about working with a contractor on the engines. He and this fellow would sometimes go waterskiing on weekends, and Henry noted “all these little scars, about that big,” holding his fingers apart two inches, “all over his legs.” Henry inquired, and the man said he’d been a gunner in an American bomber over Germany. Because the airplanes sometimes grew stuffy, he and his flight mates wore shorts. But in battle, trying to ward off German fighters, the gunner would find himself “up to your waist in brass,” the red-hot metal casings ejected from the machine guns. When Henry’s German boss, Guenther Haukohl, learned of the man’s past, he asked for more detail. The American relayed his wartime whereabouts and missions.
“Ja, ja,” said Haukohl. “There was a full moon that night, clouds were at seven thousand feet. . . and those bombers were just on top of the clouds.”
“We never saw what hit us!” the American said.
“Ja, ja, ja!” said Haukohl (according to Pohl’s retelling, complete with affected German accent). The German had been flying an experimental jet-powered plane, attacking the American bombers at bewildering speed. The plane could only run for about twelve minutes at a time, but the pilot claimed he’d had three loads of fuel and downed three bombers that night.24 There seemed to be no hard feelings between the two, a scarred gunner and a blunt German who had once nearly killed him, as they now worked elbow to elbow on spaceflight.
In addition to Huntsville and Houston, another NASA effort bustled in the center of Florida’s Atlantic-facing coastline. The agency scrambled to build a Moon-worthy launch facility among the orange groves of Merritt Island, adjacent to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, site of various rocket launches since 1950. The military had decided to move some rockets there in 1947, after a Wernher von Braun mishap in the desert. From the White Sands launch facili
ty in New Mexico, one of his V-2–inspired rockets took a sickening wrong turn and left a deep crater, fifty feet across, near Juarez, Mexico. The Joint Chiefs determined that the Atlantic Ocean would provide a wider and more forgiving studio from which von Braun could paint the skies overhead.25
Writer Tom Wolfe described the Florida “soil so sandy that the scrub pines had trouble growing fifteen feet high, and yet malarial and so marshy that the cottonmouth moccasins stood their ground and stared you down,iv the sort of hopeless stone boondocks spit where the vertebrates give up” to the insects. “At night some sort of prehistoric chiggers . . . rose up from the sand and the palmetto grass and went for the ankles with a bite more vicious than a mink’s.” Of all places, this was to be the starting point for mankind’s loftiest ambitions.26
Engineers working near the Cape in the late 1950s still remark on the wildlife. Don Woodruff, charged with all things electrical for rocket launches there, said that when running or checking new electrical lines, to and from the rocket stands and control bunkers, “you made sure it was a cable you were grabbing and not a rattlesnake.” He described one dramatically ill-fated launch, with an Atlas going in a sickening, unplanned loop overhead, and slamming into the earth with an explosion not far from their block house. Woodruff and his colleagues went out to pick through the wreckage, littered with roasted snakes.27
Some said that working at the Cape in this era felt like living through a car wreck. In preparing for all the launches of the man-in-space program (Mercury), engineers worked absurd hours. One recorded an average of nineteen hours and seventeen minutes per day. NASA administrators had to order a cap of twelve hours per shift, in order to fight off exhaustion.28
The Apollo Chronicles Page 8