The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  To the president’s way of thinking, certain societal changes were mandatory and overdue. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law in early July, but the congressional delegations of the Deep South, where most of NASA now lived and worked, had strongly opposed it. Marlowe Cassetti, newly transplanted to Houston, recalls his new surrounds being even more segregated than those in Virginia. When he hosted a group from IBM including African American employees, he says, “We couldn’t go out to lunch with them.” With some relief, he learned that a local department store’s luncheonette would accept an integrated group.

  Meanwhile, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee brought nearly one thousand young white volunteers to the Mississippi Freedom Summer to register black voters. In between the various engineering deadlines, NASA families would see TV footage and newspaper photos with waves of policemen beating and jailing volunteers and prospective voters alike.

  Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, remained an outspoken proponent of the old ways, and even as he proclaimed “segregation forever” throughout 1964, he found himself at odds with the more progressive-minded von Braun. During a meeting with the governor, von Braun and NASA director James Webb tried to diffuse the tension. They politely asked of Wallace, wouldn’t he want to someday visit the Moon? “Well,” he replied, “you fellows might not bring me back.”42

  A legacy of the NASA versus Alabama disconnect persists in spirit today, where you can still hear a joke among the retired engineers. You know what they say: the great thing about Huntsville is you’re only fifty miles from Alabama in any direction. The space centers, with their long hours and stacks of impossible problems, along with federal leadership and mandates, could function as islands. For the most part, the engineers didn’t have spare time or energy to consider careening social changes outside their labs and offices. At times, they didn’t even think much about their families or about Earth in general, until an event could yank them back.

  One Marshall Center engineer described joining von Braun’s workforce and moving to Huntsville in 1963; he was new to the South. With his first real salary, he bought a car, an Impala. One warm September Sunday, he was living a cherished American dream of washing an automobile in the driveway and listening to the radio, when the announcers cut in with horrifying news: The bombing and burning of a black church in Birmingham, one hundred miles to the south, had taken the lives of four young girls. The white engineer stopped fussing with his car and stood stunned, as the white disk jockey transitioned directly to music in a jovial tone. An evil-sounding, mocking laugh opened a popular surfing track before intoning, “Wipe Out!” The story still gives him chills.43

  By all accounts, the racial animosity and injustice genuinely moved and disturbed Wernher von Braun. Coworkers warned von Braun about public stances. They told him he would get a cross burned in his family’s yard if he kept speaking against racism. But von Braun described his arrival in America and the questions he had faced. “Where were you? What did you do? . . . What did you do when people were disappearing?” he said. “That’s not going to happen again. . . . I am not going to sit quiet on a major issue like segregation.” And he didn’t. He spoke for desegregated schools and voting rights. In December of 1964, he addressed the Huntsville Chamber of Commerce: “I think we should all admit this fact: Alabama’s image is marred by civil rights incidents and statements.” At another event, he told an audience that “all these regulatory barriers form a Berlin Wall around the ballot box.”44

  Despite his good intentions and some sincere efforts, von Braun made little progress in integrating his Huntsville workforce. Throughout the 1960s, while 18 percent of Huntsville’s population was African American, the Marshall Space Flight Center featured less than 1 percent African American employees. Segregated schools in Alabama, including segregated higher education, meant few African American students received the engineering training needed for rocketry. And von Braun’s recruiters found it nearly impossible to entice any non-white person from outside the state to Alabama, given its overwhelming association with the words of Governor Wallace.45

  Though any investigation of von Braun’s life in America finds fawning stories of a kind man, a great listener, and a natural leader, many people find it difficult to reconcile his stance in the Civil Rights era with his participatory Nazi past. The same man who spoke truth to the power of Wallace, in some cases questioning him directly, had accepted promotions as an SS officer, and he had witnessed the gruesome underground facility, Mittelwerk, where slave laborers died en masse building V-2 rockets to his specifications. Records show that von Braun even sifted through concentration camps, looking for engineering talent. But the 1944 and 1964 versions of von Braun are not necessarily at odds. Any gesture against the Nazis certainly would have (and arguably did) put his life at risk, whereas a strong stand in Alabama did not. As with the story from his co-workers, he may have had a sincere change of heart, the emergence of a strong moral gyroscope. People are allowed to grow between their youth and their middle years. But we could also cynically say that in each case (Nazi Germany and 1960s America) von Braun recognized the hand that fueled his rockets. George Wallace wasn’t paying the bills. Meanwhile, the federal government and NASA leadership had told him in 1963 to start a serious affirmative action program in Huntsville. He was truly following his orders again.

  The day after von Braun addressed the Huntsville business community, chiding Alabama for its self-inflicted harm, NASA prepared a significant test launch in Florida. The region enjoyed one of its more gorgeous December days (calm winds, sunshine, and 68˚ Fahrenheit), buoying the hopes of the assembled. Engineers needed to test an intermediate spacecraft called Gemini, a two-seater model that would bridge the earlier Mercury capsule to the eventual Apollo spacecraft. On this day, they would use a Titan rocket to lift the empty spacecraft briefly into space. They needed to test its performance in space and its newly designed heat shield on return. The Titan used the nasty hypergolic fuels that burned on contact with one another, no spark required. As the countdown reached zero, the engines roared but then went quiet, as an acrid red cloud of fuel billowed around the launch pad and rocket. A simple plumbing problem had caused this misfire. Engineers, trying to save weight, had simply shaved one of the pipes to be just a little too thin to withstand launch. After the unnatural caustic smog cleared, engineers rubbed their temples, gathered themselves, and got back to work.46

  * * *

  i Aerozine 50 and N2O4.

  8

  1965—Saturn Breathes

  Henry Pohl’s team ran around-the-clock tests for two weeks at a time working to perfect Apollo’s forty-four control thrusters, each the size of a hand. They had to be sure the thrusters would reliably cycle on and off, over and over, during longer missions. Engineers watched an orange residue encrust the inner test chamber walls. This leftover, congealed from thruster exhaust, was still explosive. “We could put some on an anvil and tap it with a hammer and it would pop like those old cap pistols,” Henry says. They sent some to a standards technician in Boulder, Colorado, to assess the material. “The next day he called back and said it was 1.6 times stronger than TNT.” Soon after, late one night, a frightened technician ran into the laboratory. He said that the residue now coated the parking lot outside; the system must have a substantial leak, and they were spreading an explosive powder across the center. “We ran out and with cigarette papers scraped [a sample of] it off the cars,” Henry says. His boss wanted to shut down the test facility immediately, but Henry couldn’t believe they had such a bad leak and he wanted to analyze what was falling outside. He took a bit of the powder to a local expert. “That University of Houston chemist looked in the microscope for a very long time, stood up and said, ‘If I didn’t know better I would say it’s pollen.’ I snapped my fingers and said something like, ‘Son of a gun.’ . . . [T]hat area [around the parking lot] was solid goldenrod in full bloom.”1 Though the engineers could exhale for now, the thrusters would bede
vil them for months to come.

  Wernher von Braun and his Huntsville team worked on the larger scale propulsion, as they prepared to test their behemoth: the first stage of the Saturn V rocket, where five of the world’s most powerful engines would light in concert. The Saturn V consumed roughly one-third of the total Apollo budget throughout the 1960s, and about half of every dollar spent on the Saturn V rocket went to testing.2

  The enormous test stand that had sparked a Huntsville labor strike in 1962 was ready. In total, with its upper crane, the test stand stood over four hundred feet high. Technicians bolted the rocket’s bottom stage upright, suspended some one hundred yards above the earth. This temple of iron and cement began deep underground, reaching forty-five feet into the red soil until it anchored to bedrock. Its deep grip aimed to keep the Saturn engines from pulling the test stand from the ground.3 Given the stand’s non-public purpose, engineers wasted no time on cosmetics. It looked (and still looks) like an ideal set for a post-apocalyptic B movie: metal bolted to concrete bolted to metal. Sturdy but built in a hurry, some segments were not perfectly level. Bolts securing a rectangular metal plate, for instance, sat different distances from their respective corners. The stand only had to strap in the Saturn’s first stage like some baby in a high chair, to be fed swimming pools of kerosene and liquid oxygen.

  From the upper levels of the stand, an engineer could view a half dozen other test facilities interrupting the forests and fields. One of the closest was the “dynamic” test stand, a black monolith-like structure, fully enclosed. Its name may suggest a moving building, but here the engineers would assemble a Saturn rocket and then vibrate it, poking and prodding the rocket with various timings to understand exactly how its various parts would rattle and shudder in the violent launches to come.

  The static test stand featured a gigantic scoop to corral fiery exhaust. The scoop’s semicircular curve, ribbed and segmented, resembled a giant earthworm lifting itself from the ground. Each segment was plumbed for cascades of water during a test firing, to prevent the test stand from melting and to dampen the tremendous roar (see Figure 8.1).

  figure 8.1 The static test stand’s curved flame bucket at the Marshall Space Flight Center. To help emphasize the facility’s scale, current Test Laboratory Director Ralph Carruth stands near the bottom. (Photograph by author.)

  At a basic level, the engineers weren’t sure what to expect. When firing together, the five F-1 engines would become the most powerful human-made device outside of an atomic weapon. Engineers weren’t sure if nearby structures could survive the first test, so they ordered staff to vacate every building anywhere near it, except for the blockhouse.4 About three stories tall and a football field away from the test stand, the blockhouse hunkered within reinforced concrete walls at least a foot thick. (Like the test stand, it remains there today, and it’s not clear what could ever destroy it.) Square windows, each one foot by one foot by one inch thick, decorated the side facing the test stand. The edges of the building were rounded, offering no purchase for the possible winds of an explosion.

  The initial test of the first stage, in the spring of 1965, ran for just over six successful seconds. All five F-1 engines lit together, burned without trouble, and fell silent together. Engineers who witnessed the test described it as a repeating shotgun blast, with sound waves of such strength that their shirts would flap violently against their chests. All meetings around Marshall stopped with the incredible noise of the test firing, and not by choice. One engineer, on an important phone call far away from the test stand, crawled under his desk and yelled into the receiver, not sure if he was still connected. Another had taken his family shopping in Birmingham, some one hundred miles to the south. As they walked in the J. C. Penney department store, all the windows around them began to rattle. The engineer’s wife asked him what was happening, and he calmly said that Marshall was probably testing the Saturn V. Indeed, Birmingham registered an earthquake-like event, but it arrived through the air, from sound waves of too low a pitch for the human ear to register (see Figure 8.2).5

  figure 8.2 A static test firing of a single F-1 engine in 1965. With five of these engines firing together, the Saturn V’s first stage consumed fifteen tons of fuel per second. (NASA photograph.)

  The tests became a spectator sport for some. “There were two or three of us that would call our wives,” engineer Bob Austin says. “And there was a place to watch from a safe distance.” They would call about thirty minutes before the test would start, but the tests themselves were usually brief. “I’d tell my wife, don’t get caught looking the other way . . . watch the pump house, and when the black smoke comes out, that’s when we’re about to fire.” The pump house kept a row of monstrous diesel engines, and right before a test firing they forced torrents of water toward the stand to coat the inside of the blast scoop. A tall person could easily stand up in the pipe between these pumps and the stand, and the pumps could move a million gallons in just a few seconds.6

  While successful tests of the first stage encouraged von Braun, he received dire news on the second stage, as a version crumpled and failed during a structural strength test in California. The second stage of the Saturn V used the more advanced hydrogen engines, the ones requiring wholly new welding techniques for their super-cold fuel tanks. The second stage was so far behind schedule that NASA eliminated the plan for a series of test models and asked the contractors to focus on the version they would use for the actual missions. One of von Braun’s deputies warned him that the project was “out of control” and could, on its own, push the entire Apollo program past their deadline.7

  If the Saturn’s thick breath came in halting bursts, the more rarified issue of human breathing confronted engineers in Houston. Astronauts would need oxygen, with their lungs accustomed to our thick atmosphere near Earth’s surface. But to have a full atmosphere’s worth of pressure in a spacecraft is to increase the stress on all its joints, welds, and seals. NASA opted for a decreased pressure for its various spacecraft. They aimed for roughly one-third of normal air pressure (about that found atop Mount Everest). It was much easier to have things leak-proof with the lower air pressure inside; the eager vacuum of space sucked on each seam with one-third the force that it would have otherwise. But that led immediately to a second problem: humans usually breathe thick air that is about 20 percent oxygen and 80 percent nitrogen. Thinner air, of course, offers less oxygen, and the brain starts misfiring a bit. With low enough oxygen levels—never mind making a few bad decisions—an astronaut could die.

  Increasing the percentage of oxygen in every gulp of spacecraft air offered one solution, but Max Faget and others argued against a mix early on. Having two gases (nitrogen and oxygen) meant twice as much piping and twice as many systems that could fail during a mission. The simplest solution involved a 100-percent oxygen cabin atmosphere, at a lower pressure. The astronauts would have all the oxygen they needed, but the pressure in the cabin could be fairly low before the astronauts were in danger of asphyxiating. For an astronaut donning a suit and floating in space or walking on the Moon, engineers wanted to decrease the pressure even further, to about one-fifth that of our normal atmosphere. At that point, having any nitrogen risked a nasty condition called the “bends” where a body would start sucking nitrogen into the blood stream. This could strike an astronaut, much like a scuba diver, without warning, with a variety of dangerous symptoms ranging from intense joint pain to paralysis.8

  A perilous lesson in pressurized space flight occurred during a 1965 Soviet mission, but at the time NASA only heard the great and glorious result announced: a Russian named Alexei Leonov had become the first human to float freely in space, without the protection of a spaceship. He floated at the end of a tether, supremely vulnerable yet feeling peaceful, until his colleague reeled him back toward the ship. Only decades later did America learn the whole story.

  Before drifting into space, Leonov had lowered the pressure of his suit to roughly one-third the normal atm
ospheric pressure, and while floating, he was just fine and even thrilled for fifteen minutes. But then he sensed a dire problem. “I realized that my feet had pulled out of my shoes and my hands had pulled away from my gloves,” he later said. “My entire suit stretched so much that my hands and feet appeared to shrink.” Unlike during various tests on Earth, the suit in space had come to resemble the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. At every point, it strained outward like a rigid balloon. Leonov’s gloves no longer fit, and he didn’t have the strength to even bend the suit fingers. “It’s like bending a pipe,” NASA engineer Larry Bell said later. “Gloves are still a challenge and always will be.” And as Leonov tried to clamber back to safety, the bloated suit no longer fit through the hatch to the Voshkod capsule. He tried to bend at the waist, but the suit wouldn’t yield. His pulse and blood pressure shot up and he began sweating mightily as he fought his rigid carapace. To save himself, he violated mission orders, deflated his suit to an even lower pressure, and squeezed inside the craft. Even after re-pressurizing the capsule, the mission did not let up on poor Leonov and his fellow cosmonaut. Their automated navigation system failed on their return to Earth, and they fell in the Ural Mountains, some two thousand miles away from their anticipated target. Suddenly, the men had descended from the space age into a traditionally grim Russian short story. Soon, hungry wolves surrounded their capsule, far from any human village. The cosmonauts shivered through the night and only heard the voices of rescuers the next day. As usual, outside of a handful of Soviet engineers, the rest of the world only heard of a cosmonaut’s happy, carefree spacewalk, another bragging right for the program.9