The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  One of von Braun’s people went to see a crawler in Kentucky. After climbing on board and waiting for a while, the engineer finally said, “You can start!” But his coal-mining hosts said, “We’ve been moving for a couple of minutes now.” Slow would be just fine for the job at hand, and NASA placed a custom order for a rocket-ready crawler.18

  Lists of engineering head-scratchers weren’t the only ones confronting von Braun and company. In August, as he approached Marshall’s front gate, an expansive picket line greeted him. Electrical workers started the strike, but more than one thousand other unionized workers refused to cross their line. Tensions ran high as Marshall tried to build new test facilities at a whiplash pace. The strike started at a new monolithic structure, all iron and concrete, that aimed to someday provide a test stand for the first stage of the Saturn V rocket. The size of the new stand not only accommodated a rocket behemoth, but it also had to hold the monster in place during firing. Boasting as much concrete below ground as above, the new stand would eventually squat on the local wooded terrain like King Kong’s own pizza oven. The priority and speed of the project led to an unhappy mix of union and nonunion labor with too much to do every day. Wernher von Braun complained to the press that the strike would cost America one million dollars per day and put us further behind the Soviet Union. The National Labor Relations Board stepped in after ten days, and work resumed.19

  Von Braun witnessed another tension growing in Alabama. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. visited Huntsville in the spring of 1962, lending support to a series of sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in town. Several of these resulted in arrests. Just the year before, a white mob had badly beaten a biracial group of “freedom riders” in Birmingham, to the south of Huntsville. The freedom riders promoted racial equality by mixing races elbow-to-elbow on public buses (against local custom, to put it mildly). Von Braun spoke against racism as outdated, immoral nonsense, perhaps to further bury his Nazi past. But the Marshall Space Flight Center received two complaints from black employees that year. Appealing to President Kennedy’s new Equal Employment Opportunity committee, the men complained of being denied promotion in one case and having inappropriate work assigned in another.

  Wernher von Braun was developing a love-frustration relationship with his Alabama home. On the one hand, he liked to start his talks in D.C. and elsewhere by apologizing for his accent and pausing before explaining, “I’m from Alabama.” Hearing a southern twang mix with a lifelong German cadence, one observer said the rocket scientist might as well adopt the middle name “Cornpone.” But he had also started speaking up when he saw unfair views and counterproductive policies. For instance, he had a difficult time finding local workers with enough technical training. In 1961, he’d given a talk to the Alabama legislature, promoting investment in higher education. “Let’s be honest,” he told them. “It’s not water, or real estate, or labor, or cheap taxes that brings industry to a state or city. It’s brainpower.” In the years to come von Braun would also speak plainly against segregation.20

  Sometimes a significant loss for an organization can be as small as one person. With heavy hearts, supervisors in Huntsville watched Henry Pohl, the do-everything, do-anything engineer, prepare to leave. Pohl had new opportunities and new problems to solve in Houston, and the move would take him closer to his family. Maybe, he thought, he could even go work his father’s cattle on weekends.

  Transplanted Langley engineers were busily designing their new test facilities for the Houston site: they planned dedicated laboratories for testing a spacecraft’s structure, its response to vibrations, its resistance to wild temperature changes, and how the plumbing of its engines handled extreme chemistry. They even planned a large “space environment simulation laboratory” where engineers could create the same conditions that ships and astronauts would encounter in outer space. Conscripting one of von Braun’s Test Lab people made sense.

  After Pohl’s exemplary work on the small Saturn model, he was also now among the world’s experts on tiny rocket engines. In particular, Henry had built his model rocket to fire inside a vacuum chamber that approximated the void of space. Now the engineers developing the Apollo spacecraft wanted someone to perfect sets of little thrusters that could maneuver in empty space, nudging the ship to its proper trajectory. Such thrusters would need to come on and shut off at a moment’s notice, over and over again, with minutes, hours, or days between firings.

  Henry had come to adore the environment at von Braun’s center, with its many different labs and interesting minds. He particularly admired some of his forthright German supervisors there. Karl Heimburg, in particular, passed along some advice. “The day I left, he kept me in his office all morning,” Pohl says. “It seemed he so badly wanted to see me succeed in Houston. He told me I was trained well. That no one there would know more than I did.” Heimburg, born in 1910, had been a boy in one devastating war, an engineer in another, and then had crossed an ocean, half guest and half prisoner. He warned thirty-year-old Henry about the turbulence of a new organization under great pressure. He said Henry “would be like a speck in a pot of boiling water. At times the speck is on top of the water and then it is at the bottom.”21

  After the move, Pohl wasted no time in being his direct and plain-spoken self. “I had been in Houston about a week when the review of the first test facilities came up,” he says. One of the main designers of the new facilities gave a presentation and asked for questions. “I said, ‘Yes, I have a few, but first I want to thank you for a very good presentation. I know a lot of thought and hard work went into it. But there is a problem: it won’t work.’ ”

  His new boss chided him. “Henry, don’t say that unless you can prove it.”

  Henry did. He described how the test engines would be placed too close to a wall and the exhaust would blow back from the wall and kill the engines. He set out the equations to illustrate the effect, and his boss, irritated, picked up some paper and went to work, double-checking what seemed like nonsense. His boss “sat there with a pencil and calculated it,” Henry says. “Then he threw the pencil down and said, ‘You are right.’ ”

  Pohl had a budding reputation with his new colleagues in Houston, who “thought I knew a lot more than I did,” he says. “I never did tell them that I had already made that mistake in Huntsville.” But Pohl rolled up his sleeves and helped the team devise all sorts of facilities that would soon rise from the muddy pastureland.

  He also needed new-found patience in Houston. In chaotic 1962, some meetings were more pragmatic and others more meandering and officious. “They would start with a list of the names of all the people that came in late and how many minutes they were late then get into the offsite telephone calls made and by whom and for how long. . . . After that they would go into all the mistakes they found in all the memos,” Pohl writes now. “I thought that was a lot of trivia when we had so many pressing issues.” Underlining his worries, NASA’s Mercury program had logged about twenty hours of manned space flight at that point, compared to nearly two hundred hours by Soviet cosmonauts.

  Pohl considered going back to Huntsville, but then began to see rapid improvements; he watched a NASA culture bloom in Houston where each subsystem or process would ultimately belong to one individual. Each buck would have a place to stop. And the engineering efforts broke into more and more sensible organizational branches. Henry joined the Propulsion and Power group, headed by Max Faget’s good friend Guy Thibodaux. “Now this guy was much like the Germans in Huntsville,” Pohl writes. “He didn’t much care if all the i’s were dotted or the t’s crossed in the reports so long as they were accurate, and he had the best understanding of the physical sciences of any person I had ever dealt with.”22

  Sans Pohl, the Huntsville team kept pushing. To help resolve instability in the big engines, von Braun assigned one of his more experienced engineers to go to California to work directly with the contractors who were building and testing the engines there. �
�It aged me. I’m sure,” engineer Jerry Thomson said of his trials with the F-1. By the end of 1962, the engineers were ready to accept the burn instability as a part of life. It seemed that it would arise from time to time no matter what. They could never predict when it would start, and no two engines were alike—the exact instabilities were essentially part of each engine’s personality, and even then, one engine could have different moods from one week to the next. Sometimes the devils weren’t even in the details—they seemed to move around between tests, finding ever-better places to hide. By the end of 1962, engineers started thinking about just making engines that could survive instability. If an engine, by design, could calm the staccato burning, if it could smooth out the problem over a few seconds, that might be good enough. NASA headquarters now worried that if this engine didn’t shape up, there would be no Apollo program. Some voices started wondering if they should scrap that overblown V-2 type engine entirely and pivot quickly to a new design. And for Christmas, Wernher von Braun got two new lumps of coal: two more engines fell to burning pieces in the latest tests, as dollars and precious hours mixed in the flames.23

  * * *

  i John Houbolt was the most persistent advocate of “Lunar Orbit Rendezvous” (LOR).

  ii With apologies to rocket engineers, I am simplifying by calling the fuel kerosene; it’s a special blend called RP-1 that is fairly close to kerosene.

  7

  1964—Of Doubts and Bugs

  From my father’s keepsakes, he pulls a small paper booklet published by NASA in 1964, bluntly titled “Why Land on the Moon?” and formatted for mailing, with a spot for a stamp. “You wouldn’t believe it now,” he says, “but people really had their doubts early on.”

  The booklet borrowed text from an article in the Atlantic Monthly, where two NASA scientists explained, step by logical step, why they supported Apollo and why the nation should as well. The authors listed positive outcomes to come for the many billions to be spent. In hindsight, some were more prescient (e.g., an economic boom in communications technology and a boost to science education) than others (e.g., providing the ultimate “Rosetta stone . . . even more important than Mars and Venus” for understanding the history of our solar system). But their main intent was as clear as it is now surprising: shielding Apollo from a barrage of critical arrows.1

  On the heels of their troubled 1962, the negativity facing NASA and the Apollo program in particular had steadily grown. In the summer of 1963, the New York Times headlined a “Lunar Program in Crisis.” Meanwhile, an internal NASA report told headquarters they had only a 10 percent chance of accomplishing President Kennedy’s end-of-decade goal. Former president Eisenhower poked his head up from retirement to say he feared the burden of a Moon program on the nation’s taxpayers.

  Even the nation’s scientists were taking shots. The editor of Science magazine penned a common view: The same scientific knowledge could probably be gained for 1 percent of the cost, if the nation would just go with an unmanned approach. In fact, many scientists accurately saw Apollo for what it was and what it would ultimately be: more a proof of technological principle than a mission of scientific discovery. And in terms of cost, it was clear that NASA didn’t just need to climb a high engineering peak—they would need to build several new bridges just to get to base camp.2

  The scientific community felt themselves on the outside looking into an agency that, early on, employed twenty-six engineers for every scientist. External groups of scientists worried that Apollo would drain NASA funds away from scientific missions. They listed their scientific priorities for the Moon, such as uncovering its geology, probing its interior via surface instruments, and measuring the ephemeral lunar atmosphere. While many of these eventually did come to pass, many scientists felt ignored, and the tensions were real enough. “Scientists and engineers simply do not think alike,” engineer and flight director Chris Kraft later wrote. “One of the important lessons [of his time at NASA] was that any apocalyptic prediction by a scientist would almost certainly be wrong.”3

  Even the selection of landing sites became contentious in the early 1960s. One leading scientist, Harold Urey, said he could not tell who was ultimately making the decisions for where to land, and when he did learn of the sites, the communications were so chock full of engineering acronyms as to be unreadable. Engineers did consider the scientific requests. Lighting made for one incredibly important factor, and not just for photo opportunities. Landing at a site and time where light was plentiful but also falling at a good angle became a central requirement. If the sunlight hit from directly overhead, the lack of shadows would obscure features from the view of the astronauts trying to land (and from photographs that could help geological scientists understand the Moon), but if the shadows were too long, late in the month-long lunar “day,” too many features would be in complete darkness. Unlike a shadow on Earth, a lunar shadow is truly dark, with no atmosphere to introduce an ambient glow. Engineers would take the scientific requests and put those through their trajectory paces. “All the landing sites are within a fairly narrow band of the equator,” said engineer Hal Beck. “That’s where your basic orbit was, and so you couldn’t get up to higher latitudes.” Given the tight squeeze on every pint of fuel, an Apollo mission didn’t have much leeway for exploring the lunar map.4

  Meanwhile, Khrushchev cooked up new PR challenges for NASA as well. The summer of 1963 saw cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova become the first woman in space. “Bourgeois society always emphasizes that woman is the weaker sex. That is not so,” Khrushchev crowed. “Our Russian woman showed the American astronauts a thing or two. Her mission was longer than that of all the Americans put together.” Official Soviet statements would soon return to typical male-centered rhetoric, with Tereshkova herself saying, “[N]o work done by a woman . . . can enter into conflict with her ancient ‘wonderful mission,’ . . . the bliss of motherhood.” But Americans had found a new way to shake their heads. We didn’t just have a missile gap now. One Senator’s wife suggested that America was “one hundred years behind in using the full abilities of women.” Indeed, the engineering workforce in the Soviet Union enjoyed a much higher percentage of women than that in the United States.5

  Interestingly, the U.S. space program had started training female astronauts and found they physically stood up to extreme conditions just as well as, or even better than, their male colleagues. More than a dozen women had excelled in early 1960s training programs. (As of this writing, we know that women are not just the equals to men in space, but they may be better suited for long-duration voyages in deep space.) When Vice President Johnson saw a summary of the early results, however, the tradition-bound southern gentleman scrawled “Let’s stop this now!” across the top.6 The first American women would have to wait.

  Late in his abbreviated presidency, Kennedy had actually made public overtures to the Soviets, hinting at (and even presaging, we can say now) cooperation in space. After announcing a nuclear test ban treaty with the Soviets, and then installing that icon of all Cold War films to follow—the “hotline” phones linking the Kremlin and the White House—Kennedy had told an autumn 1963 United Nations assembly, “Let us do the big things together.” Khrushchev’s son later revealed that his father continued to warm to the young American president and was even receptive to the idea of joint space exploration. By November, however, Congress had cut over $600 million from Kennedy’s budget request for NASA and even included a rider ruling out a joint lunar landing with the Soviets.7

  Kennedy’s tremendous physical discomfort had only grown since his election. By late 1963, he spent a great deal of time in a heated pool. But he had maintained his support for NASA and a presidential travel schedule, including tours of space centers. He took what would be his last trip to Cape Canaveral on November 16, meeting with various NASA leaders on a tour of the burgeoning Apollo facilities there. (See Figure 7.1.)

  figure 7.1 Wernher von Braun leads President John F. Kennedy on a tour of the Mars
hall Space Flight Center in September 1962. (NASA photograph.)

  Just a week later, a startled nation had lost its president to assassination. November 22, 1963, had been set as the date American satellite technology would transmit the first television signal across the Pacific Ocean (from the United States to Japan): a pre-recorded greeting from President Kennedy. With his jarring, public death hours before the broadcast, officials quickly scuttled the event. A few days later, the new communications satellites (or “comsats” to the engineers) beamed footage of the presidential funeral around the world. Lyndon Johnson, newly sworn in as commander in chief, named NASA’s Florida launch center after John F. Kennedy.8

  Within a year, a less dramatic shift in the space race arrived as a quiet Soviet coup removed Nikita Khrushchev from power. While his chief rocket designer Korolev would continue struggling with a new, more powerful booster rocket, the incoming leadership began to emphasize scientific discovery over flashy missions that could embarrass their American rivals.9 But Korolev was left with a specific Khrushchev order that he didn’t relish. Mindful of America’s Apollo plans, Khrushchev had ordered his chief designer to get a three-seater into space, sooner rather than later. Without time to properly develop a new spacecraft, the Soviet engineers simply removed the ejection seat and reserve parachute from their working one-seater (the Vostok) and announced a “new,” crowded craft (the Voskhod) ready for three cosmonauts.10