The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  Before a lander could launch back into space, it would have to navigate its way to the bumpy lunar surface. Robert Brown accepted a job with rapidly growing NASA in 1964. His work experience at Hughes Aircraft looked like a good fit for the Apollo missions. Not only did the unmanned Surveyor program require all the calculations of getting to the Moon and making adjustments along the way, but Surveyor also aimed to land softly on the Moon, where it could take photos and make some simple measurements. Did they use some sort of remote means, like a mission-control joystick, to land the Surveyor probes? No—it was all automated. The Surveyor flew solo, using no astronauts and no remote human input, to land on a foreign world of largely unknown terrain and texture. “It was very simple,” my father says of Surveyor. “We had to make it simple.” Surveyor lived on a fraction of Apollo’s budget and a relatively small team of engineers. A radar unit on its underside aimed at the Moon’s surface. The radar was actually inside the cone of its landing engine. When the craft got close enough to the Moon “the radar triggered the descent engine and blew the radar out.” And destroyed it? Yes. “We didn’t need it at that point.”

  As of 1964, the planning and a lot of the construction for Surveyor were complete, but it had not yet flown to the Moon. Still, weren’t the lessons learned attractive to Brown’s new employer, NASA? “No,” he says with a tinge of sarcasm. “They knew better, on everything.” Inside the agency, the engineers were (despite or maybe in concert with their youth) developing an iron-clad technical confidence. If the nation had any expertise for space travel, they reasoned it had to be in-house.

  Records show that the Soviet space program had already embraced automated systems for most of their space journeys. The cosmonauts did not have much to do. Even when they eventually docked two ships together in space, the humans primarily enjoyed the show as computers did the work. But for the American space effort, the astronauts maintained a more central role. Later in the Apollo program, worries about astronaut safety intensified. “We put a group together to see if we could fly unmanned,” my father says, “and sure enough, we figured you could do it. But that was nixed also. The question comes up about why you have all these astronauts.”

  In late 1964, the lander program had plenty of stressors, with or without astronauts on board. In addition to cracking materials and a dangerous liftoff engine, its thruster prototypes—the smaller rockets for maneuvering—sometimes backfired and exploded. And unlike the unmanned Surveyor, the lander needed more complicated radar systems. It was one thing to set down a hunk of metal on the Moon, but it was another thing to set it down gently enough that a standing human being wouldn’t break his legs. Plus, while a Surveyor stayed put (five of the seven probes landed and will sit on the Moon for eons to come), an Apollo lander needed to shoot part of itself back into space, find the rest of the Apollo spaceship, and carefully dock with it. Having radar for the Moon landing and for docking added weight, added complexity, and even generated unwanted heat. Moreover, engineers weren’t sure the technology could provide good enough information to the astronauts. NASA actually considered removing the radar systems and trying to inform the Moon landing and the rendezvous of ships using large Earth-based communication systems. This didn’t come to pass, but imagine it for a moment: two fragile ships orbiting the Moon and awaiting moment-to-moment orders from Earth. “A little to the left . . . no, your other left.” And all these signals would be slightly delayed by the length of two astronaut heartbeats, the time for radio waves to speed a quarter-million miles.

  When a rough-draft, full-scale lander model came together in October of 1964, Wernher von Braun had been one of the first and most enthused humans to crawl inside, but the model showed a new problem and prompted changes right away. A worker played the role of an astronaut trying to get in and out of the thing, but the exit hatch was too small. A suited astronaut with his life-supporting backpack could only squeeze through after superlative effort, risking suit damage.30

  The story of the space suits illustrates the equal importance of every level of detail, from titanic rockets to tiny stitches meant to protect a man from the harsh indifference of space. Like a self-destructive engine, or a problem-filled lander, the suits themselves made for another distressing issue. A test of the leading Apollo suit candidate failed in spectacular fashion in late 1963. Staff, playing the role of astronauts, could not rise from prone positions—the awkward suits pinned them on their backs, according to one account, like a bunch of helpless turtles. In the spring of 1964, NASA took a rare step and declared “contractual failure” against the suit maker, Hamilton Standard.31

  Early in the space program, some had considered a hard suit, like an insect’s exoskeleton, as the most sensible model. The joints were always a difficult matter, but storage was just as damning for hard suits in a Moon mission. A hard suit was like an extra passenger in a mission with no extra seats, but a soft suit could be folded and compressed when not in use. (The hard suit idea persisted in the background, and in a more secret space program, the U.S. military preferred hard suits when planning an orbiting outpost. The proposed space garrison would have had a darkroom to develop spy photographs of the USSR, but the idea lost out to unmanned spy satellites.)32

  Any spacesuit for Apollo faced a decathlon of space requirements. It was one thing to build a leak-proof suit that could keep a man alive in the vacuum of space. The extreme temperature differences of the light and dark sides for any object floating in our solar system posed another challenge, with one side of a suit being hotter than boiling water, and the other colder than any deep freeze on Earth. But even if a suit reliably overcame these hurdles, the suit then needed to allow people to work: to move, to lift, to grip, and to press keys. Astronauts would need to operate equipment, climb down and then up ladders, and possibly survive falls onto sharp Moon rocks.

  An unlikely dark horse challenged the larger suit-making contenders. The company that brought “Playtex” undergarments to America, the International Latex Corporation, was now making their best pitch for NASA’s Apollo spacesuit. The Latex Corp. had worked on specialty pressure suits since it first won a small contract with the air force in 1950. NASA originally had them subcontract to Hamilton Standard, the presumed favorite contractor for making the Apollo suits, but that collaboration started to unravel in 1964. While Hamilton was a button-down, formal defense contractor, their smaller partner was a different animal—less hierarchical and more averse to paperwork.

  The Latex Corporation encouraged the input of the seamstresses, some of whom were pulled from their work on diapers. These women deeply understood the various fabrics and materials of the many layers in a spacesuit and knew what it would take to stitch a seam so flawlessly as to make it airtight. The final Apollo suits, fit for a walk on the Moon, gathered a total of twenty-one layers. In their Delaware offices, managers and seamstresses huddled in late-night sessions. Over coffee and cigarettes, they debated materials, fabrics, and the ordering of the layers, balancing safety versus flexibility on the top of a sewing needle.33

  Half a continent away, NASA managers stitched together another complex structure, layer by layer. New hires and Langley transplants streamed into NASA’s new Manned Spaceflight Center south of Houston.

  My parents moved to the area in the spring of 1964, as my father joined the “Mission Planning and Analysis” division. This group would worry about trajectories to the Moon and back, including minding the calendar for those ideal lunar shadow lengths. They would roil through every conceivable way a mission could go wrong and how to then recover astronauts safely; they would sweat every drop of fuel, gulp of air, or charge of electric power needed during a Moon voyage. As engineer Aldo Bordano put it, “The first thing we did was design the mission. Then we had to teach the ground controllers and the astronauts what that mission was to look like and how to monitor it.”34 Aside from writing and teaching the script, the division also had to weave this expertise into the computer programs that would run in both the
Mission Control Center and the spacecraft themselves. The planners describe nutty meetings of this era where they argued not only about solving problems but also over precious chalkboard real estate. They stood elbow to elbow in a cacophony of clicking, sliding chalk, marking task lists, differential equations, weights, and time points. “Problem was,” my father said, “boards could be erased.”

  One of my father’s first tasks for NASA was to go out and start hiring other new employees. The agency was growing rapidly, and only a handful of college programs even tried to prepare graduates for space work. Many new NASA employees attended days of impromptu classes held at Ellington Air Force Base, just to the west of the new Manned Spaceflight Center.

  Engineer Lee Norbraten, for instance, accepted his NASA job offer right out of college, after graduating with a mathematics degree. “It was my first big adventure from home,” he says. “I came to Texas without a car—this is not a very good thing.” Once in Houston, he took a cab out to the new site and found what many new employees saw there: a sprawling, new campus with little else in sight. As my mother describes the 1964 scene, an old farm-to-market road provided the only route to the NASA center. “I don’t think there was even a gas station out there at the time,” she says. And there was definitely not a housing complex or dormitory.

  Norbraten rented a small apartment many miles to the north, in the industrial town of Pasadena. Then he learned with dismay that he was too young to get a car loan. But he was a problem solver, and he started to circle his apartment building. “I went around the parking lot looking for a NASA sticker,” he says. “I left notes offering to pay for gas if I could get a ride.” He soon got a knock from a fellow who was glad to help. The man was from Arkansas, largely uneducated, and did maintenance work at the new space center. Their shared rides taught the young mathematician a few things. “It was my first encounter with country music.” A popular tune of the day told the story of a tense double date: “You Can’t Have Your Kate and Edith, Too.” During those fifteen-mile rides to work, “I heard it more than once,” Norbraten says.35

  Engineer Aldo Bordano started at age twenty-two, right out of Texas A&M University. “I was so naive,” he says now. “I remember the [application] said, ‘Can you work at high places?’ ” So, he began to imagine himself working on the rocket support gantry next to the enormous Saturn V, “peeking in the window.” An older coworker escorted Bordano on his maiden visit to the new center. “I was sitting shotgun in his car and I looked over to the right and there was a huge structure—it turns out it was a power plant. We drove by it kind of quickly and I looked over and I said, ‘Is that where we’re going to launch from?’ ” His coworker gave a casual nod in the affirmative.

  “For another six or so weeks I thought that was the launch tower.”

  Bordano’s early days give us a glimpse of the center’s culture, as he soon was working sixty-five to seventy hours per week. One Saturday morning found him running and tweaking a computer program. He was so tired and so focused on keeping his stack of cards in order that he didn’t see a little bottle on top of the chest-high IBM 1620. “I accidentally knocked that ink well over and it poured right down inside the computer.” What would the ink do to the mysterious innards of this expensive device, a machine central to so many NASA projects? “I looked around and I picked that ink well up and I cleaned everything up and I looked at my run and it looked all right. Other people were coming in and I hung around kind of sheepishly. But their runs were working well, so I didn’t ever have to tell anybody.”36

  The engineers arranged stacks of nightmares in obsessive detail. Eventually, for every possible Apollo mission that would come to be, engineers had planned and computed scores of failed and aborted missions. Some engineers specialized in the first eight minutes after a launch and each type of problem that could scuttle a mission before it got to space. If aborted, how would NASA get the astronauts back safely, and where would the astronauts land in the Atlantic? They asked and answered arrays of these questions for each conceivable problem. Others focused, for instance, on a return trip from the Moon to Earth. At what points in space could they safely adjust a mission’s path and speed? When exactly would it have to leave the Moon to eventually land, during daylight, in the Pacific Ocean just west of Hawaii, near a fleet of waiting ships? They plotted a band of possible splashdown points and made sure the capsule wouldn’t crash-land on any islands. If problems arose in any of the many orbits of the Moon, engineers computed the exact trajectories back to Earth from each of those distinct lunar laps. And still, surprises lurked.37

  Max Faget’s engineering division toiled just as busily on the new campus south of Houston. The testing facilities—Faget started calling them his “garage”—needed to test a spacecraft, its materials, and its design versus drastic temperature changes. Seals around windows had to prove they would not leak when space was sucking on them with an unrelenting vacuum. Different modules had to prove that they could lock together during docking, at various speeds, with some forgiveness for the imperfections of human pilots. In 1964, he nervously watched the proposed Apollo spacecraft pack on the pounds, as idealized schematics became physical objects, with extra complications, extra materials, and extra subsystems added. Just some fifteen years after the scruffy kid who’d slept in his dad’s car interviewed at Langley, Faget now employed 1,400 engineers. About three times that many also worked on the primary spacecraft via the contractor North American, based in Los Angeles.38

  Faget also had a growing non-mechanical concern: preventing a deadly Moon-demic. The National Academy of Sciences had just announced that “the introduction into Earth’s biosphere of destructive alien organisms could be a disaster of enormous significance to mankind.” Again, we might struggle to return our minds to this time, when so little was known of the Moon and what exactly we might find there. The risk of contaminating Earth with a Moon virus or a Moon weed were small, and many people scoffed at the science-fiction type of alarm, but just to be sure, Faget and a few of his engineers began to think about how they would quarantine and monitor returning lunar material. He became an early advocate for a lunar “receiving lab.”39

  My father never knew Faget well, but they intersected in meetings, and what he recalls squares with other accounts of the quirky genius. Many a meeting featured Faget, “glasses up on his forehead, eyes closed,” my father says. “Everyone assumed he was asleep but he was wide awake.” If someone in the meeting said something mistaken or ventured onto shaky engineering ground, Faget sat upright, eyes fluttering open, and issued a correction, sometimes in harsh terms.

  Henry Pohl recalls some special cases of Faget feedback. “I remember I was making a briefing to him, and he told me, ‘Now Henry, it’s like a dark wool suit. [Your presentation] gives you a nice warm feeling, but nobody really notices it.’ ” Another time, Pohl was describing a new method for the small control thrusters, one that would save the Apollo spacecraft some valuable weight. “Now Henry,” Faget said. “You’re picking at cabbage.”

  “Well, I knew I [had] lost him,” Pohl says. “Cabbage was plentiful and he was trying to tell me that [the idea] was not significant.” He pauses. “It’s a good thing, too.” Pohl’s idea, in this rare case, had been fundamentally flawed.40

  In 1964, a major new residential development was underway in Clear Lake, but more immediate housing options were still limited for transplanted or newly hired engineers and their families. While a number of the Langley personnel had settled well west of the center, in Friendswood, Texas, others had settled to the south.

  The Faget family opted for a home on Dickinson Bayou. “He basically designed the house himself,” Max Faget’s daughter Ann recalls. “With some unique features.” For instance, “there was a long hallway to the bedrooms and at the end of the hallway, he had a little plug in the foundation, covered with carpet. But you could lift it up and there was a little [golf] hole so he could practice putting.” His daughter Carol says their fathe
r built a bulkhead against the bayou in the late 1960s, to protect their yard from erosion. (The home is still in the Faget family, and while the bulkhead has held up beautifully for half a century, the floods of Hurricane Harvey overran the house in 2017.) Max had always loved being on the water. In the new home, he designed his own sailboats for local racing competitions, and he built his son, Guy, a little boat for exploring the bayou.41

  My parents purchased a parcel of an old pecan orchard, about seven miles south of the new NASA center. Like the Fagets, they settled into a formerly working-class environment. The school buses mixed a few NASA kids with children of shrimp fishermen, mechanics, petrochemical technicians, and migrant field workers. In the years to come, most families of the space race inhabited the new developments around Clear Lake or other sprouting suburbs. Like Huntsville, the southern reaches of Houston experienced an abrupt cultural lurch—in terms of schooling and average income, as well as accents and traditions. But broader shifts were afoot.

  The new president, Lyndon Johnson, accelerated an upbeat, progressive agenda. His Earthside projects included his Great Society programs. Meanwhile, he and Congress continued to increase NASA’s budget, which surpassed five billion dollars for the year (over 4 percent of the total federal budget). The White House banked on the economy sustaining incredible growth, printing more and more money for ambitious projects.