The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Still, they planned any attempted landing with great caution. Early ideas for setting a craft to the lunar surface aimed for a slow approach, so the mission could leap away if curb feelers found it too rocky or too soft. And NASA decided the first landings would risk no lives. They opted to first make detailed maps using unmanned orbiting satellites (the Ranger program) and then test the surface with unmanned probes (the Surveyor program).

  Having not yet mastered laps around Earth, NASA began plotting orbits of the Moon. Engineers balanced a number of factors. For a craft zooming away from Earth, calculations would show what engineers called a “dispersion” of possible outcomes when it tried to hit its brakes and assume a serene, repetitive path around the Moon. The closer the orbit was to the Moon, the more those possibilities could lean toward violent impact craters. At the same time, an orbit too far from the lunar surface, while safer, required more fuel and power for a lunar lander to descend and return. NASA selected Apollo’s optimum lunar orbit at a height of about sixty miles. A final piece of engineering logic and precision determined the altitude: An orbit of this size took two hours per revolution.ii Engineers would be able to look up at the humming, government-issue clocks in Mission Control and always know where the spacecraft was, without consulting some sort of timetable. (A similar logic placed many manned Earth-orbit missions in a path that took approximately ninety minutes.)

  Even with a spacecraft sixty miles up, questions remained. Would the Moon’s gravitational tug prove so varied and fickle that it ruled out a safe, circular orbit? And did the far side of the Moon have unexpected features, like enormous mountain ranges that could snuff a low-flying spacecraft? NASA assumed and hoped no geological feature could jut that far into space, but the engineers used to darkly joke about the sixty-one-mile-high mountain awaiting Apollo’s first visit.5 In 1961, the far side of the Moon still lurked as uncharted territory, like those blank patches of old maps filled with ornate, speculative sea monsters. The Soviet Union’s Luna 3 probe had, in 1959, taken some very blurry photos of the Moon’s unknown side. Despite its limited success, the probe still stands as a technical marvel. The earliest spy satellites (like America’s Corona) needed to drop film packets back to Earth. But the Soviets couldn’t return film canisters from the Moon at that point. No, Luna 3, never to return, developed its own film with an internal, automated machine and then used a primitive scanner to turn a resulting photograph into something that could be sent to Earth, dot by dot, via radio transmission. The final resolution was understandably terrible.6

  Luna 3’s images provided a Rorschach pattern: did a viewer see a welcoming world revealing its secrets, or did one see new complications and threats of failure? Far from easing any fears for the NASA engineers, Luna 3 and the Soviet space program served only as a kind of jittery fuel. The engineers stayed at their desks night after night plotting ways to shave bits of mystery from the Moon until they could hold it as a tractable problem.

  * * *

  i We don’t have enough celestial time on the clock to actually have this come to pass. The inner solar system will be consumed by the sun’s swelling red giant phase well before we phase-lock to the Moon.

  ii Physics dictates that the closer a satellite gets to a star, planet, or moon, the faster it must move. Each and every orbital distance has its own required speed (independent of the size of the orbiting object). Closer orbits take less time, and higher orbits consume more.

  6

  1962—Punch Cards and a Key to the Trunk

  In a 1962 press conference, President Kennedy said the nation and the modern world were moving headlong into a post-political era. “Most of us are conditioned for many years to have a political viewpoint—Republican or Democratic, liberal, conservative, or moderate,” he said. “The fact of the matter is that most of the problems . . . that we now face are technical problems. . . . They are very sophisticated judgments.” In sketching a technocratic future, Kennedy said that modern solutions were “now beyond the comprehension of most men.”

  The idea that one could engineer solutions to thorny political and social problems had many people nodding their heads. The City of Oakland, California, invited a delegation of NASA and military officials to brainstorm city planning. They organized a conference for the following year, eventually sponsored in part by NASA, called “Space, Science, and Urban Life.” Surely the problems of an urban landscape paled in complexity to the intricate workings of a massive rocket. They could be welded, computed, wired, and solved for good.1

  More than half of Kennedy’s 1962 budget went to military, surveillance, and the burgeoning space program. The CIA’s first spy satellite, the Corona, had by then established that the Soviet military threat was more bark than bite. There simply weren’t many missiles or missile bases. But Kennedy sought to make America the obvious model of choice for all the world’s people. With his advisors, he also began outlining massive tax relief to super-charge economic growth.

  Techno-milestones finally rose to feed this kind of giddy optimism. Early 1962 witnessed an uncommon victory for young NASA and a public outpouring not seen since the end of World War II. Riding skyward atop an Atlas rocket, an astronaut became the first American to actually orbit Earth. In a little under five hours, he would ascend, take three laps in a tiny capsule, and come back, barely, to Earth. “Nothing about John Glenn’s flight was easy,” flight controller Chris Kraft later wrote.2

  Unlike the Soviet capsules of the time, NASA’s first spacecraft had control thrusters: pint-sized versions of rockets that adjusted the capsule’s orientation. And to highlight the fundamental principle of rocketry here, the smaller thruster rockets needed no flame whatsoever—just little puffs of hydrogen peroxide. Like the child on skates tossing a stone, the puffs gave the capsule a kick in the opposite direction. Early in Glenn’s flight, one of the thrusters began misbehaving, moving the nose of his module left, like a shopping cart with a bum front wheel. But that was only the appetizer crisis. A warning light informed NASA that the capsule’s all-important heat shield might be loose. An astronaut would never survive the fiery re-entry without the heat shield, sitting just inches behind his back. And as NASA opted to contrast their Soviet competitors by opening themselves to the press, Americans heard by radio and television that something might be very wrong with the capsule. The astronaut’s return to Earth would be a tense and possibly deadly ride.

  After some drama, with audiences waiting to see if a live astronaut would emerge from the recovered capsule, the nation enjoyed the sight of an upright astronaut, exhaled collectively, and then yelped with pride. In the end, the technical problem was simply a faulty sensor. Marlowe Cassetti says it was not much of a surprise. “It just really underscores in those days we were battling a lot of problems with the technology. . . . Nowadays an indicator comes on in the dashboard of your car or your airplane or your boat, you’re pretty sure that there’s a problem there, but in those early days, sometimes the indicators failed more often than the [systems] did.” Moreover, the Mercury capsules were electronically messy. Engineers recall a crazy nest of wires running throughout its innards and weaving around the astronaut.3

  In fact, the engineers had prepared the capsule, and the astronauts, for all sorts of sensor failures. Cassetti describes a set of physical scratches etched onto the capsule’s window. The two most important tasks confronting any returning capsule were getting its wide end pointed earthward at the correct angle and initiating descent at just the right moment. Start seconds too early or too late, and the capsule’s arc would splash down in unknown waters, far from the waiting recovery ships. Start minutes too early or too late and the capsule might hit with a deadly jolt on less-forgiving land. These last-minute adjustments were usually handled automatically. So, why the scratch marks on the window? If the automatic system failed, Cassetti says that the astronaut would “maneuver the vehicle to where those marks are on the horizon, then fire the rockets [to start descending]. That’s pretty simple. It sounds
pretty crude . . . but it’s one that if all else fails and you lose contact with the ground and everything else, an astronaut, on his own, can line up that mark with the horizon, and he’s got a stopwatch . . . so he knows it’s just time and [orientation] and pull the switch.”4 Such a technique, like bygone mariners using a sextant, would eventually come in handy for one desperate Moon mission.

  America’s handful of astronauts had already achieved celebrity status by this time, but the euphoric response to our first American in orbit caught most people by surprise. We no longer seemed doomed to lag behind the mysterious and powerful Soviet Union. And here was an idyllic, advertising-ready, crew-cutted American hero who boldly rode a dangerous rocket and fell in a meteor’s trail to Earth, all to absolve the nation of its earlier failures. And the act was absurdly brave. The medical community had been genuinely worried—Gagarin may have orbited Earth and survived, but the Russians were keeping any medical information to themselves. Maybe the cosmonaut had returned half dead and could no longer speak or feed himself. Doctors sent a significant kit into space with Glenn: medicines to treat pain, shock, or motion sickness; and even shark repellant for his eventual time floating and waiting for rescue in the ocean.

  His subsequent parade generated nearly 3,500 tons of confetti (still a post–World War II record). At a White House reception, the president’s elderly father, Joe Kennedy, started crying when he met the astronaut hero, and he could not stop, even as his son tried to comfort him. “Now, now, Dad, it’s all right, it’s okay.” It was anything but okay—a surprising new age was quickly flying over the old.5

  Not every household had the same emotions for these early milestones. The Faget family had every reason to be jubilant—Max had devised a capsule that was taking men into space, where, now weightless, they could maneuver and measure and even marvel at Earth’s serene curve through a small window. The capsule protected these men and guided them safely back without a scratch, a burn, or broken bone. “He’d bring home little models now and then that we liked,” daughter Carol says of her father. “I still remember the model of the Mercury. You could hold it your hand.” (See Figure 6.1.)

  figure 6.1 Max Faget holds an early capsule model. (Public domain photograph originally printed in the pages of The Virginian-Pilot.)

  A quiet family scene unfolded at their two-story brick home in Newport News, Virginia, circa Glenn’s triumph and not long before their move to Texas. Father Max was at work, and Carol was enjoying a carefree day upstairs. “At that age, I was probably reading a book . . . or playing with my Ginny dolls,” she says now. “I came down the stairs and saw my mom on the steps crying. . . . Looking back, she probably did not realize I was upstairs instead of playing outside.” Mrs. Faget had never been one to show much emotion in front of her kids.

  A frightened Carol asked her mother why she was crying. “She was upset because my father wasn’t going to be in this parade . . . that he was overlooked.” Carol doesn’t recall such a slight upsetting her father.6

  Houston, Texas, embraced the arriving NASA engineers, and especially the astronauts, in their special Houston way. During a hot summer welcoming parade, astronauts waved to thousands of quiet onlookers, a crowd described by Tom Wolfe: “They stood there four and five deep at the curbs, sweating and staring. They sweated a river and they stared ropes. . . . They didn’t even smile.” Houston, to this day, offers sincere hospitality and kindness to visitors, but in large groups, Houstonians are not easily roused to excitement. It may stem from a pre-air-conditioning culture, where people learned to move gently through monstrous summer heat. There’s also the fact that, in local tradition, males abandon facial expressions by age fourteen or so.

  Meanwhile, the engineers had no time for parades; they worked in a sort of roiling chaos. They hired waves of reinforcements, designed the facilities they would need at their new center, ran the first phase of the space program at full-speed, all while planning the next two phases. Engineer Aleck Bond’s recollections speak for most. “Those were days when we worked ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day and sometimes seven days a week in order to be able to get the job done, and it was rather hectic at times. We neglected our families.” And with their new campus just starting construction, they were spread all over, with rented space in shopping centers, bank buildings, a Canada Dry bottling plant, and, just off the freeway that headed south toward their empty pasture, a few addresses in the Houston Petroleum Center.7

  The year 1962 saw great progress in NASA deciding how to approach the Moon; by year’s end the dark horse plan had won. Not only would they use multiple craft, with necessary rendezvous of these ships in space, but NASA opted for having that take place around the Moon. The chief proponenti for this approach summed up its central appeal, having a separable, light lander, as follows: “I would rather bring down 7,000 pounds to the lunar surface than 150,000 pounds.”8 A number of central figures found the logic inescapable. Max Faget was one of the first engineers to change his mind, and he helped convince others. This approach provided the new freedom of designing a space craft that only needed to land and then lift itself from the Moon. It wouldn’t need a heat shield. It wouldn’t need to be sturdy enough to survive Earth’s gravity and could therefore be absurdly light weight. It wouldn’t need to carry the fuel required for a trip to Earth. All Earthly-needed things would stay up in orbit around the Moon, waiting for this secondary ship, a sort of metallic lunar insect, to gently alight below, look around, and return.

  Wernher von Braun and his Huntsville team had originally supported a one-ship approach. They liked the simplicity and cleanliness of it, avoiding the need for two pressurized, habitable cabins, two systems of electronics, two sets of thrusters, and so on. They reasoned that having just one ship cut potential failures and problems at least in half. But they’d given that up once they embraced the reality of Kennedy’s deadline. There just wouldn’t be time to perfect a rocket powerful enough to lift one big do-everything ship away from Earth. Next they had embraced the plan with multiple pieces coming together in orbit around Earth, before embarking for the Moon, the big advantage here being that, if things went wrong, they could abort the mission close to home and safely return. By contrast, if ships had trouble around the Moon, perhaps even the far side of the Moon, with desperate astronauts blocked from contacting Earth, engineers would cling to few (if any) options for saving the mission. But von Braun’s future ambition had also tilted him to favor assembling missions in Earth orbit. If NASA embraced such a practice early on, they could use the same method to prepare missions to Mars and beyond.

  The various factions gathered for a crucial meeting in June of 1962, on von Braun’s home turf in Huntsville. After various presentations, including some from his team advocating rendezvous operations near Earth, he quietly surprised everyone in attendance. The basic logic on the table had convinced him, and he announced support for the risky-sounding plan of a rendezvous operation near the Moon. Besides, this approach was the most forgiving for his Saturn rocket program. The lightest possible Apollo mission was one planning for the multiple ships coming apart and then docking again close to the Moon.

  This simple, somewhat technical decision—rendezvous at the Moon rather than Earth—was a “seismic shift,” according to Marlowe Cassetti. He’d been one of two Houston representatives at an all-day Huntsville planning meeting in the spring of 1962. He says the mood of the Marshall engineers grew somber as they saw the inevitable logic emerging. They recognized that a smaller overall rocket and a new lunar vehicle shifted more ultimate power to the Houston center and permanently away from Huntsville. Still, some of von Braun’s staff held out hope, and they expressed some shock when their boss curtly changed his official position in June. Von Braun’s incredible powers of persuasion knew when to yield. He was rarely stubborn when engineering logic sat before him.

  With the need for orbital rendezvous now more or less certain, engineers had to push the idea from theory to practice, to learn its pitfal
ls and possible snags before attempting it in space, where lives and multi-million-dollar space ships would be on a collision course. And in Houston, where engineers shouldered all things spacecraft, they didn’t have any facilities yet.

  Engineer Tom Moser recalls an early improvised test facility. “We did it on an ice rink in the south part of Houston.” On this borrowed skating rink, they slid two mock-ups of space ships around, trying to dock them together. Just imagine a grimly serious game of bumper cars, with a bunch of tired engineers scribbling notes on clipboards. In space, the engineers would face what they called “six degrees of freedom,” meaning a ship could move in three directions (up-down, left-right, and forward-backward) but also rotate in three different ways.

  If you, reader, hold your arm out in front of you, it’s easy to demonstrate the three rotations, and their names, using your amazing shoulder joint. Keeping your arm stiff and pointing forward, first sweep your arm to point left or right—this is one rotation (called “yaw”). When you have your arm pointing forward again, rotate your entire arm to give a thumb up or a thumb down. This is a second rotation (called “roll”). Finally, as you alternately move your arm to either raise your hand or pat your thigh, this is a third rotation (called “pitch”). Floating in space, you then have six distinct ways to change the motion of a ship: three movement directions plus three types of rotation. When a craft engages several of these at the same time, mathematics gives the human mind one of its only grips on a literally dizzying situation.