America had lost its president and NASA had lost its political prophet, the man who had pointed at the Moon and made a promise to Earth. The agency’s setting for 1964 looked especially dark. Books like Moon-Doggle and The Rise and Fall of the Space Age made loud pronouncements of Apollo’s coming demise and a nation’s science fiction folly. And additional worries plagued the sleep of NASA’s leading rocket architect. A book had emerged in East Germany titled (in translation) Secret of Huntsville: The True Career of Rocket Baron Wernher von Braun. The book uncovered many unflattering facts of von Braun’s Nazi-era past and his compromises with the Third Reich. Von Braun was concerned enough that he warned NASA leadership, but they told him to ignore it. Despite some legitimate content, the book also owned a breathless, tabloid tone and embellished many stories with hyperbole. Given America’s well-founded mistrust of Soviet-bloc propaganda efforts, the local press ignored the book, and it remained hidden in the German language and behind the Iron Curtain.11
In public, Wernher von Braun led the agency’s attempts to counter the negative space narrative. He had entered a full-court press of public relations. In this era, he gave and wrote around 150 major public speeches and articles per year. These included monthly columns in Popular Science, and he shrewdly confronted other topics, putting our space missions in the context of all things America: democracy versus communism, for one, and the dialogue between science and religion for another. Witnesses describe a public confrontation between a church deacon and von Braun. The deacon complained of an Alabama drought and accused von Braun of “punching holes in the clouds with those rockets and drying up the rain.”
The rocket scientist deftly swung to the Bible and reminded the audience of Jacob’s ladder, with angels ascending and descending. He said that humanity was now on the ladder, taking the first steps. “If the good Lord does not want us to go up and down His creation, all He has to do is tip over the ladder.” The crowd erupted with applause.12
In the face of national doubts, NASA leaned on the strident political support of Lyndon Johnson, who had originally huddled with von Braun and recommended the Moon missions to Kennedy. Shortly after becoming president, Johnson told an economic advisor, “To tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.” He put a team to work on a major anti-poverty initiative, and the drive to the “Great Society” was on. If Kennedy put the nation’s do-everything ambition in high gear, Johnson floored the accelerator pedal at home and abroad. As he famously said in 1964, “Surrender anywhere threatens defeat everywhere.” Selecting from a menu of policing the world against communism, rebuilding impoverished neighborhoods in America, or engineering an expensive trip to our nearest celestial neighbor, Johnson voted for all of the above.13
Of all the national voices, an inhuman one spoke loudest to Wernher von Braun, as the singing of the F-1 engine resisted all coaching. Given von Braun’s outreach work, it would be easy to assume he stayed well above the technical fray of the Marshall Space Flight Center, but he did most of his public writing at night. Even though he had excellent managers working under him, he maintained his vital role for realizing the Saturn V. At the start of 1964, the hazardous warble in the immense new engines remained Huntsville’s chief worry. Combustion instability threatened the whole enterprise, still striking without warning and too often to ignore.
As the engineers thought less about complete elimination of the problem and more about building an engine that could dampen the effect and survive it, they started to regularly induce the unwanted vibes in their tests. They sought to create the worst warble imaginable to make sure a firing F-1 engine could then tamp it out or at least remain intact. In a surreal move, they began setting off small bombs within fully burning engine bells. The blasts would start up an uneven burning pattern. Some had predictably catastrophic results, but when an engine survived and returned to normal, smooth burning within half a second or so, that marked success.
Two contract engineers working on these tests found themselves simmering in a new kind of heat. During a commercial flight, the pair argued about their bomb tests. A flight attendant overheard their energetic discussions and grew worried. When they deplaned, dark-suited FBI agents escorted the engineers to an interview room and proceeded to grill them for hours about their suspicious bomb discussion. Their story—we’re setting off little bombs to help test rockets for the Moon mission—struck the agents as absurd, and eventually top brass from the engineers’ employer had to intervene.14
At the peak of instability panic, 125 engineers and some 400 technicians focused on the problem. And 1964 did witness progress. One type of instability responded to an ad hoc solution that tweaked existing engine structures. Fuel entered the F-1’s blast chamber through, in essence, the world’s largest showerhead, with some 3,700 holes for the kerosene fuel and another 2,600 for the oxygen. Engineers began altering the angles of these holes through the plate, giving a little more variety to the directions by which fuel would enter the blast chamber, and they also introduced small metal ridges on the blast side of the showerhead. In this case, the engineers had guessed right: These “baffles” helped dampen the instability when it arose, perhaps by interrupting spiral flows of burning gas.15
Engineers also worked through a different kind of instability, and at least in this one case, they actually found the culprit. “There were ten or twelve of us in an office that was twenty by forty feet,” Huntsville engineer Len Worlund said. “We were all sitting there, desk to desk in two rows. I could turn around and bump an elbow on the desk behind me. You knew everything that was going on.” When they faced a tough problem, they would sometimes start developing three possible solutions in parallel, so as to not lose calendar time.
The engineers, predating computer screens to display their measurements, printed everything. In probing one of the instabilities, they tracked the pressure inside a fuel line over a long engine burn and printed out the graph. It wouldn’t fit on their desks. “We’d unroll that oscillogram down the hall,” Worlund said. “You’d see a little bitty trace oscillating.” They carefully marked the time between the warble’s peaks on the printout, and in time they uncovered an odd sort of communication between different structures of the engine. One engine part (a long metal pipe transporting liquid oxygen) and another (in the wall of the engine’s bell-shaped blast chamber) happened to ring at the same low tone, just under the range of human hearing. When the thin pipe started singing, the engine bell couldn’t help but join in. By year’s end, the engineers thought they’d handled the problem by restructuring the fuel line just enough to change its tune. (This instability villain would lurk, however, awaiting the moment a Saturn finally vaulted into the air.)16
Worlund, then embedded in the instability issues, describes flights with von Braun from Huntsville to the Cape, sometimes for a presentation and other times for a test launch. “Von Braun always liked to take off, so he sat in the copilot seat.” But once they were airborne, he moved to the rear of the plane to start working. Worlund recalled one intense trip, flying to update staff at the Cape on the instability problem. “And he [von Braun] said, ‘Let me see your charts.’ He’s sitting there and flipping through those charts, and he says, ‘Guys we can’t do that. It’ll never fly.’ ” Von Braun wanted to find a more optimistic message for their technical presentation, and they reworked the game plan in the air.17
Instabilities weren’t the only problems von Braun’s team faced in 1964. An alarming number of cracks emerged in most of the test engines. The team tracked each one like a murder mystery: collecting and analyzing evidence until they could convict a perpetrator. A strange act of chemistry created one set of cracks, with components of exhaust combining and conspiring, like bad influences, on the metal walls of the combustion bell. In other cases, the super-cold liquid oxygen simply froze and cracked the engine materials. Engineers alternately turned to new materials or devised special pre-treatments to strengthen metal components against the ex
tremes of fire and ice.
Meetings at the Marshall Space Flight Center regularly ran past midnight. Many of these were coordinating sessions, just to keep track of how solutions to one problem would affect other segments of the rocket. Some describe “a battle” to keep track of daily changes and follow them logically—knee-bone to thigh-bone and so on—to their predicted impacts in other systems. This hive of details buzzed within a carefully orchestrated set of well-worn file folders. Engineers describe conference rooms thickening with cigarette smoke as meetings paced into late nights. Von Braun was an ideal leader through such sessions, attracting respect and inspiring excellent work. Colleagues look back and admit they never hesitated to work around the clock for him.18
Many engineers in both Huntsville and also Houston recall an extra task that was rare in other organizations. “Every single day they required every engineer to write one page, a handwritten page, and send it in to your boss, of what you did that day,” Henry Pohl said. “The section [leader] took that from all of us and condensed it into one page that was passed out the next day to the branch, the next day to the division, and the next day up, and every day von Braun got from every laboratory a one-page summary. It always stayed one page, but it moved up the line.” This was not just an exercise, as Pohl learned; supervisors scrutinized these summaries. He once received an early morning phone call from an irate manager. Henry had written that he followed normal protocol on handling a fuel tank but then admitted he could see a method less prone to mishap. “I mean he just chewed me up one side and down the other side,” Pohl said, “for agreeing to do something that I knew was not safe.”19
But work for von Braun was not all smoke-filled conference rooms and reams of one-page work summaries. In 1964, he and a few of his long-time German colleagues became regulars at a new lounge, the Top Hat. The owner later recalled von Braun showing up in the gravel parking lot around 5:00 p.m., and then seven or eight “other doctors” followed. The group, she said, would “head straight for our stockroom in back, where all the beer was stored. Only American beer. They would drink the beer hot in there and talk and draw all over the beer cases—rocket designs and things.” After about an hour, von Braun would invite her into the room to survey their empty bottles—neatly arranged for counting—and compute a bill. She said this weekly routine spanned most of the Apollo years. She regretted never saving the cardboard cases that mixed German rocket scribbles with American beer logos.20
Von Braun started to see reason for optimism in 1964. He promised NASA headquarters that he would boost the power of the Saturn V rocket, until it could lift an extra half-ton into space. With the mission featuring multiple modules now, every pound counted, and von Braun said his team could lift a thousand more.21
In the fall, von Braun got a special treat, seeing part of what his rocket would eventually heave toward the Moon. NASA headquarters invited him to climb into a first-generation “lunar module,” a light, insect-like landing craft that would separate from the other Apollo modules. He had always enjoyed flying and wished he could actually take a mission into space. In the Mercury program, he joked that he’d been declared too fat to join the astronaut core. But in 1964, this was his first genuine tour of a ship designed specifically for foreign worlds. After carefully inspecting the innards of this Moon lander, he emerged like an excited child. “You’ve got to go up there,” he called to a colleague. “It’s great!”22
By now, support for the lunar lander plan was widespread. “We gave it a good hard look,” Max Faget later said. “Not only did it solve the problem of being able to get there with one launch of the Saturn . . . but it solved problems that we didn’t think about before. . . . [It] didn’t have to have any heat protection, no aerodynamic considerations at all.”23 In 1964, NASA set out some very basic requirements for the lander. It would need to ferry two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface, along with 250 pounds of extra equipment to be left on the Moon. The craft would land on the side of the Moon facing Earth, with an antenna pointed aloft to maintain radio contact. And it would need to then lift roughly one hundred pounds of lunar soil and rocks back to lunar orbit.
Initial ideas for this nimble little Moon craft varied widely. One early sketch showed just a skeletal frame holding one standing person. While that fanciful idea never really had a chance, it did prove prescient in one respect. Engineers struggled to figure out a way for seated astronauts to effectively see the Moon’s surface using a limited number of tiny windows. (Windows were extremely heavy and also had to be perfectly sealed against the vacuum of space.) Engineer Thomas Kelly, one of the leading designers, described the flash of insight that both saved weight and improved viewing angles. “What if we get rid of the seats?” The final lunar lander was a standing-room-only affair, with tethered astronauts standing upright and using the small triangular windows. In fact, given standing astronauts, engineers decided to make the windows even smaller, saving more weight. And losing the bulky, cushioned seating created extra space in the tiny craft as well.24
Having a craft that would never have to deal with Earth’s atmosphere or Earth’s strong gravity gave designers a vertigo-inducing freedom. They debated whether all the key equipment (life support, storage tanks, communications, etc.) would be best placed inside, with the astronauts, or outside, on the hull of the craft. If it didn’t have to worry about the friction of an atmosphere, this ship could be lumpy. Rough-draft models proposed a spherical crew chamber, sort of like a diving bell. The lander would have the most space for the crew using the least amount of metal if it was round. The little promotional pamphlet provided by my father featured cartoon sketches of this early prototype landing on the Moon. With its spherical head and two little cylinder-shaped docking hatches, it looks like a cartoon pig wearing a fez. Many changes were still to come. Eventually, engineers opted for a lumpy exterior and a more cylindrical crew chamber. “It didn’t have to be pretty,” recalled Faget, laughing. “It was nicknamed ‘the bug,’ which everybody objected to . . . but it looks like a bug.”25 (See Figure 7.2.)
figure 7.2 A dreamy, early diorama of a lunar lander. (NASA image, via Grumman.)
To save every ounce of weight, engineers planned to shave components to be as thin as physics would allow. As long as it could hold air within it for a few days, like a sheer metallic balloon, that would suffice. All the pieces, even the plumbing of fuel lines, were shaved, etched, and thinned to save weight. As early as 1964, however, engineers found worrisome cracks in the spider-like aluminum legs.26
The initial requirements for the lander’s legs were as mysterious as the nature of the Moon’s surface itself. Engineers moved from a five-legged critter to a four-legged one, with large platter-like feet at the end of each spindly leg. If the lunar surface was dusty and soft, the large pads—each about the size of a banquet serving tray—would keep the lander from sinking. And if the surface was relatively hard, like a parking lot, the large feet would just add stability against tipping over. But if the Moon was too hard and we couldn’t bet on a gentle landing, the legs would need shock absorbers. Normal shock absorbers involve some kind of fluid, but this adds weight, and fluids could easily leak into space, freeze in the cold, or boil in a blast of sunlight. Engineers arrived at a fluid-free system: a thin honeycomb structure that would softly collapse under the pressure of landing. It could only be used once; the lander could not take off and land a second time.27 In fact, to simplify the return trip, the bug would molt: its legs and landing structure would stay on the Moon, even as its upper half rocketed back into lunar orbit.
That leap off the Moon presented one of the Apollo program’s most worrisome segments. In talking with the engineers, you hear a mantra of “fail safe” systems; nearly every segment of the mission planned to have a back-up method in case some piece of equipment failed, and most segments had a back-up to the back-up. But there was an exception: the one, lone engine that needed to lift the astronauts back into space. “To me, that was the biggest probl
em point,” my father says. “If it didn’t fire, you were dead.” Other engineers concur that this “ascent engine” was a rare “single-point failure” for the entire enterprise, with no back-up plan. If that engine didn’t fire properly, NASA would maroon two astronauts with a few extra hours’ worth of oxygen, and the world would watch them slowly asphyxiate next to the American flag.
When a single piece of gear is this important, engineers remove as much complexity as possible. As lander designer Tom Kelly wrote, “It was simpler than the common oil burners used for home heating.” This one didn’t have special fuel pumps or intricate plumbing or the ability to aim the direction of its exhaust, like the Saturn V main engines. “This innocuous-looking device,” Kelly wrote, “proved to be one of the greatest threats” to realizing the Moon missions.28
The prototypes were also dangerous on Earth. One way to simplify an engine is to eliminate an ignition system. Like a stove burner, most engines require an initial spark to get going, but we’ve all seen stove burners that quit sparking—they just emit a hiss of useless gas. An alarming but useful alternative involves using “hypergolic” fuels, two or more chemicals that start burning as soon as they mix. These had been used before in missiles (like the Titan series), and other modules of the Apollo mission would use them, on a smaller scale, as thrusters that let a ship rotate itself or tweak its course. (Henry Pohl, master of small rocket engines via Huntsville, would be working on those for the main Apollo modules.)
But the big ascent engine for the lander dwarfed those thrusters, and even though it faced only the Moon’s weak gravity, it still had to lift itself, two astronauts, and one hundred pounds of Moon rocks back into space. The two chemicals of choice here, giving a great bang per ounce of fluid, happened to be extremely toxic.i One, when leaking, formed a cloud-like white vapor, while the other was a more earthy, brownish red. Checking for leaks in early engine design was critical not only for future mission survival, but also for the lives of the Earth-bound staff putting the system together. One engineer recalled dipping a stick into one of the chemicals and letting it drip onto snow outside his laboratory, only to watch the snow burst into flames. Another story from these times had a distracted technician click a ballpoint pen against one of the paper-thin storage tanks, where he unwittingly created a tiny leak. The incredible pressure shot the pen, with a good piece of his finger, into a nearby fence post.29
The Apollo Chronicles Page 13