The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  With an accelerating space race, there was no time to waste on Merritt Island. They would need ridiculous facilities, on the scale of the Great Pyramids, rising from soft coastal marshes and scrubland. They would need an assembly space, where pieces and stages of a Saturn rocket, along with a Moon-ready spacecraft, could gingerly come together, out of the weather—a garage, in essence, that could easily house the Statue of Liberty. For the fires of a Saturn launch, they would need a solid metal flame deflector, shaped like a plow blade, forty feet high. Rising above it, they required a launch tower about four hundred feet tall, with sturdy, retractable arms that would release the rockets to space.

  Given ambitions of a biblical scope, engineers weren’t the only overworked employees. Two unions staged walkouts in late 1960. Wernher von Braun met directly with the union members one November evening. He emphasized helping NASA maintain its commitment to the nation, but found himself shouted down. A strike of 650 electricians, plumbers, and carpenters followed around Thanksgiving. NASA retreated, agreed to mediation, and hired a labor counselor.29

  Aside from the structures, engineers also had to figure out how to transport an assembled rocket from its gigantic garage to a launch pad. Why would they try to move an enormous, expensive, teetering rocket—350 feet high but only about thirty feet wide? “They designed the Cape for thirty or forty launches a year,” my father says. This “mobile launch” concept, championed by Wernher von Braun, guided facilities planning. While a team of engineers would someday be launching one rocket, another team could be safely preparing another in an assembly building a few miles away. Instead of just assembling rockets on the pad and shooting them off one at a time, a mobile system allowed a much faster turnaround time. Hypothetically, even a major launch disaster could be swept aside while a new rocket and its own tower, undamaged, rolled out a week later. In fact, von Braun envisioned launching a major Saturn rocket every two weeks. The Moon was always just stop number one for von Braun. He assumed a major space station would follow, and then a trip to Mars. Once we started, logic and momentum would never let us stop.

  In 1961, NASA didn’t have many compelling ideas of how to actually move one of these rockets, bolted together and upright, several miles toward a launching pad. Would they build a special rail line, use some sort of fat barge on a canal, or what? Even if they moved one of these rockets without fuel, it weighed about two hundred tons (the weight of twenty stacked elephants, or two adult blue whales balanced upright). Engineers calculated that it would fracture the steel wheels of a rail car. Even just moving the individual rocket stages to Florida left engineers shaking their heads. One Huntsville team seriously considered using dirigibles to move chunks of the rocket across the country to the Cape.30

  A very different sort of conundrum, spanning the globe, saw major progress in 1961. At the inception of NASA, engineers knew that a launch from Florida, heading east, would lose radio contact with Cape Canaveral in a matter of minutes, and an orbiting astronaut, even with a carefully chosen loop around Earth, would only fly over American soil for a tiny fraction of each ninety-minute orbit. At the time of NASA’s birth, however, no global communication system existed. There was nothing, from the military to the world of global finance, on which engineers could easily piggyback a network that maintained regular contact with an orbiting satellite or spaceship. Moreover, existing radar systems, bouncing radio waves from an object to locate it and see where it might be going, were designed to find missiles and jet aircraft, not objects zipping around in space. And finally, there was no way to reliably move ever-larger clumps of information around the nation and world. NASA needed to collect information from their spacecraft and input it quickly to their fledgling computers. There, the machines churned through future projections of the spacecraft. Otherwise, unwelcome surprises could escalate to tragedies within a single lap around the globe.

  When forming the agency, Congress set aside a former agricultural research center for a “space projects center,” and this grew over time to the Goddard Space Flight Center,v handling tracking, data streams, and communications for the manned missions.31 Within a few years, one in nine NASA employees worked on these communication and network issues, with some deployed overseas. Handshakes were made with local governments from Australia to Nigeria. For a tracking station in Guaymas, the agreement between the United States and the Mexican government marked a true milestone, as one of the first of its kind between the two neighbors since the early years of the twentieth century.

  By the summer of 1961, NASA had formally opened a worldwide network of communication stations. Now a satellite, or a man in space, would have regular (though not constant) contact with engineers on the ground; NASA could track an orbiting spacecraft, send it direct radio orders, receive sensor data from it, and carry on a conversation with an astronaut. Even then, some of the first eighteen stations in the first network were just ships floating at sea. To monitor the health of a person trying to survive in orbit, doctors had recommended a network that provided constant contact with any manned spacecraft, but such a system was neither geographically nor politically feasible. NASA settled on the rule of having no more than ten minutes at any time without direct contact, and these gaps would still provide some nail-biting episodes in the early missions.

  We can appreciate the gulf between present and past via the stories of an engineer who helped bring the system to life. “You couldn’t talk to the flight director at the Cape from [half] of those [global] sites,” Arnold Aldridge said. “They only communicated via teletype. So at these sites. . . you would write out what you wanted to say on a piece of paper, you would hand it to a teletype operator, and he’d run over to the teletype machine.” A similar set-up at Cape Canaveral would receive the messages and run them to the right person before crafting a teletype reply. “Now, that whole process might take somewhere between three and five minutes if it was working well,” he said. Given that a quickly orbiting capsule might only be over a station for seven minutes, some of the stations would only get one shot at dialogue with Mission Control in Florida—not yet in Houston—before sending a single message to the mission above. Worse still, no technology existed to transfer and gather exact radar tracking data. From remote sites, data tapes came to Goddard via couriers. Precise knowledge of orbital paths for the early missions wouldn’t come together until a month after the mission’s conclusion.32

  Young Marlowe Cassetti, a phone line, and a pencil formed one early communication relay. For some of the early, unmanned test flights, Cassetti helped compute the exact timing for a capsule to leave orbit and head for a properly located splashdown. Someone at NASA’s main data center in Maryland would read a mission’s latest whereabouts and its speed over the phone to Marlowe (in octal, versus decimal, numbers). Cassetti wrote these as quickly and legibly as possible and handed them to a secretary waiting just over his shoulder. She in turn ran those to a key-punch machine to create a computer card that she rushed by hand to a computer operator. The computer then, if functioning properly and if given a flawless card, could compute the exact times for a capsule to fire its thrusters and come home.

  While the process sounds error prone and slow, Cassetti says that, after frequent interruptions of “wait, read that again,” it worked well. “Interestingly enough, we could compute retrofire time as fast as they were doing it at Mission Control in Florida.”33

  The summer of 1961 also witnessed the completion of NASA’s most critical early hard-wired data link, from the main mission hub at Cape Canaveral to computers located at the new Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington, D.C. The four direct lines provided transfer rates just over one hundred kilobytes per second; a 4G cell phone today can relay data two hundred times faster. But at the time, the new link was blazing some thirty times faster than NASA’s other options.34

  If you grab a globe, it’s easy to see the orbit loop chosen in NASA’s early days; it was a circle that maximized its intersection with North America and, on
the opposite side of the orb, friendly Australia, while minimizing any time over the Soviet Union. A reader may wonder why orbital space missions seem to fly in crazy curved paths, up and down over Earth. This sine-wave type of curve is actually just a flat representation of a path that completely circles the globe, a ring tilted away from the equator—we flatten that three-dimensional path so that we can see it on a two-dimensional map (see Figure 4.1).

  figure 4.1 The “big board” for early Mission Control. Without electronic means to display capsule locations, the capsule graphic was moved manually along wires. (NASA photograph.)

  Cassetti was arguably the first American to experience an orbit of the globe. One of the early test missions collected a movie. NASA called Cassetti to the standard conference room where a technician set up the film projector for him again. “You’re going to be the first person to see a view of Earth in color,” the technician said. “I don’t think there’s ever been a color film of Earth.” The empty orbiting capsule had held a movie camera pointing downward, and the film canister survived the heat of re-entry.

  Young Marlowe sat down excitedly and prepared to take notes. “I thought, ‘Oh boy! I get to watch the whole world!’ ” But the nearly ninety-minute silent film tested his patience. “The way you launch, you go over the whole Atlantic Ocean and then you kiss the coast of Africa and then you get the whole Sahara Desert. Half of the time, the first forty minutes, you’re in daylight and you’re seeing nothing. Just ocean or desert. And then you say, oh well I get to see Australia, but that’s wrong because Australia is in darkness. And then you see Earth lighting up and you get the Pacific. And a quick run across the western United States and then you splash down in the Gulf of Mexico. . . . [I]t was really rather depressing.”

  The technician returned to the conference room, flicked on the lights, and asked what it was like. Was it amazing? “Water and dark!” Marlowe told him.35

  This story presages something that would come to blunt America’s space ambitions. As wonderful as the missions could be to the public, outer space could never quite live up to the human imagination and the science fiction stories that had primed Americans’ interests. Nor could space compete with our buzzing, chirping, multi-hued home world.36

  At the end of 1961, the communication challenges ahead were still daunting. Engineer Chris Kraft had been named to a new post, responsible for directing and choreographing the missions minute-to-minute after launch. It was largely Kraft dreaming up the architecture of what became Mission Control, that war room of consoles, headsets, read-outs, and cigarettes now familiar to all NASA fans. By Christmas of 1961, the agency had outlined phases two and three of the evolving space program. After getting single humans to orbit Earth (the major goal of the Mercury missions), phase two, Gemini, would send up two men at a time to test space suits against the hazards of space and to practice the dicey rendezvous of two separate spacecraft. Finally, phase three, Apollo, would somehow get humans to the Moon and back.

  As of Christmas, 1961, the task ahead gave Kraft an involuntary shudder. “How the hell do we control a mission when the crew is a quarter million miles away?” he thought. “It’s hard enough when the capsule is only 120 miles overhead.”37

  * * *

  i These were hardly the only options. One serious contender involved landing two ships: a light one with astronauts and another one nearby acting as a pack mule with fuel and supplies.

  ii This word, interpreted as “east” by the Western press at the time, can also mean “an upward flow” and in some sense suggests a sunrise.

  iii The broad brushstrokes presented here do not fully relay a complex decision, analyzed by book-length manuscripts over the years.

  iv Referring to agkistrodon piscivorus, a nightmarish, semi-aquatic pit viper living throughout the southeastern United States and especially near NASA centers.

  v Of all NASA’s centers, Goddard developed the most heavy-metal-sounding acronyms, including GRARR (Goddard Range and Range Rate) and SATAN (the Satellite Automatic Tracking Antennas).

  5

  The Moon

  We can pause now in a way the engineers could not. We can relish a half-century’s hindsight and appreciate the audacious goal itself. Humanity knew surprisingly little about the Moon in the early 1960s, but even today many of us could use a brief refresher on our closest celestial partner.

  By borrowing and reflecting sunlight, the Moon has comforted Earth’s evenings for billions of years. Our celestial dance partner’s reliable cycle of crescents and disks provided a template for mapping humanity’s sense of passing time. Its monthly procession from full to new simply broadcasts its location on its looping orbit. When farther from the sun than Earth (i.e., when it is “behind us” in the solar system’s amphitheater), the Moon shows a brighter face. We see it much like we would turn in a darkened movie theater to see someone in a farther row, their face lit by the screen. When closer to the sun, the Moon’s orb grows dark, as with someone’s silhouetted head closer to a movie screen. And the half-disk confronts us when the Moon sits in the same row, as it were, with Earth.

  Unlike a movie patron, the Moon always faces us. Like an obsessed admirer, our companion “phase-locked” to Earth’s gravitational pull long ago. Gravity between any two objects pulls more intensely at closer distances. We tug on the Moon’s closer side with a tad extra force—about two percent more—than we do its more remote side. Over time, this difference locked one side of the Moon to us as if we’d stuck it with an invisible harpoon. And this is a common affair. Many other moons in the solar system show the same gravitational devotion to their central planets.

  The Moon, in turn, has a similar gravitational effect on Earth. More massive and stubborn, Earth tends to shrug off the uneven pull. But physics does not relent, and it slows the spinning Earth. We are, year to year and moment to moment, “phase-locking” to the Moon. Given enough time, one side of Earth, chosen by a slow physics lottery, would never see moonlight again, while the other would have the Moon ever present at one spot in the sky.i We grind toward that vision at a glacier’s pace—tomorrow will be a tenth of a microsecond longer than yesterday.

  Some scientists believe the Moon’s pull played a significant role in nurturing our planet’s complicated spray of life. Earth’s spinning axis is more stable than that of the other inner planets, providing more regular seasons and climates over a much longer stretch of time. This arguably results from the Moon’s perfect dance partnering. And compared to the solid parts of Earth, our malleable oceans more blatantly broadcast gravity’s effect. They swell outward toward the Moon, with bulges rising and falling as ocean tides. In that way, by massaging shorelines and leaving tide pools with daily refills, the Moon may well have helped coax life from the seas long ago.1

  In 1961, it compelled a newer species to consider a similar type of madness, enticing them from their natural habitat. But in NASA’s early years, engineers saw little time or reason to contemplate that sort of ancient history. They needed to measure, compute, and troubleshoot a leap to the Moon. How can we digest the intervening gap? In a humbling, sun-centered perspective, the distance separating us from our nearest neighbor becomes absurdly small. If we could shrink our entire solar system to be an Earth-sized eight thousand miles across, Earth and the Moon would shrink by proportion to the size of dust motes. They would float together in the sun’s glare just one centimeter apart, the width of a pinky nail.

  But the separation looked substantial enough to the engineers. Any round-trip mission to the Moon would commit to some 480,000 miles, or about twenty times Ferdinand Magellan’s distance in circling the globe. We can better grasp the distance as shown in Figure 5.1. In the figure, Earth and the Moon appear at appropriate scale: The Moon is roughly a baseball to our basketball. To separate the two appropriately, you would move this Moon graphic two-and-a-half feet away from the Earth graphic—about five times the width of this book. In 1961, that gulf alternately mocked and beckoned the engineers.
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  figure 5.1 Earth and the Moon shown at proper relative scale but not with the correct separation. Note that this graphic breaks an important rule: The familiar side of the Moon facing the reader here should always be facing Earth.

  Assuming they could get a spacecraft to cover the distance, what did the engineers know about the Moon in 1961? Even the best telescopes—all based on the ground and forced to peer through Earth’s thick atmosphere—could not divine lunar features smaller than one thousand feet, about the width of a football stadium. Our best images owned a panic-inducing fuzziness for those hoping to plan a safe landing.2

  Faget’s design partner, Caldwell Johnson, recalled these early days of the challenge. “I must admit, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in the whole thing,” he said. “How in God’s world are you going to ever hit the Moon in the right place that far away? . . . The scientific community was no help at all.”

  Indeed, scientists held little consensus on the Moon’s surface itself. They had more or less agreed that asteroid impacts, not volcanoes, must have caused most of the craters. Yet, some observers had noted “ruby moonglow,” bright winks of hot gas as mysterious as they were temporary. Did they emerge after Moonquakes or perhaps seep from hidden volcanic activity?3 Some scientists believed the surface would be too heavily cratered, rocky, and uneven to provide a legitimate landing place, and still others sounded a different warning. “Nobel laureates would say, ‘Hey, the thing is nothing but a bunch of pools of dust,” Johnson recalled. In fact, scientists debated the lunar surface into the mid-1960s. They sifted through radar measurements, computed temperature swings, and eventually used photographs from orbiting probes, arguing over interpretations all the while. Some voices warned the engineers that landing a spacecraft would risk having it slip into a dusty quicksand, never to be seen or heard again. Others worried further that, even if an astronaut survived the landing, he might stir up an ancient space virus in the lunar dust and, none the wiser, ferry it back to a defenseless Earth. The engineers shook their heads and leveled a more pragmatic eye on the Moon, deciding its harsh terrain probably felt a lot like remote stretches of Arizona, but with conditions so brutal that no microbes or even viruses could survive.4